On Friday, Wendy and I were fortunate enough to visit the recently re-christened Glasshouse to hear Erland Cooper and a string quartet from the Scottish Ensemble, supported by Midori Jaeger. We had a brilliant time.

Neither of us had previously heard Jaeger, but her set of original songs performed solo with her pizzicato cello demonstrated remarkable talent. It was Wendy’s favourite part of the night. Jaeger also joined the Cooper and the quartet in the main set.

And what a main set it was, with remarkable performances. I’ve listened to all of Cooper’s albums repeatedly, but my favourite is still the original Solan Goose, and a fair proportion of the set was drawn from that album. There were a couple of moments of real imagination: the title song of that album accompanied by a ‘gannet choir’ made up of the audience streaming gannet calls from Cooper’s website; one song played entirely in the dark.

Cooper’s music isn’t entirely up Wendy’s street: the melodies are quite simple and repetitive (I would say ‘meditative’) but we were both nevertheless entranced by the skill of the musicians. Cooper himself also proved to be an endearing character, bringing real warmth and humour to the evening.

Basically: we had a great night out.

Over recent months, I’ve become more certain in my position that the BBC shouldn’t be creating and sharing material on closed social networks. I’m defining ‘closed’ as anything that isn’t available to the public without a login. For example, BBC journalists shouldn’t—as part of their job—be posting threads on ‘X’.

Universal access is a core part of what the BBC stands for. Indeed, they’ve always aimed (with variable success) to give equal access to their television services regardless of the platform rather than giving preferential treatment to, say, Sky subscribers. I shouldn’t have to give my data to a third party to receive BBC content.

I used to think the same of government bodies, but then I changed my mind: it’s the responsibility of the government to reach people where they are, no matter how unpalatable that location.

A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Broderick gave me a whole new suggestion to ponder when he suggested that all politicians should be banned from private social networks. It is coming up to a month since he wrote that, and it’s been swimming around my mind ever since.

On one hand: clearly, there’s a risk of politicians being duplicitous by posting different things on different closed social media networks.

But on the other: ‘twas ever thus. I’m sure politicians have always said things in closed fora that they might not say elsewhere. The bit they write for a church newsletter is probably quite different in tone and content to the speech they give at the local social club. That’s clearly not wrong nor necessarily bad. If they end up saying contradictory things to different audiences, then they risk exposure.

It’s fair to say that the internet is not a church newsletter: for one thing, social media content has the potential to travel further faster than anything handed out in hard copy. But that’s actually protective of the underlying principle: the further content spreads, the greater the probability of inconsistencies coming to light.

So, despite my misgivings about social media, I don’t think I’m with Broderick on this one.

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

This film, currently in cinemas, is the third in a series based on Agatha Christie’s character Poirot. The series is produced and directed by its lead actor, Kenneth Branagh. Given the rationale for this series of posts, you’ll be unsurprised that I haven’t seen the others.

I did, however, read a lot of Poirot in my youth, and my mum and I would often watch the David Suchet adaptation together. I was surprised, therefore, that I didn’t recognise the plot of A Haunting in Venice: only afterwards did I read that it was based on Hallowe’en Party, a novel to which the film’s plot has only the most passing resemblance.

The film opens with Poirot in retirement in Venice—that’s new—when a friend and writer played by Tina Fey visits. The twinkle in Fey’s eye made me sit back in my seat: ’they’ve got this,” I thought. They’d clocked the fact that the Poirot series is essentially ridiculous, and needs to be treated with a knowing lightheartedness. Death is no more than a puzzle, the investigation no more than a riddle to be solved. They’ve understood that.

Reader, I was wrong. Far from treating death lightly, the writer has decided to make one character suffer post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. We’re so far from funny that we’re literally discussing the Holocaust.

But it’s okay because Fey will be along with a genuinely funny one-liner about Poirot’s idiosyncratic phraseology shortly.

This is a film that gave me whiplash. It seems to try to combine the lightest, silliest approach to death—spearing on a classical statue, drowning during apple bobbing—with a deep-seated reflection of the horror and trauma of war. It’s a deeply peculiar oil and water combination.

Just to add to the confusion, the film is imbued with something adjacent to horror. There are classical horror tropes in here—jump scares, weird cinematography, haunting noises—but it doesn’t feel like the film is intending to make these moments genuinely frightening. It’s almost like it is hinting in that direction, as though someone’s realised that juxtaposing cheap scares with the horror of war is a little insensitive.

This wasn’t a terrible film: overall, I found it fairly enjoyable. I certainly preferred it to Sound of Freedom and Gran Turismo. But my overriding thought as I walked out of the cinema was: ‘well, that was odd.’

Richard Smith recently proposed banning the word ‘prevention’ in healthcare:

A few years ago, my friend Pritt, one of life’s instinctive radicals and iconoclasts, talked to me about “the deficit model of health.” At first, I didn’t grasp his point, but slowly I came to understand. What is being prevented? Sickness, of course. Prevention leads to health, which is the “absence of sickness.” Health is defined as a deficit, the absence of sickness. And who determines if you are sick? Doctors. If we stick with “prevention” then doctors will determine who is sick and who is “healthy” because they are not sick.

