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.

This book was recommended by lots of bookish writers so often that I bought it without really knowing much about it. The blurb gave me a signpost:

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.

Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.

When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool—a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.

From this, I expected a slightly twee inspirational story linking this esoteric moment of scientific discovery to Miller’s own challenges, and to conclude with a sweet reflection on the nature of resilience.

I think it’s best to go into this blind, so I won’t say too much, other than: blimey, I underestimated this. This is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read before: part biography, part memoir, part biology, part philosophy. It is beautifully written, with Miller’s passion and curiosity dripping from every page. She clearly poured her heart into this—and it feels like this is the perfect cultural moment for it.

This was so good that I ended up photographing quotations and sending them to Wendy on WhatsApp as I read—I can’t remember doing that before.

It’s less than 200 pages, and I think it is well worth anyone’s time.

I highlighted lots in this book; here are some good bits that hopefully don’t spoil anything:

Imagine seeing thirty years of your life undone in one instant. Imagine whatever it is you do all day, whatever it is you care about, whatever you foolishly pick and prod at each day, hoping, against all signs that suggest otherwise, that it matters. Imagine finding all the progress you’ve made on that endeavour smashed and eviscerated at your feet.

The “soul-ache … vanishes,” he writes, “with active out-of-door life and the consequent flow of good health.” He claims that salvation lies in the electricity of our bodies. “Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, “from the exercise of functions; from self-activity.” Don’t overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savour the small things. The “luscious” taste of a peach, the “lavish” colours of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience “the stern joy which warriors feel.”

To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.

And so it must be with humans, with us. From the perspective of the stars or infinity or some eugenic dream of perfection, sure, one human life might not seem to matter. It might be a speck on a speck, soon gone. But that was just one of infinite perspectives. From the perspective of an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, that very same human could be so much more. A stand-in mother. A source of laughter. A way of surviving one’s darkest years.

One day, while riding bikes along the Potomac River, she started racing me, and I couldn’t catch her. I ran five miles most days. And I couldn’t catch her. I liked that feeling. Her mind was faster than mine, too. She could drum up dazzling rants about tentative drivers, about scrambled eggs, about people who sign their emails with only one initial. “Are you that busy?!” she groaned. “Are you that beholden to the cult of overwork that you need to communicate that you do not even have those four milliseconds to spare?” She had a way with words.

The best way of ensuring that you don’t miss them, these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at. To examine each object in the avalanche of Chaos with curiosity, with doubt. Is this storm a bummer? Maybe it’s a chance to get the streets to yourself, to be licked by raindrops, to reset. Is this party as boring as I assume it will be? Maybe there will be a friend waiting, with a cigarette in her mouth, by the back door of the dance floor, who will laugh with you for years to come, who will transmute your shame to belonging.

My wife stirs in bed next to me. She slaps my shoulder. “Pipe down, Flipper,” she mumbles. Referring to the fact that I am flipping, tossing and turning, unable to sleep. She wants me only to join her in peace, in slumber, in the soft cotton waves of our powder-blue sheets. I clutch the brimming warmth of her thigh and think about the fact that even at its most hopeful, my measly brain could have never dreamt up something as infinitely intoxicating as her.

I’ve written about the Byker Viaduct before, including as recently as July, but I’ve just found this brilliant video about its construction:

I’ve long understood that it was notable for the sections being glued together, but I couldn’t quite visualise what that meant: it turns out it simply means spreading glue, by hand, on the two surfaces and spreading them together. Remarkable!

I also didn’t know that the arches in the supports were designed to allow sections of the viaduct to pass under them as part of the construction process, which is a very neat solution.

I don’t normally like to post big chunks of other people’s text without some commentary, but I really don’t know what to add to this. Sometimes, serendipity means that we come across exactly the right paragraph at exactly the moment we need to read it.

Reflecting on the outcome of the US Presidential Election, Oliver Burkeman wrote in his email newsletter:

You really, really, really don’t know when a given event is, or isn’t, for the best. You can’t know what effect present-day events will have in the long run, and it’s to ignore your status as a limited human being to imagine you ever could. As the old Taoist story has it: “We’ll see.” Remember, it’s one of the normal responses to a diagnosis of critical illness—not the only one, but a commonplace one—to conclude that in the end, it was a wonderful gift, thanks to how it led to a focus on what truly mattered. Seismic political defeats can stoke the fires of renewal or transformation, while victories can breed complacency, leading to worse catastrophe. Of course, the point isn’t that good things always emerge from seemingly bad things—you can’t be sure of that, either! It’s that this radical uncertainty is where you’ve always lived, whether you realized it or not, and the only place from which you’ve ever accomplished anything. You don’t need hope. You can move forward in the dark. You just need to do “with conviction the next and most necessary thing” – which is all you’ve ever been able to do anyway. And there’s room for enjoyment in the middle of it all, too. I come back to John Tarrant’s observation that the average medieval person lived with no understanding of when the next plague, famine or war might come along to utterly upend their lives. If they’d waited until the future looked dependably bright before gathering for festivals, or creating art, or strolling under the stars with friends, they’d have been waiting forever. So they didn’t wait. You don’t need to wait, either.

In the London Review of Books, Donald MacKenzie has a beautifully written and informative article about apps and online advertising.

The only mobile phone games I regularly play are Wordle and Connections from the New York Times (Wendy and I often tackle the latter together), so I’m a bit out of my depth with all of this stuff. I’m not sure I’ve ever played Candy Crush, which is the game MacKenzie leads his piece with:

Playing​ Candy Crush Saga on your phone involves moving brightly coloured sweets around to the sound of cheerful music. Get three or more identical sweets into a line, and they gently explode and disappear. Your score ticks up, and a cascade of further sweets refills the screen. If all goes well, you’ll soon complete a level. A warm, disembodied, male voice offers encouragement: ‘Divine!’, ‘Sweet!’

