Last week, The Times’s leading article asked:

Why should doctors, trained at great expense by the state, not be obliged to serve a minimum number of years in the NHS?

Politicians occasionally suggest that doctors who have been trained in the UK—and who have accumulated an average of £71,000 in debt in the process—should have a period of indentured service to the NHS or else pay a still higher contribution to the cost of their training to be freed from this requirement.

I always wonder why the equivalent suggestion isn’t made regarding politicians themselves. Elections are costly, and when MPs resign mid-term, before the end of the period of service for which they were elected, there is a cost to the public purse of running an election to replace them. Why not require MPs to serve their term or repay the by-election costs if they don’t?

The answer is obvious: it’s in no one’s interest to have a de-motivated, disruptive, non-attending Nadine Dorries of an MP, trapped in a job they want to leave because of a perceived ‘fine’ if they quit—a ‘fine’ that they may not be able to afford. And it strikes me that the same applies to doctors.

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

This book contains 23 short chapters, each of which Housel attempts to identify an aspect of the world that never changes. Therefore, I had expected this to be discursive and philosophical and was disappointed. This is more the sort of book which belongs in the business section of an airport bookshop, which isn’t the sort of book I tend to enjoy (though many people do).

It’s a book that creates trains of logic between different disciplines, but in a way that does not always seem to work. For example, one chapter is dedicated to the need for businesses to keep ‘evolving’ to stay relevant and successful. Housel uses the example of Sears as a business which became too static, partly because of its size. He relates this to comparing a T-Rex and bacteria: the T-Rex is too large and therefore vulnerable to extinction, whereas bacterial species have tenaciously survived for millennia. But this example undermines the original point: the bacteria have remained static in evolutionary terms, especially compared to a T-Rex, so it’s a counterargument to the requirement to keep ‘evolving’—not a supporting argument as Housel seems to think.

Much of the book struck me as similarly confused. There are a lot of things in this book that Housel cites as fundamental, unchanging lessons about the world, which I think are anything but. He rarely looks back more than a couple of centuries for his supporting anecdotes, and the format doesn’t give him the space to develop his ideas or refute any counterarguments.

At one point, Housel quotes Bertrand Russell as saying:

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

I would characterise the book as ‘stupid’, but it is certainly long on confidence and short on doubt.

One sentiment that I thought Housel put across well in this book was about the difficulty of maintaining long-term plans:

Saying you have a ­ten-­year time horizon doesn’t exempt you from all the nonsense that happens in the next ten years. Everyone has to experience the recessions, the bear markets, the meltdowns, the surprises, and the memes. So rather than assuming ­long-­term thinkers don’t have to deal with ­short-­term nonsense, ask the question, “How can I endure a ­never-­ending parade of nonsense?”

But overall, this book just wasn’t my kind of thing… but it might be yours!

For Boxing Day, I enjoyed this brief article in The TLS about the surprisingly modern history of carols. It turns out that singing them in church is a relatively modern innovation: they moved there from the village green as part of

the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century and its introduction of what might be called a performative inclusivity – try saying that after two glasses of the Archdeacon’s sherry – in Anglican worship. Get them in and singing, and they’ll feel more a part of things.

My latent assumption had always been that there was a long British tradition of carols, but in fact, most of them are from other places:

“Good King Wenceslas”, comes from a songbook of 1582, Piae Cantiones Ecclesiasticae et Scholastichae, by Jaakko Suomalainen, head of the Turku cathedral school in Finland? Or that both “We Three Kings” and “Away in a Manger” are American? The latter was published in a bulletin of the universalist movement, which falsely attributed the words to Martin Luther.

I had no idea.

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

What do you write in a Christmas Day blog post?

This is this blog’s twenty-first Christmas, and I’ve written ten previous Christmas Day posts. Most of them are entirely forgettable, but looking through them, two stood out.

In 2009, I ranted about the Dean of Newcastle ranting about Ann Summers. I wrote that

Christmas in particular brings out the worst in Christians. Many normally tolerant Christians see it as their duty to shout down those who don’t have god at the centre of their seasonal celebration, regardless of whether those people actually believe.