Like most radical ideas, this one took me on a journey. My instinctive response was to agree: I smiled broadly as I read, ‘Dying is healthy; living forever would be unhealthy.’

Of course, ‘we need a bolder and broader definition of health—something to do with resilience, adaptability, coping, interdependence, and relationships with others, our community, the planet, and nature.’

But then, I paused. I work in health protection. Most of my job is about ‘preventing’ illness. If someone is a close contact of a patient with a particular disease, then they may need antibiotics to prevent them from becoming unwell themselves. If there’s a high likelihood that a foodstuff in someone’s fridge was manufactured in a way which has introduced contamination, that food might be better off binned to prevent food poisoning. If a cloud of chlorine gas is rolling towards a housing estate, then the people must be evacuated to prevent them from choking to death.

And then I saw the point. To see my job as ‘prevention’ is precisely the sort of simplification that I myself often rail against. My job isn’t really to prevent people from becoming unwell: they can take as many risks and be as unwell as they damn well please. My job is really to inform them of the risk they face, help them to decide whether they want to act in light of that new information, and to support them to act if they wish to do so.

This is significantly different because—as I frequently find myself emphatically explaining to others—it can be perfectly rational not to act in response to a risk. This is especially true given that most actions generate side effects, which each of us will value differently. We don’t—and shouldn’t and mustn’t—compel people to act based on our assessment of the risk to their physical health, because there might well be other things that they value more greatly.

Banning the word ‘prevention’, even from an area of medicine that might seem to be entirely focused on it, would be enormously helpful in reframing what we do.

The UK Government doesn’t see the climate catastrophe as one of its ‘priorities’—‘stopping the boats’ is more important than protecting the future of life of Earth. Perhaps, then, I shouldn’t be surprised by the newspaper reports this morning that Sunak is descending further into populism by ‘watering down’ his climate commitments.

Liam Byrne’s ‘there’s no money left’ note has been a millstone around the neck of the Labour Party for the last 13 years.

We’re often told that the Conservative Party is an election winning machine. It is incredible that their strategists can’t see that this policy is their own equivalent if they are hoping to return to Government in 2029 or 2034—after five or ten more years of growing floods, fires, and climate-related chaos.

Wendy and I watched a news report recently which referred used the word ‘steaming’ to refer to shoplifting. It’s hardly a neologism—here’s a newspaper article from the last century which uses it in the headline—but it was new to us.

There have been a lot of puzzling articles about shoplifting recently, whether it’s Dame Sharon White referring to an ‘epidemic’ or Tyler Brûlé worrying about how toothpaste is displayed. I say ‘puzzling’ because none of the coverage seem to get under the skin of the issue.

Reports to police of shoplifting seem broadly comparable to pre-pandemic levels. We all understand that there can be differences between experienced and reported crimes, and that bare numbers of crimes don’t tell the whole story: a business experiences the loss of a packet of Polo mints differently to a gang ‘steaming’ a technology display, even if both are reported as a single crime. Most of the news articles seem to base at least some of their reporting on the crime figures, making slightly odd year-on-year comparisons without providing any wider context. So, I’m not really given to understand from the coverage whether this really is a period of unusual incidence, or whether something else has changed, or whether this is just a return to the pre-pandemic norm.

It’s one of those unfortunate examples where, almost universally, the news coverage of a trend leaves me feeling less well informed.

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

Wendy and I saw Past Lives advertised a little while ago, and were keen to see it at the cinema.

It is Celine Song’s debut film, starring Greta Lee and Teo Yoo. It follows two 12-year-old friends in South Korea who are parted when one of them emigrates. We catch up with them at age 24, and again at age 36, as they reflect on how their lives have changed, and on the paths not taken.

It’s hard to know what to say about the film. It was wonderfully acted, beautifully shot and the script was understated and emotionally powerful. It is one of those films which is as much about what is not said as what is said: there are several extraordinarily powerful moments without dialogue.

Both Wendy and I thought this was excellent, and thoroughly enjoyed seeing it. Yet, I think we’re perhaps less likely to remember it a year hence than, say, Tár, which I think made a bigger impression on us both.

Ernie Smith recently wrote:

In the internet era, there is absolutely zero guarantee that our words will outlive us. While not to be morbid, I have literally said to my wife that this would actually be important to me, to have the knowledge that my thoughts would continue to be online, even after my passing. That’s not a small ask.

I was surprised by the strength of my negative reaction to the implied idea that I would want my writing to be preserved after my death: it was something approaching horror.

I have very fixed ideas about my own death, and this made me realise that these ideas are perhaps more fixed than I realised. In essence: when I’m dead, I am dead. I therefore will no longer give a toss about whether my website is online, what anyone does with my organs, or whether I’m buried or cremated. I will, quite literally, care less than I did at any point during my life. If the people who remain find comfort in some activity or other, then they ought to do it; they ought not to sit around and consider whether it is ‘what I would have wanted’ or not, as I am quite literally unable to care.

