Boy Parts is Eliza Clark’s first novel. It was published in 2020. I thought I’d give it a go after it was mentioned in passing on the radio.

The novel, largely set in Newcastle, is narrated by a Royal College of Art graduate, Irina, who is also working in a bar to make enough money to survive. Early in the novel, she is offered the opportunity to exhibit at a fashionable London gallery, which leads her to look through an archive of her work to date, as well as throwing herself into production of new work. Her art involves taking explicit photographs of average-looking men she scouts in everyday life.

This is one of those novels that hits the reader full-square in the face from the first page, and doesn’t slow down. Some have described it as a horror and some as a thriller, but I think it defies straightforward categorisation. It explores questions about the connection between art and mental illness, about gender norms in contemporary Britain, about the nature of consent, and about the attitudes of cluelessly disconnected people based in London to those in “the North”. I note that Clark is a Newcastle-born novelist living in London, and the last of these elements is so hilariously / depressingly pitch-perfect that it must surely be drawing on her own experience. (Irina’s “Is your dad a miner?” query recalled my own ”I’ve never met a doctor from one of the Northern medical schools!” moment when working in London.)

There are some moments of quite graphic violence in this novel, which would often put me off, but here they are integral to the character-building, and so didn’t seem unnecessary or gratuitous. There is some mention of Newcastle-specific details, including a paragraph riffing on the possible routes that a character could take when driving between two locations, but this seemed to parody assumptions about geographical familiarity made in books set in the capital—which I found hilarious.

All things considered, I thought this novel was exceptional, and I look forward to Clark’s future work.

I’m grateful to Newcastle City Library for lending me a copy of this book.

Visiting the British Museum feels a bit uncomfortable these days. A venue that shows off treasures stolen from other countries, refuses to give them back and exhibits them with interpretation from a primarily British perspective gives me “the ick,” as people younger than me might say.

Visiting an exhibition sponsored by an oil company, with a cloying “have a great time” message from the company beside the entrance, is also discomforting.

The fact that the guard searching my bag in the security theatre had to check with a colleague whether my toothbrush constituted a “potential weapon” did not feel especially welcoming. For clarity, I hadn’t (yet) fashioned it into a shiv.

But it’s often said that no-one does exhibitions quite as well as the British Museum, so I thought I’d dive in any way.

I visited the British Museum’s latest temporary number on Hieroglyphs—not something you’d ordinarily associate with Bloomsbury.

It wasn’t really worth it. My view is probably coloured by the fact that the exhibition was overcrowded. I don’t know how that’s allowed to happen with timed ticketing, but it was a struggle to see much of anything.

I didn’t really know much about hieroglyphs before attending: I knew that their meaning was lost, and then essentially rediscovered when the Rosetta Stone was found. I didn’t feel that I left the exhibition with really any more understanding than I arrived with, though perhaps I had more appreciation of the amount of (weirdly competitive) work that was undertaken to use the stone to decode hieroglyphs.

I don’t think I’ve seen the Rosetta Stone before (though maybe I did as a child): it’s a remarkable object, but it’s hard not to look at it and wonder why on Earth it is in a glass case in London, shorn of all natural context. It’s an Egyptian artefact with Greek text pilfered by the French—and Egypt has wanted back it for decades. It seems cruel and absurd for it to be held in a British museum, a relic of the attitudes of an age which we might hope to have consigned to the past.

It also felt to me like many of the cultural interpretations of objects were over-reaching, or at least did not explain how the conclusions did not overreach. I spent some time looking at an object described as a calendar of “lucky days”, and wondering how on Earth that conclusion could be drawn. It made me think that millennia from now, someone will dig up a calendar of lottery draws and talk about how there were European-wide “lucky days” when the population would collectively place money on the drawing of random balls. It’s a valid interpretation, but unrecognisable as a description of the motivations and experiences of most people.

But this exhibition has been praised by people who know what they’re talking about, so don’t let the fact that I found it more depressing than enlightening put you off: you still have a couple of weeks left to go and see it.

’Hieroglyphs’ continues at the British Museum until 19 February.

As I continue to fritter away any sense of being ‘on trend,’ I only recently came across podcast production company Wondery (owned by Amazon). I was introduced by the podcast Harsh Reality, presented by Trace Lysette.

