Wonka is the much-hyped prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, starring Timothée Chalamet. It’s a warm, Christmassy children’s musical which many professional critics have highly praised… but I, who know nothing about cinema, have some reservations.

Wonka seems to misunderstand Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and so doesn’t serve as the character origin story it purports to be. In Charlie, Willy Wonka is a Roald Dahl mix of light and dark; the character we meet in Wonka features no darkness whatsoever. This is surprising, as Chalamet is an actor who could perfectly tread that line.

Wonka reprises the song ‘Pure Imagination’ from the Gene Wilder adaptation, which underlines the degree to which the source material was misunderstood. In the Wilder film, ‘Pure Imagination’ is a welcoming song containing a warning concealed in a riddle: ‘You’ll be free / If you truly wish to be’. Wonka is not looking to treat the children but to assess their pureness of heart to select one of them to replace him. To reveal the children’s true wishes, Wonka encourages them, ‘Anything you want to, do it’—actions resulting in humiliating factory ejections for the unworthy majority. Like the character, the piece combines lightness with a slightly unhinged darkness.

In contrast, Wonka uses the same—still mildly threatening—tune, with slightly altered lyrics, to score a scene in which a child’s dream literally comes true, a scene whose intent is unbridled happiness. This is a weird choice if ever there was one.

The new music in Wonka seems to misunderstand how musicals work, which is a peculiar problem. The music in musicals benefits the production by enhancing the ability to explore complex emotions. Instead of spoken exposition or trying to communicate complicated feelings through body language, characters can describe multilayered emotions through song. But not in Wonka: they are primarily pieces that hammer home plot points. It strikes me that it must be pretty tricky to write a song about opening a shop without exploring the emotional drive to do so, which perhaps explains lines like ‘Put your hand into your pockelet / Get yourself some Wonka chocolate’.

The absence of character arcs makes this an unusual film: no one learns anything. Every character is the same at the end as at the film’s start, with only their situations changed. There is no growth, no coming-of-age: everyone is as everyone was.

Yet, despite all of the above, it wasn’t a bad film. It was pacy, fun, and unchallenging. I’d rather see Wonka again than Gran Turismo, and Wonka had a better grip on its source material than The Exorcist: Believer. It was… okay. And sometimes, okay is good enough.

I’m not even certain what a potato race involves any more.

When I was about 14, I wrote some software in QBasic to support the running of the school library. Hitherto, the library catalogue and loans had been stored in a spreadsheet. I replaced it with bespoke software.

Over the next couple of years, I iteratively tweaked the software based on feedback until I finished my GCSEs and left. I think I learned more from that process than from any computing course I’ve ever taken: I also came to love Greg Perry’s book QBasic by Example, which—ironically—wasn’t to be found in the library’s collection.

In my A-level computing course, I was required to write in Visual Basic instead. I remember finding this irritating, deriving much less satisfaction from developing software using a graphical user interface rather than a blank screen with an expectant blinking cursor. It felt like a little bit of power and control had been taken away, as though the final product wasn’t completely mine in the same way.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. These days, there’s nothing I create from scratch as I did in QBasic. The closest thing is writing for this blog: it’s only here that I start with a blank screen and a blinking cursor. Only here do I exercise complete control over every word and every pixel.

I’m sometimes surprised at my own tenacity in keeping this blog up for more than two decades. It’s not for anyone else’s benefit that it continues to exist. I’m sure no one else would think twice if it disappeared tomorrow. Yet, I’ve published over 760,000 words here in nearly 3,000 posts over more than twenty years. I suppose it must scratch a creative itch, even if I struggle to explain precisely where that itch is located.

Maybe I’m just a control freak at heart.

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

In Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman wrote:

Some things in life, like music, resist all attempts at greater efficiency. While we can produce coffee machines ever faster and more cheaply, a violinist can’t pick up the pace without spoiling the tune.

I’ve also read Rory Sutherland’s ‘doorman fallacy’, though I don’t think I’ve ever read Alchemy from which it originates:

The ‘doorman fallacy’, as I call it, is what happens when your strategy becomes synonymous with cost-saving and efficiency; first you define a hotel doorman’s role as ‘opening the door’, then you replace his role with an automatic door-opening mechanism.

