I’ve a sneaking suspicion that most people don’t visit my blog for incisive football analysis, even though I have even been to a match at St James’ Park. But that’s not going to stop me.

Yesterday, in the FA Cup, Newcastle beat Sunderland. The match was held at the Stadium of Light in Sunderland, and earlier this week, the plans for the day resulted in a controversy which caught my eye.

Some corporate guests who supported Newcastle United were to be hosted in a bar at the Stadium of Light, with the seats selling for £600. The bar—as one might expect—is usually decked out in Sunderland-supporting slogans and whatnot. Given the plan to use the space for rival supporters, these were temporarily covered with Newcastle-supporting alternatives.

This is exactly the decision I would have made in the drastically unlikely situation of being in charge of the decor for a football stadium bar on derby day. If I were flogging tickets for £600, I’d take it as read that the bar should be decorated for the supporters who are expected to be in it. It just seems polite: as a host, I’d want my guests to be relaxed. And, frankly, I’d expect severe complaints if I hosted a party in a space decorated for the rivals. Seriously, I don’t think I’d have given this a second thought.

It turns out, though, that I would be in mega-trouble. It’s the kind of thing that leads to a corporate statement referencing ‘a serious error of judgement’ and the board of directors requesting that ‘an immediate review is undertaken to determine how this process unfolded.’

Blimey. I know nothing about football, but the error and the scale of the controversy here make me feel like I’ve beamed down from a different planet.

Cultural and societal norms are tricky things. I’ve lived in the North East for decades but could have felt like a social pariah for making an error in basic sporting etiquette. It’s easy to forget how much of this stuff imbues our everyday lives. It must be near-impossible for those who live and work in places with entirely different cultures to feel comfortable, confident and accepted in their new homes. Trip wires lurk in the most unlikely places.

It’s a reminder that we should all be a little more patient, understanding and helpful when people get the basics wrong. There’s a line in Philippa Perry’s recent book:

Often we can fall into the trap of interpreting behaviour by what it would mean if we did whatever the other person is doing. Someone else’s behaviour has a different meaning from what it would mean if you did it.

A little understanding can go a long way.

The pictures in this post are from my own visit to the Stadium of Light in 2019. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

One of the joys of reading the news is the occasional opportunity for disparate articles to end up explaining one another.

Ernie Smith’s Tedium yesterday was about Facebook’s new project to ask users to consent to a new feature called ‘link history’. This appears to be a feature built solely to give users a unobjectionable justification for Facebook to continue to collect data which is primarily used for advertising.

Ernie linked to a Gizmodo article by Thomas Germain which said:

When you click on a link in the Facebook or Instagram apps, the website loads in a special browser built into the app, rather than your phone’s default browser. In 2022, privacy researcher Felix Krause found that Meta injects special “keylogging” JavaScript onto the website you’re visiting that allows the company to monitor everything you type and tap on, including passwords. Other apps including TikTok do the same thing.

I find it astonishing that Facebook is harvesting people’s passwords for other services, and yet this is neither major news nor has prompted a mass exodus from the platform.

Yet, I often hear people discussing with certainty the conspiracy theory that Facebook covertly analyses continuous audio recorded from people’s phones to target advertising. Confirmation bias provides ‘evidence’ for people. It’s essentially nonsense, but it’s accepted as fact by many people.

So… what’s going on here? Why would people choose to keep using a service that violates their security and which they believe to spy on them? Why are so many people still active users?

In Platformer, Casey Newton shared a link to an article by Hannah Devlin in The Guardian which answers those questions:

Almost half of British teenagers say they feel addicted to social media … The finding, from the Millennium Cohort study, adds to evidence that many people feel they have lost control over their use of digital interactive media.

People feeling addicted to products which don’t have their best interests at heart is a depressing situation, though I guess it’s a common one.

I quit social media in 2020, for no better reason than noticing that my mood after opening the apps was typically worse than my mood when logging on. I can’t claim that I’ve become a new person, reclaimed hours of time, or cast off any psychological shackles. But I can say, without a scintilla of doubt, that I don’t miss it at all.

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

In the Financial Times earlier this week, Professor Margaret Heffernan made a startling claim:

I have yet to meet a chief executive who reads regularly.

She means, essentially, reading for pleasure—not reading reports and so forth as part of their role.

Many skip newspapers, and magazines are a stretch. They don’t have time, they say. It’s inefficient; they can get the information they need from those around them.

