I read this short book in an afternoon, as a sort of escapism. It had been recommended somewhere—I can’t remember where—as a gentle alternative to Marie Kondo’s books. I love a bit of Marie Kondo, but the idea of a gentle alternative felt comforting.

At heart, this is a book for people who are, for whatever reason, struggling in life and finding the tasks of looking after themselves and their home to be overwhelming. I am fortunate not to be in that position, but I nevertheless enjoyed the book.

Alongside the practical advice, Davis reflects on her own challenges in life, and passionately makes the point that household maintenance is not a moral issue. Her advice isn’t always practically generalisable—this is firmly disposable income, large house stuff—but I think Davis is really trying to suggest a mindset rather than particular cleaning techniques.

I was struck that Davis doesn’t seem to acknowledge the impact of social media on her own mental health, despite several mentions of TikTok comments leading her down dark paths. This seemed a strange omission given the themes explored in the book. It was only after reading the book that I understood that the book is a spin-off from her TikTok fame, and so perhaps her social media experiences are fairly singular.

I was interested to read this, and it was short, and it gave me something of a different perspective on the topics it explored—but I’m uncertain if I’ll remember it a year hence.

I’ve mentioned a number of times on this blog, though always in passing, that I enjoy Daft Punk’s music. I was saddened to learn of their split in February 2021.

Last week, Le Monde published a fanatic five-part series of long reads by Bruno Lesprit. Under the title ‘how Daft Punk got lucky’, the series went into far more detail on the duo than I’ve ever read before. I enjoyed it enormously.

The articles aren’t very well linked on the English version of the Le Monde site, so here the five articles in orderfor convenience:

• Daft Punk’s New World odyssey
• Daft Punk’s early masterpieces, crafted in a childhood bedroom
• Daft Punk and the album that was a Hollywood blockbuster
• Daft Punk, pardon my French touch
• Daft Punk, two robots put to sleep after 28 years
  

There were two particularly stand-out takeaways from this series.

Firstly, Daft Punk have released a new, extended, tenth anniversary edition of Random Access Memories—my favourite of their albums—and the news had completely passed me by. Guess what I’ve been streaming while I’ve been writing this?

Secondly, this was a thing that happened in this crazy world of ours, and I’d forgotten all about it:

What happens when you take three artists who are used to working in ceramics and give them a ten-day residency at the National Glass Centre? They try to explore ideas in a new material, resulting in an exhibition that—for me, at least—didn’t really work.

The three artists involved were Bouke de Vries, Andrea Walsh and Andrew Livingstone.

Andrea Walsh experimented with the fluidity of glass and ceramic, seeing how each could be made to fold or flex, almost like fabric. Her pieces were mostly tiny and intricate. They felt a bit like the artists’ artist’s response to the challenge, in that they explored the material, but didn’t offer an awful lot to a casual observer like me. I don’t really know how fluid ceramics can be, so a comparison with glass was a bit lost on me.

Bouke de Vries’s work seemed to mostly involve putting ceramic pots in glass boxes, marked with words like ‘fragile’ and ‘handle with care’. I appreciated the whimsy of doing that in glass, but I didn’t get much beyond that. According to the labels, the artist was intending to draw some connection with Vermeer’s Milkmaid, which appeared as four tapestries, but I didn’t really understand how the whole thing was supposed to fit together.

Andrew Livingstone exhibited a bowl of glass emoji-like fruit which I enjoyed, and which was displayed alongside the artist’s earlier painting which featured the fruit. I thought this was an amusing commentary on his style and the artistic process, upending the usual way in which still life art works. Until I read the label, I didn’t realise that there was another sexual layer of meaning in that the fruits are all used in ‘sexting’ and also reference ‘fruit’ as a homophobic slur.

Livingstone also exhibited a glass model of a house in its own section of the gallery, surrounded on the floor by what3words grid references. I had no idea what this was all about: according to the label, it aimed to “explore ceramic and glass as queer politically charged materials.” I didn’t get it, not least as there wasn’t even any ceramic in the piece, as far as I could make out.

All things considered, I suspect this exhibition would be of more interest to those with some background knowledge or experience of working artistically with ceramic or glass than it was to me.

Confluence continues at the National Glass Centre until 10 September.

