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

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts introduced me to the Italian word for jewellery box: portagioie, which can be literally translated as “joy box”. This initially struck me as beautiful, but became more and more depressing the more I thought about it.

In the TLS, Ysenda Maxtone Graham says

I always feel sorry for the poor consumptives of history, who would probably far rather have stayed in their home bedroom in England, but were dragged off in some bone-shaking vehicle in search of better air in the south of France, where they died anyway.

Now I do, too.

Also from the TLS, I leaned that the bestselling author James Patterson used to be the CEO of Toys’R’Us and also wrote its jingle… and that his autobiography is called James Patterson by James Patterson: Stories of My Life by James Patterson.

Your email signature should reflect the role in which you are sending the email. That is its main function. People who have a list of different roles in their signature, such as professorships and editorships, are basically show-offs who don’t understand basic principles of governance.

Julian Barnes’s piece in the LRB comparing Ingres’s Madame Moitessier and Picasso’s Woman with a Book was fantastic, and made me look at both paintings more closely than I’ve looked at any painting in years.

In the depths of lockdown, Wendy and I said that we’d make an effort to go to more galleries and exhibitions of art in a post-lockdown world, but we’ve somehow still not quite got round to it.

Having only recently watched My Octopus Teacher (without me), Wendy was distressed to see octopus toasties on a menu this week.

It also got us trying to remember the correct plural of ‘octopus’—Wendy thought ‘octopuses’, I thought ‘octopodes’, and we both thought ’octopi’ was wrong. The OED lists all three options, with ‘octopuses’ first… though the 1989 edition didn’t include ‘octopi’ and had ‘octopodes’ as the first option. The right answer is clearly to never have more than one: they are fairly solitary creatures in any case.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “digital art of an octopus reading a dictionary and emerging from a jewellery box” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE 2.

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

I’ve been reading Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment this week, and the introduction introduced me to the lovely word ‘palimpsest’:

We have written ourselves into the DNA of this planet, laced human history into the very earth. Every environment bears a palimpsest of its past. Every woodland is a memoir made of leaves and microbes that catalogue its ‘ecological memory’. We can learn, if we want, to read it—to observe in the world around us the story of how it came to be.

It looks like it comes from the Latin palimpsēstus which has almost exactly the same meaning as the modern word (a parchment on which the original text has been overwritten by another).

On my walk to work each morning recently, I’ve been passed by a push-bike with a trailer which has “catering for Manchester by bike” written on it. I assume no-one is really cycling 140-miles to cater for Manchester, but then I suppose stranger things have happened.

The public information sign lying that “The Government and NHS are well prepared to deal with this virus” has finally been taken down from the men’s toilet wall at work, two-and-a-half years on. The poster advertising a long-closed staff survey for an employer which previously occupied our office remains.

I feel seen.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “a drawing on parchment of a person cycling past a toilet.” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE 2.

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

Walking past a coffee shop on a university campus this week, I heard a student regaling a small group of friends. As I walked past, I caught the exclamation: “I was in the middle of a crematorium with fire alarms going off, what would you expect!?”

This week, I’ve been reading some Gore Vidal. In one of his novels, a character mentions a “streptococcic infection.”

I deal with cases of streptococcal infection all the time, but have never come across that alternative form of the adjective. Google Books Ngrams shows that “streptococcal” has always been the commoner form, but that “streptococcic” was used a little in the first half of the twentieth century.

Wendy and I have wanted to replace the wall lights in our living room for years, but have never spotted ones that were quite right. We did this week, though… and despite imagining that it would be difficult, the DIY job of replacing them only took me about 15 minutes. By sheer fluke, the brackets already attached to the wall for the old lamps were identical to the brackets for the new ones, so didn’t require removal and replacement.

I’ve been irritated this week by the Tory leadership candidates talking about “NHS efficiency”. I think there are scarcely any people who want an efficient NHS; I think most people want a gloriously, wonderfully inefficient NHS.

