I received this book as a particularly well-chosen Christmas present, just a few months after I finished Tim Marshall’s excellent book The Future of Geography. While Marshall’s book considers space in geopolitical terms, Peake concentrates on the human experience of space flight, from the first cosmonauts to the current Artemis programme.

Peake’s experience in space means he can bring personal insights into much he discusses, and he’s also a great writer. It helps that his focus in this book is on humans, which means that it doesn’t get excessively bogged down in discussion of the technology of spaceflight, which I have sometimes found hard to follow in other books.

Rather than recounting the history of human spaceflight chronologically, Peake tackles it thematically. For example, the early part of the book covers the process of astronaut recruitment and selection, and Peake shows how this has changed over time. There’s a lot of social history woven through the narrative, which I felt added some extra interest. I found this an inspiring read.

Peake discusses the unique contribution that humans can make to space exploration. This section prompted me to reflect: in many areas of life, we’re used to considering how robots can replace humans. In spaceflight, the discussion seemed to start from the opposite point, looking for the areas in which the unique contribution of humans displaces the automatic assumption of using robots. With the expanding capabilities of artificial intelligence and automation becoming ever-more common, including in medicine, I wondered whether this might be a worthwhile thought experiment. If we assume that everything can be done by robots and algorithms, where can humans bring added value? I suspect the conclusions may be more nuanced and helpful than just thinking about which bits of a process can be replaced by automation. It’s an approach I might steal for future discussions about my own work.

I’ve read a fair amount about space exploration over the years, so much of this book’s content was already familiar. However, Peake’s enthusiasm and insight made for an enjoyable read, and his approach to telling the story highlighted areas I’d perhaps under-considered. I raced through this and would thoroughly recommend it.

Council of Europe Boulevard is a road running between Stockton-on-Tees and Thornaby. It runs over the River Tees via the Princess of Wales Bridge, still locally known as the Diana Bridge. I had always assumed the bridge was named as a posthumous tribute, but in fact, it was named in 1992 and opened by the Princess herself.

But it’s the road I want to write about today. Until the late 1980s, it was called Trafalgar Street, but as the area began to set its sights higher and wider, it was renamed to reflect the spirit of European co-operation exemplified by the Council of Europe.

Over the coming years, the acknowledgement of Europe co-operation in a road name became ever-more relevant: Teesside became a huge net beneficiary of European Union funding, with hundreds of millions of pounds spent in the area even as national Government funding for the area dwindled. Indeed, the bridges immediately up- and down-stream of the Diana Bridge—the Millennium Bridge and the Infinity Bridge—were both built with European funding.

Yet, current Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen has said:

There is hardly a more prominent, but inappropriately named road in Teesside than ‘Council of Europe Boulevard’.

I struggle to follow his logic as to why the name is inappropriate. Given that the UK remains a member of the Council of Europe, the specific choice of name remains apposite even post-Brexit. Houchen has spoken at length about the importance of protecting Teesside’s heritage, and European co-operation remains a key plank of that heritage. One can’t even make a post-rational argument that the name was inappropriately ‘bought’, given that the Council of Europe and the European Union are entirely distinct entities.

Nevertheless, Houchen would prefer the road to be renamed again, this time after Stanley Hollis, a war hero with no connection to Stockton or Thornaby.

The Mayor of Thornaby, Steve Walmsley, disagrees: he has observed that a different war hero—Edward Cooper—was born in Stockton and lived in Thornaby. Cooper might therefore be the more obvious choice, but as Walmsley has acknowledged:

We should recognise these people, but this just seems a bit silly.

It’s hard to disagree.

The Zone of Interest is Jonathan Glazer’s critically acclaimed, double-Oscar-winning, triple-BAFTA-winning adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel. It is a bona fide nailed-on success of British cinema that everyone who knows anything about film says you should watch. In this post, I’m going to tell you that I didn’t think it was very good, but I know nothing about filmmaking.

The film is set during the Holocaust in the area around the Auschwitz concentration camp. The central character is a fictionalised version of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the camp. The film focuses on his domestic life in the family home next to the concentration camp, and the impact of his career progression on his family life. The viewer is never taken inside the camp, though we do hear atrocities being committed in the background of scenes, and see the rising smoke from the crematoria.

