Here in Newcastle, there’s been a long-running saga about a massive new housing estate—Great Park. In fact, ‘massive housing estate’ considerably undersells it: with more than 4,000 homes planned, it is essentially a whole new suburb of the city.

Construction started in 2001 and has continued apace. A town centre was constructed some years ago, but until recently it was the subject of great controversy because there were virtually no shops or services open in the units built along it. Residents were very upset that they had no local services. Earlier this year, Morrisons opened in the town centre to great fanfare.

It’s against this backdrop that I read over the weekend that Rishi Sunak disapproves of services being close to where people live. To quote BBC News:

The Government said its plan would stop councils implementing “15-minute cities”, where essential amenities are always within a 15-minute walk.

Apparently, Sunak considers building essential amenities close to people’s homes to be part of a

war on motorists

A war we can only assume is being waged by the Government. Imagine how angry he will be when he realises who’s in charge of that.

Now, Newcastle hasn’t had so much as a Conservative councillor for almost three decades, so perhaps I’m out of touch. Indeed, in the latest round of local elections, their percentage share of the vote didn’t make it into double figures, their 27 candidates averaging fewer than 300 votes apiece. I walk past my local Conservative club most days, and their brass plaque is frequently defaced with amusing, topically critical slogans written on masking tape, which always strikes me as a politely British form of protest.

Yet: I can’t imagine that a desire to put essential amenities further away from people’s houses is likely to be a vote-winner. I don’t know anyone who has ever said “I can’t rent this place, the GP is less than 15 minutes’ walk away!”

This is Sunak pandering to ridiculous conspiracy theorists, seemingly without any insight into the fact that the Government is assumed to be part of the conspiracy. It is literally laughable: I was sitting on a park bench when I read that BBC line, and I laughed out loud.

Today, we get to see whether he has enough similarly insane policy ideas to turn his first—and, I’d happily wager, last—conference party leader speech into a stand-up comedy act.

Here’s hoping.

Eleanor Catton is a much-loved, Booker-winning author. This is Catton’s third novel, but the first I’ve read. The plot, set in New Zealand, concerns a dispute between a guerrilla gardening collective of stereotypical eco-warriors and a stereotypical tech billionaire.

This book has received rave reviews elsewhere, so I think the fault is with me rather than the book, but I just didn’t get it. The writing in the first part of the novel is great, and there is a lot of fun as Catton introduces her well-meaning but essentially ridiculous group of eco-warriors. There’s a particularly memorable scene where the group discusses translating their name—Birnam Wood—into an indigenous language. The group gets into an insane argument over whether that’s a way of showing respect, or whether using someone else’s language is cultural appropriation.

The problem is that the later parts of the book—which are a sort of plot-driven thriller—require me to care about people who have been set up as cartoons. Then the book also ends cartoonishly, sort of reverting to type. I couldn’t make those shifts, and didn’t really care about the characters, losing interest in the slightly silly plot.

Most upsettingly of all, especially for a literary novel, I didn’t feel like I came away from this book with any new perspective on anything. It felt like the novel relied on well-worn tropes without doing anything to subvert them.

So, in summary, this wasn’t for me.

Yesterday, I had the entirely unexpected pleasure of seeing the world’s first web server at CERN in Meyrin, Switzerland.

Over the years, I’ve read a lot about the early development of the world wide web, and I’ve also read about the storied history of Apple, including Steve Jobs’s period at NeXT computers.

Yet somehow, it had spectacularly failed to lodge in my mind that the first web server was a NeXTCube. Before I peered into the display case, my assumption was that I’d see a beige tower, probably with an IBM badge on it. It’s strange to contemplate how assumptions like that take hold, even though I must have read many times over the years that it wasn’t the case.

I also loved the sticker for its real-world mundanity. Not shown in the picture above is the handwritten comment on the top of Berners-Lee’s paper describing his system: “vague but exciting…”

It’s also fascinating to ponder the problem he was trying to solve—managing information about complex, evolving systems—and how we really haven’t applied it in healthcare more than three decades on. Even at the very simplest level, we really haven’t embraced the idea of hypertext, and of live-updating bits of guidance as new evidence emerges—or even just as new policies emerge. Most healthcare guidance remains static, with whole documents being refreshed in cycles.

For example, even the boilerplate description of many organisations at the front of documents is baked in, and only refreshed when the document is updated. If only we had learned from Berners-Lee, that could be a ‘do-once’ update that would be linked into all relevant documents.

Or, more relevantly, look at COVID guidance: each time the isolation period changed, hundreds of pages of guidance documents, including even all of those hosted on gov.uk, needed manual revision. If they’d been more thoughtfully constructed, that too could have been a ‘do-once’ update.

The counter argument, of course, is that changing ‘bits’ can substantially change the meaning of the whole, and a standing document needs approval and sign-off at regular intervals. But really, nothing in medical guidance is more complex than particle physics, for goodness’ sake, and there’s no reason that approvals to updates couldn’t be sought with an eye to where they propogate.

Perhaps we’ll get there one day.

Over recent years, we’ve all become quite used to the language of epidemiology. There are few people who would be flummoxed by the word ‘pandemic’ these days, and unlike 2018, no-one accidentally refers to ‘breakouts’ instead of ‘outbreaks’ these days.

Hansard lists fifty-seven things described in Parliament as an ‘epidemic’ in the last twelve months. When arranged in order of frequency of mentions, there is quite a long tail.

I wonder how many of them you could name off the top of your head.

Could you guess the top ten?