I think people want an NHS where staff have the time to sit and hold the hands of those dying alone. I think people want an NHS where staff have the time to give tea and sympathy to the bereaved. I think people want an NHS where staff have time for a little chat with the lonely patient without any visitors.

Of course, efficiency should be a consideration, but it shouldn’t be the top priority. I’d much rather be looked after by a caring service than an efficient one, and I’d much rather pay for the former too.

Wendy and I went to our first wedding of the year this week. Either fewer people are getting married or we’re getting old… or both. We saw the Perseid meteor shower as we walked home.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “a painting of a group of friends drinking coffee at a wedding with a wall light in the background” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE 2.

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

I’ve moaned more than enough on here about ridiculous imprecise business jargon, but I’m being invited to a rash of “birdtable meetings” at the moment. This phrase manages to be both linguistically excruciating as well as grammatically irritating. I can accept “birdtable” as a non-standard compound adjective in the phrase “birdtable meeting”—but the moment people use “birdtable” as a noun, and continue to omit the space, it really makes my teeth itch.

I’m fully aware that this makes me a ludicrous human being, that the rules of grammar aren’t fixed in any case, that I make much worse grammatical errors all the time, and that I should just breathe through it: but it still irritates me.

I’ve been reading Caroline Knowles’s Serious Money this week. She mentions that when wealthy people dig out multi-storey basements below their central London houses, the digger used is often left in situ, because to extract it again is uneconomic. I think I’d heard that before, but I’d never really pondered the details.

Presumably, one has to be quite careful about removing all the fuel to prevent a fire hazard. Does the digger get walled in, or is an access point left just in case? If the latter, do you finish the room where the digger is, or is it just a dark and dusty dug-out dungeon? Do people try and make a feature of it, like some of the London Underground tunnelling machinery? So many questions…

I’ve long been irritated by self-censorship in the news which leads to scripts referring to “the n-word” or “the p-word” or whatever. It irritates me because it omits a key fact from the story and fails to educate the reader or listener that the term under discussion is inappropriate. Language changes over time and these are “teachable” moments—and no-one can be reasonably offended by an appropriately couched single mention. I’m not calling for offensive advice words in banner headlines.

This has reached a fresh nadir this week, with BBC News publishing an article about the removal of a word from some lyrics. The only clues given are that the word “has been used to demean people with spastic cerebral palsy” and that it has a variety of other meanings. I can think of multiple words that fit those criteria—words I wouldn’t use—but what if this is a new usage of a word I would normally use?

Even The Guardian, which has a specific policy of stating words “when necessary to the facts of the piece”—which is surely the case here—kept it secret.

This could have been an article that helped me to be more sensitive to others’ perceptions of language. Instead, because they haven’t told me which word is offensive, it’s essentially just noise.

This week, an expansion to the Guggenheim in Bilbao has been approved, with two extensions on sites 5km apart connected by a greenway, and connected to the main museum—40km away—through a brand new tunnel bored through a mountain.

Having never even been to Bilbao, and having seen only a couple of paragraphs about the plan in the press, I’m really not at all qualified to have an opinion. Nevertheless, I got a little thrill at the sheer audacity of the plan when I first read about it this week. I felt a little boosted by the confidence the plan projects about the world… even though, on the face of it, it doesn’t sound environmentally ideal, and even though we all know that few such grand projects ever reach fruition.

Also from Serious Money comes the revelation that there are more people employed in domestic service in the UK now than there were during the Victorian era.

The largest and most elaborate houses employ cleaners, waiters, maintenance staff, housekeepers, security staff, drivers, gardeners, chefs, nannies, tutors, PAs and, sometimes, multiple butlers. The twenty-first century domestic service labour force is as complex and specialised in its own way as its nineteenth-century predecessor.

Of course, the population has grown by 2-5 times (depending on what we’re calling “the Victorian era”, but even so… I wouldn’t have expected that.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “brightly coloured painting of a bird on a bird table with money” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE.

Last week, I posted my regular “What I’ve been reading this month” post and was surprised to note that all the books were by female authors. I noted that this hadn’t happened before, and by flicking back through the series, I could see that the last time all the books were by one gender was in February 2019.

