When I decided to post every day in 2023, I didn’t expect to be on my third Egypt-themed post by March. Yet, last year’s centenary of the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb has sparked a renewed fascination in all things ancient Egypt, and so after Hieroglyphs and a coffin, I’ve been to see some art.

This exhibition by the Sainsbury Centre explores artistic responses to ancient Egypt, including all sorts of objects from paintings to pottery, and dresses to neon lights.

The first pair of objects in the exhibition make a clear statement of intent for the exhibition as a whole. Joshua Reynolds’s 1759 oil painting, Kitty fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl (to demonstrate her wealth) shows Cleopatra as we hear about her in Western myth: an extravagant, white seductress. Using the same medium in 1992, Chris Offil paints Cleopatra as a black African queen, shorn of the imposed Western myth.

This exhibition taught me how much of what we imagine to be ‘ancient Egyptian’ is anything but: much of it is actually reflective of other cultures. Before this exhibition, I didn’t know how much of ‘Egyptian’ style was actually Roman, the Romans having conquered Egypt in 30BC and Roman objects having been misattributed to ancient Egypt. Wedgwood, who pioneered ‘Egyptian’ designs in pottery, was actually (unknowingly) working from Roman artefacts–and never actually visited Egypt himself.

Before I visited this exhibition, I think I vaguely knew that The Times had an exclusive deal with Howard Carter for the photographs of his excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb. It’s the sort of thing newspapers like to celebrate. But I hadn’t previously understood that this exclusivity applied even within Egypt, depriving Egyptians of coverage of one of the most significant archeological findings in their country’s history… hardly something to be proud of in retrospect.

This exhibition features several watercolour paintings by Howard Carter, recording decorations that he uncovered during excavations, necessary in his early career as photography wasn’t an option. I had no idea that he was a talented artist, and I’d never really considered the necessity for archeologists to be able to paint and draw.

The exhibition closed with David Hockney’s 1961 Egyptian Head Disappearing Into Descending Clouds. This was an inspired choice. I wandered through the doors and tried to ponder exactly how I’d think of ancient Egypt in the future, given that all of my existing pre-conceptions had been blown away.

This was an exhibition that taught me things, corrected my misconceptions, and made me think: more than either of the other Egyptian things I’ve seen this year. I thought it was excellent.

Visions of Ancient Egypt continues at The Laing until 29 April.

A quick note about the photos in this post. The one at the bottom is a picture I’ve ‘borrowed’ from the David Hockney Foundation. The one at the top is a photo I took during the exhibition, before I realised that photography was banned… oops. I’m ummed and ahhed about whether I should include it given that I shouldn’t have taken it, but decided that it was such a great piece of curation that it deserved celebrating. Sorry, if you think I shouldn’t have done that.

Let me say up front: I’m not a fan of a pasty. You can keep your flaky pastry. But I do like a Greggs hot baguette, or a coffee, or a cake or two.

Greggs is based here in Newcastle, and I walk past the original Gosforth High Street shop most days. One of the interesting aspects about living in Greggsland has been watching their gradual transformation from a bakery to a takeaway-cum-coffee-shop.

Greggs has long had a handful of ‘Greggs Café’ branches: a large seating area with a pretty standard Greggs counter. These exist mostly, or perhaps even exclusively, in big shopping centres.

If I remember rightly, their first recent major push into a coffee shop model was the launch of ‘Greggs Moment’. This was a short-lived North East chain of coffee shops similar to a high street Costa or Caffé Nero, which also carried a range of Greggs food. These didn’t work. I don’t have any great insight into why, but I suspect the business model was flawed in that the sales volume wasn’t high enough to make a decent profit at the Greggs pricing level. Coffee shop customers tend to hang around.

The next push was into a chain of Greggs branches that were given a bit of an upmarket makeover and had seating installed, branded as ‘Greggs Bakery’. These seemed to work pretty well, combining the high-throughput of the bakery counter with the option for people to buy and eat hot stuff on the premises. A version of this—more extensive hot food plus some seats, minus the upmarket makeover—has now been rolled out to a large proportion of Greggs shops.

‘tasty by Greggs’ seems to be a new approach to creating a coffee shop style business. They are located within Primark stores, and I popped down to the third branch, which has just opened in Newcastle. This branch replaced and extended a former Costa concession within Primark, and the clothing shop has placed a range of Greggs-branded apparel for sale right by the café.

The branch I saw—which I’m assuming was representative—was filled with ‘Instagrammable’ features, like the large neon bridge pictured above, a themed phone box, a branded swing, and seating booths designed to look like giant doughnuts. Beyond the decor, though, they seem to be a standard Greggs outlet with much more seating (114 seats at the Newcastle one). They heavily advertise that ‘take out’ is available, but I can’t imagine this being a roaring trade: nobody is going to trek up to the second floor of a Primark for a Greggs takeaway when the shop is within spitting distance of three ordinary ground-level Greggs branches.

