This metal sculpture by Ray Lonsdale in Sunderland city centre commemorates the Vaux brewery. The brewery operated from 1837 to 1999.

The brewery continued using horse-drawn delivery wagons long after other methods became financially preferable. Five delivery horses were rehoused at the Beamish museum after the brewery ceased production in 1998, and the last surviving horse—Justin—died there in 2016. The chains on the sculpture were donated by a former driver, and are part of the original tack.

The Northern Spire bridge in Sunderland opened in 2018. It’s the tallest structure in Sunderland, soaring to 105m—a little taller than Parliament’s Elizabeth Tower.

The A-frame pylon was manufactured in Belgium and brought to Sunderland by barge. Perhaps appropriately, the first three vehicles across the bridge after it opened were locally-built Nissans.

This is Rory Stewart’s memoir of his decade as a Conservative MP, from his election campaigns to his Ministerial posts. It is funny, readable, and a little bit gossipy. I think it will come to be viewed as one of the definitive accounts of this bizarre period in Westminster politics and probably one of the best insider takes. It is very well written.

And yet, I found it a little disappointing. I’ve often been impressed by Stewart when I’ve heard him speak on the radio or his podcast, and I’ve come to think of him as an insightful and intelligent political operator. Yet the experience of reading this book was a little similar to reading Hilary Clinton’s account of the 2016 US Presidential Election: I was left with the sense that Stewart lacked the distance and time necessary to properly reflect on his time in Government.

There are lots of examples I could use to illustrate this, but it was his account as the minister responsible for prisons that stuck with me most. He writes with some pride about his successful work to reduce the level of violence through his ‘ten prisons project’, and to improve the basic standards in those ten institutions. He says that he made a difference through extreme and close focus on the basic issues, including involving himself in detailed operational aspects of running individual prisons.

He hasn’t the distance to recognise the two obvious flaws with this approach.

Firstly, driving improvements in a way which is dependent on the actions and attitudes of an individual minister is guaranteed to make those improvements temporary, as successive ministers will choose different approaches and items of focus. To be truly effective, a minister needs to tackle the much harder job of figuring out how to embed a different approach in a system, with a broad coalition of institutional buy-in, so that the improvements outlive the ministerial appointment.

Secondly, inviting ministers to focus on operational detail is dangerous, firstly—and perhaps most importantly—because it leaves a major gap by having no-one focused on wider strategy, and secondly because it invites less thoughtful ministers to drive through absurd operational changes which are unnecessarily damaging to people’s lives. It comes dangerously close to the ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ view of the world which he criticises in passages about his previous experiences outside of politics.

Neither of these flaws necessarily mean that Stewart’s actions weren’t the right ones for the specific circumstance in which he found himself: they may well have been. But Stewart’s tendency to generalise feels misguided, and his often self-critical reflections feel weaker than they ought to because he doesn’t acknowledge—or perhaps doesn’t see—that he’s missing these bigger questions about his approach.

I’m glad I read this book: the insight it offers and the quality of the writing outweigh the problems. I perhaps hope that there will be another volume to come, maybe a decade hence, when Stewart has had a bit more distance and a bit more space to reflect more expansively on his experiences.

‘A bit of madness is key,’ sang Emma Stone in La La Land, ‘to give us new colours to see.’

In Poor Things, she proves it: the film is absurd, unhinged, and glorious. It’s my favourite film of the year so far, and one I wouldn’t have seen in a million years were it not for this project.

Our setting is a steampunkish, retrofuturistic version of the Victorian era. The plot centres on Stone’s character, Bella Baxter. The film’s Victor Frankenstein-esque character, Godwin Baxter, played by William Defoe, pulls a pregnant suicide victim from the Thames. The victim’s brain is removed and replaced with that of the foetus, and Bella Baxter is created. We follow her growth and development, her betrothal, and her decision to run away with another man.

The set-up makes this sound like a horror film: it’s not. Horrific things happen, but they are treated lightly and comedically. This was a film that had me grinning almost from beginning to end, even as Bella repeatedly stabbed a face with a scalpel.