This brought back memories, but made me reflect that I’ve haven’t heard anyone complaining about Christ being take out of Christmas for years. I wonder whether the number of complaints has decreased, or whether I just don’t see them any more. It strikes me as the sort of argument I’d once have seen on social media, but that I perhaps don’t see any more as a result of abandoning those platforms.

Last year, I wrote that

One of work’s national leaders tied himself in such knots this week in his attempts to be religiously inclusive that he ended up robotically “wishing you all a wonderful set of end-of-year activities.”

No other Christmas greeting has ever made me laugh so hard and, while not his intention, perhaps that makes it the best greeting of all.

I had forgotten all about that and chuckled anew at the memory. I haven’t seen anything to rival it this season, sadly.

Looking elsewhere for inspiration: Diamond Geezer, an altogether more successful blogger for a similar number of years, normally sticks to a Christmassy picture.

So accept this shot of Newcastle’s Christmas tree. For more than seventy years, a tree has been sent from Bergen as a token of appreciation for support during the Second World War. This year, however, it seems someone noticed that we’re in a climate crisis, and that killing a tree and shipping it over 1,000 miles isn’t all that wise.

Instead, a new tradition began this year: decorating an existing, living tree that grows near the traditional site, and shipping a bauble from Bergen instead. Using a tree that’s still in the ground strikes me as going one better even than the King’s potted, replantable effort!

Newspapers often complain about television repeats at Christmas, and in some ways, this is a blog equivalent. The photos are new, but I’ve shared images of this waterfall many times, even as recently as last spring. Here’s an animated gif of the same place nine years ago.

William Armstrong, a noted manufacturer of armaments, used explosives to blast the rock and create the waterfall in the middle of the 19th century.

Armstrong is a fascinating character who is often cited as a supporter of renewable energy thanks to his interest in hydroelectricity and solar power.

But this can sometimes be overdone: both Wikipedia and The Telegraph have strongly implied that his eco-credentials were behind an 1863 prediction that coal mining in Britain would be over within two centuries. This is bollocks, as The Spectator’s contemporary report makes clear: he was merely predicting that ‘in a century or two, the United States, which possess coal-fields thirty-six times as extensive as ours, will supply the world with coal’.

I planned to use this post to moan that Rishi Sunak’s decision to approve a new coal mine during a climate emergency would mean that Armstrong’s prediction about coal production in the UK would be proven wrong. But that, too, would deviate from facts: Woodhouse Colliery is scheduled to cease production after twenty-five years, long before the 2063 ‘deadline’.

A landslip caused by extreme weather a decade ago badly damaged the Dene, and some paths are still closed off. It is hard to be optimistic about its chances of surviving the climate catastrophe we’ll be living through by 2063.

I read this popular Japanese novel in its English translation by Alison Watts, and if I could use only one word to describe it, it would be ‘warm’. The book has five sections, each narrated by one of a diverse collection of residents of the Hatori ward of Tokyo. Each of them, for one reason or another, visits the community library. The fearsome librarian, Sayuri Komachi, recommends an unexpected book which helps things work out in their life.

This is a comforting book about things which turn out well for lovely people, if not quite as originally envisaged. It’s a kind and tender book, but it’s a deep kindness: this is a story with depth. I was charmed by it.

This quotation captures the theme of the book, I think:

Life is one revelation after another. Things don’t always go to plan, no matter what your circumstances. But the flip side is all the unexpected, wonderful things that you could never have imagined happening. Ultimately it’s all for the best that many things don’t turn out the way we hoped. Try not to think of upset plans or schedules as personal failure or bad luck. If you can do that, then you can change, in your own self and in your life overall.

Sometimes, books which feature books become a bit overly sentimental about, well, books. Aoyama nicely captures the way that the experience of reading depends as much on the reader as the writer. This is an obvious truth, but it’s too often overlooked in favour of sentimentality about books in books:

Readers make their own personal connections to words irrespective of the writer’s intentions and each reader gains something unique.

It was just lovely.

The other day, I talked about how many of the EU’s most populous cities I’ve visited. But what about the UK?

As Citymonitor describes, it’s quite difficult to make a list of UK cities by population, so let’s assume we’re talking about the UK’s most populous urban areas as defined by Demographia, instead. And I can’t remember everything I did as a child, so let’s limit it to the last two decades.