As well as citing lots of evidence around the benefits of reading, Heffernan observes that reading broadly provides perspective.

Fiction invites you to loiter unseen in the lives of others. We are living through a golden age of translation too, so you can go anywhere in time or place.

The idea that modern complexity is new is swiftly put to rest by the rich brew of voices, perspectives and disciplines that see human history through a spinning kaleidoscope.

Heffernan’s article made me reflect on several things.

Firstly, I disagree a little with her evangelism. I derive considerable benefit from reading, but a large part of that is because I enjoy it. Reading isn’t for everyone. There are other ways of seeking diverse voices and transporting our minds elsewhere.

That said, reading is an enjoyable and effective way to reach those goals. Many people who don’t think they enjoy reading just haven’t yet found their groove, often because they pick up the books they feel they ‘ought to’ read rather than ones they ‘want to’ read. The specifics of what people read are less important than the benefits that come from being swept up and transported to an entirely different view of the world.

Secondly, I’m surprised that so few chief executives read. There’s a surprising overlap between literature and medicine, and it’s common to hear casual book recommendations from senior people in their fields. I’m surprised that this doesn’t extend to the world of business.

Expertise in both medicine and business requires good pattern recognition. Books allow us to live through many more experiences than could be packed into a lifetime and to distil the patterns and lessons from them. I’m surprised to hear that this isn’t recognised in business.

Thirdly, my surprise is tempered by the reflection that the revelation feels true.

In one of the places I’ve worked, a corporate line seemed to catch on about it being a ‘huge organisation’. This wasn’t true: it was smaller than most in its field. I challenged this with executives so often that I ended up with a text file saved on my desktop full of numerically accurate comparisons I could quote whenever necessary.

I’ve worked for organisations whose senior leaders claimed them to be ‘world-beating’, and I’ve wondered which world they lived in.

Wendy and I have come to admire the journalist Sophy Ridge for her pluck, often remarking to political and business interviewees, ‘Come on, you don’t honestly believe that, do you?’

On reflection, all these are about the same thing: a lack of broad perspective. If all executives ever engage in is their tiny sliver of the world, then of course they will believe the unbelievable and of course they will misunderstand their organisation’s place in the world.

Reflecting on what I’ve seen about the lack of perspective many executives possess, I should have intuited that few of them read. Perhaps we ought to hope that things might change.

Animals are often reluctant to show their bellies as they are a soft, vulnerable point for predators to attack. This debut novel by Dinan, aptly titled Bellies, is about people who become close enough to be vulnerable with one another, to show each other their metaphorical ‘bellies’. It’s about the emotional vulnerability the characters allow themselves to experience in their relationships.

The novel centres on Tom and Ming, who take turns to narrate. Tom is a slightly awkward, newly out gay student. Ming is a charismatic young gay playwright from Kuala Lumpur. The two fall in love and move to London together. Things become complicated when Ming decides to transition to living as a woman.

Having just finished reading Jan Morris’s Conundrum, a renowned book on transsexuality, I thought it couldn’t be a coincidence that a couple in the book are called Janice and Morris: it must surely be a reference.

But really, the book is about so much more than the central relationship and certainly about more than transsexuality. It’s a novel about a group of young friends, and it reflects how their relationships and dynamics change as they grow up and take sometimes divergent and sometimes convergent paths through life. In that sense, it reminded me of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, though covering a slightly shorter timespan and with a little less bleakness.

The characters, even the supporting cast, felt real to me, with true human irrationality and unlikability at times. The book is suffused with both humour and tenderness. There is a speech at a funeral in this book, which conjures an image that I think might stay with me for the rest of my life.

Overall, this was a brilliant novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It might be the first I’ve reviewed this year, but I’m sure it will be one of my favourites of 2024. I’m already thinking of people to recommend it to.

Here are some passages I highlighted. There are quite a few: I really liked Dinan’s turn of phrase and ability to capture a mood or idea in just a few words. She’s an incredible writer.

I’ve censored the first one so it doesn’t become a spoiler.

I’ve been thinking about how the trunks of trees bend and curve when they grow next to each other. Their leaves twist to accommodate each other. Their closeness reads on the shape of them, and you can infer the shape of one from the shape of another. When you know someone and you grow together, your shape and form become theirs. And so even though X is gone, and there’ll never be another X, another friend I’ve know as well or as closely, the impression their life left on me will always be there, and in that sense we haven’t lost them at all.

