A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The forty-second post of a series.

A great post on the LRB blog this week by Liam Shaw makes the fundamental point that “prescribing a course of antibiotics shouldn’t be an isolated consumer transaction; rather, treatment should be part of an integrated system with continuity of care”.

On one of its front pages this week, alongside a headline reporting that “Truss was a disastrous dalliance who served only to remind us what a real leader looks like,” the Daily Mail claimed to offer “unrivalled reports and analysis.”

Only 79 days previously, one of their headlines informed the readership that “Liz has the boldness, vision and strength of conviction to build on what Boris began.”

Only 45 days previously, their banner headline celebrating Liz Truss’s selection by the Tory membership screamed, “cometh the hour, cometh the woman.”

Only 27 days ago, their front page proclaimed the disastrous mini-budget to be “a true Tory budget” offering the “biggest boost for 50 years.”

There’s only one way in which these reports and analyses are unrivalled: their distance from reality.

“The possible return of this unscrupulous leader who damaged the moral credibility of the Conservative Party is causing a lot of concern,” says Cécile Ducourtieux in Le Monde, with understatement.

And this editorial is stinging:

Still traumatized by the shock of Brexit and the never-ending negotiations and extreme division it brought about, the UK is struggling to point to its exit from the EU as the trigger for the downgrading and destabilization impacting the country. Growth and investments are at half speed, with exports slowed, and there is the renewed risk of secession by Scotland and Northern Ireland. For a while, Covid masked the damage of Brexit, which has become the elephant in the room that few people, even those in the opposition, want to see. From this perspective, Ms. Truss’s time in office, which claimed to “take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit,” looks like a terrible crash test.

Learning the lessons will be long and painful. But it is hard to see how the UK can return to stability and prosperity without escaping from the denial and silence about the consequences of a decision that has isolated it and cut it off from neighbors and natural partners on the continent.

Eshe Nelson in the New York Times:

Since Brexit, the nation has had more barriers with its largest trading partner, the European Union, business investment has been lackluster and companies have lost easy access to a large pool of workers. The National Health Service is overburdened, and the immense backlog of patients needing care is keeping many of them out of work.

In addition, like many nations, Britain is enduring the highest pace of inflation since the 1980s, taking the momentum out of consumer spending and economic growth.

While Britain shares some economic problems with other advanced economies, its outlook for inflation is particularly painful. Consumer prices in the country rose 10.1 percent in September from a year earlier. with the annual inflation rate returning to its fastest pace since 1982.

Tom McTague in The Atlantic, even before this week’s events:

For the first time in my adult life, there is a genuine sense of decay in Britain–a realization that something has been lost that will be difficult to recover, something more profound than pounds and pence, political personalities, or even prime ministers. Over the past three weeks, the U.K. has been gripped by a crisis of crushing stupidity, one that has gone beyond all the turmoil of Brexit, Boris, even the great bank bailouts of 2007, and touched that most precious of things: core national credibility.

None of this is fixed by changing Prime Minister. It’s hard to imagine our country side-stepping some kind of fundamental constitutional reform after this level of destruction, probably beginning with the break-up of the nation.

Wendy and I have been visiting someone in Berwick-upon-Tweed this week, in only our second visit to the town, despite speeding through on the train many times. We particularly enjoyed a stroll around the town walls, only a few weeks after I did the same in York. We also popped to Bamburgh on the way back, though the world-renowned majesty of the Northumberland coast was enveloped in fog, so really we could have been anywhere.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The forty-first post of a series.

One of the sillier apps I have on my phone is Conqueror Virtual Challenges, which takes the distance I walk and plots it along a given “challenge” route. This is qualitatively absurd: schlepping from the sofa to the fridge for more chocolate is not sensibly comparable to trekking a few metres further up a mountain.

It therefore feels mildly fraudulent (but also a little bit lovely) to have received this medal this week. It commemorates having walked the length of Route 66, a total of 2280.5 miles, since September last year. I’ll happily confess that I’ve made no special effort, it’s just my normal, everyday steps.

