Diamond Geezer had a masterclass of a blog post yesterday. He crescendoed from an observation about the layout of departure boards at Euston station to a single state-of-the-nation sentence of 282 words.

Glorious.

Jonathan Moules recently wrote in the FT about the British Library’s ongoing response to a significant cyber attack. The piece focused on the role of the Chief Executive Officer, Roly Keating.

I have no inside knowledge about what happened at the British Library. It is perfectly plausible that the Library’s public face on the events might not truly reflect the experience of the staff working for the organisation. In addition, the piece is light on accountability for the (assumed) security lapses which led to the attack in the first place. Nevertheless, as a profile of a senior leader responding to an incident, a few things stood out to me.

Firstly, I admired Keating’s calmness. Moules explicitly describes him as ‘calm’ and ‘softly-spoken’, but it was Keating’s declaration that ‘I’m a believer in eight hours’ sleep’ that stood out to me.

When big things happen, it is second nature to panic and rush headlong into responding. The more one panics, the more urgent tasks appear to become. Teams must work ever-increasing hours at an ever-increasing pace until they inevitably burn out. This is a pattern I’ve seen more times in my career than I’d care to count.

The secret to things going well is for the person leading the response to remain calm. This takes considerable training and enormous effort in the moment. It usually requires disappointing people who are panicking: it might mean declining requests for hourly updates from people with every right to ask for them. It often means slowing the response down, acting on the insight that doing the right thing at a medium pace is considerably better than doing the wrong thing quickly. Most of all, it means projecting calmness and control.

Keating says, ‘This was a situation we had thought about, we had rehearsed.’

You can almost hear those words as the opening to the initial ’emergency meeting’ that Keating chaired. It’s easy to understand how they would imbue a sense of calm among those attending. It’s reassurance that, while this situation is unprecedented, it isn’t unexpected. It’s just time to follow the plan.

And that’s the second thing that stood out to me: they had a plan, and more importantly, the person leading the response knew they had a plan, had confidence in it, and followed it. This shouldn’t be surprising, yet it is frighteningly common to find people trying to lead incidents who are either unaware of the plan or disregard it.

Of course, having rehearsed the plan is a great help in enabling a sense of calm, so this is self-reinforcing. Yet, it’s not uncommon to hear of senior leaders who fail to prioritise preparation for unlikely contingencies, thereby shooting themselves in the foot.

The final thing—and it’s hard to know how much of this is down to Moules’s writing—is the clarity of thought in the response. Keating uses plain English in describing ‘an emergency meeting with library executives and the security team’, not some opaque jargon like ‘establishing an incident response cell.’ Moules talks about ‘articulating choices’, not ‘developing an options appraisal’.

It was an article that gave me a little bit of hope.

In my job, one of the trickiest things to consider in outbreak management is the secondary effects of any restrictions. They are often difficult to predict, let alone quantify, yet they can drastically alter the balance of risks.

Imagine, for example, a batch of ready meals which are suspected of being contaminated with a bacterial pathogen yet are destined to be heated and served to hospital patients. I think everyone’s first instinct would be to withdraw the meals to reduce the risk of giving patients food poisoning.

But this decision would not be as straightforward as it first appears. The risk of illness from the meals might well be mitigated—but not necessarily eliminated—by the need to heat them, which will usually kill the bacteria. If the patients are not to have the hot meals, then they will have to be served something else. If that ‘something else’ is, for example, pre-packed sandwiches, then the risk of illness for vulnerable patients from pathogens such as listeria, which are reasonably common in pre-packed sandwiches, might be higher than the risk associated with the hot meals.

In this scenario, the fact that patients must be fed and that there will, therefore, be a secondary effect is obvious and predictable. Sometimes, secondary effects are entirely unpredictable, and you can do no more than take an informed, professional guess. And then, crucially, keep an eye on the impact of interventions so they can be tweaked if necessary.

The same is true in clinical medicine: adding one extra tablet to a patient’s regimen might reduce their risk of developing a particular illness. But it might also increase their side effects, interact with another medication, or be the extra tablet that tips them over the edge into non-compliance with the whole regimen. Well-intentioned decisions can have unexpected secondary consequences.

Kelsey Piper of Vox gave a great example of the importance of considering secondary effects last week. She describes the fact that the US Federal Aviation Authority has done extensive research which has found that it is considerably safer for very young children to fly in their own secured seat, rather than travelling in someone’s lap. They give clear public advice on this, yet—despite all the evidence—choose not to mandate it.