Le Monde had a great editorial on Friday about the UK government’s attitude to asylum seekers. Its conclusion:

In the UK, as in other countries such as France, debates on immigration are in urgent need of candor, especially in light of labor shortages. The UK, far from being “overrun,” as Braverman claims, registers far fewer asylum seekers than France or Germany. London suffers from a lack of efficiency in processing applications, 166,000 of which are pending. Brexit has led the British to deprive themselves of European coordination tools, and to a policy that favors migrants from distant countries over Europeans.

As for the real ways of managing migration, they mainly involve improving European cooperation policies and our relations with the countries of origin. Unless they have the courage to speak the truth, the leaders of developed countries risk continuing to put on, like Sunak, a pernicious show of powerlessness.

I find it hard to disagree with a word of that. The government’s profound lack of seriousness is hard to fathom at the best of times, but becomes uniquely distressing when applied to the treatment of vulnerable people literally fleeing for their lives.

It’s also hard to imagine any of the editorials of the British press focusing on the substantive issue, as Le Monde has done, if the ‘fuck off to France’ shoe had been on the French foot.

Highlighted by Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic Daily yesterday, this first-person account of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 is brilliant and hilarious. It was published in 1956, and written by Thomas P. Curtis. It is stuffed full of moments like this:

For the aquatic events we had on our team a very fast short-distance swimmer, who had won many races in warm American swimming pools. He journeyed to the Piraeus on the day of the first swimming competition blissfully ignorant that even the Mediterranean is bitterly cold in the month of April.

He had traveled 5000 miles for this event, and as he posed with the others on the edge of the float, waiting for the gun, his spirit thrilled with patriotism and determination. At the crack of the pistol, the contestants dived headfirst into the icy water. In a split second his head reappeared. “Jesu Christo! I’m freezing!”; with that shriek of astonished frenzy he lashed back to the float. For him the Olympics were over.

It’s well-worth five minutes of your time.

I know nothing about sport, but even I’m aware that England faces Spain in the World Cup Final this morning.

I enjoyed reading the Economist’s Simply Science newsletter on the subject, written by Abby Bertics. I had no idea, for example, that “women still overwhelmingly wear football boots designed for small men, not women.”

But the most interesting part of the article concerned some research by Arve Vorland Pedersen, who proposed several modifications to the game to scale it to the physiological attributes of women, rather than those of men. Women are shorter, for example, so the pitch and goals ought to be smaller. Women should not have to live in a world designed for men.

And yet the kicker, so to speak, came at the end. The average physiological attributes of men at the time the sport’s rules were codified have more in common with the average physiological attributes of today’s women than today’s men. So really, the challenge ought not to be to scale things down for women, but up for men.

In today’s world, football is a women’s game.

In an old LRB diary, Patrick McGuinness makes an observation about loquacious train announcements:

In Europe what you hear on trains is minimal and informative: you get told your destination and the stops as they approach. In Britain it’s a relentless patter of pseudo-information aimed at pseudo-customers by people running a pseudo-business. You don’t ‘read’ the safety instructions, you ‘take some time to familiarise yourself with’ them. Your belongings must always be ‘personal’, and in case you were wondering, as you neared your ‘station stop’, what to do with them, you are ‘advised to remember to take them with you’. The train is also the only place outside a Classics course where you’ll hear the word ‘vestibule’. That’s OK, it’s nice to hear it again, but they spoil it by saying ‘vestibule area’.

He’s wrong about ‘vestibule’: you can also occasionally hear it in our house, where Wendy and I sometimes playfully use the word to refer to our porch. It’s even what we call the porch in our smart home setup.

This is an anatomical joke: there are many vestibules in the body, which are generally small spaces leading to larger spaces. The anatomical features retain a metaphorical connection to the original Latin vestibulum, the small enclosed room at the entrance to a house… otherwise known today as a porch. But I’d never thought about it enough to realise that we were re-creating the metaphor in reverse.

You’re also possessed of a pair of vestibulocochlear nerves. We occasionally misappropriate the word as an adjective meaning ‘in the porch’—‘Who turned the vestibulocochlear light off?’ There ain’t no humour like anatomical humour, amirite?

Musing on this today, however, made me wonder about the connection between a ‘vestibule’ and a ‘vestry’ in a church. I first wondered if it was maybe a similar metaphorical thing, in that the ‘vestry’ is the area in which one prepares before entering a church. Or perhaps the connection is ‘vesting’, as in donning or doffing clothes.