Let me first say that I streamed this at home, which was clearly not the best way to experience the film, as it translates poorly to a small screen and to TV speakers. The film often uses distant shots where the action is quite hard to make out on the small screen. The dialogue is German, and the subtitles (which are burned-in) were slightly too small to comfortably read. In many scenes, the contrast of the white text on a light background failed me. The sound design is hard to appreciate in this setting, too. If you’re going to see this, see it in a cinema.

I don’t usually engage with works of fiction about the World Wars, with some notable exceptions. I tend not to enjoy them: the totality of the experience of war is so difficult to capture that I often find them trite. I’m not therefore able to set this film in any sensible artistic context, which might mean that I’m missing a lot of what’s in it.

The film seemed to be making a point about ‘othering’. The family was portrayed as seeing Jews as a ‘problem to be solved’. The Jews who worked in the house were mostly ignored or were casually taunted in horrifying ways about the spreading of their ashes. This point was driven home by the mother-in-law character, who had a personal connection to a Jewish woman and who couldn’t hide her horror at events.

However, focusing on ‘othering’ in a context where such division is already institutionally enforced seems an odd choice. The narrative fascination with ‘othering’ typically lies in the transition into ‘otherness, a process glaringly absent here due to the pre-existing, state-imposed separation. If we accept that the Jewish community had already been ’othered’ by the state, then it somewhat lets the individual characters off the narrative hook in terms of not acknowledging the screams, the shots, the rising smoke.

It strikes me that it would have been better to use the setting to make a point about the universal nature of humanity, but this is weirdly excised. Living in a place surrounded by the sounds of atrocities would surely make people anxious about what if the screams were from this side of the wall? For example, if you were sending your children out to play in a garden where the background is gunshots and screaming, even if you’d blocked that out through continual exposure, surely you’d naturally worry that you wouldn’t hear your own injured child? And, surely, that would lead you to reflect on humanity? It’s strange that the chillingly mundane impact isn’t even observed, let alone explored.

This film doesn’t offer explanations, and nor could it: but if we take it as a work of fictionalised observation, it’s a peculiarly framed one.

Towards the end of the film, there’s a section of present-day footage of cleaners at work in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. This footage is haunting and emotive, but I think it’s entirely inappropriate to use footage of the site of death of thousands of people, as well as their personal effects, to lend emotional heft to a fictional piece. It felt immoral.

And maybe, in the end, this just wasn’t a film for me.

It fucked up my life but I wasn’t upset. You know, they kept talking about “undergoing” surgery, “undergoing” chemo. It really bugged me. I never saw it that way. I was just living my life. I wasn’t “undergoing” it.

— Geoff Dyer, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It

I struggle to imagine how it feels to sit on a bench and record a statement telling the world about your cancer treatment, just weeks after hearing the news yourself.

But more even than that, I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to get up in the morning and know that’s in your diary for the day; or for your family to ask how the filming went; or to go about your day as the news breaks in ripples all around.

It’s not something separate and distinct and different and cordened off; it’s part of life, and that makes it all the more difficult.

Twenty years ago, this piece of land near Thornaby station was home to The Rocket. This was the Students’ Union associated with Stephenson College at Durham University, where I started my medical degree… and where several of my fellow students performed a ‘full monty’ striptease for the local mayor. I’m not sure that would be a University-sanctioned activity in 2024. It feels more like an event that could lead to a political scandal.

I’m not certain when The Rocket closed, but it had been long abandoned and had suffered a large fire by the time it was torn down in 2021. It could hardly be called a rapid unscheduled disassembly.

It’s surprising how quickly things change, and also how quickly time passes.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it was the Vernal equinox yesterday, which means only one thing…

I didn’t realise how wonky our egg-house doors were until I took that photo!

So here’s a question that occurred to me today: with more and more Local Authorities in financial straits, are we likely to see fewer overnight counts in the forthcoming general election?

The answer is ‘no’, for two reasons.

The first is the law. In the run-up to the 2010 election, when a quarter of councils proposed leaving counts until the next working day, the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill was passed. It had a provision requiring counts to start ‘as soon as practicable and within four hours of the close of the poll’.