It was very busy, and I didn’t stick around for food or drink, though was disappointed to note that they use disposable coffee cups, even for those dining in. Emmanuel Macron would not approve, though it may be the least of his worries.

Logically, this would seem destined for the same outcome as Greggs Moment given the lack of passing traffic… except for the fact that I don’t think these branches are designed for cash generation. They seem like they are actually there as brand-building tools, generating positive associations with the brand and building cachet through people sharing social media posts.

This seems to play into the Greggs strategy at the moment, which seems to be all about building the brand. It seems to be working for them… but it does feel a bit time-limited to me. Fashions change, and it’s hard to see a bakery riding that wave for long.

But what do I know? I’m only in it for the okay coffee and the alright southern fried chicken baguette.

Wendy and I have always shared eclectic musical tastes, and when we recently took a road trip, our two most-played songs perhaps summed up that eclecticism.

2wei’s cover of Faithless’s Insomnia:

The Postmodern Jukebox cover of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On:

I maintain that it’s impossible not to smile during either of those tracks.

The Dead is the final story in James Joyce’s collection Dubliners, but it is also sometimes issued as a single-volume novella, which is what I read. Published in 1914, it centres on a teacher called Gabriel Conroy attending a Christmas party hosted by his aunts. It is easily short enough to read in a single sitting, as I did, and has been cited by TS Eliot and others as literature’s finest short story.

It becomes a meditation on the relationship between life and death, and particularly, how all of our lives are influenced by people who are now dead. There’s also some reflection of how little we know about what goes on inside others’ heads, even those we know intimately.

If I had been reading this blind, I’m not convinced that I would have dated it at more than a century old. I would have said that it was well crafted, and did a good job of drawing out quite complex ideas through a relatable real-world situation in a few pages. However, I don’t think I would have ever imagined it to be considered one of the best short stories of all time… but then that judgement is based on a century of other works building on these ideas.

This is a book that’s well-quoted elsewhere, but I particularly enjoyed the line:

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

Today is April Fools’ Day, and so some scepticism about the world is probably warranted. But cynicism is probably best avoided as much today as everyday, even if we all sometimes fall into it.

My iPhone 12 Mini is 25 months old. While Wendy and I were nursing lattes in a local deli recently, I spotted an ‘important message’ telling me that the phone’s battery had ‘significantly degraded’ and my heart sank.

The cynic in me decided that it was no coincidence that this had happened just after the warranty had expired. Surely, this was a ploy to get me to upgrade? But I don’t want a massive phone, so I knew without really checking that the latest and greatest iPhone 14 series wasn’t for me—it doesn’t have a ‘mini’ model.

And so, I resigned myself to taking my phone to the Apple Store and parting with £100 or so for a new battery—and having the hassle of them wiping my phone and having to restore a backup. I assumed that would play havoc with my eSIM, and that I’d be spending an afternoon trying to reverify Apple Pay cards.

I was entirely wrong. I scheduled an appointment at the Apple Store, and they replaced the battery in about an hour, for free, without wiping the phone. They didn’t even take my screen protector off. It really wasn’t any hassle at all, and the staff couldn’t have been friendlier.

Sometimes, tech support can be a pain, and even Apple doesn’t get it right all the time. But when they do, the experience can be superb.

The subtitle, ‘The Mystery of Mastery,’ would have been much the better title for this reflection on mastery, but there isn’t much else that I’d change about this book.

I know of the American writer Adam Gopnik from his many non-fiction essays, his byline being one that always guarantees an interesting read, no matter how esoteric the subject. He has published many books, but this is the first I’ve read. I was inspired to read it after seeing an FT review by Erica Wagner.

Gopnik tries to understand what it takes to master skills in a variety of fields, sometimes by simply spending time with masters, and sometimes by attempting to learn the skill himself: be it magic, dancing, bakery, painting, boxing, urinating (he suffers paruresis) or driving. He reflects philosophically on the similarities in mastery between fields, while keeping the tone light.

Gopnik’s observation that mastery is much more common than we realise is perhaps the one that will stick with me longest from this book. There are people all around us—including ourselves—who are exceptionally skilled in various ways, but that don’t necessarily recognise that description even of themselves.

I was also taken by Gopnik’s observation that mastery of magic has very little to do with the technique of illusion—which is sometimes elementary—and much more with the patter and performance around it. I also enjoyed his reflections on the similarities between ballroom dancing and boxing, which would never have occurred to me until they were pointed out.

Like all good books, though, this is actually about a huge number of other topics, from Gopnik’s relationship with his aging parents, to the nature of life, and to his relationship with his children.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and it provided much food for thought.

