Wendy and I have been lucky enough to visit the blockbuster Donatello exhibition at the V&A. As the museum puts it, this was an opportunity for us to ‘explore the exceptional talents of the Renaissance master Donatello, arguably the greatest sculptor of all time’.

Except… well… it didn’t feel that way. We were a little pushed for time, but found it a bit of a challenge to work out what we were supposed to take from each item. For example, the ‘God the Father’ from Milan Cathedral, above, has no connection whatsoever with Donatello. The label suggested that the technique used to make it was uncertain, but that it might have been a technique that Donatello might have also sometimes used. Right.

And the exhibition rather continued in this vein. Neither of us knows the first thing about Renaissance art, and so perhaps we’re not really the target audience, but we left with no real appreciation for why Donatello was so especially revered.

We did both comment that the Donatello works seemed to stand out in the exhibition, thought couldn’t quite work out whether that was due to an inherent quality of them or the curation.

I was struck by the incredible detail of Donatello’s rilievo schiacciato, a phrase I’ll never remember a week from now which refers to the low-relief marble carvings like the one above. Weirdly, these felt a bit tucked into a corner in the exhibition, with more space and focus seemingly given over to Donatello’s possible (but uncertain) training as a goldsmith.

I think maybe I’ve been spoiled by Vermeer, but I was left thinking that I’d have preferred there to be less in this exhibition to allow the Donatello to breathe, and to help us understand why he’s so revered.

‘Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance’ continues at the V&A until 11 June.

There’s nothing I could write today that’s even half as spot-on as yesterday’s Economist leader.

The recipe for saving the NHS requires radicalism, but of a simpler sort: turning the NHS from what it has become—a sickness service—into what its name promises—a health service. That will mean spending more money. But to spend it productively requires a shift in focus: away from hospitals to the community, from treatment to prevention, from incentivising inputs to encouraging better outcomes.

A system focused on hospitals is one designed to treat people only after they have become really sick. That is the equivalent of buying more fire extinguishers while dismantling the smoke alarms.

The whole thing is well worth five minutes of your time.

The UK press is waiting with baited breath for publication of migration statistics at 09.30 today. Each outlet will then pick over the statistics and find a of presenting them which reinforces their pre-existing view of the world.

So, allow me to write preemptively about something completely different that’s due to be unveiled today, in a way which entirely reinforces my views.

Today, a major part of the work going into the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris is being unveiled, as the triangular structures that make up the framework of the choir and apse begin to be unveiled. These have been made using techniques dating back to the 1200s.

We’re supposed to be awed by this, but I can’t help but feel a little depressed. In the great tradition of cathedrals, Notre-Dame included, the French could have chosen to blend spectacular history with spectacular modernism, to have explored and redefined the meaning of the cathedral for the modern age. This could have become a beacon, something to rival La Sagrada Família for demonstrating how ancient traditions apply to the twenty-first century.

Instead, the response was “put it back as it was,” using centuries-old techniques to reconstruct a centuries-old building, neither truly preserving anything (it’s newly built) nor connecting it to the modern world (it was designed to work in the 13th century). Through striving to avoid controversy, the project also avoids relevance.

Pretending things are preserved in aspic is very rarely the best way to conserve them.

This song, which is somehow more than two decades old, has been in my head while I’ve been writing this. It has northing to do with either of today’s revelations, and yet somehow feels like it connects the two:

The image at the top is by Ranopamas on Flickr, used under this licence.

It’s been way too long…

I recently gave blood for the 75th time, and I’ve been pondering my blood donation history.

I remember the first time I gave blood: it was in Southport at the Holy Trinity Church Hall. My mum drove me there because she was worried about me driving after donating. She was scandalised by the need to ‘pay and display’ to park, especially because—in those days—it was hard to know how long to pay for. There was no appointment service: it was a ’turn up and queue’ affair. These days, I book appointments from an app on my phone.

I can’t accurately place this episode in time, though. I think it must have been when I was 19, as I don’t think I donated before starting medical school, and I assume I must have started during the summer holiday at home.

I’ve posted a few times on this blog about donating blood, and was surprised to find that it was in 2012—a little after my 25th donation—that beds were replaced with reclining chairs. They still strike me as somewhat new-fangled, even though I’ve clearly now made two-thirds of my donations in one.

If I did start at 19, then I’ve now been donating for half of my lifetime. A total of 75 donations over 19 years means a frequency of 3.9 donations per year, which is more than double the average. This isn’t because of any particular deep-set sense of altruism, it’s just because I always make the next appointment straight after my last session, and the logical option is to schedule it at my earliest convenience. I’m lucky these days to live within walking distance of a blood donation centre, so I don’t have to try to be available when a peripatetic session happens to be nearby.