This is a six-part documentary series released in November which reports on the production and personal impacts of the 2004 Sky reality series, There’s Something About Miriam. It’s not a reality series that I watched, but I was certainly aware of the surrounding controversy. I had very little awareness of the longterm ramifications for those involved, including the titular Miriam Rivera, the contestants, those involved in the production, and the host.

I was absorbed by this podcast’s discussion of the commissioning and production decisions behind the programme, and its reflections on the pace of change in society’s view of transgender rights over the two decades since.

According to the blurb, ‘Hinterlands is a group exhibition that invites us to consider our relationship with the land and its ecosystems’. It features work from Michelle Allen, Uma Breakdown, Jo Coupe, Laura Harrington, Emily Hesse, Alexandra Hughes, Mani Kambo, Dawn Felicia Knox, Sheree Angela Matthews, Anne Vibeke Mou, Sabina Wallis and Foundation Press.

There were two installations which particularly struck me, neither of them featured in the picture at the top of this post, demonstrating that I’m not a brilliant blogger.

Laura Harrington’s Fieldworking was a 2020 video installation featuring a group of artists spending time with an ecologist in the Upper Teesdale National Nature Reserve. Something about the combination of the familiarity of a rainy walk in the middle of nowhere with the meditative pace of the video gave it a slightly trippy quality. It made me think about the passage of time, and how the human perspective on time is bounded by our experience and the length of our lives. To the extent that they have one, the perspective on time experienced by much longer-lived organisms like trees or bogs would be vastly different. It was a novel way of reminding me of the need to ‘zoom out’ sometimes from everyday concerns, and see how trivial they really are in the wider scheme of things.

Dawn Felicia Knox’s The Felling was a 2022 installation, which included a video component. She had taken videos of different parts of the local suburb of Felling, once very industrialised, showing the natural succession of plants on the industrial sites. Two of these films were projected simultaneously onto makeshift screens and sheets at odd angles, meaning that the images were broken over multiple surfaces and the two films were, in part, overlaid on one another in interesting ways. This made me think about perspectives on the natural world. It reminded me of how nature isn’t static, but is constantly shifting and changing, even if we can’t always see it.

The exhibition is presented in its own typeface—Hinterlands—designed by Foundation Press. I wasn’t initially very taken by this, until I realised that each letter form has multiple versions, each progressing from a fairly traditional letter form to one covered in extensive plant growth… which is clever.

’Hinterlands’ continues at the Baltic until 30 April.

This 2021 novel by Jasper Gibson has been on my “to read” list since publication. I have been nervous to start it because I thought I would have a strong reaction to it, one way or another. And I was right: I thought it was brilliant.

The novel is a first-person account of living with schizophrenia, set in present day leafy East Sussex. Our narrator, Tom, has a first-class degree in law, and also hears the distinctive voice of the “Octopus God,” Malamock. Malamock also has the power to cause Tom to feel sensations, sometimes painful and sometimes pleasurable.

The central portion of the novel concerns Tom’s admission to a mental health ward. A doctor attempts to recruit him to a drug trial, possibly convincing or possibly coercing him to take part. There is a lot to reflect on the challenges of consenting to research, and also the complex decisions psychiatric patients must make about their treatments. Not everyone wants the voices to go away.

And what are the side effects? I don’t want any more side effects. They’re not usually on the side, are they? More in the middle. Slap bang.

There was also quite a bit in this novel about the fine line between religion and mental illness—always fertile ground—as well as reflecting the paucity of social and financial support for those with psychiatric illnesses.

Doubt is an article of faith and not its opposite.

I had expected this to be a fairly reflective novel, ruminating on mental illness—but actually, it is plot-driven with lively writing and plenty of humour. It was much the better for this.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, and Tom and Malamock will live long in my memory.

Thanks to Newcastle University Library for lending me a copy.

I recently had occasion for a return trip from Newcastle to London. This is a trip which I’d preferentially take by train, but have previously ended up flying as a result of the comparative cost.

In the time since I used to do this journey frequently, a new locally based operator—Lumo—has begun serving the East Coast Mainline, with the express intention of getting people onto electric trains instead of flying. It’s been running for a little over a year. I thought I’d give it a go.