The second is money. For general elections, councils can reclaim the cost of counting votes, so it doesn’t come from limited Council resources. The funding for local elections does come from council budgets, but given that starting the count within four hours is also a legal requirement for those, it seems likely that even the most financially embarrassed councils will be required to do so.

Whether or not that’s the best use of money is debatable.

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

I can’t remember when I first read a Kazuo Ishiguro novel, but I can remember when he became one of my favourite novelists: I was blown away by The Remains of the Day in 2016.

I can’t remember when I first heard Stacey Kent’s singing. I suspect I’d have first heard her on Monocle Radio, and I know for sure that she’s been on my playlists for about a decade.

I can remember when I first learned of a connection between the two: it was six months ago, when Faber announced the publication of this book. It is a collection of sixteen songs Ishiguro has written for Kent since 2007, several of which are still to be recorded. Some of my favourite Stacey Kent songs are in here: how did I miss that they were written by one of my favourite novelists?

Reading the lyrics of familiar songs on the page is a strange experience, and it is most definitely not the best way to experience these pieces of writing. They are made to be sung.

And yet, seeing them written down in the book, alongside beautiful cartoons by Bianca Bagnarelli, gave me a different appreciation for the work.

As astoundingly obvious as it may be, I’ve never before noticed that many of Kent’s songs are rooted in the present day, unlike jazz standards. No matter how many times I’ve heard The Ice Hotel or Bullet Train, it’s never previously occurred to me to think, ‘Gosh, that’s an unusually modern setting for a jazz song.’

I was also surprised by how short many of the lyrics are: the songs tell complete stories in my mind, and I’ve never before realised the linguistic brevity with which they’re told—or, perhaps, how much of the story-telling relies on Kent’s performance.

This book therefore gave me a renewed appreciation for the talents of both Ishiguro and Kent—but if you haven’t already heard the music, then it might not do much for you.

According to BBC News:

To the jazzy sounds of Nancy Wilson’s 1960s tune I Wish You Love, the Duchess of Sussex emerges from the kitchen of her Californian mansion in a teaser unveiling her new lifestyle brand.

Although little was revealed in the 16-second long video, an Instagram account for Meghan’s new brand has already amassed hundreds of thousands of online followers.

For the past week or so, I’ve had Blossom Dearie’s 1964 cover of the same song stuck in my head after Spotify kept serving it to me. It seems that I’ve more in common with the Duchess of Sussex than I could ever have guessed, though I’m not certain I’d have chosen a break-up song to launch an aspirational lifestyle brand. I defer to the Duchess’s much greater knowledge and experience in this area!

A year ago, a visit to the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibition left me completely astonished.

Obviously, it’s the paintings that are the star here. That unexpected, indescribable presence, the astounding attention to detail, the lifelike quality. They really are utterly unbelievable, completely astonishing.

I was so unexpectedly bowled over by the exhibition that I did something I’ve never done before with any exhibition: I went back the next day. I was so surprised by the strength of my own reaction that I couldn’t quite believe it, and wondered if I’d just been tired or overawed at being back at the beautiful Rijksmuseum. But no: the paintings really are spectacular, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

This weekend, Art Fund members—myself included—are being treated to the opportunity to stream the film version of the show, created by Exhibition on Screen. And so, last night, I found myself settling on the sofa to watch.

I was impressed. Obviously, seeing paintings on TV is not nearly the same as standing immediately in front of them. Many of the things I liked about the exhibition, such as its spare use of commentary and explanation which really allowed the work to sell itself, wouldn’t lend itself to film.

Yet, the film really did a fantastic job of bringing across that ineffable quality in Vermeer’s work, the arresting way they pull in the viewer. The experts featured in the film explain that this is partly attributable to Vermeer’s use of light, as I thought when I saw them. They also point out that Vermeer’s brushstrokes are invisible: an attribute I hadn’t noticed independently, though I suppose it should have been obvious.

It was an hour and a half well spent. That the opportunity to watch the film appealed even after seeing the exhibition twice made me reflect on quite how big an impact that once-in-a-lifetime show had made on me. As I said last year, Vermeer got inside my head; he clearly hasn’t left yet.