I wasn’t familiar with Caycedo’s work before visiting this survey exhibition. Her practice considers the connections between nature and humankind, with a particular focus on drawing parallels between natural forces and human protest movements.

The exhibition is mostly beneath Plomo y Brea, an arresting set of nine traditional circular fishing nets suspended from the ceiling. The title—translated as lead and tar—reveals some commonly used components. Caycedo reflects that these can be used responsibly and endlessly recycled—as by the fishermen—or as sources of conflict, or weapons in those conflicts.

A large triptych video installation, Patron Mono, illustrates the relationship between a community and its river, with the extraction of both fish and gold but only at a rate which preserves the river’s natural beauty. There was something physically representative about the way in which it wasn’t quite possible to turn one’s back completely on any of the three videos, helped by the integrated soundscape.

I also found inspiration in the video installation Spaniards Named Her Magdelena, But Natives Call Her Yuma, which juxtaposed imagery of rivers and dams with urban protest marches. Just as water will always win over dams on a planetary timescale, perhaps society always progresses in the end, too. At least we can hope it does.

I was less taken by Caycedo’s inclusion of Durham Gala Banners and the like. I had intended a short rant in this post about a pandering connection of the exhibition to its location. It turns out that I’m just an idiot: I missed the fact that these artefacts were represented in Caycedo’s Tyne Catchment, exhibited exactly opposite them. I’m obviously no good at art galleries.

’Land of Friends’ continues at the Baltic until 29 January.

Wendy and I have been for a wonderful winter wander alongside a short section of Hadrian’s Wall. We started at Housesteads Fort and walked a couple of miles to Sycamore Gap, before about-turning and wending our way back.

We feel so lucky to live so close to such spectacular and historic landscape. When we got up in the morning, we had no particular plans, but fancied a bit of a walk—and within 40 minutes or so, we were strolling a World Heritage Site.

The walk was five fairly easy miles, though with lots of undulations and on quite muddy and slippery ground.

Just as we were finishing our walk and trying to dredge up our Key Stage 3 history to remember when Hadrian’s Wall was built, we spotted the AD122 bus, which solved that mystery for us.

I know I’m late to the party, but I very much enjoyed the BBC series The Traitors; far more in the end than I initially thought I would.

For those who haven’t seen it: from a group of players who undertake tasks to earn a large prize fund, a small number are selected as “traitors” who must “murder” the other contestants in secret. The whole group also eliminates contestants based on votes as to whom they believe to be a traitor. At the end of the series, the remaining players share the prize fund, although if any traitors remain, then only they share it.

The obvious gameshow structure from a gameplay perspective would have been to challenge the “traitors” to sabotage the prize fund tasks, in the manner of The Mole. When I read about the format, I thought missing this point was a considerable flaw in the show. However, from a television perspective, having the players work collaboratively while also scheming against each other makes for greatly heightened drama.

It worked beautifully. The series also had a brilliant soundtrack and some stunning cinematography, plus a pitch-perfect host in Claudia Winkleman. It had twists that—at least to me—came as complete surprises.

I don’t think it’s a series that will run and run, if only because the novelty of the format is important to the gameplay. But we shall see.

‘The Traitors’ is available on BBC iPlayer until the end of the year… when maybe, hopefully, there will be a second series.

I was inspired to read this short memoir, published last April, after seeing a positive review in The TLS. It is a short account, mostly extracted from Freddy’s journal, of his experience as the 21-year-old son of a man diagnosed with, and ultimately dying from, glioblastoma.

While Freddy’s experience is singular and recounted with both wit and tenderness, I found that it didn’t really resonate with me. It struck me that Freddy seemed a very “young” 21-year-old, and it made me reflect on our very different paths in life. At the same age as he was struggling to deal with awful news, I was being trained to deliver it. Death was unfamiliar to him at 21, while I’d spent years with cadavers. Some of the conversations that struck Freddy as beautifully expressed struck me as medical cliché.

There was just, somehow, too much medicine in here for me to really separate off that part of my brain and allow myself to feel the humanity. I think that’s more my failing than Freddy’s.

There has only been one funeral for a Pope during my lifetime: John Paul II, in 2005, one of history’s longest serving popes. Today will see my second, this time of the longest lived pope—and the first Papal funeral in modern history to be presided over by another Pope.

They say the Vatican works to a schedule of centuries rather than days or weeks. We know that today’s events (however ‘low-key’) will be historic. Yet, it may be centuries before we can judge with clarity whether the funeral brings to a close an aberrance in which a Pope succeeded a living Pope, or whether Benedict XVI has reformed how Papacy ends.

