When it comes to music that just makes me smile, nothing beats cover versions of songs where the cover is in a different musical style to the original. They can be as out of the box as you like—the madder the better, really—and Wendy generally can’t help but smile either.

Postmodern Jukebox do exactly that, covering modern tracks mostly in 1950s style. Until very recently, I was only aware of a couple of their tracks from albums, and didn’t realise they are very popular on YouTube.

Wendy and I were fortunate to get tickets to their tour, which called in at the Sage on Friday night. It was completely nuts—where else would you see someone tap dance to the Super Mario theme or watch a Motown cover of Beyoncé? But it was also brilliant, both for the joy in the insanity and for the outstanding musical performances of the band, the singers and the dancer.

We had two particular highlights. Our long-standing favourite, a 50s cover of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On, is in a style that’s totally at odds with the lyrics yet is somehow spot-on, and it closed the show perfectly. And Effie Passero’s cover of Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, which we’d never heard before, found something genuinely new in a song that has been covered to death, and received a mid-show standing ovation like nothing else I’ve seen before.

Their support act, The Last Morrell, was a complete unknown to us, but he struck us as a brilliant songwriter and he’s gone on our playlists.

We had a great night.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the first post on this blog—the reason I’m trying to post every day this year.

This date is almost a fiction: the first post on this blog was transferred over from another one, so it isn’t the anniversary of this site; I blogged elsewhere earlier, so it isn’t the anniversary of my first blog post either. But it’s as good as any date.

I have anything meaningful to post on this auspicious occasion. I have enjoyed posting daily so far this year, and feel freed by the fact that the number of readers these days is probably tiny. I don’t have any way of counting visitors, but I surmise that my presence here is pretty invisible, as I don’t actively promote the blog, and I’m not on any of the major social media platforms. I can therefore write just about anything I want—and given that I disabled comments years ago, no-one can argue back.

It’s all a far cry from the early days of posting for clicks and comments, being mentioned on Newsnight and Channel 4 News, joint posts with Guido Fawkes, and appearing on lists of most popular bloggers. These days, I very much prefer the quieter online life.

If anyone is reading this—thank you for your company, and I hope you enjoy my writing.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

Yesterday saw the World Health Organization declare the end of the global health emergency attributable to COVID-19. Today, for the UK at least, the focus shifts from a virus with a corona to, well, just the corōna.

Later, we’ll see the first United Kingdom Coronation of the century; of the millennium; of my lifetime. Or, as The Economist has it, ‘a man in London is about to be given a hat.’

Inevitably, this has made me reflect on my feelings about monarchy, which are not as straightforward as one might suppose.

Firstly—obviously—no-one would support the creation of a monarchy today. It’s absurdly anachronistic. It grants power and responsibility through birthright, it is the definition of antidemocratic, and symbolises limits on social mobility that hold us all back. Even with some elements of primogeniture having been removed, it is a system fundamentally rooted in gender inequality, perhaps never more obviously underlined than on a day when the wife of a son of a Prince Regent is crowned Queen.

Yet, I wouldn’t support an alternative. As long as the family are willing to continue to deliver the function, then having a head of state that none of us can choose, trapped in an endless stalemate of not being able to do anything meaningful without risking abolition, seems like a suitably British fudge. The system is obviously absurd and indefensible, and those—perversely—are its virtues. Instead of abolishing a symbol of inequality and suppression, let’s spend our effort on tackling inequality and suppression.

And yet, I do support disestablishment. It is absurd that monarchy gives us a state religion. It is profoundly wrong and demonstrably divisive that we have 26 English Bishops as automatic representatives of that religion in our legislature. This is the bit of monarchy that has a practical effect on all our lives, and if we’re going to abolish something, abolish that.

And this is the moment to do it. The 2021 census showed Christianity to be a minority religion in this country. Today, we anoint a King as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, alongside a Queen with whom he did not share the sacrament of marriage. Let him be the last. Let him call himself the ‘defender of faith’ rather than ‘the faith’ if it pleases him. Let’s finally separate church and state.

Pianodrome makes and exhibits seriously arresting sculptures from discarded pianos, which Wendy and I happened across in an entirely unexpected place recently: an abandoned former Debenhams.

If you worry—like we did—that this is a bit of a ‘waste’ of a serviceable instrument, then fear not. It turns out that they make the fixable pianos they find available for adoption, reasoning that ‘the best thing for an old piano is to find a new home.’

In 2022, more people resigned from the Government than were accused of voter fraud. More people resigned as Prime Minister than were convicted of voter fraud.

You may therefore conclude that voter fraud isn’t the biggest current threat to our democracy. Of course, though, looking only at current threats is foolhardy: we must always be looking ahead and preparing for threats that are on the horizon.

Perhaps, therefore, the Government’s decision to introduce a requirement to show photo identification when voting is a smart move.

Perhaps, too, there is a good reason why a long-expired over-60 photographic Oyster card is valid for this purpose, while a just-issued over-18 photographic Oyster card is not. It would be cynical to lazily assume that this is reflective of the typical voting patterns among card carriers in each age bracket.