On the day I booked my tickets, the Lumo return journey cost £64.80.

The LNER fare for similar departure times was £155.40. The British Airways economy fare for similar times was £271.44, but I would never have paid (or compared with) that figure. I would, unfairly, have compared the prices to the £85 + some Avios price of a BA return in business class… I’m a delicate flower. At those LNER and BA prices, I would probably have opted for BA, rather than paying nearly ‘twice as much’ for LNER standard class.

The Lumo fare substantially undercuts both options. Having whinged a decade ago about the variability of ticket prices, it’s worth noting that Lumo has far fewer price points in its ticketing structure than LNER—though Lumo can’t match the £8.10 single fare I once paid with the old operator, East Coast.

To a certain extent, a train is a train: there isn’t always much to pick between them. Lumo’s are all-electric, which is environmentally advantageous.

The seats are in a standard 2-2 layout, almost all airline-style, with tray tables. The trains are near-identical to LNER Azuma ones, with the same colourblind unfriendly traffic-light seat reservation indicators. It’s a single-class service, and my train had five coaches.

Lumo has gone to town on making their interior an on-brand blue, supplemented by light grey. It felt a bit cold and austere to me, and the plain blue moquette really showed the dirt, but I’m no interior designer. The lighting is unpleasantly bright white, almost clinical, and not at all conducive to relaxation. The luggage rack is glazed with a bluish glass, which looks mirrored and bronze-tinted when packed with bags. It’s a weird choice, but how much time does anyone spend looking at the underside of luggage racks?

The seats have airline-like flappy headrests for snoozing, and individual reading lights above the tray table. The tray table is extendable, which means that you can actually work on a laptop on it. There’s one three-pin socket and two USB-A sockets shared between each pair of seats. The seats are firm: I miss the padding on the older, non-Azuma LNER trains. The arm rests are the narrowest I’ve ever seen, no more than a couple of centimetres in width, but I suppose that’s probably a compromise to keep the seats themselves as wide as practically possible. The legroom was fine.

The service was almost non-stop, save for an alight-only stop at Stevenage on my southbound trip. There is something luxurious and relaxing about non-stop services: it’s nice to settle in and know that the train isn’t about to become suddenly crowded at the next stop.

Food is available to pre-order if boarding at King’s Cross or Edinburgh. This is delivered to your reserved seat, and perhaps as a consequence of this, the conductor was militant about people sitting in their reserved seat and nowhere else. A cashless trolley paraded through the train for impulse purchases. Lumo didn’t ply me with endless mini bottles of complementary champagne like BA Club Europe, but my pre-ordered food was delivered almost immediately after leaving King’s Cross, homeward-bound.

While my southbound journey was perfectly to time, my return was delayed by a little under an hour, so I automatically received half my fare back.

All things considered, and based mainly on the price and reduced ecological impact, Lumo will be my first choice next time.

Apropos of nothing, a few bits of depressing corporate-speak by which my eyes and/or ears have been assaulted lately.

“Docks to” as a synonym for “reports to”—as in, “Team X docks to oversight group Y.”

If this catches on for line-management, the mental imagery is going to become a challenge.

“…as the UK cements its status as a life sciences superpower.”

Superpowers are considered to be science now, not science fiction.

“Most of our work happens at place where we work.”

You might think that the definite article has been omitted, but this is a very fashionable health service use of the phrase “at place” to mean “in a local community”. It is exactly the sort of jargon that ought to be called out on every use until it stops.

“We must flirt with apocalypse in order to feel alive.”

“The morning was dedicated to how we will improve the experience of our people.”

Leaving aside the vague use of “experience”, I find this use of “our people” to mean “employees” both vague (it could be any group of people—e.g. a racial group) and offensive (because I am not “yours”).

I am the sort of heretic who, if asked, would have supported the recent transformation of (part of) Battersea Power Station into a shopping centre. The same part of me that has been whinging recently about the stasis of cathedrals would have praised it as an interesting bit of repurposing, celebrating heritage by making something new of it.

I’ve been down to the Power Station a couple of times in recent years, before the main building opened, so the surrounding ‘distinctive’ (ugly) flats and mildly preposterous ‘community’ shops weren’t a surprise. But this time, I was able to venture inside, and I was surprised at what I found.