I’m not going to bet on it—not least as I don’t plan to be around a few centuries hence to collect my winnings—but I think the latter is more likely. Once the genie of resignation is released, it quickly becomes an expectation, especially as health declines. I suspect today won’t be the only occasion in my lifetime that a Pope conducts the funeral of his predecessor.

This is Wahid’s first institutional exhibition, which brings together three works into a single space.

The first and most immediately arresting is the sculpture Baba Gurgur. This is a gigantic, stylised reproduction of a Salvia spinosa flower, which is common in the Baba Gurgur oilfield in Iraq. It also represents the first moment at which oil gushed from the Baba Gurgur oilfield.

Set behind the sculpture is Sick Pink Sun, a projected pinkish circle which represents the strange appearance of the sun during the bombing of oil wells, resulting from filtration through the toxic smoke plumes.

The room is filled with the arresting sound of Naptha Maqam, a series of English poems in the style of Kurdish maqams performed by a contemporary Kurdish singer. The music is overlaid by occasional snatches of commentary from the artist.

As a whole, Conflagration is apparently about the relationship between Britain and Kurdistan. I wouldn’t have known that from my wander around. I found both the sculpture and the overall exhibition arresting, but only read the explanatory text on my way out. I had decided that it was about the exploitation of oil wealth and the connection with suppression of women, which isn’t at all what the artist intended. I’m obviously no good at art galleries.

’Conflagration’ continues at the Baltic until 30 April.

As the NHS continues to collapse, you will hear a lot over coming days about 7,000 ‘extra’ hospital beds—the number the Government has pledged to ‘create’ to reduce A&E waits. This appears to be part of a conscious strategy, perhaps best described as ‘political numberwang’: bandy around a big number, and political journalists seem to freeze, with perhaps the only follow-up being ‘and how are you going to pay for it?’

Matt Hancock was a master of this art. By counting individual gloves separately, despite them being neither sold nor used as separate items, he was able to quote ridiculous figures for the ‘number of items of PPE distributed’. His inflated numbers made little difference to social care staff left wearing ‘aprons’ fashioned from bin bags.

7,000 beds sounds like a lot—but is, in fact, about half of one percent of the total number of beds available in the NHS. It’s far less than the 12,000 NHS beds occupied on Christmas Day by people fit for discharge but for whom no social care placement was available. It’s also less than 20% of the 37,000 beds cut from the NHS over the period since the 2010 General Election. And there’s no answer as to how these will be staffed when we’re already 40,000 nurses short of a full complement.

You’ll also hear a lot about an ‘extra’ £14.1bn of support the Government has pledged over the next two years to help ‘tackle the backlog’. That’s a roughly 4% of the NHS budget—a fraction of the cost of inflation alone.

Numberwang cannot fix health and social care, and I’m not even sure it’s a successful strategy for propping up electoral support any more. We can’t go on like this.

Wendy and I recently had occasion to buy two Merseyrail Day Savers, which set us back a total of £11.20.

“Blimey,” we thought, “that’s so much cheaper than the Metro!”

But it’s not. The equivalent Tyne & Wear Metro Day Tickets would have cost us £11.40, and—unlike the Merseyrail ticket—our fare would have additionally covered up to six children. It would have also allowed travel during the morning peak, which the Merseyrail ticket did not. And it would have permitted travel not just on the Metro, but also on local rail services and the Shields Ferry.

It’s funny how perceptions of fares don’t always match reality. Deals can be better (or worse) than they seem.

It’s often said that a life is about ‘what counts’ rather than ‘what can be counted’. But for this post, I thought I’d ignore that and just do some tallying. So, here are 22 numbers in descending numerical order.

I walked 2,002 miles

Another twenty would have been just perfect for this post!

I am lucky to be able to walk to work, and that accounts for a huge proportion of this total. Wendy and I frequently remark on how we walk a lot in population terms (about ten times the national average), but we don’t really feel like we put any special effort into it. This sometimes makes us feeble hosts: when we suggest to visitors that we will walk into town, they don’t always expect it to be three miles, and we don’t give it a second thought.

Oh: it’s 4,765,974 steps, if you’re into counting steps.

My car drove 1,831 miles

A fair proportion of these were driven by Wendy, who tends to drive when we’re together and sometimes borrows my car. I feel unbecomingly smug to have walked further than my car has driven this year, though it’s mostly circumstantial as so many work meetings have been online rather than face-to-face.

Wendy and I took 1,739 photos

Wendy and I have a shared photo library, so my this is a total for the two of us, but even so: this scale would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. We are living in an age of unprecedented documentation, and none of us have really yet figured out the impact of that.