I think I’ve only bought two of the top 20 biggest-selling debut albums in UK history, both on CD, though there are another two that I might have bought. I can’t remember for certain, and I’ve no idea where any of them are now.

I shop at IKEA more than most people. I tend to consider it to be an easy place to shop. It’s painless to check stock before visiting, it’s easy to pop in and pick up the needful, and if you want to view something before purchase, the layout is logical and well-signposted. They’re far from perfect, but they are at least thoughtful about their impact on the environment. I pop in just to use the restaurant occasionally.

I’m therefore always tickled by articles about it being a labyrinth. These often seem to be based on the more common experience of wandering the entire store at the busiest time of the week, trying to make stressful decisions about large furniture purchases, all in a novel and unfamiliar environment. The articles are frequently very funny tales or analyses of stressful experiences—but not at all like my experience of IKEA.

Tory MPs are telling us again that they are ruthless about getting rid of leaders, less than six weeks after they finally dispatched Boris Johnson following a psychodrama that dragged on and on and on for years. Facts needn’t hinder party mythology.

The thirteenth Chancellor of the Exchequer of my lifetime was appointed this week. The first six served for my first 25 years on the planet. Jeremy Hunt must serve thirteen years if the second seven are to draw level that record. This seems unlikely.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The fortieth post of a series.

I’ve been reading Andrew Holleran’s The Kingdom of Sand this week. About a third of the way through the book, the narrator reflects on his decision to continue living in his parents’ house:

I liked the idea of keeping the same post office box, the same bedroom with the same books I’d had to read in high school lined up in the headboard of my bed, in a little compartment whose sliding door I merely had to push back to pull out my well-worn paperbacks of Hamlet and The Great Gatsby. I liked never having to write the alumni magazine to say I had a new address, never having to switch banks or have to ask my dentist to forward my records to a new town. I wanted to stay in one dear, perpetual place. I wanted to watch what happened to it over time.

Even the act of reading that makes me feel a bit claustrophobic, a bit suffocated. I couldn’t disagree more.

I went to my quarterly appointment to give blood this week. I look forward to it: I enjoy the unusual experience of being able to lie back in a public place, undisturbed, and just spend time with my own thoughts for ten minutes or so.

It makes me think of a passage in the sixth edition of Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine which made a big impression on me as a Foundation Doctor. I used to think about it almost daily.

This is not one of those passages about how you should be kind to the patient, explain in full what you are going to do, talk him or her through venepuncture, label the bottles carefully, and make a plan for communicating the results. Be all this virtue as it may, there is something else which needs communicating about the most menial of our tasks: the act of taking blood. It is partly to do with the fact that as blood is life, and, because, as Ruskin taught us, ‘there is no wealth but life’, we are led to the conclusion that what is special about taking blood is that for once we are being given something valuable by the patient. What is this wealth? The answer is time. For while the blood is flowing into our tube we cannot be disturbed. We are excused from answering our bleeps, and from making polite conversation (a few grunts in reply to patients’ enquires about the colour of their blood is quite sufficient)—and we can indulge in that almost unimaginable luxury, at least as far as life on the wards is concerned, of being alone with our own thoughts. Thinking of this sacred time as a sort of hypnotic holiday is excellent. For however many nights we have been awoken, and through however many wards we have traipsed to this bedside, this little holiday will be worth an hour’s sleep—if our mind is furnished and ready to empty itself of all objectivity. The best sight in haematological practice is, during venepuncture, to watch for those occasions when, owing to some chance characteristic of flow, the jet of blood streaming into our tube breaks up into countless globules, and before coalescing again, these globules jostle together like the overcrowded chain of events which led us to this bedside.

I’d forgotten, until I looked it up, that this passage leads into eight lines from William Blake’s Milton, complete with a footnote explaining some of Blake’s imagery and the completely unconnected influence of Blake’s editor on breast cancer surgery. That’s a whole other level of authorial indulgence.