Poor Things is a completely realised comedic fever dream. Everything about it is pitch-perfect: acting, set design, score, costumes, cinematography, it all adds up to a mesmerising whole. This is a film that embraces its form: sections are in black and white, sections are shot in a circular format, sections use a disorienting fish-eye lens. I am lucky to have seen in on the big screen, and would recommend that others do the same. It looks and sounds gorgeous.

Using its absurd world, the film has interesting observations to make on so many things, from feminism, to parent-child relationships, to the ethics of sex work, to the harmful straightjacket of polite society, to paedophilia. It is wonderfully, delightfully, inspirationally and insightfully odd. It’s richly and outrageously crazy.

Stone’s performance is nothing short of astonishing perfection. I cannot begin to imagine how someone can even attempt to inhabit such a gloriously weird character, with such a wide developmental arc. Stone brings Bella to life, making sense of a totally mad sketch of a character. It is unbelievable.

The other performances are also universally excellent. Of particular note, Vicki Pepperdine made a giant impression from a tiny part, not least with the surely immortal line, ‘She grabbed my hairy business!’

I enjoyed this from the first frame to the last. I’d happily watch it again.

There’s a poster I pass at work regularly about identifying phishing emails. It advises that the content of these emails is frequently ‘mispelled’. I’ve spent more time than I ought pondering whether that misspelling was intentional or not, likely a slightly-less-obvious version of telling us that emails might be full of ‘seplling mystakes’.

Then, I doubted myself and wondered if ‘mispell’ was an acceptable alternative to ‘misspell’. I checked the Oxford English Dictionary: it’s not. There’s no historical context in which it is correct—the etymology is plainly ‘mis’ + ‘spell’. The inclusion of a lonely ‘s’ is simply wrong, whether or not it’s intentionally wrong.

The Dictionary does list a single quotation in which the word appears as ‘mispelling’: England’s 1695 Treason Act. Section XI of the Act provides, among other things, that misspellings in legal documents cannot be used as the sole grounds for dismissing a case unless highlighted before any evidence has been presented (in which case, they could be corrected and the trial could proceed). Amusingly, ‘misspelling’ is misspelt:

noe Indictment for any of the aforesaid … shall bee quashed on the Motion of the Prisoner or his Counsel for miswriting mispelling false or improper Latine

This section of the Act was repealed with the passage of the Treason Act 1945, so you needn’t worry about the misspelling of misspelling still being in force. Unlike the poster, we can, at least, assume the 1695 mistake wasn’t a deliberate pun.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

A little over a decade ago, I read David Nicholls’s novel One Day.

I just found myself getting a little fed up with it. The progress of the plot is so utterly, teeth-gnashingly predictable that the ending couldn’t come soon enough, and the interminable circuitous storylines and ruminations holding it back became just a little bit dull.

It doesn’t sound as though I enjoyed it, but then I gave it a four-star rating, so who knows what I was thinking? I certainly can’t remember.

Fast-forward to 2024, and Wendy and I have just finished watching the Netflix adaptation. I couldn’t recall even the major beats of the plot of the novel, though I did remember that it was a love story, and I had a clear idea in mind of the central characters, Emma and Dexter.

Wendy and I both enjoyed the series: I certainly didn’t get fed up with it, nor find it predictable or dull. I found it moving, which my review suggests wasn’t the case for the novel.

The series follows the same structure as the novel, catching up with our central characters on 15 July for each of twenty years, beginning at university in 1988. The episodes vary in length from about 20 to about 40 minutes. The period details, including the soundtrack, are spot-on.

Ambika Mod is perfectly cast as Emma Morley, and will surely be catapulted into stardom by the success of this series. Leo Woodall is excellent as Dexter Mayhew, though I think Dex is the less interesting character.

I was struck by the sense of place in the series, particularly how central Edinburgh is to the plot. I didn’t remember that from the novel.

But mostly, it packs an emotional punch. It’s funny, it’s moving, it’s reflective, it’s thoughtful.