This made me wonder what other secrets were hiding in the archive of book reviews on this blog. I decided to make a spreadsheet of all the books I’ve ever reviewed on here, and the posts in which they first appeared.

This was a bigger task than I anticipated: it turns out that I’ve reviewed 561 books over a period of 17 and a half years.

My first review was of Dan Brown’s most famous novel, in January 2005. Since then, there have been 74 other posts reviewing single books (plus a few slightly edited repeats, which I didn’t count) and a total of 75 “what I’ve been reading this month” posts (plus a few ‘favourite books this year’ repeats, which I didn’t count).

The authors I’ve reviewed the most are Ian McEwan (7 books) and David Sedaris (7), followed by Ali Smith (6), Jon Ronson (6), Julian Barnes (6) and Kazuo Ishiguro (6).

Just over half—53%—of the books have been fiction.

Diversity hasn’t historically been a strong point for me: more than two-thirds of the books I’ve read are by men, with only 12% being non-fiction books written by female authors. Less than one-in-ten of the books were first published in a language other than English, with French (9 books) and Italian (9) the most common non-English original languages.

However, I’m getting better: over the last year, exactly half of the books I’ve read have been written by women, and nearly 20% of the books I’ve read have been translations from one of eight different languages. I’ve also been reading more fiction, which accounts for 68% of books I’ve read over the last year, but still less than 30% of the non-fiction I’ve read has been written by female authors.

I appreciate that this is mostly of interest to me, as the reader of the books and the writer of the reviews… but I’m compulsively sharing nonetheless.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt “cubist painting of piles of books on balance scales in a library” created by OpenAI’s D-ALLE.

I’ve five books to mention this month, all of which—by sheer fluke—are by women. Considering all the inequalities and biases at every step of the journey from conception to being in front of my eyeballs, it’s pretty remarkable that this would happen by chance, and yet it has.

This made me wonder: when was the last month when I read only books by men? This series of posts allows me to answer straightforwardly: February 2019.

We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

Originally published in Dutch in 2021, I read Emma Rault’s English translation of this novella in a single sitting. The narrator is a new employee of an unnamed social network, where her role is to review content reported as ‘inappropriate’ to determine whether it ought to be removed from the platform.

Through a focus on the lives of the narrator and a small group of fellow employees, Bervoets explores the impact of being continually and routinely exposed to ‘inappropriate’ material. It also explores subjectivity, and how even in ‘real life’ people’s perceptions of events can vary—and in ‘real life,’ there isn’t a codified and detailed set of rules as to how things ought to be interpreted.

I thought this was an excellent novella: it’s timely reflective, and effective. It made me think a little differently about the human cost of content moderation. In particular, while there has been much written about the psychological trauma of continued occupational exposure to violent or sexual material, I’ve never really given much consideration to the impact of constant exposure to material espousing conspiracy theories. The consequences are fairy obvious, but the ethics of the whole thing remain dubious. The novella was also a perfect length, with just enough space to make its point.

I think this is the only one of Bervoets novels to be translated into English so far, but this was more than good enough to keep me on the lookout for more.

Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith

This collection of short stories, interspersed by various writers’ reflections on the importance of public libraries, was published in 2015. It is a collection written in support of the UK’s public libraries, which are closing in large numbers as they are starved of public funding. I discovered Ali Smith’s writing through her incomparable Seasonal Quartet and so thought I’d probably enjoy this collection… and I did.

As in her other work, Smith interrogates and plays with language in intriguing ways, while also driving forward interesting and unexpected plots, where it is sometimes difficult to untangle the “real” from the “imagined”. This combination seemed to me to be especially well-matched with the theme of public libraries.

As a rule, I tend to prefer longer pieces over short stories, and so I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the novels of Smith’s I’ve read. It was, nevertheless, a pleasure to spend time with her extraordinary prose.

The Seaplane on Final Approach by Rebecca Rukeyser

I picked up this recently published novel after it was featured in Tom Rowley’s newsletter with the suggestion that it was as “if Sally Rooney’s characters went to Alaska and actually did something interesting with all their yearning.”