But back to my blood donation… it was with mild dismay that I noted that the patient information sheets have been updated to include a section on things patients can do if they fear boredom during their ten-minute donation. Top of the list is playing with their mobile phone.

Having got my vintage 2004 OHCM off the shelf (well, Wendy’s copy, actually) I wondered what bon mots it may have about my current specialty. It didn’t disappoint:

Many of the diseases which preoccupy consultants in infectious diseases are new—food-borne E. coli, waterborne Cryptosporidium, airborne Legionnaire’s disease, blood-borne hepatitis C, and sexually transmitted HIV have come to the fore only in the last 30yrs. Why have these years been so tumultuous in the ID world? The short answer (at least for some of these) is greed, and our desire to exploit nature. For example, economic drive builds dams (increasing breeding grounds for vectors by orders of magnitude) and forces land development, putting people closer to vectors, eg ticks, mosquitoes, and rodents. Intensive farming is also making it easier for infectious agents to jump the species barrier (think of CJD).

Can we win? No: we cannot win against infectious diseases. All we can do is live with them. To help us do this in ways which are not too destructive, we need robust public health surveillance institutions, political will, quarantine laws, and above all, openness and cooperation. SARS and its spread underline these facts in a particularly graphic way: as the Chinese and other less-than-open societies have found out, when it comes to reporting infectious diseases, lying means dying.

I gave a conference presentation and an in-person MSc lecture this week. I’m not certain, but I think this is the first time since the start of the pandemic that I’ve done either of those things. I think I’m rusty, and that neither was as good as it could have been. Yet, the sheer number of thoughtful and caring messages of appreciation I received following the former gave me a bit of a boost this week.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “a junior doctor taking a blood sample in a hospital ward, oil painting” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE 2.

A couple of things I’ve been thinking about this week. The thirty-ninth post of a series.

I gave a presentation this week to prospective public health trainees. I’m told that my enthusiasm for my job was “obvious and infectious”, which is a surprise after the last three years.

Eleven years and five months ago, Wendy and I spent ages browsing shop upon shop, trying to find two decent sofas. This week, we’ve been doing it again.

Now, as then, only a tiny proportion of sofas are to our taste. There are frequent exclamations of “Who would want that in their house?!”

I’ve eight books to tell you about this month.

The President’s Hat by Antoine Laurain

I decided to read this 2013 French novel after hearing political journalist Charlotte Ivers, on her fourth or fifth read, describe it as “the most charming book”. It’s translated into English by Jane Aitken, Emily Boyce and Louise Rogers Lalaurie.

I can’t disagree with Charlotte: this is an utterly charming book which is just brimming with a pleasant, gentle optimism. Set in the 1980s, the plot begins with a man finding François Mitterrand’s hat. It seems to bring him a small amount of good fortune. After he misplaces the hat, it ends up in the hands of another Parisian character, and so the book continues with four small vignettes of ordinary Parisian lives enhanced by temporary possession of a hat.

It sounds irritatingly twee, but Laurain manages to spin a comforting and engaging tale of it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Some translation decisions were unusual: for examplesommelier, a term frequently used in England, is routinely translated as ‘wine waiter’ yet motoscafo, an unfamiliar term, was left in French. But these are minor niggles, and this book is well worth 200 pages of your attention.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

A Month in the Country by JL Carr

This novel, first published in 1980, has been much-recommended as a book which is perfect summer reading. It is a rather gentle tale set in Yorkshire in the summer of 1920. Thomas Birkin, the central character, is an ex-serviceman who accepts a job in Oxgodby, Yorkshire, to get out of London for something approximating a period of convalescence. His task is to uncover a Medieval painting which has been whitewashed in the local church.

Birkin becomes drawn into village life, becoming especially close to another ex-serviceman who is digging for a lost grave, a young girl from the village, and the parson’s wife. He develops especially strong feelings for the latter.