It is utterly soulless. It has the feeling of a shopping centre in a second-rate European railway station, the sort that behooves one to grip one’s backpack straps a little more tightly and quicken one’s pace.

This isn’t helped by the lighting scheme. It seems to have been designed to with ‘traditional’ warm white lighting set against mostly matte black fixtures and fittings throughout. I suspect this was designed to be sympathetic to the building, but instead it clashes at every turn with bright white retail lighting and flashy screens—while leaving corridors feeling threateningly dark. There are more narrow, dark, low-ceilinged corridors than one would imagine in a newly opened premise, which I guess is a side-effect of the conversion. This atmosphere might improve as the centre’s occupancy rate rises and injects some life into the place, but many of the warm-white LED fixtures have already acquired a flicker that suggests the LED controller is faulty. Low-level flickering lighting in a dark space gives an oddly rundown feeling to a venue that isn’t even yet fully open.

The grey-ish terrazzo flooring—somehow already looking dirty—only adds to the rundown railway vibe. Incongruous touches of brass and wood here and there, as though someone felt that the scheme needed warming up a bit, look more like non-matching “patched” bits than a design scheme.

For reasons surpassing understanding, the architecture is left to fade into the background. Look at the picture at the top: beautiful columns virtually unlit, while shop names, flashy screens and two incongruous food trucks are brighter than the sun. Why would anyone do that?

Maybe I’m judging it too soon. Perhaps it will seem better when more units are occupied, and the whole thing feels a little more lived in. I don’t think I’ll hurry back, but potentially in a couple of years this will seem like another “he clearly didn’t know what he was talking about” post.

There’s nowhere quite like the North East of England, and nothing quite like living within walking distance of the quayside.

Published in 2022, this is a brief history of sixteen cathedrals. I decided to read it after seeing a review in The Spectator. As I’ve previously reflected, one of the major things the book made me consider was that—at least traditionally—cathedrals have had functions which span way beyond the sacred. As Wells puts it,

Between them, the cathedrals featured tell a narrative faith, intellectual culture, art, politics and economy.

In her introduction, Wells drew a comparison between buildings and books:

We can argue, quite plausibly, then, that buildings are books without words—and through their stones the dead may speak.

What I failed to realise before embarking on this tome is that while buildings may be books without words, I’m not necessarily all that interested in what they have to say. Most of this book was detailed histories of buildings with which I have no particular relationship. Therefore, while I’m sure these histories represent years of detailed research, if I’m honest, I found it all a bit dull. However, it did still give me some tangetial food for thought. This was, in part, because this isn’t normally the sort of thing I read.

Wells has a short section about the devastating fire at Norte-Dame de Paris in 2019. In the context of the histories of these 16 cathedrals, a devastating fire does not stand out at all: nearly all of them have suffered over the years. However, the response to the fire—to replicate and rebuild as closely as possible to what went before—is truly exceptional. In the history of these grand historic buildings, fires have generally been followed by modifications befitting the social and architectural mores of the time. This trend is also true of the York Minster fire of 1984, also briefly covered in the Wells’s book.

I remember feeling a tinge of disappointment when President Macron announced the plan to rebuild exactly what was destroyed. The announcement came after fevered speculation about possible new additions, and it felt a little dull. It wasn’t until I read this book that I also reflected on how historically anomalous it was.

I was reading earlier this year about an inspired campaign to introduce a new Grade III listing for buildings on ecological grounds: “The status would apply automatically to every building and it would come with just one rule: the property may only be demolished if it is structurally unsafe, or is given special dispensation by the local planning authority.”

It strikes me that preserving old building often means modernising them, not dunking them in aspic. And I think that’s what Wells made me reflect on most. Cathedrals were once ever-changing hubs of both religious and secular activity, adapting to serve society as the world changed. These days, they typically feel frozen in time, suspended in antiquity, serving more as curiosities than as community hubs.

Given the opportunity to redefine one of the world’s greatest Cathedrals for the 21st century, with a dash of modern relevant architectural flair, society shrugged its shoulders and said, “put it back like it was before.”

And maybe that means Cathedrals are over.

Thank you to the London Library for letting me borrow this book.