It’s great.

Crocuses are a lovely reminder that spring is on the way. Both globally and across the UK, purple crocuses are planted to remind us of humanity’s pledge to eradicate polio.

In the years when my parents were born, there were as many as 8,000 cases of polio each year acquired in the UK, leaving many families bereaved and tens of thousands of children with lifelong disabilities. An effective vaccine was developed in the late 1950s, and as a result of the success of its rollout in the UK, there has been not a single UK-acquired case of polio in my lifetime. It’s easy to forget the astonishing and unprecedented progress we made in public health in the twentieth century.

We haven’t eradicated polio worldwide quite yet, though we’re getting close, with only tens of cases reported each year. Two of the three strains of polio have been consigned to the history books. The purple crocuses should remind us that we still need to finish the job.

Wicked Little Letters is a frothy comedy film that has been heavily trailed for months. As in the trailer, the comedy relies on the assumption that prim and proper 1920s characters using unexpectedly foul language is inherently funny. I think that it is, to a point, though perhaps not funny enough to support a whole film.

To my mind, the stand-out feature was Isobel Waller-Bridge’s score, which lifted the whole production, imbuing it with a sense of drama and emotion even when the script was a bit lacking. Waller-Bridge’s compositions also underpinned some fantastic musical/visual puns that were among the funniest bits of the film.

Unfortunately, the plot is a bit of a letdown. It concerns some expletive-laden poison-pen letters received by Olivia Colman’s character, and whether the police have correctly identified the sender, Jessie Buckley’s character—if not, who might it be? The answer is practically telegraphed from that start, so tension doesn’t really build, and the case is solved on-screen peculiarly early in the film in any case.

Now, I’m hardly the morality police, but allow me a paragraph on the wonky social ethics of the piece. I was irked. The film is written in such a way that we’re clearly supposed to judge the central characters with modern eyes, and sympathise with Buckley’s less buttoned-up, more ‘modern’ character who is harshly judged by the standards of the time. But despite the film being vaguely about the ridiculousness of the patriarchal society of the 1920s, we don’t see the main patriarch (Timothy Spall’s character) suffer any comeuppance for behaviour that—by modern standards—is domestic abuse. The script comes perilously close to making a joke of bullying and controlling familial relationships. It’s as though we’re invited to judge the women by 2020s standards but the men by 1920s standards. It’s uncomfortable.

But look, this is light comedy tosh: I don’t think we’re expected to think that hard. Let’s just laugh at Olivia Colman swearing a bit more. Most of the characters are two-dimensional clichés, as I suppose we ought to expect, and there are a few laughs along the way. Come for the chuckles, stay for the music. It’s fine.

I read Jacob Stern’s article in The Atlantic about the political controversy in the USA related to specific car manufacturers selling certain models without AM radios.

It made me wonder whether my car has an AM radio. I know it did when I bought it, a little over 14 years ago. I remember occasionally listening to Richard Bacon’s afternoon show on BBC Radio 5 Live in the car. But I’ve replaced the radio twice since then.

For the last three years, I’ve been using a ‘radio’ which uses Apple’s CarPlay system to stream content from my phone. Since then, I’ve never listened to broadcasts via FM or AM. I knew the system had a ‘tuner’ function, but I wasn’t sure whether it included AM frequencies.

Surprisingly, the ‘radio’ unit I bought is still ‘current’. I found it on sale on a national retailer’s website. Despite the technology now being several years old, the retail price has inflated by more than 11% since I bought it.

The retailer’s website didn’t list whether the ‘radio’ had an AM tuner. I can only assume this must be irrelevant to many people’s purchasing decisions these days.

I consulted the manufacturer’s website, but it wasn’t listed on the main product page there, either. I dug into a separate ‘full specifications and features’ page—lo and behold, there it was!

My car radio does, indeed, have a hitherto unused AM tuner.

Some US commentators appear to believe this to be essential to my freedom. I still don’t think I’m going to use it. Given that my car model isn’t sold in the US, perhaps no one will mind.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.