There is a lot of gentle hinting in the book at religious themes of damnation, redemption, and forgiveness. It’s a short book, under 100 pages, but is rich in atmosphere and description while maintaining an underlying gentleness. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer

I’ve previously read and enjoyed Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It and so was tempted by this new book when I noticed that the library had acquired a copy. Much like the earlier book, it’s an extended and somewhat rambling essay recounting the author’s personal experiences and a wide range of cultural touchstones. This volume concentrates on ‘endings’ and draws on a lot of literature, jazz, art, classical music and other references.

Many of the references are beyond me, but Dyer’s engaging and funny style of writing and the pace of the ’conversation’ keeps things moving on. And there are occasional passages which speak directly to me, or make me see things from a wholly new perspective.

In all, a bit like the earlier book, I’m not really sure why I liked this, especially given that so many of the references were unfamiliar… but I very much did.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal

I had two reasons for picking this up. Firstly, there has been a lot of recent discussion of the Elkhart of Vidal as the tenth anniversary of his death has just passed, and I thought it would be good to read some of his work. Secondly, I recently read A Ladder to the Sky which features Vidal as a character and includes a few mentions of this specific book, with which it turns out to share some minor themes.

The City and the Pillar caused considerable controversy on its 1948 publication for its portrayal of an ordinary, somewhat sympathetic gay man who served in the military. Clearly, this is much less shocking to modern sensibilities, but the story still holds up as a tale of longing, and as a criticism of prejudice. The writing is in that plain, precise style of the great American writers, which I enjoyed.

I’m glad I read this because it gave me a bit of historical perspective. However, I wouldn’t rush to re-read it; I wasn’t really moved by it, and I’m not really sure that I’ll remember the finer details of the plot six months hence.

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

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

I picked up this novel having previously enjoyed Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.

Lahiri’s previous novels were written in English, while she was living in the USA. She has since relocated to Rome, and wrote and published Whereabouts in Italian in 2018, as Dove Me Trovo. It was translated by the author and re-published in English in 2021.

Whereabouts is a subtle novel. It takes the form of short essays or reflections on the life and inner thoughts of a single woman in her 40s, living alone and working as an academic. It explores the fascinating intersection between solitude and loneliness. This relationship is something which has played on my mind in recent years in connection with older people, but I hadn’t really considered it in younger people who live alone. There isn’t much plot to speak of, but then it’s not that sort of novel.

While I didn’t feel I took quite as much from this book as I did from Interpreter of Maladies, I will certainly be seeking more of Lahiri’s books.

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

Weather by Jenny Offill

I picked this up because I recently enjoyed Offill’s previous novel, Dept. of Speculation. Weather was published in 2020, and shares the same fragmentary structure of short paragraphs sharing the protagonist’s tangentially connected thoughts and observations. The later novel is even lighter on plot than the earlier one.

Weather contains plenty of thoughts about the turbulent times in which we live: about populism and climate change and ‘the end times’. But it is also about marriage, family, parenthood and addiction, all of which loom large in the university librarian narrator’s life.

I felt like I got a little less from this book than from the earlier novel, but perhaps that is in part because the structure wasn’t so arrestingly novel. The references to the difficult times in which we are living also served to make it a little less escapist. But I’m still glad I read it.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Two of my friends on Goodreads gave this short 1911 novel good reviews, which led me to seek a copy. It’s a thoroughly bleak tale of the despair of forbidden love, and of being trapped by circumstance and duty.

In all, this was thoroughly depressing. I appreciate Wharton’s brilliance in creating a complete world which evokes strong emotions in so few pages… but this isn’t the sort of thing I could stand to read regularly!

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

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

I picked this short 2013 Booker shortlisted novel on a complete whim, based on nothing more than the author and the title. It’s a narrative of the last days of Jesus from the perspective of his mother.