The novel is narrated by Mira, an 18-year-old Californian who goes to work in an Alaskan wilderness lodge staffed by a small cast of compelling and comedic characters, and visited by amusingly stereotypical tourists. She chooses to work in Alaska after developing a crush on her slightly older step-cousin Ed, who lives a few towns away, who she, either optimistically or naively, thinks she will suddenly bump into again.

This book is thin on plot (at least until the final section) but has lots of reflection, longing, and humour. A thread through the novel is Mira’s obsession with developing a taxonomy of ‘sleaze,’ a subject she enjoys but recognises as difficult to pin down. To my mind, the Sally Rooney comparison is not unreasonable (and perhaps inevitable), but I much preferred Rukeyser’s writing.

Idol by Louise O’Neill

This is a recently published thriller with a promising premise. The main character is a successful ‘influencer’ in her 40s who has built a global Goop-like brand (Shakti) around wellness and empowerment of women is accused of having sexually assaulted another woman earlier in life. There could be a lot to unpack here: the fallibility of memory, the challenge of reconciling different perceptions, the emotional weight of building a brand on a personality, and more besides.

O’Neill does touch on these themes, but the novel becomes weighed down. Despite being in their 40s, the central characters are mostly motivated by, and frankly obsessed with, their friendships and relationships from their time at high school. I found this difficult to relate to or empathise with, and I found it difficult to maintain interest as a result.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

This short novel was first published in Swedish in 1972. I read the fiftieth anniversary edition, the 1974 English translation by Thomas Teal. This is a much-loved book by a much-revered author, so please don’t be put off by the fact that I didn’t enjoy it.

The book comprises 22 short stories set during a summer that an elderly artist spends with her six-year-old granddaughter on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. It draws upon Jansson’s experiences on a similar island with her niece, who has written an afterword in the edition I read.

Others describe the book as magical, as capturing something unique about the relationship between the very old and very young, and of reflecting the unique mood of summer. I’m afraid I got none of that: I found it dull, I found the characters as two-dimensional as those in children’s books, and the occasional brushes with philosophy as superficial as can be.

Given the acclaim this book has received over the decades, there is clearly much more to it than I appreciated, but this just really didn’t seem to be the right book for me right now.

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

It was in last Sunday’s paper, but I read this article about coffee this week, which has this comment in the first paragraph:

The mother-of-one, 36, who works in a lettings agency, is such a fan that she often makes the 20-minute round trip in her car to pick up a caramel latte if she’s working from home.

My initial reaction was a mildly judgemental one, wondering why someone would drive for a drink while working at home, and wasn’t that terrible for the environment, and so on and so righteous. And then I realised that I sometimes get a sandwich or salad delivered when I’m working from home, and that’s more expensive, more replicable at home without special equipment, and possibly worse for the environment. I promptly dismounted my high horse.

I’ve written before (11) about my worry that my complete absence of desire to ever enter politics is part of a wider problem:

If I’m not willing to engage, why should anyone else bother? Are people who enjoy party politics really the people we want making decisions on our behalf? Shouldn’t we all engage more for the good of society? Is “I don’t want to” just a selfish whinge? How can things improve if we leave politics only to those who can be bothered? Aren’t decisions made by those who show up?

The spectacle of the Tory leadership contest just illustrates why I could never bring myself to try.

It’s painful to watch the candidates contort themselves into arguing that they will bring “change” through “continuity” with the party’s 2019 manifesto; performing sleight of hand to impress a tiny unrepresented selectorate without alienating the Tory voting base; trying to dodge sledgehammers thrown by colleagues who, in a short time, will be telling us that the candidate they currently despise is the best Prime Minister since Thatcher.

It’s unedifying, but worse than that, nobody but nobody could sensibly argue that leaving the selection to a small cadre of self-selecting unelected fee-paying loyalists is the best way to find the right person to unite and lead a nation. And yet, there is consensus on that element of the process for replacing a Prime Minister across both main parties. It is absurd, and it shows that neither party truly values good Government over party management and membership.