Approximately two million eligible voters don’t possess photo identification, and something like 1.9 million of them have been disenfranchised from today’s election, as they didn’t apply for a voter ID card nor a postal ballot. Still more will not know the rules and be turned away when they attend a polling station, and many won’t return.

But, the Government argues, this is essential for keeping our democracy safe. And, as is little mentioned by critics, the Electoral Commission agrees.

So let’s not give into cynicism: let’s assume that there are indeed good reasons to carefully protect the process for voting for local councillors.

Let’s assume that the Government is acting in all our best interests, not the narrow electoral interests of the governing party.

Let’s agree to blithely ignore the fact that just months ago, the governing party’s internal election to select a Prime Minister was held mostly online, with no attempt to check photographic identification at any point in the voting process.

Let’s agree to see the logic that electing a Prime Minister requires less security and rigour than electing a local councillor. After all, the turnover of the former these days is much greater than the latter.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.

This recently published audiobook discusses social aspects of the human voice. It has a friendly and humorous tone. It sounded to me more like a Radio 4 documentary than an audiobook:¹ it’s certainly not something that would work as a printed book.

Bell explores many aspects of her topic, but there were two that stood out to me.

In one ‘chapter,’ Bell has a detailed discussion of the ‘sexy baby voice,’ an affected way of speaking in the manner of the cartoon character Betty Boop. This became common in popular culture in the 2000s, and Bell explores her own complex feelings about it. On one hand, Bell argues, people should be able to express themselves however they want. On the other, Bell acknowledges her visceral negative reaction to this type of voice, seeing it as anti-feminist. She invites Malcolm Gladwell to interview her about her conflicted feelings, which turns into an insightful conversation which I enjoyed.

The second section which struck me was Bell’s exploration of voice and politics. We’ve all heard how Margaret Thatcher had training to lower the pitch of her voice during her political career in an effort to appear more authoritative. Like one of Bell’s interviewees, I’ve long thought that—to modern ears—this seems absurd. Surely, these days, we listen to the words people are saying more than the voice they are using? Bell challenged my view by having people with a variety of different voices read sections of notable political speeches. I can’t deny that this revealed my own biased prejudices, which were previously entirely unconscious. Now that I’m aware of it, I can make extra effort to overcome it in future.

I heartily recommend this audiobook.

1. It’s interesting, I think, that Radio 4 was the connection I made while listening to this—rather than a documentary podcast. I’ve certainly listened to the latter more often than the former in recent years. I’m not sure what it was about this production that said ‘Radio 4’ specifically, but something definitely did. ↩

Wendy and I have finished watching the first season of Apple TV’s Shrinking, a comedy drama series by the creators of Ted Lasso. It is a comedy drama which centres on Jimmy, a therapist who is struggling with grief for his late wife. It has a great cast, including a brilliantly sarcastic performance by Harrison Ford as Paul, a senior therapist at the practice. Over the course of the series, the show becomes more of an ensemble piece, featuring more of the excellent performances given by Lukita Maxwell and Jessica Williams in particular.

Wendy and I enjoyed it, and looked forward to each episode as it was released. But it is all a little uneven, and it fails to pull off the Ted Lasso trick of making viewers laugh at the same time as pulling their heartstrings, instead wildly vacillating between the two tones. The interpersonal relationships between characters stretch credibility, as they too seemed to alter from episode to episode.

So while we both enjoyed it, we both also came to refer to it in conversation as ‘that odd programme.’ Assuming one is forthcoming, I’ve no doubt that we’ll stick around for the second series.

Wendy and I have been to Edinburgh more times than I can remember, but until recently, we’d inexplicably never climbed Calton Hill to see the National Monument, City Observatory, Old Observatory House, et cetera.

It’s worth the short, gentle climb—especially on a sunny day.

Wendy and I went along to see this 2022 Tate Britain commission which is currently being exhibited at the Baltic. It’s an installation made up of over 100 life-size figures, each elaborately dressed, waving flags or wearing masks or carrying banners or playing the drums or riding a horse or any number of other protest- or procession-like activities.

The first impression is one of overwhelm: there is just far too much to take in, even as you wander around and between the groups of figures. The more each figure is considered, the more startling details meet the eye: a share certificate here, a colonial map there, prints of troubling artworks in between, topped with some imagery of royalty. It’s a lot.

And really, that was as far as we got with it: there were too many ideas all at once to really feel like it was saying anything in particular. The work that has gone into the piece is astounding, but we didn’t really have any profound reaction to it. We didn’t leave the exhibition with a different view on the world.

In the Baltic setting, unlike in Tate Britain, a balcony allows visitors to consider the work from above. This has the secondary effect of visitors considering the figures appearing to become part of the procession themselves, when viewed from this angle. This probably changes the work in an interesting way, but it’s hard to know for sure when this is the only setting I’ve seen it in.

The Procession remains at the Baltic until 11 June.