Despite this being a very short book, I had a bit of a variable relationship with it. I very nearly gave up on it about halfway through, finding the narrator unlikable and the writing very much in a single, maudlin key. When I picked it up again, I liked it more, though it still felt as though the “strings” were visible, as if this were an essay for a school project, and I wasn’t really emotionally affected by it. The writing felt much clunkier than I expected. I suspect I’ll barely remember that I’ve read this book a year hence.

However, this is a book which has received glowing reviews elsewhere, from people who know much more about these things than me. Don’t set too much store by my negative review. It’s less than 100 pages, so probably just worth reading and making up your own mind.

With thanks to Newcastle Libraries for lending me a copy.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The thirty-eighth post of a series.

Nobody tell “pro-growth” Liz Truss, but my taxpayer funded job is terrible for this country’s Gross Domestic Product.

By preventing people from catching serious infections or being harmed by chemical, radiological or biological hazards, I’m sucking millions out of the economy. I’m denying the country all the economic activity which could have been generated from decades of expensive medical treatments, or hugely costly spells in hospital or eye-wateringly costly stays in intensive care or isolation units. All those private companies whose drugs will sell slightly less well, or whose facilities management will have one less bed space to clean, or whose disability aids will have lost a potential customer must be raging at me.

And—which may be worse—I’m reducing productivity by making business focus on protecting their staff and customers from harm, instead of freeing them up to spend more time making widgets.

My entire job is based on the outdated socialist ideology that people’s health is worth something, even while reducing those all-important GDP figures: I’m the scourge of modern capitalist Conservatism, and yet the Treasury pays my wages.

That. Is. A. Disgrace.

Our local Councillors like to shove newsletters through our door every so often. One of the topics they frequently cover is recycling, and specifically, what residents may or may not put in their recycling bin. Their missives often end with the exhortation, “if in doubt, leave it out.”

For years, I’ve wondered whether they meant “if in doubt, leave it out for collection” or “if in doubt, leave it out of your recycling bin”. Both options seem reasonable: one increases the proportion of waste that is collected for recycling rather than landfill; the other protects the purity of the recycling stream.

This week, for no particular reason, I thought I’d search online to try to solve the puzzle. It appears that this is a commonly used slogan across different parts of the UK and is meant to communicate the latter message.

I guess this is proof that slogans don’t need to be clear to be catchy.

The previously mentioned closed branch of Barclays on my route to work is now plastered in Barclays notices headlined “Here to help”—despite that being demonstrably false. Bizarrely, they even say “pop in and arrange a time to talk”.

The small print shows that they’re advertising a seven hour per week service at a local cricket club.

Wendy and I finished watching the ten-part series The First Lady, a historical drama interweaving the lives of Michelle Obama, Betty Ford and Eleanor Roosevelt. I struggled to get into it at first: it’s difficult to get over the barrier of other people playing characters as familiar as the Obamas, and Kiefer Sutherland as Theodore Roosevelt was… a stretch.

But there is some fantastic acting in there, and we both found that the series gradually got under our skin. It’s worth sticking with.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “a physician and a First Lady of the United States, photographed from behind, sorting mixed recycling in an old-fashioned banking hall” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE 2. Interesting that the physician is dressed in traditionally male clothing in all cases.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The thirty-seventh post of a series, and the second during this national period of mourning.