Why would anyone with solid principles and a real drive to do the right thing by the population debase themselves by participating in this sort of vaudeville trash?

I know most politicians will never in their life enter a leadership competition, I know that most MPs quietly beaver away, I know local politics is different, I know party membership isn’t a prerequisite for political impact. But the system is patently broken, there appears to be a collective decision to pretend it’s not. I don’t understand why anyone would choose to leap into the shallow, fetid puddle we’ve collectively decided to pretend is an elite swimming pool.

Nine years ago this week, I shared this Radio Free Europe article about Facebook. I particularly drew attention to this point:

Characters revert to type on social media, but their attributes are turbo-charged. The annual family update (“Chloe has had an impressive first term at Brown and seems to enjoy the social life as much as the academic!”) has become the hourly update. The whiny friend we once met now and again outside the grocery store is now a daily occurrence. Of course, we can hide these people on our feeds, but this is information we love to hate. That is the dichotomy of Facebook.

I’ve not been on Facebook for years now, and so I feel a little more removed from the whole thing. But from hearing people talk about it, it strikes me that everything in that quote, and everything in the RFE article, is still substantially true. The problems highlighted seem to have deepened rather than being solved.

Even I watched a few minutes of football today.

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

With all the talk about “the lionesses” this week, and with more no doubt on the way next week, I can’t help but keep thinking of this bit from The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which I read years ago.

“I can think of a more despicable word than ‘nigger’”, I volunteered.

“Like what?”

“Like any word that ends in –ess: Negress. Jewess. Poetess. Actress. Adultress. Factchecktress. I’d rather be called ‘nigger’ than ‘giantess’ any day of the week.”

This, from Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation which I’ve been reading this week, brought back happy memories of when Wendy and I visited Capri in 2014:

We did not understand where we were going when we took the boat over to Capri. It was early April. A light cold rain misted over the sea. We took a funicular up from the dock and found ourselves the only tourists. You are early, the conductor said with a shrug. The streets smelled like lavender and for a long time neither of us noticed that there weren’t any cars. We stayed at a cheap hotel that had a view out the window more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen. The water was wickedly blue. A cliff of dark rock jutted out of the sea. I wanted to cry because I was sure I would never get to be in such a place again.

I went on a Met Office course relevant to my job this week. I’m pretty sure I’ve now been on it three times in six years. They always introduce it with a bit of background on how jet streams impact the weather, a topic I seem unable to retain in even the most cursory detail.

This time, I did manage to retain something about orographic rain, which—if I understood correctly—is the reason it rains every time I visit Leeds, yet rarely rains when I’m walking to work in Newcastle.

Wendy and I were talking this week about the mnemonic we were taught at school for remembering the order of the planets of the solar system.

I was taught, “Me Very Early Man Just Standing Under Nine Planets.”

Wendy was taught, “My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets”

And, by sheer coincidence, Offill also cites an example in her book:

My Very Educated Mother Just Serves Us Noodles

Of course, the downgrading of Pluto has necessitated shorter mnemonics.

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

Corbeil Essonnes, France: Your package was cleared after the scheduled transport departure. We will reschedule for the next available departure.

Truly, the Brexit dividend keeps on giving.

This week, I’ve twice been subjected against my will in a public place to Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden. (I would argue that the peak of Theakston’s career was a brilliant but commercially unsuccessful game show.)

They frequently plug a competition in which the listener must text the station during songs by a given artist in exchange for cash. They are clear that only entries made during the duration of the song will count. And this led me to wonder how on Earth they would know: with the highly variable delays between FM, DAB and (most especially) online broadcasts, how can they accurately time this?

And so, I consulted the terms and conditions to see how they fudged this, and the answer is specifying certain ways of listening:

To enter the Promotion by SMS text message, you must text in when the sequence of one, two or three songs by the specified artists play, as heard on FM or DAB, following the instructions by the presenter(s) on-air

I have never once heard this restriction mentioned on air… but then, perhaps the internet steam is different, and perhaps I’m hearing an FM or DAB version.