So I fired up the OED.

As it turns out, they seem to be unrelated, or at least both existed in Latin. As I’ve mentioned, vestibule comes from vestibulum, which retains its meaning today. The history of ‘vestry’ is less certain. It seems to come from the ‘vestments’, from the Latin vestīmentum—clothes. However, it’s not clear if that’s a direct thing—because it’s where the garments are stored—or a metaphorical thing, ‘vesting’ in the sense of endowing someone with something, like ‘investment’.

A ‘vestry’ in the church sense is also sometimes called a ‘revestry’ or a ‘vestiary’—some sources suggest that ‘vestry’ is just a corruption of ‘vestiary’. Interestingly, Wikipedia seems to prefer ’sacristy’, which I would have said was specifically Catholic, but very much isn’t.

The OED provides a whole separate meaning of ‘vestry’: the rubbish associated with a mine, which I think I’d probably naturally refer to as ‘slag’. I would never have previously imagined featuring those two words in the same sentence.

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

‘Dechurching’ is an awful word, but Jake Meador has an interesting article in The Atlantic about the decline of church attendance in the USA. I thought this section was particularly interesting:

After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it—you might want to go, but you also dread the inevitable questions about where you have been. “I skipped church to go to brunch with a friend” or “I was just too tired to come” don’t sound like convincing excuses as you rehearse the conversation in your mind. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even if some part of you still wants to go.

The dread of having to explain previous non-attendance—not at church, but anywhere—is a specific feeling. I can feel it in the pit of my stomach as I write this. I think it’s something we’ve all experienced, but which I don’t recall seeing articulated, and certainly not in this context.

I probably need to be better at thinking about how to avoid conjuring that feeling in others. Are there, perhaps, meetings that I invite people to, where they feel guilty if they miss one—guilt which, in turn, makes them less likely to come to the next one?

Keep with the churchy theme: how can I be better at welcoming back the prodigal son rather than making them feel guilty for their prior absence?

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

As I wandered along the coast at Roker and Seaburn, I began wondering about the fate of lighthouse keepers. I can well imagine that they thought their job would be there forever, and that the human aspect of lighthouse-keeping could never be replaced. Even as electricity replaced other modes of power, I can hear their voices musing that a human presence would still be required. Even if the operation of the light could be automated, lighthouse keepers with their local knowledge do so much more than maintain the light, and can understand the local conditions better than any automated system. It may not be their primary function, but lighthouse keepers were responsible for some remarkably heroic rescues over the years: no automated system could replace that.

And yet here we are, a quarter of a century on from having any staffed lighthouses in the UK, after every lighthouse keeper in the country was replaced by automation in a transition lasting less than two decades.

Many experts predict that artificial intelligence will replace numerous professions in the UK within the next few years. I’m sceptical: maybe because I work in health. There is much in my field that could be (and is already) aided by artificial intelligence, but it strikes me that the human-to-human relationship is the most important part of a lot of medicine. It’s hard to see that being replaced.

Perhaps, though, I’m the medical equivalent of a lighthouse keeper, falsely predicting my own continued necessity in the face of the unstoppable march of automation.

Wendy and I have just finished the disturbing and absorbing six-part drama Fifteen—Love on Amazon Prime. It primarily examines the relationship between a brilliant tennis player (played by Ella Lily Hyland) and her coach (played by Aidan Turner).

We found the script to be deftly plotted and the production to be outstanding, as the two combined to peel away layer after layer of complexity in a series where almost nothing is black and white. It is timely, coming as it does after so many stories have come out of abusive behaviour from coaches towards young athletes. Without wanting to spoil anything, it also thoughtfully and cleverly includes a character with dementia in a way that feels integral to the plot.

We did have some quibbles: the contortions the script goes through to avoid mentioning the word “Wimbledon” introduced some unintentional and inappropriate levity in some serious scenes. There is one central character whose writing is so uneven that their inclusion felt vaguely pointless. And there is quite a bit of unnecessary and unnatural scripted exposition: it may be unpredictable, but when revelations occur they are telegraphed rather than hinted at.

But the acting—especially Hyland’s incredible performance—is unmissable.