Obviously, this kind of thing is intensely personal, and I wouldn’t want to seem like I’m judging others. Each to their own. What surprised me was the strength of my own feeling about my own view of this stuff.

It also made me reflect on how my own position is an imposition in its own way. It shifts the whole burden of decision making onto other people, who may not feel that they are in a position to make those decisions. It withholds any easy answers. Perhaps having clear wishes is the easier option all round.

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

I’m not a fan of cars, and I’m neither experienced nor especially competent when it comes to DIY. I’ve changed my car stereo before, but it felt like it was pushing the limits of my competence.

Wendy’s indicator in her car had been working intermittently for over a year, and recently stopped working altogether. I’d searched the web and come to the amateur conclusion that the indicator stalk had corroded, which seemed to be a common problem in her car’s model. Wendy asked the garage to repair it when she took it for an MOT, but they said they couldn’t do it. At another garage, they said they’d have to get a specialist in.

And that’s how I ended up buying a replacement indicator stalk online, and following a YouTube tutorial to fix the problem. It was straightforward, taking me about ninety minutes (over two days) and requiring no specialist tools. It did require taking the steering wheel off, which looked quite dramatic.

It all went back together effortlessly (with no bits left over!) and is working splendidly. I was really proud of myself for taking this on, despite it being way out of my comfort zone, and reaching a satisfying conclusion.

It also made me reflect on repairability, from two different perspectives.

Firstly: in the pre-internet era, would I have had the confidence to tackle this with nothing more than a Hayes manual? I think almost certainly not. There’s something reassuring about seeing multiple people tackle the task on video, and getting a proper visual sense of what to expect at each stage.

Secondly: if we had more up-to-date cars, would this be a manageable task? Again, I think almost certainly not. I suspect that modern cars are far less user-repairable, and that there would probably be some garage programming required to replace an electrical part. It seems unlikely that it would be plug-and-play, which wouldn’t be ideal in these climate challenged times.

And so, I suspect this repair has fallen at a very particular, fleeting moment in history. Technology gave me the confidence to tackle the job, but had not made the car itself too complex for a total amateur like me to be able to fix it.

Writing for the Financial Times yesterday, George Parker and Lucy Fisher said:

Next year, Sunak will ask the public at a general election to trust the Tories with another five years in power. Even many in his own party believe he is doomed to fail, that he will be dragged under by the legacy of 13 years of Conservative rule: public sector austerity, Brexit, the chaos and lies of Boris Johnson, the Covid-19 lockdown parties and the economic meltdown of Truss’s brief tenure.

Nonetheless, Sunak remains bullish about his chances of defying the sceptics, with the economy faring better and inflation coming under control. A revamped Number 10 operation is determined to deliver a fifth consecutive Tory election victory. “He really believes he can do it,” says one Downing Street insider.

I think—and hope—Sunak is wrong. I don’t think the Government he leads represents the best group of people to run the country. But Sunak’s confidence gives me optimism.

I worry that Sunak’s best chance of retaining power is a snap, single-issue election in the next handful of months, the issue being the European Convention on Human Rights. A pretext can be manufactured easily, and may even be handed on a plate by a Supreme Court decision that deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda contravenes the Convention. The fact that withdrawal would be controversial provides a strong pretext for “putting it to the people” at a general election. It’s not hard to imagine the right-wing press campaigning fervently in support: “you might not like everything about the Tories, but this is our one opportunity to get this done.” It’s also not hard to imagine that message cutting through.

The logic of enacting this plan this autumn is also straightforward: Sunak can argue that he is “making progress” on his “priorities” and it bounces Labour onto the turf on which they are currently least comfortable, before they’ve worked out their election position. With the press behind them, the Conservatives can define the terms of the debate and largely keep the election as a single-issue vote.

The most dangerous thing for a party heading to an election is ennui introduced by low expectations. The clear narrative based on polling is that Labour is on course to win the next election. The best way to suspend those expectations is by doing something unexpected: calling an early election and redefining the terms of that election to something where the majority view is less clear-cut. Suddenly, the narrative becomes that “it’s all to play for”—inflating the perception of the popularity of the Conservative vote.

This would be a horrible thing to happen. It would spark a distressingly toxic debate and—by definition—give voice to some of our most inhumane tendencies. For what it’s worth, I also don’t think it would work: I don’t think moderate Conservatives would fall into line, I don’t think this sort of campaign would energise large sections of their base, and I think Labour would find ways to cut through with strong ‘change’ messages. This ‘nuclear option’ might be Sunak’s best shot, but I still think it’s a long shot.

If Sunak “really believes” he can win conventionally, then this bet—not to mention the damage it could do to Sunak’s reputation and future earning potential—is not worth the risk. And if Sunak’s confidence avoids us taking a disastrous path, then it’s hard not to like it.