An incomplete list of unexpected places I’ve been offered written condolences on the Queen’s death: a billboard over the A167(M); the Amazon app; the Apple App Store; the Argos app; the ASOS app; the British Airways Executive Club app; every screen in the window and interior of Charles Clinkard; the Costa Coffee app; a signature on the bottom of an email from a local Council officer; the CrossCountry Trains website; the Deliveroo app; the EasyJet app; screens in Eldon Square; every single notice in several estate agents’ windows, because there’s nothing as disrespectful as advertising a house for sale; the window of Fenwick; the GoPuff grocery delivery app; the menu board in Greggs; Haymarket Metro station; the window of HMV; the window of HSBC, in a notice featuring the Queen wearing an outfit in the bank’s black and red colour scheme, because mourning presents an opportunity for brand reinforcement; the IKEA website; the John Lewis app, as well as their shop window; the LNER app; an email from The London Library; the M&S app and shop window; Matt Goodwin’s Substack; the Newcastle City Council website; one (and only one) of the entrances to Newcastle City Library; the Next app; an email from the Royal Society of Medicine, though maybe I should have expected that one given the name; a wall inside a Samsung Experience Store; the Selfridges website; the window of Skipton Building Society; the window of Specsavers, in surprisingly small writing; the Superdrug app; a broken screen in the window of TSB which I think was offering condolences, but for all the text I could read may have been suggesting the overthrow of the monarchy; screens in the window of Vision Express showing photos of the Queen wearing glasses, because mourning presents an opportunity for a sales pitch; a little A5 sign on the Waitrose deli counter; the window of WHSmith; emails from no fewer than four people above me in the management chain at work, no doubt time well spent; the Yeo Valley website; the window of the Yorkshire Building Society.

So, where was I (last week) when I heard? I’d been in the office, and aware from news websites of the concerning update from Buckingham Palace regarding the health of the monarch. Without really any knowledge to back it up, I half-expected an announcement at 5pm, which didn’t come.

As I walked home from work, assuming I’d be unable to stomach whatever Radio 4’s was offering, I listened to John Pieneaar and Stig Abell on Times Radio. They were delivering a pitch-perfect live programme reflecting on the life of the Queen. The hour I heard was focused on the response around the world to the concern about Her Majesty’s health. Correspondents from a string of countries reported on how their national news media was covering the story and shared insights into those countries’ longstanding relationships with the Queen.

As 6pm drew near, Pineaar and Abel prepared listeners for an expected ‘significant update’, cueing up 6pm with a well-chosen clip of the Queen’s “we’ll meet again” speech. There was some palpable filling after the top-of-the-hour when the expected news didn’t come, with the usually prompt headline sequence following only minutes later.

As I arrived home, Wendy had BBC News on the TV. At 6.30pm, I spotted a Press Association update on the web, which announced the death. Wendy and I sat together, anticipating the BBC’s announcement. Once Huw Edwards had broken the news a few minutes later, we got on with dinner.

Shortly afterwards, my on-call phone rang with news of a multiagency Tactical Command Group called that evening by a local police force as the North East elements of Operation London Bridge began to be implemented. And the world kept turning.

I’m loath to criticise anyone for over-reaching with days of continuous coverage of a single story to fill, but some may have pushed it a little far. I’m not convinced that we can infer much about King Charles’s approach to kingship from his haircut, as one weekly newspaper suggested. While technically true, I’m not certain that it’s all that illuminating to discuss our new monarch as an ‘orphan’, as one news channel did. And I’m not confident that the King’s response to a leaky pen really gives us quite the insight into his psyche that so many media outlets proposed.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The thirty-sixth post of a series, and the first in a period of national mourning.

The eighth Prime Minister of my lifetime was appointed this week. The first four served over my first 25 years on the planet. Prime Minister Truss must serve until 2035 if the second four are to match that record. This seems unlikely.

The second monarch of my lifetime ascended the throne this week. The first reigned over my first 37 years on the planet. The King must reign until he is 110 years old to match that record. This seems unlikely.

The Government has announced a tenth Bank Holiday in 2022. There have never been so many in a single year in my lifetime. There must be two huge national events in the same year for this to happen again, or fewer if one or more new standing Bank Holiday(s) are introduced. Neither contingency seems unlikely, but history suggests that both probably are.

A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The thirty-fifth post of a series.

I’ve been reading Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer this week, and, while describing someone’s house, he mentions in passing that

the previous time I was there, I’d held a human brain in my hands (a visiting neuroscientist happened to have one in the trunk of his car).

This was one of those arresting moments: of course, I (and many of my friends) have held human brains while studying anatomy at medical school. It’s so normal among us as to be unremarkable, but in the wider scheme of human existence, it’s a bit… weird.