I sent 381 personal emails

I didn’t think I sent many personal emails any more… I was wrong.

I collected 289 coffee shop loyalty stamps

This both embarrassingly high and also a wild underestimate, as I’ve only counted Caffé Nero (220) and Costa (69) who make this data obvious in their apps. I’m not loyal to any particular chain, and have also earned many stamps or points at Pret, Greggs and Starbucks. The only positive spin I can put on this is that many of these stamps were collected for re-using a travel mug rather than a disposable cup.

I placed 226 Amazon orders

This is the item on this list that I feel most guilty about, knowing everything we know about Amazon. It’s my lowest number of orders since 2016, but really, that just makes me feel worse as it makes me consider my impact over years.

Part of the challenge of escaping Amazon’s clutches is not knowing whether alternatives are truly better or worse. For 2023, I’ve resolved to assume that shopping at many places, some of which might be ethically awful, is better than spending so much with one ethically dubious outfit.

My tumble dryer completed 191 cycles

Thinking of numbers to include on this list became challenging. When I realised that my unnecessarily smart tumble dryer automatically logs this data, it was a shoo-in for inclusion.

I’ve no idea whether this is relatively high or relatively low, but it is exactly 19 more cycles than we used in 2021.

I took my blood pressure 160 times

I like to keep an eye on it, but I wonder if this might be a little on the obsessive side?

I placed 122 Deliveroo orders

Well, that’s mortifying, and much higher than I would have guessed. I wish I hadn’t checked.

I plead that some of them are grocery orders, not takeaways… but I bet the total isn’t far wrong once you factor in the takeaway orders I’ve placed via other means.

A little over half of these are salads ordered in when working from home, so this isn’t as artery-clogging as it might first appear, but it’s still environmentally ridiculous.

My car was driven on 73 days

Does it really make sense to own and maintain a car that’s driven little more than once a week? Obviously, not from any reasonable perspective, but I don’t think I’m organised enough to manage without it.

I published 71 blog posts

This compares favourably with only 29 in 2021 or 21 in 2020, mostly because of the 52 posts of Weeknotes.

I’m hoping the total for 2023 will be higher. The oldest post on this blog turns twenty this year, which feels like a significant anniversary. To mark it, I’m going to try to post daily, if often briefly, all year. I’m so on-trend. Though, like all resolutions, this one may not survive the first two weeks of the year.

I read and reviewed 66 books

This is the lowest total since 2018, and I’m okay with that. Books are an escape, and perhaps I’ve felt less need to escape this year than the last few!

I swam 57 miles

Pre-pandemic, I used to enjoy swimming before work one or two mornings a week. I only got properly back into this routine in August, so this total mostly reflects the last five months of the year.

It’s only thanks to my Apple Watch that I really know how far I’ve gone: I enjoy letting my mind wander when swimming, so I’m hopeless at counting lengths.

I made 50 personal phone calls

We don’t have a connected landline, so I can count this easily from my mobile bill. I would have guessed that this number would have been much lower, considering how many calls are via WhatsApp or FaceTime these days. It seems that traditional phone calls aren’t dead, after all.

I borrowed 35 library books

About half of the books I’ve read and reviewed this year have been library copies, borrowed from one of four excellent libraries. A good proportion of the remainder were second-hand; I frequently order from Wob (though I preferred their previous branding).

Borrowing library books feels environmentally responsible, but it doesn’t do much to financially support authors or the industry, and so I’m a bit conflicted about it.

I used 35 single-use paper cups for hot drinks

I’ve obsessively counted these this year, and the total is way higher than I would have guessed. A little more than a quarter of the total is attributable to cafés unexpectedly using disposable cups when I was sitting in, rather than taking away. Others are attributable to people kindly buying me a drink. But mostly, these are occasions when I fancied a drink and didn’t have a cup on me. I must try harder next year.

I spent 27 nights in hotels

Plus one night on a sleeper train and a daytime hotel sleep while travelling. I used to sleep more soundly in hotels than at home, but these days I’m more comfortable in my own bed.

I took 17 flights

This definitely comes with a certain sense of flygskam, but compares with 29 flights in 2019, so I’m perhaps moving in the right direction.

I visited 5 countries

Assuming I can count the UK. None of them were new to me, sadly.

I wore 4 new pairs of shoes

People who hear that we walk more than average tend to comment that we must go through myriad shoes, so this year I counted my new pairs: it’s not an exciting total.

You might wonder why I’m not counting pairs of shoes bought: that’s because I usually have a “new pair” in the cupboard ready, rather than buying at the point of need.