• Violence against women and girls (described an epidemic 17 times)
• COVID-19 (16)
• Vaping (10)
• Fraud (9)
• HIV/AIDS (9)
• Avian influenza (8)
• Obesity (7)
• Eating disorders (5)
• Loneliness (5)
• Bowel disease in the North East (5)
• Pornography (4)
• Allergy (3)
• Homelessness (3)
• Self-harm and suicide (3)
• Tuberculosis (3)
• Child sexual abuse (2)
• Cholera (2)
• Illicit use of Monkey Dust in Stoke-on-Trent (2)
• Mental illness (2)
• Pandemic influenza (2)
• Rape (2)
• Sewage spills (2)
• Sexual harassment (2)
• Youth violence (2)
• Arson (1)
• Antisemitism (1)
• Brain injury (1)
• Brain tumours (1)
• Bullying in the armed forces (1)
• Crime committed by young people (1)
• Crime in Blackpool (1)
• Dental ill-health (1)
• Discrimination against women at work (1)
• Dumping food and drink packaging in parks (1)
• Ebola (1)
• Exhaustion among NHS staff (1)
• Executions in Iran (1)
• Food and mouth disease (1)
• GPs moving to ‘ring-road’ locations (1)
• Heat stress (1)
• High street bank closures (1)
• Illicit use of nitrous oxide (1)
• Illness related to the Bhopal disaster (1)
• Knife crime (1)
• Lung disease in among children living near Heathrow Airport (1)
• Malaria (1)
• Misogyny (1)
• Moral injury among military personnel (1)
• Mpox (1)
• Name changes among sex offenders (1)
• Polio (1)
• Potential future injuries related to exposure to asbestos in unaudited rubbish dumps created by the Ministry of Defence (1)
• Seasonal influenza (1)
• Short-sightedness (1)
• Teenage nicotine addiction (1)
• Type 2 diabetes (1)
• Workplace harassment (1)

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

When a big news event occurs, like a death or a terrorist attack, the atmosphere palpably changes. Word spreads quickly around the office; an air of melancholy descends. On public transport and in shops, it’s overheard as the sole topic of conversation. The air is sombre; the mood subdued. The actual events might be relatively remote, but even locally, the day isn’t a normal one.

Yesterday felt like one of those days in Newcastle. Not because a person had died, but because the Sycamore Gap tree had been felled.

It may have been one of the most famous trees in Britain, and certainly one of the most photographed, not to mention that it was part of a World Heritage Site. Yet, I think many underestimate the degree to which many people from the North East felt personally attached to this sycamore. It’s personal to so many: it was the site of countless proposals, a common spot to leave memorials, and a place imbued with hundreds of years of family memories.

Sycamore Gap also features on endless bits of North East merchandise: often the option left over once the Tyne Bridge, Millennium Bridge and Angel of the North tat has been sold. It always felt like the North East’s symbol for the North East, not necessarily known or appreciated to the same degree by outsiders. It has pride of place in the ITV Tyne Tees title sequence.

Wendy and I were at Sycamore Gap in January. We never thought that it would be our last opportunity to see it.

Yesterday was a sad day.

Shelley Rubenstein’s piece from the FT’s HTSI about the unlikely friendship between the artist David Shrigley and tennis’s Andy Murray is simply delightful.

I think there’s a feature format in it: I’d love to read more about people from different worlds who are unexpectedly close.

Let me say up front that this is the first film I’ve seen during this project that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen and which I’ve also really enjoyed. My socks weren’t blown off, but I did have a good time.

The plot concerns a tutor (played by Daryl McCormack) hired for a young lad who aspires to Oxford’s English Literature programme (played by Stephen McMillan). The lad’s parents are played by Julie Delpy and Richard E Grant. The setting is a large manor in the English countryside. Grant’s character is a successful novelist and McCormack’s character is an aspiring novelist, who also made one of Grant’s character’s novels the subject of his PhD. The family’s butler is played by Crispin Letts.

The plot is vaguely thriller-ish with revelations about the sources of plots, the family’s history, and the developing relationships between the characters. There’s a healthy dose of moral ambiguity to set the whole thing in motion.

McCormack plays his role beautifully: he has a real capacity to imbue his characters with complex layers, which is exactly what is required here. I’ve seen him previously in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande which was a less good film, but in which he also played a reasonably complex character.

Delpy is similarly brilliant, and McMillan manages to portray his character’s repressed emotional depth with complete veracity. Letts’s character felt underwritten—perhaps scenes were cut—which slightly undercut his character’s intriguing arc. I don’t recall seeing any of these three previously.

But for my money—and perhaps this just demonstrates that I don’t know anything about film—Grant’s performance was off-kilter in this film. His character, like the others, is complex with facets revealing themselves as the narrative progresses. But Grant’s characterisation read as uneven to me, as though he was playing different characters with different motivations at different points in the film, rather than a single character who we were getting to know more completely. I don’t think that was the intention, but perhaps I’ve misunderstood it.

One of the best things about this film was the music, composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge. Like all great film music, it disappeared into the background a lot of the time, but occasionally drove the plot, or even provided moments of real humour. There’s a moment of musical levity with a robot lawnmower, which is a sentence I never thought I’d write.

Overall, this was great fun. I enjoyed watching it. It’s not the best film I’ve ever seen, but I’d happily watch it again if I had to. The plot is perhaps a bit contrived, but it is well done. It held my attention throughout, was intriguing, and had some really fun moments too. The slightly rubbish trailer undersells it. It’s worth 103 minutes of your time.