In our anatomy exams, bits of cadavers would be presented to us with flagged pins stuck in them, like miniature golf flags. The task was to ‘name the structure first pierced by Pin A’, for example, with the classic easy example of the ’beautiful tortuous splenic artery’, as we were all accustomed to calling it.

When it came to the brain, we were often presented with slices of brain with pins in them, much like thick slices of strangely shaped ham with seemingly random placed markers. This was meant to be important because this is typically how the brain is imaged, in CT scans for example. I was hopeless at this bit. In retrospect, I think this was related to my (relative lack of) colour vision: the slices looked uniform colours to me, whereas Wendy tells me there were shades to them. Anyway, my total lack of ability in this clearly wasn’t enough to prevent me from qualifying in the end.

I started reading Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror this week, and was particularly struck by this passage:

I have become acutely conscious of the way my brain degrades when I strap it in to receive the full barrage of the internet—these unlimited channels, all constantly reloading with new information: births, deaths, boasts, bombings, jokes, job announcements, ads, warnings, complaints, confessions, and political disasters blitzing our frayed neurons in huge waves of information that pummel us and then are instantly replaced. This is an awful way to live, and it is wearing us down quickly.

It’s reminiscent of Bo Burnham’s Welcome to the Internet distilled into a paragraph, and it’s hard to disagree.

This week, I’ve seen young couples turning up to a hotel breakfast with an iPad, which they’ve propped up on the table so that they can jointly and collaboratively fill in a crossword. This happened on several days with different couples each time. I’ve never seen that before.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “a Vermeer style painting of a man holding a human brain” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE 2.

I’ve six books to tell you about this month, most of which were really excellent.

A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne

This 2018 novel follows the complicated life of novelist from his early 20s onwards. It is divided into three longer sections and two interludes, each of which has a different narrator, with the central character himself narrating the final section.

I’ve previously read three of Boyne’s novels (The Heart’s Invisible Furies, The Echo Chamber and The Second Child) and while I’ve enjoyed them all, the latter two didn’t quite live up to The Heart’s Invisible Furies, which I thought was truly exceptional. This book had a broadly similar biographical structure to The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and similar threads of humour and literary chatter, and even a mention of Maude Avery—a favourite character.

I enjoyed A Ladder to the Sky enormously, but it too didn’t quite live up to its predecessor.

Its recurring themes of ‘ownership’ of stories and differing interpretations of events depending on perspective were pointed out repeatedly and a little heavy-handedly for my liking. There was a lack of subtlety throughout, in a way that reminded me of some of Jeffrey Archer’s fiction. I haven’t quite untangled in my own mind whether that was an authorial choice meant to reflect unsubtle aspects of the protagonist’s character, or something less considered, but I found it a bit wearing at times.

But really, this is nit-picking. Even where plot points were unsubtly telegraphed way in advance, I still raced through the book anticipating each dénouement. I wouldn’t hesitate to read more of Boyne’s novels.

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

This recently published novel concerns a relationship between an English professor and her recently appointed younger colleague. This is also the story of her troubled relationship with her husband, also a professor, who is under investigation for several historical relationships with his female students, conducted with her knowledge.

Vladimir is beautifully written, dark and exhilarating. It explores many contemporary questions, especially around shame, power and sexual consent. It has a bleak, cynical wit to it, and has a page-turning thriller-ish aspect to it.

I devoured it.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

This 2014 novel has been on my “to read” list for years. It is a short novel (179 pages) which provides a portrait of a marriage: there is some plot, but not a huge amount of it, and it is very much in the background.

Reading the blurb, I had completely misunderstood that this was an epistolary novel consisting of letters between a husband and wife. It isn’t. It is written in an unusual form, consisting of short thoughts and ruminations from the point of view of the unnamed “wife” character. In the second half of the book, the narration shifts to be apparently third-person, though I think this is intended to reflect a shift in how the character sees herself, rather than a genuine change in narrative perspective.