The problem arises because opening the door is only the notional role of a doorman; his other, less definable sources of value lie in a multiplicity of other functions, in addition to door-opening: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition, as well as in signalling the status of the hotel. The doorman may actually increase what you can charge for a night’s stay in your hotel.

It strikes me that there’s sometimes a crossover between these things. Sometimes, greater efficiency isn’t possible because we’re not comprehensively understanding the task. The task of playing the violin is not merely to produce all of the right notes in the correct order, just as the task of the doorman is not simply to open the door.

Something I’ve often found myself saying in the age of Microsoft Teams is that the point of attending a meeting sometimes has nothing to do with the meeting itself. Sometimes—perhaps even often—the value is in the corridor conversations before and after the meeting, either because that’s where the real ‘intelligence’ lies or because they provide an opportunity for solid relationship building. I’m not yet aware of a good online recreation of that aspect of meetings.

And, of course, this applies in all sorts of areas of professional life. I suspect this is more true in medicine than in many other professions, though perhaps I’m biased. Often, the value of a consultation isn’t really in the problem-focused clinical interaction but in the built trust and confidence.

Sometimes, making human interactions more efficient can destroy them as effectively as speeding up the violinist can ruin a piece of music.

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

At this time of year, my pedestrian route to and from work is frequently blocked by flooded footpaths. Luckily, I’m able to nip onto the grass verge and ‘borrow’ the better-drained cycle path for a bit, the only consequence being muddy shoes. Not everyone can do that.

Compared with roads and cycle paths, the lack of maintenance afforded to pedestrian facilities is attributable to weird, politically driven funding incentives. It gives the unfortunate impression that walking is less important than riding or driving.

Readwise reminded me today that Oliver Burkeman makes an insightful observation in Four Thousand Weeks:

Email is an unparalleled tool for responding rapidly to a large volume of messages – but then again, if it weren’t for email, you wouldn’t be receiving all those messages in the first place. The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.

These days, it strikes me that tools like Microsoft Teams chats have added even more to the ‘everything’. Lowering the barrier to communication isn’t always helpful.

I sometimes daydream about insisting on replying to emails by letter. This is partly to slow down exchanges which need not be at the speed of light. It also increases the barrier to communication to a height which more accurately reflects the time-cost of receiving it.

Even if just internally, corporate email systems ought to have a built-in tool to estimate the time cost of any email (i.e. reading time multiplied by the approximate salary of the recipients). There ought to be a budgetary approval process for any exceptionally high-cost emails. The same ought also to apply to Microsoft Teams messages and meetings.

The observation is hardly novel, but it strikes me that we’ve become bad at accounting for people’s time.

In 1999, I registered the domain name simonhoward.co.uk, and I’ve owned it ever since.

There was a certain amount of foresight in that decision. I was only fourteen years old, and so I’m probably lucky that I didn’t register something wackier.

There are a lot of Simon Howards, so I’m lucky to be the one who snapped that address up early—I wasn’t early enough to get the .com, which these days hosts the website of one of many models who share my name. Thank goodness it wasn’t taken by the aristocratic child abuser who already dominates search engine results.

These days, I own 23 domain names. This is patently absurd when I only have one main website. I separate my blog (sjhoward.co.uk) from my CV (simonhoward.co.uk) from the bookshop (simonsbooks.com), which accounts for a few.

Four others are domains I registered for specific temporary projects this year, which I have no intention of renewing.

A few are handy: sjh.bz allows me a very short email address, which is occasionally handy when my main one is too long.

Others are obvious variations on my main domains to avoid confusion (sjhoward.uk and sjhoward.com).

Some are addresses I just like, though with no practical use. There’s one that would make an excellent public health company name. I recently bought simon.how because it’s the first eight letters of my name, but what will I ever do with that?

This all leads back to the same point: most people in the world have no use for a domain name, and it’s clearly ridiculous to have 23 of them, no matter how I try to justify it!

