If you’re not already scintillated enough, walk exactly 1km east along Redcar seafront from Sinterlation and you’ll happen upon Lifelines, another 2013 Ian Randall sculpture celebrating local heritage. It symbolises fishing boats being pulled back to shore.

The two make a nice, inoffensive pair.

Installed on Redcar seafront in 2013, this is Sinterlation, a sculpture which references the town’s fishing history (the boats which form the bottom of the columns) and its historic steelmaking (the chains). The non-standard spelling references sinter, a mixture of iron ore, limestone and coke which is used to feed a blast furnace.

It’s a perfectly nice, if forgettable, bit of civic sculpture which brightens up the place, but I’m not moved to any strong feelings.

I recently walked past this sculpture next to London’s ExCel exhibiton centre and thought, “that’s new!”

It’s not, though. It’s been there since 2009. I evidently walk round with my eyes closed.

The sculpture shows three dock workers, and was the result of a long campaign supported by the Queen Mother, among others, to commemorate the people who worked at the docks between 1855 and 1983. The figures are based on the likenesses of real dock workers, including Johnny Ringwood who helped raise money for it. Now aged 89, he re-visited the statue earlier this year.

The bloke with the hat and the book is Patrick Holland, depitcted as a tally clerk but in reality a stevedore, a word I last thought about in April 2021.

The scene is loosely copied in Mychael Barratt’s Mile End Mural.

For the sake of everyone involved, I think I’m better off giving blood than wearing spandex.

Epictetus wrote:

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.

I think most people would identify with this quote on a sort of ‘individual topic’ level. If you’re a know-it-all in a field, it’s hard to admit that there’s something you don’t know, which is an obvious prerequisite to learning.

But I think Epictetus may also have had a bigger message: I think there’s an inverse correlation between ego and curiosity. The more you think you know in general, the less likely you are to notice things that don’t fit your preconceived notion.

Krishnamurti wrote:

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

The ability to separate observation from judgement is a key part of countless practices, from philosophy to psychology to management theory.

It’s only over the last week, though, that I’ve really noticed the link with ego—and how much harder it is for people with a large ego to make that separation. If you think you already know the answer, or already know how the world works, it is many times harder to look objectively at a situation and truly understand what’s driving it. Worse still, you might not even be motivated to try.

These two giant chairs, by Yinka Ilori, are currently on display next to the Royal Victoria Dock. One represents happiness and the other pride, though the fact that I can’t tell which is which is perhaps a marker of their limited success.

It’s a couple of years since I read Claire Keegan’s short novel Small Things Like These, but I haven’t forgotten it. I was curious to see how it would translate to film. Is it really possible to capture on celluloid the world of meaning in questions like…?

As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another?

Can this sentiment be acted?

The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been done—which he would have to live with for the rest of his life.

I’m not certain whether it’s possible, but I don’t think this film achieves it.

This is a fine film, though not one without issues. It’s a little longer than it needs to be, and there are some cinematic choices (wobbling cameras, bits out of focus) that made me feel unpleasantly nauseated. I may also be the last person in Britain who’s just not that convinced by Cillian Murphy’s acting—I didn’t really ‘believe’ him in this role. I also wasn’t convinced by Emily Watson’s characterisation, though I think that may have been because her part was a little overwritten: it felt like her underlying evil was written so obviously that it bordered on being a little camp. There was a point where I almost expected an exaggerated wink. Eileen Walsh, on the other hand, was pitch-perfect.

It was, though, an understated and visually arresting portrayal of the plot of the book: a man sees a hint of something evil, and must decide whether to prioritise doing the right thing or protecting himself and his family. It’s a mafia tale with nuns added, which shines a light on a shameful part of the history of Ireland and the Catholic Church.

As far as I’m concerned, though, the book’s plot was secondary to its message. It’s a book about quiet evil and quiet resistance and the moral decisions each of us makes. It strikes me that this form of cinema is a very literal medium, and that in the last year or so of watching films, I’ve noted three ways of subverting that. One is to make the film consciously and obviously abstract (like the wonderful Poor Things); another is to be operatic about it, focusing on moments of intensely expressed emotion and don’t worry so much about the literalness of the plot; and the third is to make clever use of a soundtrack to link figurative illustrations to allegorical ideas. It felt to me as though this film did none of those things: it just ended up being a film constrained to its plot, with seemingly no pressing desire to share a universal message.

For that reason, I’d recommend the book over the film—which is a more clichéd conclusion to a blog post about a film based on a book than I’d prefer to write.

While we’re on refreshed artworks in Rotherhithe—and there’s a sentence I never imagined writing—this pair of boats made by Kevin Boys was recently unveiled on the refurbished Redriff Footbridge, replacing a previous artwork that had been stolen.

I would never have come across this spot had I not serendipitously wandered into the Russia Dock Woodland on an ‘I wonder where that path goes?’ whim.

After the closure of the Surrey Commercial Docks in the 1970s, Russia Dock was filled in—except for a little trickle of a stream. The surrounding area was planted to create a little woodland. Forty-odd years after it was completed, it’s become a 34-acre haven of nature in a formerly industrial area.

The filled-in dock sits at a lower level than the surrounding pathways, with the capstones still visible. This provides a nice link to its industrial past, but it did strike me that safety considerations might have prevented that design approach if the woodland were created today.

I’ve previously written about the many country parks in North East England, which stand as the beautiful legacy of our mining past, and I suppose this is a sort of industrial dock equivalent.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the area around Rotherhithe in London did a roaring trade in importing ‘deal’—large pieces of timber. In order to import it, it needed to be unloaded from incoming ships, and ‘deal porters’ were the answer to that problem.

Working in pairs, one worker would lift one end of a stack of deal, and their partner would stand at the deal’s mid-point and heave it up onto his shoulder. The worker would then walk, carrying this extraordinarily long and heavy deal, across a gangplank to the dock and into nearby warehouses. You could, I guess, say that this method was ‘the art of the deal’—and it was backbreaking work. There’s some archive footage on Youtube. Much of the wood was turned into paper to supply the nearby newspaper presses, while the rest was used in construction and furniture carpentry.

In 1990, Philip Bews and Diane Gorvin created a sculpture in steel and oak to sit among the greenery on the edge of Canada Dock commemorating this work. It was well-received, though as the trees and greenery grew around it, the sculpture became difficult to see during the more verdant seasons.

Last year, the sculpture was taken away for refurbishment. A few weeks ago, it returned to the newly redeveloped Canada Dock. The workers now look out over a vermillion bridge of thousands upon thousands of pieces of timber, as though their work will never be completed. I’m not sure whether I’m more depressed by that idea, or by seeing how the greenery which previously stretched higher than the seven metres of the statue now doesn’t even hide its base.

Still, I do rather like the sculpture, even if it’s a bit figurative for my usual taste.