I found this structure interesting, insightful and enjoyable. Experimental forms are sometimes a bit of a slog, but that certainly wasn’t the case here.

This has left me keen to explore more of Offill’s work.

Turbulence by David Szalay

I read Szalay’s Booker-nominated All That Man Is back in 2018, and didn’t really think much of it: it seemed to be nine well-written, thematically connected stories, but it didn’t live up to being anything more than that.

Perhaps because I went into Turbulence, published in 2019, with a more open mind, I enjoyed it much more. It is a similar concept: twelve short stories about people going through “turbulent” times in their lives, their stories interconnected through aeroplane flights. Each of the short stories was immediately evocative of its setting and mood. The ways the stories interacted with one another pulled off that wonderful narrative trick of convincing the reader that the characters’ lives extend before and after the story we’re told.

I didn’t get any wider, grander theme from this book, but unlike All That Man Is, I wasn’t expecting to find one, so didn’t find the absence jarring. I really enjoyed reading this short book, and it makes me wonder whether I should reread the earlier book with different expectations.

Serious Money by Caroline Knowles

This book, based on a sociological research study, was published in May. Knowles walked around the wealthier parts of London and interviewed people who are found there. It was recommended in Tom Rowley’s newsletter as being “packed with sharply-observed insights into how the super-rich make their money and how they spend it. Gently written, with warmth and real curiosity.”

I’d agree with all of that. Knowles went well beyond simply describing the enormous privilege in which the super-rich are surrounded, and tried to genuinely understand the people and their world. One is left with the unavoidable impression that many of the super-rich are simply unaware of the real world, and most of them don’t seem especially kind nor friendly.

I expected the gaping inequality, and so was perhaps a little less shocked by that than the tone suggests I might be. What really depressed me about this book is the lack of imagination, the sheer mundanity of the everyday life of the people described. The sense of “keeping up with the Joneses” and the divisions between the “haves and have yachts” feels essentially grounded in the same envy as at other income levels. So much of the behaviour seemed to be driven by a sense of societal norms—we simply must have a swimming pool / country house / yacht because that’s what people would expect of those with our income.

I suppose I like to think—in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that if I had effectively unlimited means, then I’d spend my life trying to do something demonstrably worthwhile and leave the world a better place. I see that, to massive swathes of the world’s population, I do have effectively unlimited means, and yet, here I am, writing fairly shoddy and mostly unread book reviews rather than volunteering at the local soup kitchen. I suppose this book pierced my fantasy that my life would be different if I just had a little more money.

A Class of Their Own by Matt Knott

It was interesting to read this memoir, published in February, at the same time as Serious Money, as the two discuss broadly similar themes in entirely different ways. This book is the less successful of the two.

Matthew Hammett Knott is a Cambridge graduate, and this is his story of spending much of three academic years post-graduation as a private tutor to wealthy clients. The facts are a bit opaque: the blurb talks about “over a decade” spent tutoring—but while the events of the book take place over a decade ago, they cover only three years, and the end of the book leaves the impression of being the end of his tutoring career. The cover calls the author ‘Matt Knott’, while the book’s listing calls him ‘Matthew Hammett Knott’, which might just be a design thing, but—in the context of everything else—feels a bit like an attempt to draw a stronger dividing line between the hardly under-privileged author and his very upper-class clients.

The content is also a little odd. For a book which is notionally about tutoring children, references to sex are surprisingly frequent and occasionally jarring, and there is a surprising amount about the author’s early career as a writer.

The combination of the time that has passed since the events this describes, the strange content decisions and the opaque descriptions in the blurb make me wonder if this was originally written as a broader memoir. It may have been gradually beaten into a marketable shape by committee over many years, not wholly successfully.

This was easy to read, and occasionally very funny, but the overall sense I’m left with is a combination of puzzlement and suspicion, which is not really what I was looking for.