I shouldn’t use the word crazy, but I feel like I can. In the same way I can call myself a faggot. Sometimes the shoe fits if you put it on yourself.

Amateur pottery always looked shit, fermentation was just a lot of waiting around, and marathons were for people who had something to run away from.

We walk upstairs together towards my room. I look at my messy, unaccommodating desk. Tom hates how my belongings splat over any surface like jam.

Next to Ming’s, my own mind felt flat, a city highway and not a winding road with sharp loops and swerves. Ming’s thoughts seemed an exciting place to be, a lucky thing to experience.

Everyone laughs. The joke’s not even funny, but there is a collective yearning to shift the mood. The shakes in our ribs are enough to connect the empty spaces between the chairs and across the table. The conversation turns light.

‘Do you want to be a woman?’ I asked.

‘I don’t even know sometimes. I think so. But then I ask myself what does living as a man or woman even mean?’ He shook his head. ‘And I tell myself it’s all sexism, but at the same time it’s a sexist world, and those things still mean something, you know.’

I’m not being funny, but I don’t really know what I like or care about any more.

Maybe that’s what people are supposed to do, sponge out the bad, wring out the suffering as much as we can, even if it stains our hearts and hands.

It’s a little over five years since Wendy and I moved into our current abode. One of the first things we did upon moving in was to change all the light bulbs, and we’ve continued to tinker ever since. The quality of light can transform a space, and buying the right bulbs for a particular room has become ever more complicated… and perhaps I’ve become ever more obsessed.

I recently bought a new lamp for my desk at work—a very simple and cheap IKEA Fado. It has attracted many admiring comments. Unbeknownst to the commenters, I suspect their admiration lies more in the warm and homely quality of the light from this Paul Russells bulb than the fixture itself.

I recently stumbled across this New York article from March 2023 in which Tom Scocca examines the transition to LED lightbulbs. Scocca, in my opinion, undersells the benefits. Our home has rooms that transition beautifully from cool, clinical lighting, ideal for working, to cosy, warm lighting, perfect for snuggling up with a book, all at the touch of a button. This wouldn’t have been possible with incandescent alternatives, not least because hidden self-adhesive LED strips supply some of the light. However, I did sympathise with Scocca’s troubles and found the challenges faced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be, if you’ll excuse the pun, quite illuminating.

This time last year, I decided to count things that had happened in 2022. This New Year’s Day, I’m going to count the same things again for 2023, and add one more.

Here are 23 numbers about my life in 2023, in descending numerical order, with comparisons to 2022.

They say that reading history is the only way to understand the news. Someone recently, perhaps in a news article, suggested reading Conundrum as an essential text to understand the current hysteria over gender.

Morris died in 2020 at the age of 94: she was of my grandparents’ generation. She is best known as a journalist and travel writer, including the only journalist accompanying Edmund Hillary and colleagues on the first expedition to successfully ascend Mount Everest in 1953.

This book, published in 1974, documents her gender transition. She was born James Morris, the name she used until after her gender reassignment surgery in 1972. There is, by the way, plenty of background colour about her journalistic career, which I found fascinating.

Conundrum is of its time, and some descriptions and gender stereotypes would be considered ‘problematic’ today. It is, nevertheless, beautifully written, and I had no trouble turning the pages.

I’ve sometimes struggled to fully understand the motivation behind transitioning from one gender to another. I’m in the privileged position that it’s something I’ve never been driven to contemplate at any length. Perhaps I undervalue the impact of my gender on my life, and so I find it difficult to appreciate why it’s such a big deal to others. Morris helped me see this differently and understand that—for her—the change and associated surgery were ‘corrective’.

This is an idea I’ve come across before, but something in Morris’s explanation made it ‘click’ for me. I think I appreciated her comparison between the medical ethics of removing a healthy arm and a healthy penis, a perspective I hadn’t considered before. I found myself challenged and enlightened as a result.

I also found Morris’s discussion of the bureaucracy of her change insightful: whether she could remain married, still be a member of her male-only members’ clubs, and so forth. I was struck by how such things were dealt with in the 1970s, mostly with compassion, care and, perhaps above all, consideration for Morris’s feelings.

It feels worlds away from the unpleasant approach of those who seek to divide us in the 2020s. It’s both unimaginable and yet true that half a century later, Ministers of the Crown try to score rhetorical points in Parliament by discussing whether women can have penises. There is no compassion for any individual in suggesting, as a former Home Secretary did at the despatch box, that Sir Keir Starker may run as Labour’s first female Prime Minister.