By this measure, I’ve been to all the top five, and seven of the top ten. I haven’t been to Southampton-Portsmouth, Nottingham or Sheffield in the past twenty years. Perhaps I should try to correct that in 2024. I like to explore new cities.

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

In recent weeks, I’ve found it a bit difficult to concentrate when reading: there’s been a lot of other stuff going on. I felt like I needed an easy read to get back into my groove, so when I saw Backstory recommending Quietly Hostile, I thought it might fit the bill.

Prior to picking up this book, I’d never heard of Samantha Irby. It turns out that she is a well-known American comedic writer in her early 40s. She came to attention by writing a blog of humourous observations about her life, bitches gotta eat. Since then, she’s written five books, hosted a number of shows, and worked as a writer on the Sex and the City reboot. Quietly Hostile is her most recent book, consisting of a series of short humorous essays.

It was a good fit for my intention: it was easy to read, mostly trivial, and quite funny. I enjoyed reading it partly because Irby’s life as a black American female comedian is so far removed from mine, while still remaining relatable. This did mean that many of the knowing references were lost on me. I skipped the essay about Sex and the City in its entirety as I simply couldn’t follow it.

I don’t have any intention of re-reading this book, nor of seeking out Irby’s other similar titles, but this book served the purpose I asked of it. Can we ever ask more of a book than that?

A couple of quotations I enjoyed:

I like to have the news on in the background when I’m puttering around at home because I find the tone-modulated droning of newscasters oddly soothing, and my preferred way of learning what’s happening in the world is to absorb it via osmosis, never directly because that feels too stressful.

‘Quietly hostile’ is how I would describe my public personality; I am mild-mannered and super polite, but just beneath the surface of my skin, my blood is electrified and I am one inconsiderate driver away from a full Falling Down–style emotional collapse.

I would have guessed that I’d visited almost all of the most populous cities in the European Union. However, on checking a list, it turns out that I’ve only been to five of the top ten, and ten of the top twenty. Somehow, I’ve never visited the EU’s biggest city: Berlin.

The news in Le Monde of the return of night trains from Paris to Berlin might just change that. The idea of hopping down from Newcastle to London on a Saturday morning, taking the Eurostar on a Saturday afternoon, wandering across Paris to connect with the Nightjet at 19.12 and waking in Berlin at 08.26 on Sunday sounds impossibly relaxing, and certainly more luxurious than a connecting flight.

My history with sleeper trains is limited. I vaguely remember taking Motorail night trains through France in my youth, with the family car on board: those services were all discontinued more than a decade ago.

I enjoyed a trip on Britain’s very own Caledonian Sleeper last year. While I’ve had no call to do so this year, I would prefer the sleeper to an evening on the East Coast Mainline and a cheap London hotel if I need to be in London early for work purposes. Showering on a moving train was a strange and memorable experience: I’m pleased to see that, like the Caledonian Sleeper, the Paris to Berlin Nightjets similarly have deluxe compartments with their own bathrooms. I’m a deluxe kind of guy: I read Midnight Trains’s weekly newsletter without fail, and look forward to the day when I’ll be able to check into their ‘luxury hotel on rails’.

While I don’t have a great deal of experience with sleeper trains, I have become increasingly fond of using trains for international travel. That’s only partly attributable to flygskam; the better part of it is that train travel feels so much more laid back and relaxing than flying. It typically takes a little longer, but that’s a virtue: it really allows time to sink into the experience of travelling and to enjoy it for its own sake, rather than as a means to an end. There’s something ineffably luxurious about spending time in the act of travelling rather than rushing from place to place. I’m in the small proportion of travellers who intentionally book very long layovers on connecting flights for that exact reason: I’d rather have time to collect my thoughts and fill my stomach in an airport lounge than to be harried from gate to gate.

The European sleeper train renaissance therefore feels right up my street.

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

In response to the tragic death of 27-year-old Leonard Farruku aboard the Government’s Bibby Stockholm barge, the BBC reports that:

A Home Office spokesperson said it took its responsibility for the well-being of those on board incredibly seriously.

Even before this death, I would have strongly preferred the Home Office to treat its responsibilities with credible seriousness.

To suggest, after this man’s death, that they treat the weight they give their responsibility is incredible—as in, ‘not credible: that cannot be believed; beyond belief’—strikes me as being both callous and, probably, Freudian.