Some quotations I noted down:

By now, you have heard the rumor: the hummingbird and the whale have the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime, differently expended. In that truth we seek some consolation for the speed of our mortality. Each being has a heart that beats a billion times—one over months, the other over decades. The hummingbird lives a brief and busy life, its heart beating literally a thousand times a minute, and the whale a slow and ponderous existence out in the deep. Yet their inner experience, the heartbeat rhythm of their lives, is foundationally alike. The hummingbird would not trade its place for the whale’s, because the hummingbird’s life is the whale’s, in a decent existential translation.

More than we fear being evil, or even outrageous, what we fear most in life is being embarrassed. It is the great constraint, and the great propellant, of human accomplishment, and of its opposite, human destructiveness. Much of the worst of history is only comprehensible as a tale of embarrassment feared and, at huge lengths, avoided, or trying to be avoided.

The highlights of life are first unbelievably intense and then absurdly commonplace.

Studying snowflakes, we were once told that they were all different, and thus gave some kind of natural metaphoric endorsement to our inherent individuality. Instead, it turns out that snowflakes are all alike, when they begin in clouds, changing in form and appearance only as they drift to earth through the accidents of wind and weather. A better image, that, of how we truly live and differentiate ourselves.

People were fooled because they were looking, as we always seem to do, for the elegant and instant solution to a problem, even when the cynical and ugly and incremental one is right.

If the concert audience is baffled, they are intrigued, even impressed. In show business, if they are baffled, they leave. In our age, the difference between entertainment and art is that in entertainment we expect to do all the work for the audience, while in art we expect the audience to do all the work for us.

My mother continued baking and cooking even as she aged, and though some of it was at her usual level, a habit of habit crept in and then triumphed. She worked, this woman whose ease in the fine art of strudel-rolling was my very first memory in life of mastery, increasingly intently, increasingly angrily—if one can imagine an enraged croissant or a pain au chocolat baked in fury—increasingly made for its own frightened sake. I can still do this. I can. On that much smaller scale, my mother’s baking became, as the years went by and our visits became first more infrequent (it was exhausting to go) and then more frequent (they needed more care), baking for the sake of the bagel. The bagel eaters were left outside the circle of dough.

But, and this is a truth that must be said, over and over: suffering is intrinsic to the human condition, and so we cannot grade it on any kind of absolute scale. What we feel is what we feel, and though it may be true that we cry when we have no shoes until we meet a man with no feet, the larger truth is that having no shoes is our only way of beginning to understand what it must feel like to have no feet. Deprivation, discomfort, unhappiness—these cannot be wished away by pointing to those who have better reason for them than we do. If we could be cured by the truth that someone is suffering more, then human suffering would long ago have been cured.

We have to pack our own parachutes with the silk that we have gathered and tested, probing it for each possible moth hole and tear… but then you have to jump out of the plane.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy. Because while the only kind of action we can attempt may be illusory, a stone rolled up a hill only to roll down again, the happiness it gives us is not. Sisyphus is right to be happy with his work. It’s what he’s got. It’s what we have. In a doomed, fatal, mortal world, we are all Sisyphus rolling stones, but we are also aware of the possibility of contentment as we do, not because the stone won’t roll back (eventually, it will), but because when it does—and this is the secret, hopeful side to the curse that the gods gave Sisyphus—it doesn’t actually crush us. It just gives us the work to do again.

I’m not sure what the opposite of ‘a hoarder’ is, but I might be an example. I’m wired like William Morris: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

When Wendy and I catch snatches of antique programmes on television, I frequently lament that I would have no hesitation in disposing of whatever’s on display. I long for the day that someone takes an item to The Repair Shop only to be told that it’s a waste of space, but that the parts will be great for recycling. When I was built, the circuits which promote sentimentality for objects were left out.

I wasn’t drawn at all to the objects in Jools and Paul Donnelly’s small exhibition of 1960s mod culture, It’s my life… and I’ll do what I want. I admire their passion as collectors, but there isn’t a thing in this exhibition that I’d keep. Perhaps luckily for the Donnellys, if any of this turned up in my house, it’d be down at the charity shop in the blink of an eye.

I also didn’t learn anything from the exhibition: this was intended as a celebration and reminiscence, so there was no interpretive text. I couldn’t reminisce about a time that precedes my lifetime by decades.

Yet, it was clear that others loved this tiny exhibition—including plenty of people too young to remember the period. I’m the odd one out here.

And, perhaps perversely, that made me enjoy my visit. It’s always refreshing to be reminded that life takes all sorts of different people, and that one person’s junk is another’s treasure. This was not for me, but the world is a better place for containing multitudes, not just exhibitions of things that I like.

More power to the Donnellys’ elbows.

It’s my life… and I’ll do what I want continues until the end of this week, tucked away on the top floor of Newcastle City Library.