The iPhone version of Candy Crush was released in November 2012, and an Android version a month later. In December 2013, the BBC reported that train carriages in London, New York and other big cities were full of commuters ‘fixated on one thing only. Getting rows of red jelly beans or orange lozenges to disappear.’ It has always been free to install Candy Crush, and it has been downloaded more than five billion times, which suggests that hundreds of millions of people must have played it. More than two hundred million still do, according to the game’s makers, the Anglo-Swedish games studio King. Those players aren’t going to exhaust the game’s challenges any time soon: Candy Crush has more than fifteen thousand levels, and dozens more are added every week.

Candy Crush is big business. By 2023, it had earned more than $20 billion in total for King and Activision Blizzard, the games conglomerate that bought King in 2016 for $5.9 billion. Activision Blizzard has now itself been bought by Microsoft for $69 billion, a consolidation of the games sector that caused the UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, enough concern that it initially tried to block it.

I was surprised to learn that only 3-5% of players typically spend money on these games. I’d understood that microtransactions were a big source of income, but not that so much of the income comes from so-called ‘whales’ who spend tens of dollars a month.

I did not know that a big portion of the income from these games comes from advertising other games within them. Companies are keen not to lose ‘whales’ to other games, which is presumably why buying things in games often comes with the side-benefit of removing ads… for other games where you might otherwise spend your money instead.

I was also surprised—and pleased—to learn that only 20% of iPhone users consent to apps tracking their behaviour, in that pop up which appears when one first installs an app. I had not understood how many job losses this had caused in the gaming industry.

The article is well-worth a few moments of your time.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Children who spend time in the care of their Local Authority are more likely to go to prison as adults than they are to go to university. I can’t remember where I first heard that statistic—I guess it was some time in my public health training—but it has remained firmly lodged in my brain, and it hasn’t changed recently.

This week, I learned that there are twice as many people in space as care leavers at Oxford University. I learned that from Matt Taylor, who is himself someone who was in the care system as a child, and who is now studying at Oxford University.

The utterly unnecessary barriers which restrict the choices of the most vulnerable in society still have the power to shock. It’s hard not to think that there would be fewer of them if senior leaders in these organisations were from slightly more diverse backgrounds.

About a month ago, Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic:

I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is. The truth is, it’s getting hard to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.

It’s a sentiment that reads differently after the outcome of Tuesday’s election—and yet, at the same time, that result makes it a much more pressing issue. Warzel uses Hurricane Milton to frame his argument, pointing out that people chose to lie in ways that put people in harm’s way, and led to the government officials who were trying to help being harrassed and attacked.

Misinformation is not a new problem, and it’s not exclusive to the USA. We all know people who credulously believe ever local bullshit rumour posted on Facebook, in the same way that we all know people who believe ever bit of tittle tattle they overhear. We also all know people who peddle that stuff, even if they probably don’t believe it themselves. The rumour mill spins quickly.

We’ve always told people not to believe this stuff. We tell our children to look for reliable sources—what are officials saying? What are journalists saying?

And yet, Warzel observes that television news was peddling lies, and the people who yesterday became the US President- and Vice President-elect also spread falsehoods. The sources we are supposed to be able to trust have proven their unreliability time and again. This is also not a US-only problem: it has been proven that being sacked for lying is no barrier to becoming Prime Minister, and broadcasting lies that put people at risk of death is not a definitive barrier to retaining a UK broadcast licence.

Here in the UK, the Conservatives have just elected a leader who says that she wants to reduce carbon emissions ‘but not in a way that would damage the economy’—as though she believes that an economy can function without a habitable planet for it to sit on.

It feels increasingly like the world is losing its shared sense of reality.

The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly.

I don’t know how democracy can function in this context—and I don’t know how I’d begin to fix it.

On this morning of all mornings, it feels like I should write something about the elections in the USA. As you might have gathered, though, I write most of these posts in advance, and so have no idea how the vote has shaken out. Depending on how tight the vote turned out to be, perhaps you have no idea what the result is yet either!

But one thing can be said with certainty: whoever takes the oath of office on 20 January, the threat to American democracy will not be resolved.

There’s a tendency in politics for narrow escapes to breed complacency.

The ‘no’ vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum begat a Tory complacency about referendums which led to a populace voting for Brexit against the Prime Minister’s explicit recommendation.

The resignation of Boris Johnson begat a ‘thank god that’s over’ reaction which did nothing to fix the constitutional problems his period in office exposed. It meant that when his successor was fined for breaking the law in office, eyebrows were barely raised: the standards we expect had been eroded that far, and no attempt was made to repair them.

The electoral defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden begat a complacency about candidate selection. There was much hand-wringing, but no practical action to re-energise either the Republican or Democratic races to truly find the best and the brightest. Lest we forget that the output of the Democratic process was a candidate who failed even to complete the campaign, let alone a term in office.

The resignation of Liz Truss begat a complacency about leader selection in the Conservative Party. This led to the same selection process being repeated this year, resulting in an equally absurd selection of leader. The lesson wasn’t learned.

One of my bugbears in healthcare is that ‘near misses’ are rarely taken as seriously as incidents in which harm occurred. We often miss the opportunity to fix systems before disasters strike. There’s an aphorism among some that ‘a Datix is never investigated like a death is’ (Datix is the error-reporting system in the NHS).

It feels to me like the response of our elected representatives is often based on that same principle. Every time we flirt with constitutional disaster, in the UK or the USA, the response seems to be to shrug and observe that it all worked out in the end.

But unless the underlying problems are fixed, unless the unflashy, unpopular hard miles of constitutional reform are put in, then one day, it won’t all work out in the end. Perhaps that day is today.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.