Around the house, I wear Kontex cotton room shoes, which I haven’t included in the above total. I’ve slipped on two new pairs of those this year, and have an embarrassing number of new pairs in the cupboard because they’ve become really quite difficult to source in the UK.

I made 4 blood donations

As I’m able to donate every 12 weeks, some years it’s possible to squeeze in five donations if the dates work out right… but this year, they didn’t.

I cycled 0 miles

I don’t own a bike. I’ve not hired one or borrowed one. Not coincidentally, I also haven’t fallen off one. I’m not a cyclist (though I did do 10 miles on a borrowed bike in 2021).

This will be the last of these posts, at least for a little while. In 2023, I’m going to go back to posting about books individually, rather than in a compiled end-of-the-month post.

But for now, I’ve five books to tell you about.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

This Booker-shortlisted 2015 novel is one of those books that has been recommended to me by many people over the last few years, but that I’ve never quite found time for. This is partly because it is long, and starting a long book always feels a bit like taking on a big commitment. But mostly, it’s because the premise didn’t attract me.

This is often described as a story about four male college classmates, following them and their ever-changing relationships over the course of their lives. And yes, that is a part of this book, but it’s not how I’d describe it. I would call it a fictional biography of a brilliant lawyer with a traumatic childhood.

In my premise, this is a book which looks at the lifelong effects of trauma on both the person who suffers it and those around them. There’s a second thread about fatherhood, and the father-son relationship in particular, explored through an adult adoption process. The stuff about modern male friendship is interesting and under-explored in modern fiction, but I didn’t think it was really the focus of the book.

One thing those who recommended this book didn’t get wrong: it is very moving, harrowing even. It was a little over-written, and it took a while to find its focus and get going, but all of that is outweighed—for me, at least—by the complex layers of emotion that the book explores. This is definitely one of my favourite books of 2022.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

This latest collection of funny observational essays covers the COVID-19 pandemic and, movingly, the death of Sedaris’s father.

As documented in his previous books, Sedaris had always had a strained relationship with his father. In this book. Sedaris describes how his father’s late-in-life cognitive decline brought them closer together. He also talks about the complex emotional reaction to his death, given the history between the two of them.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, as I have Sedaris’s previous books… but if you’re new to his essays, you’re probably better off starting with the earlier volumes.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

Emergency State by Adam Wagner

I was a bit reluctant to dive into this newly published book reviewing the legal framework governing the COVID-19 pandemic in England. I wasn’t convinced that I was ready to relive earlier parts of the pandemic we’re living through, especially considering the impact it had on my professional life.

However, the reviews seemed strong, and I couldn’t resist at least making a start—and then ended up racing through the whole thing.

I was struck by the extensive similarities in the ‘chat’ Wagner reports among legal professionals and the ‘chat’ I participated in as a public health professional. Like Wagner, I was surprised that the Government chose to underpin so much of its guidance with law, in a way that is most unusual for public health practice, rather than concentrating on outlawing only the most egregious behaviour. Like Wagner, I was frustrated that the law and guidance rarely aligned. And, like Wagner, I was confounded by late publication of crucial documents, which often came hours or even days after Government announcements, leaving us all guessing in the meantime.

Wagner’s central argument is that the ‘emergency state’ needs clearer boundaries within the English constitution. His argument won me round.

With thanks to Newcastle University’s library for lending me a copy.

Intimations by Zadie Smith

Written in the early part of the pandemic, this is Smith’s short collect of short essays which reflect on her experiences and her relationship with Marcus Aurelius. The final essay is a version of the opening section of Aurelius’s Meditations.

Despite its short length, I describe this as “patchy” and “uneven”. There were sentences that produced that vertiginous effect of totally changing my perspective on something:

Writing is routinely described as ‘creative’ – this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb (I imagine, I’ve never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control.

but also passages which seemed inconsequential. I suppose, to some degree, that was the pandemic experience for many—so perhaps the form is more considered than I took it to be.

With thanks to The London Library for lending me a copy.

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

I was inspired to read this bestselling 1984 French classic translated by Barbara Bray after seeing a short piece about it in The Atlantic. It is an autobiographical novel set in what is now Vietnam in 1929, and concerns the poor 15-year-old narrator falling into an affair with a rich 27-year-old man. Duras wrote this when she was 70 years old, so had considerable distance and perspective on the events it describes.

The novel is short, a little over 100 pages, and is written in a fragmentary style which is not always strictly linear. I found it difficult to get into, and didn’t take much from it. It’s possibly a book that would close study more than my casual read, though I’m aware that Duras herself described it as “a load of shit” that was written “when I was drunk”.

Basically, this just wasn’t up my street.

With thanks to Northumbria University’s library for lending me a copy.