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

In Monocle this month, Michael Booth profiles Det Sidste Ord (The Last Word), a Danish television programme where famous people give an interview that is. filmed in great secrecy, edited and broadcast only after their death. Slightly weirdly, the questions are asked in the past tense and the third person (‘Who was Simon Howard?’ or ‘What was the most important thing Simon learned during his lifetime?’)

The interview is typically shown within a few weeks of the participant’s death, and there is an intention to re-edit and re-broadcast them around twenty years after death.

It sounded fascinating, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a radio format. The description didn’t sound televisual to me.

I’ve been trying to work out why that was my reaction. I think it is because it sounds like the format involves deep and intimate conversation, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that done well on television. Radio somehow conveys authenticity; TV struggles to break through a sheen of artificiality.

I read Rob Burley’s book about TV political interviews earlier this year and disagreed with his view that long-form television interviews are the most revealing. They often become performative and false in a way that rarely happens on radio. They are simply different beasts.

It’s an unfair comparison, but you can learn more about a person’s character from one appearance on Desert Island Discs than from ten guest slots on Graham Norton or Laura Kuenssberg’s TV shows.

With those preconceptions, I can see why my initial reaction was that Det Sidste Ord would make great radio rather than television. But perhaps the real lesson is that those who make British TV have much to learn from the Danes, or that I am watching the wrong programmes.

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

You’ll no doubt have seen that Spotify cancelled the podcast Heavyweight this week, alongside a tranche of redundancies. Ironically, I’d introduced Wendy to the show hosted by Jonathan Goldstein only a fortnight ago. I’ve listened since the start, though in a pretty on-and-off fashion. The episodes were so well-crafted and moving that it felt weirdly disrespectful to listen to them as background audio, which ironically meant that I didn’t get around to hearing them.

The best thing I’ve read on the topic is PJ Vogt’s insightful piece on the cancellation of Heavyweight and the broader state of the podcast industry. Of his Search Engine podcast, which I also enjoy, Vogt says:

We have a budget that’s good until July. After July, we’ll see.

One of the comforts of working as a doctor is the confidence in future employment. Even in public health, which is undoubtedly the rockiest of medical specialties in those terms, it’s easy to have a high degree of confidence that doctors will always be required in the system somewhere, even if the system is dismantled every five years or so.

Podcasting, by contrast, sounds terrifying: most of my job is about dealing with uncertainty, but I couldn’t sleep if I had no idea if my job would still exist in a few months. The creative drive of people like Vogt and Goldstein, their willingness to sacrifice certainty to make journalistic and artistic products, is truly something to behold.

I’m reminded of how fortunate I am to have a job that allows me to pursue my interests while maintaining a degree of personal assurance. Most people aren’t so lucky.

I’ve watched enough Aircrash Investigation to know that in an emergency, pilots focus on aviation, navigation, and communication—in that order. It seems like the ‘airway, breathing, circulation’ of the aviation world.

Listening to bits of the COVID-19 inquiry over recent weeks, Wendy observed that often, decision-makers were put off from making a decision due to fear of what might come next. This week’s most-discussed example has been lockdowns: there was much discussion about them being intentionally deployed as late as possible because of the future risk of behavioural fatigue.

I can understand why this happened. I obviously had no part in the decision-making, but before the lockdown was announced in the UK, I remember being sceptical that compliance would be high and thinking that it would tail off quickly. Even as lockdown was announced, I’m reasonably sure I said something like, ‘I bet loads of people go to work tomorrow regardless’. I was entirely wrong.

In retrospect, this feels similar to forgetting to aviate due to focusing on navigation: it’s ignoring what’s in front of the windscreen right now for fear of what might emerge later. In certain extreme situations, that might be advisable. Yet, generally, it’s more sensible to prevent the plane from crashing into the thing in front of the windscreen right now. One can consider whether the manoeuvre has knocked the aircraft off course once the evasive action has been taken.

Perhaps the lesson of the COVID-19 inquiry is the same. Take action to avert the crisis before you, and add nuance and course correction later when the impact is known. Don’t delay essential action because of uncertainty about what might happen later.

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