Their rationale is that requiring the purchase of a seat for very young children would make flying unaffordable for many families, and a proportion of those families would choose to drive to their destination instead. Driving is considerably more dangerous than flying, to the point where the FAA calculates that for every life saved by a ‘separate seat’ mandate, sixty lives would be lost on the road.

Sometimes, we can all get drawn into looking only at our piece of any given puzzle, but it’s essential to keep a broad view: you never know when a secondary effect might undermine your action.

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

Built in Hartlepool, the PS Wingfield Castle served as a Hull Estuary ferry from 1934 to 1974, just a few years before the Humber Bridge opened.

She was left to rot in London for a few years after that. In one of those mind-bending yet sound bits of maritime logic, concrete was poured into her bilges to prevent her from sinking due to leaks. In the early 1980s, Whitbread bought her intending to site a floating pub in Swansea, but had to abandon the idea when it became clear that she was too wide to fit through the marina’s gates.

In 1986, she returned to Hartlepool, where she has been lovingly restored, and is now exhibited at the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

About a year ago, I wrote about liking the first series of The Traitors: an uncontroversial opinion, if ever there was one.

In the latest edition of FT Weekend, Henry Mance rips into the series, says:

The BBC could just as well broadcast monkeys throwing darts at a board. (With budget cuts, it probably will.)

It’s a fun article which is worth reading. Unfortunately, it reveals that Mance has misunderstood the programme.

His fundamental error, from which all the rest flows, is this:

In the game, adapted from a Dutch TV show, there are 22 contestants. Three or four are “traitors”; the rest are “faithful”. The faithful ones have to identify the traitors, and vote them off one by one.

Mance is confusing the stated goal with the actual goal for players. This is like criticising The Day Today for failing to provide a comprehensive news roundup.

For most of the series, the faithful have no incentive to eliminate traitors. Traitors are allowed to replace members who are voted off, and the end-game means that it is plausible to eradicate all of the traitors in the final moments. Attempting to sway people to vote off a traitor early on is a surefire way to leave the programme, as the traitors are likely to try to convince others to banish opponents to save their own skins. The better strategy is for the faithful to eliminate their competitors, people outside their personal alliances who they suspect may eventually vote them off, regardless of their faithful or traitor status.

Mance complains that players are reduced to making banishment decisions based on feelings, with no corroborating evidence: this is true in the early game, but as we’ve discovered, this doesn’t matter. It is not true of the later game, by which point the evidence from the murders and banishments gradually stacks up.

The psychological drama in the programme comes from watching people pursue other goals under the guise of trying to ‘vote out traitors’.

Mance says:

the show is crying out for a contestant to point out the emperor’s lack of clothes: “Hey everyone, we’re no good at spotting liars. So instead of accusing each other of treachery, why don’t we stay friends and just draw lots?”

He doesn’t realise that this is a surefire way for the ‘faithful’ to lose the game… and that, perhaps, ought to have been his biggest clue that he’d misunderstood the format.

This collection of 23 prose stories is based on interviews Judah conducted with people from around Europe. Documentary photographs accompany each story. It aims to build a picture of life in Europe for the ‘ordinary worker’, revealing a diverse community of individuals facing all sorts of challenges in life. Judah’s stories also often reflect life as the COVID-19 pandemic swept Europe; several are stories of refugees fleeing to Europe. Climate change is also a recurring theme.

I’m often intrigued to read about the work lives of others, especially when—like many in this book—the examples are very far removed from my day-to-day experience. It’s fascinating to have an insight into what it is like to take over the family vineyard or to be a pilot who guides cargo ships into harbours. This book provides insight into other worlds that can be found on this continent.

However, it’s taken me about six months to get through this book, which is entirely attributable to the style of writing, which I found very difficult to tolerate on two fronts.

Firstly, Judah writes every single story in the same consistent tone and style. This is a weird choice: when telling different stories from different parts of the continent, you would think it would be natural to vary the tone. For example, I’m sure farmers have particular idiosyncrasies in how they spin a yarn compared to flight attendants. Here, every story is flattened to the same mildly journalistic tone. To me, it feels like that sucks out a lot of the potential pleasure of this book.