Each donation is 450ml, so I’ve given a little short of 34 litres in all, or a little over three times my total blood volume. There’s a cross stitch on display at my local donor centre:

The ‘75’ is, in effect, a slight exaggeration. The rule is—as far as I can make out—that if the donation needle pierces the skin, then that counts as a ‘donation.’ But on very rare occasions, perhaps two or three times over the years, the needle misses the vein, in which case nothing comes out. These days, there seems to be a ‘one attempt’ rule: they won’t even try the other arm to save the bother of coming back another day. I’m sure they used to be more gung-ho about it.

Other than the occasional bruise, I’ve only suffered two minor side effects in those 75 donations.

I remember at a session in Stockton, at the end of my donation, the carer shouted to a colleague, ’I’ve got a leak!’ I assumed there was something wrong with the collection bag, but came to realise quite quickly that it was the enthusiastic blood flow from my arm after the needle had been removed that was the cause for concern. A bit of pressure and elevation sorted that pretty quickly.

On another occasion, the fault was entirely mine. I had a quantity of alcohol after donating (against advice) and took my blood pressure medication and got up too quickly out of bed and stood up to pee. Post-micturition syncope was the predictable consequence. I think this is the only time in my life that I’ve ever fainted. My overriding memory from the event is how fainting didn’t feel like I expected it to: it was much more a feeling in the gut than a light-headedness. No cartoon birds circled my head. I did feel a little foolish.

Never in 75 donations have I ever experienced any pain.

I feel very lucky to have enjoyed good health over the years, and to have been eligible to donate. There are many people who would like to, but cannot.

When I started donating, the National Blood Service gave those who reached 75 donations was an Edinburgh crystal plate—now found in numbers on eBay. My mum could have hung it on her ‘plate wall’. These days, NHS Blood and Transplant give only a pin badge—and, since 2022, a social media badge:

If I make it to 100, I get invited to a special ceremony and—most importantly—I’m pretty sure I get the day off work to attend. There are some days when I’d gladly swap 45 litres of blood for a day off.

This paperback has been taken on numerous trips as my ’emergency book,’ in case all other sources of reading material fail me. I recently decided to retire it from that role and actually read it.

Unfortunately, this really wasn’t my kind of thing. It’s a Sunday night TV drama of a book about a group of Brixton residents mounting a campaign to save a lido that the Council wants to sell off. It’s black and white, residents good / developers bad sort of stuff. It’s a warm mug of cocoa of a book, with no unsettling surprises and no challenges to any preconceptions.

To me, I’m afraid, it was very dull. But others have found it uplifting and heartwarming, so each to their own.

Eleven years ago, I wrote on this blog in praise of Evernote:

My life runs on Evernote. It allows me to appear far more organised than I actually am. If anyone ever asks if I have a copy of something, I almost always know that the answer is ‘yes,’ and that I can find it in seconds with a simple search.

I stopped using Evernote many years ago, but I haven’t forgotten what it taught me. Evernote taught me the value of search over filing. I rarely file anything these days because search tools are generally too powerful to bother.

I realise in retrospect that much of the way I used Evernote–despite the above quote–was filing. For example, I would tend to have notes that combined emails and documents about a single topic. I wouldn’t bother with that nowadays: why bother to put all of that together in a single note when I could just search for the bits I need—usually emails—in their original location?

These days, I use OneNote—Evernote’s major competitor—the same way as I used to use a paper notebook: one ‘note’ per day. Anything I need to jot down during the day goes on the note—not in some separate topic-dedicated special folder. It doesn’t need to be filed because it is searchable. The only reason I use OneNote instead of Evernote is because that’s what my employers provide.

Evernote may not have stayed around in my life for long, but it’s clearly had a lasting impact on how I work.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lauren Oyler’s marvellous long essay in the latest edition of Harper’s, I Really Didn’t Want to Go. It recounts her experience on a Goop cruise, and makes frequent reference to David Foster Wallace’s 1996 Harper’s essay about another cruise with the same line.

The latter essay was familiar in parts, so I think I must have read it at some point—though I can’t imagine it was in Harper’s, and I’m certain it can’t have been in 1996. I’ve never been on a cruise, but they do somehow seem to offer a rich seam of entertaining journalistic essays.

I’ve long enjoyed Jon Ronson’s work: his writing in the Guardian, his books, his various radio documentaries and, latterly, his podcasts. I was therefore excited to see that he has a new one out.

‘The Debutante’ profiles Carole Howe, a wealthy former debutante who became a spokesperson for the white supremacist movement before turning undercover informant on that same movement. She was—maybe—spying on neo-Nazis for the US government in the lead up to Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma bombing. It has been hypothesised that if her information had been taken more seriously, then that bombing could have been prevented, saving 168 lives.

The series explores this over three hours or so, and… I just wasn’t that into it. Ronson’s skill as a journalist is normally found in bridging from highly specific individual cases to say something broader about society. Whether because of the relatively short series, or because the circumstances here are so extraordinary, it didn’t feel like Ronson managed that this time. The story never left the bizarre but narrowly drawn world of Howe.

I hope Ronson finds his form again soon.