Any which way, pondering this was much more engaging than their execrable ‘chat’.

I feel seen.

I believe that God fed the five thousand with the bread and the fish

Cah I seen mommy do some similar things

I’m pretty certain that if you listened to nothing but Dave and read nothing but Ali Smith, you’d have a better understanding of the state of politics in the UK than most Westminster correspondents.

The two are phenomenal writers, but I think this is also partly a timescale thing: politics moves slowly, but is forced into a daily news cycle (or a minute-by-minute news cycle on Twitter). I’m not sure that’s helpful or healthy.

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

A few days spent in Milan can be as reviving as weeks spent elsewhere, and seeing family in Northern Ireland is always fun.

It was nothing short of frightening to see the number of MPs who were willing to parrot the lie that the Prime Minister had a 14-million-strong personal mandate over recent months. Our entire Parliamentary system is constructed to avoid that particular individualist populist claim, yet it still gained traction.

Given the unwillingness of many to point out the lie—a key protection our system already has—I fear that our ultimate collective response to Boris Johnson’s disregard for democratic norms will be to attribute the problem to personality, rather than to make any attempt to modify the system.

Some would argue—fairly, I think—that the unwritten constitution worked, as evidence by the Prime Minister’s so-called “resignation.” But it’s also true that long-standing assumptions were undermined, novel questions were raised, and norms were overridden. Surely—surely—we ought to aim to learn and improve, not just unthinkingly conclude that the flexible system sufficiently flexed and everything is therefore fine.

For much of the covid pandemic, the cupboard in which sits behind my desk at work has been adorned with items referencing pandemic scandals. The notorious trip to Barnard Castle, the ridiculous assertion that a “bring your own booze” party was essential work, the issuing of fixed penalty notices, Operations Eagle and Moonshot and Whack-a-mole and more besides are represented, some obliquely and some more plainly. (And no, I’m not going to share pictures.)

Because of its position, the cupboard is the most prominent bit of background when I’m on video conferences, and occasionally provokes questions or knowing grins.

I was once asked in advance of a “VIP” touring the office whether I thought I should take it all down: I explained that if “VIPs” were touring the office, then the point was surely for them to see the day-to-day normality, and not for us to hide things from them. To my organisation’s credit, nothing has ever been said again.

As a result, on occasions when “the great and the good” descend unto us, the cupboard often catches their eye. Usually, they pay it some passing attention, express amusement and associate it with the gallows humour of healthcare work. And, in fairness, comic relief is certainly one of the cupboard’s main functions among my office colleagues and me.

But there is another side: it’s a literal representation of the metaphorical background against which we’re working. It’s the context in the mind of many when we’re giving advice that’s unpleasant for people to hear. It’s the public narrative of injustice and incompetence that sometimes undermines our work. It’s a physical representation of our pain and frustration and moral injury.

I’m never certain whether the non-humorous side comes through to our visitors. I like to imagine that it makes them laugh at the time but later makes them think, not least because it’s also the headwind against which many of them are flying. But perhaps I’m expecting too much of a cupboard.

I’ve been reading Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories this week. There’s an incomparably Ali Smith section in which she lists the qualities of ’elsewhere,’ the place we always want to find and head towards. One sentence from this passage:

Elsewhere the words of the politicians are nourishing to the heart.

If only.

I downloaded TikTok a week or so ago. The algorithm is astonishingly good, learning rapidly which sorts of videos the user watches, and which are swiped past. It seems to be able to do this thematically, and I suppose the quantity of video content it serves combined with the forgettability of swiping past something utterly irrelevant means that it seems to give very serendipitous recommendations. It feels like something genuinely new and different compared to, say, Twitter or Instagram, where the user has to spend forever “curating” their feed and following the right people to build an interesting experience.

Almost from the off, I found TikTok engaging enough to mindlessly watch for prolonged periods of times—twenty minutes here, half an hour there—until eventually deciding that this really wasn’t how I wanted to spend my time.

I’ve deleted it now.