This New Year’s Eve, perhaps we can hope for the future that our leaders will be better at learning from our past.

Wendy and I like making meals in our slow cooker, not least because it means they are hot and ready when we get home from work. We’ve got a few books of slow cooker recipes, but we’ve always struggled with two aspects:

1. Recipes typically require 6-8 hours of cooking, whereas we’re typically out of the house for around 12 hours. We could use a timer to delay the start of cooking, but having ingredients sitting at room temperature for 4-6 hours before cooking begins seems risky. We often ended up with overcooked food.
2. Possibly because of the above, we found that the food we made often ended up being quite watery and bland.
   

In an end-of-year round-up somewhere—I can’t remember where, but I suspect it may have been in The Financial Times—I read a suggestion that 2024 would be the year of restaurants promoting their use of recipes generated by artificial intelligence. I don’t believe this, but it inspired me to ask ChatGPT about slow cooker recipes.

Over the course of a conversation where I set out my requirements, ChatGPT generated a recipe for a chicken curry. I asked many follow-up questions about things like substitute ingredients, the need to do most of the prep the night before, and my strong preference for avoiding wateriness, leading to ChatGPT iterating on the recipe.

Earlier this week, we made the curry, our first dinner generated by artificial intelligence. It turned out beautifully, far better than our versions of the book recipes.

It’s an excellent example of something ChatGPT does well: explaining simple things to clueless people. Wendy and I are hardly expert cooks; being able to ask for very simple clarifications and iterations provides a much better experience than trying to work it out ourselves from a static list of instructions.

We’ll probably use the same process again to expand our repertoire.

This isn’t a cookery blog, but if you’re interested, this is the current version of our ChatGPT chicken curry recipe. I think this is the first recipe I’ve posted in the twenty years I’ve been blogging, despite dedicating a chunk of my academic life to the topic!

Ingredients

• For the marinade:
  • 500g boneless, skinless chicken thighs
  • 75g Greek-style yoghurt
  • 1 tbsp tikka masala paste
  • 1.5 tbsp bottled lemon juice
• For the curry:
  • 150g frozen diced onions
  • 2 tsp jarred chopped garlic
  • 2 tbsp ginger paste
  • 1 tbsp tomato paste
  • 1/3 tsp ground cumin
  • 1/3 tsp ground coriander
  • 1/3 tsp paprika
  • 1/3 tsp turmeric
  • 1/3 tsp garam masala
  • 1 Knorr chicken stock pot
  • 60ml single cream (to add at the end)
    

Method

• Marinate the chicken:
  • Combine the Greek-style yoghurt, tikka masala paste, and lemon juice in a bowl.
  • Add the chicken thighs, ensuring they’re well coated.
  • Refrigerate overnight.
• Prepare the slow cooker:
  • Place the frozen diced onions, jarred chopped garlic, and ginger paste in the slow cooker.
  • Add the marinated chicken along with any leftover marinade.
  • Spread the tomato paste over the chicken.
  • Sprinkle with the spices (cumin, coriander, paprika, turmeric, and garam masala).
  • Add the chicken stock pot.
• Cook:
  • Cover and set your slow cooker to low. Cook for 12 hours.
• Finishing Touches:
  
  • Stir in 60ml of single cream about 10-15 minutes before serving.
• Serve:
  
  • Serve the Chicken Tikka Masala with rice, naan bread, or your preferred sides.
    

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3. A better blogger would have taken a photo of the meal, but I was too hungry.

Back in May, I moaned about the uninspiring decision to rebuild Notre-Dame de Paris to be exactly the same as it was prior to the 2019 fire. In my view, it seemed to be an example of preservation at the expense of conservation, forcing the building into a frozen historical state that bears no relation to the changing needs of the building and the community around it.

Yet, I missed July’s announcement of Guillaume Bardet’s incredible minimalist liturgical furniture which is destined for the interior. The combination of boldness and simplicity is stunning, somehow both timeless and contemporary. The decision to create something functional and new, rather than just blindly replicating what came before, gives me a scintilla of hope about the whole project.

They may only represent a handful of objects, but they are among the most liturgically important objects in the building. Seeing the restoration take such a bold path on such important things gives me faith. Perhaps, after all, it is a more thoughtful restoration than the headlines suggested.