Secondly, Judah has an altogether infuriating habit of slipping into the second person for a few sentences now and again. In his afterword, he says that he tried ‘techniques’ to ‘make you feel like any one of these people could be you’, and I think this weird linguistic tic must be what he’s referring to.

This passage provides a good example of Judah using the second person injudiciously:

You tell yourself you’ll never get married.

You tell yourself you know what love looks like.

You don’t expect it to look like a divorced Swedish Finn, who has spent most of his life in Germany, older, with two children over there, giving it a go in Ireland. You also don’t expect them to be called Patrick. Or to be living with his mother in a castle in County Cork.

Maybe it’s my quirk rather than his, but this makes me want to scream: ‘No, I don’t!’

Here’s an example of a random switch from third to second person:

The trolley rattling underneath her.

Her last glimpse of her husband’s face.

You’ll feel much better when this is out.

The doctor smiled. Then the anaesthetist bent over.

The cold gas coming out of the mask.

Count back from ten for me now.

You never make it to seven.

I can only assume that we’re using the second person in the third line as Judah is quoting either the husband or the doctor. I can live with that. But then, by the final line, we’re using the second person for a different reason: presumably as part of Judah’s ‘technique’. It just made me want to fling the book across the room.

Luckily, each of the chapters is a discrete profile of an individual, so it is the sort of book that can be readily appreciated in small chunks.

Despite all of this—and it feels good to get that rant out—I think this book is worth reading. Judah’s stories are varied and thought-provoking, and I think the whole made me feel a little differently about the things that unite people across Europe.

I came across Julia Sanches’s translation of Eva Baltasar’s Catalan 2020 novel after it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It’s a short book, just 112 pages. The main beats of the plot are that the female protagonist falls in love with a woman called Samsa, they form a long-term relationship, and Samsa ultimately decides to have a child.

But, really, this is a book which is character-driven rather than plot-driven. As with the title, there are a lot of metaphors about geological formations and processes, reflecting how the emotional landscape in which we all live shifts over time. Despite the allusions to large expanses, the book feels claustrophobic: we’re stuck in the mind of the protagonist, a mind which is narrowly focused on her personal situation. The claustrophobia is leavened by humour, some of it deliciously dark.

This book perfectly evoked the main character’s feelings: it was a perfect marriage of language and emotion. I found the whole thing quite moving.

Some passages I highlighted:

I’m not a chef, I’m just a mess-hall cook, capable and self-taught. The thing I most enjoy about my job is handling food while it’s still whole, when some part of it still speaks of its place in the world, its point of origin, the zone of exclusion that all creatures need in order to thrive. Water, earth, lungs. The perfect conditions for silence.

I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.

I look at her and feel woozy, even though she’s Scandinavian and makes her living from a multinational with blood on its hands. I look at her and she fills every corner of me.

The first person who had the idea of building a pyramid must have been insane. What about the guy who thought it made sense to stick someone in a rocket and shoot them at the stars? Samsa is crazier than the two of them put together.

Small children have the power to impose their happiness on the everyday anxieties of grown-ups. Their power is short-lived, a gold dust that dresses the shoulders and reminds you that you’re more than just an ordinary soldier, a sailor. It’s hardly noticeable. Grown-ups have lost all interest in shiny things. A grown-up is the opposite of a magpie.

It’s not that I think small talk is dumb, it’s that I’m pretty sure it’s more reckless than adopting a pet rat during a plague.

This exhibition brings together work by twenty artists from around the world, intending to prompt reflection on how humans interact with the natural world.

Two installations particularly stood out to me.

This is Kaal (Time), a 2023 work by Kamruzzaman Shadhin and the Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts, which Shadhin founded. It’s a striking collection of seven hand-woven jute sculptures on aluminium frames. They are captured performing Bishahari Pala, a folk theatre work.

The work effectively combines a representation of the land and the people it sustains. There is something quite endearing about the characters; they look like they must have taken many hours to weave.

This is part of a dynamic water installation called Templo del agua, río Tyne by Leonel Vásquez of Colombia. Drops of purified water from the River Tyne fell through the complicated apparatus and created musical notes, which were both audible and physically sensed through the vibration of the benches.

Rocks from the Tyne hung around the space, which Vásquez describes as a ‘temple’.

Despite being in the middle of a crowded gallery of works, the combination of water and acoustics made this space feel quasi-religious or meditative. It was a quite captivating piece.

Stepping Softly on the Earth continues at Baltic until 14 April.