A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The fifth post of a series, which is looking increasingly like a regular thing, inspired by Jonathan Rothwell.
At the start of this week, I spent time on a number of calls about Storm Malik and Storm Corrie which battered much of the North East. Nevertheless, I didn’t expect to see this near home:
There was a piece in The Guardian this week in which “scientists admit their covid mistakes” in an effort to demonstrate that changing one’s mind is important in science. I’m not a scientist, but my life as a doctor protecting people from serious communicable diseases has been dominated by covid for more than two years now, so this article has been playing on my mind.
Most of the “mistakes” are nothing of the sort: we all have to make decisions on the evidence and information available to us at the time, and the fact that we might make different choices in retrospect with more information available does not make the initial act a “mistake” in my book. By the same token, making a decision against the evidence and proving to be correct doesn’t equate to having miraculous foresight.
But nevertheless, we do all make mistakes, every day.
One of my mistakes was to be unduly pessimistic about the probability of a covid vaccine. I’m not well read on vaccine development, and it isn’t an area I keep up to date on: it’s a little removed from my work. And so when asked early in the pandemic about the likelihood of a vaccine being developed, I drew a conclusion based not on the evidence, but on my background knowledge. Coronaviruses circulate widely, many attempts have been made to create vaccines against them, none have been successful, therefore vaccine development in this pandemic scenario is unlikely.
I didn’t test my thinking, I didn’t consult experts, I didn’t dig into the available evidence on relatively recent breakthroughs in RNA vaccines. Had I done so, I would probably have had a different view on the likelihood of development, and how the pandemic was therefore likely to play out.
I haven’t finished a book in over a fortnight, and not because I’m reading anything especially long. This is a sure sign that I’m worn out.
8: It’s instructive to look at how Tony Blair, who now pops up from time to time to offer the Government advice on pandemic management, reflected on his own management of a potential pandemic in his ‘risible’autobiography:
During the run up to the election, we nearly had a vast panic over the approaching ‘flu pandemic’. There is a whole PhD thesis to be written about the ‘pandemics’ which never arise. In this case, the WHO had issued a report claiming there would be 500,000-700,000 deaths across the world. The old First World War flu statistics were rolled out, everyone went into general panic and any particular cases drew astonishing headlines of impending doom. Anyone who caught a cold thought they were part of a worldwide disaster.
I’m afraid I tried to do the minimum we could we the minimum expenditure. I understood the risk, but it just didn’t seem to me that the ‘pan-panic’ was quite justified. And in those situations, everyone is so risk-averse that, unless you take care, you end up spending a fortune to thwart a crisis that never actually materialises.
However, the reaction of the system is perfectly understandable. The first time you don’t bother is the time when the wolf is actually in the village, so you have to steer a path, taking precautions and be ready to ramp it up if it looks like this time it’s really happening. But oh, the endless meetings and hype of it all!
Is doing the bare minimum really that different to the current Government’s initial approach? Isn’t the lesson of history that we should hit potential pandemics hard and early? Or, has been quipped, is the real lesson from history that we never learn from history?
9: Publishers often tell readers that ebooks are the future; but when they want they books reviewed in the hallowed pages of The TLS, they still send hardbacks.
10: More than a month on, I’ve still not seen a better briefing on covid vaccines than Rupert Beale’s.
13: 2021 is a census year: with most students working online, it strikes me that University towns might be about to discover that they have smaller than expected official populations, which could cause trouble for the next decade.
14: In professional work, I’m a stickler for keeping writing concise. Only yesterday, I moaned to colleagues that a draft internal guideline had more than doubled in length with very little additional useful content, but a whole lot more waffle. We all know the Mark Twain quip that “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”, but it wasn’t until I read this article by former Court of Appeal judge Robin Jacob that I considered that work pressures might result in baggier writing. I’m sure this is true for my own work too; I’d just never connected the two before.
15: One of the challenges with trying to use the law to control an outbreak is that the law often comes to define the limits of the response. For example, laws requiring self-isolation will necessarily tightly define those who are required to self-isolate (say, people with known identified contact with an infectious person). However, there may be very good reasons for asking people outside of that group to self-isolate (say, people likely to have had contact with an infectious person, but without certainty). If systems are then built solely around requiring isolation, with the necessary barriers around it to prevent those who should not be required to isolate from being contacted, then it can become very practically difficult to ask people to isolate, even though this may be a key control measure in a given outbreak.
For example, if an app were to be built to allow people to ‘check in’ to venues, it would be difficult to conclusively prove that any two people in that venue had been in close contact, and it may therefore be legally challenging to require them to self-isolate. However, if ten people have been in the same venue at the same time and nine of them were infectious, it would be perfectly reasonable to ask the tenth to self-isolate on the basis that they may well be at high risk of contracting the disease.
If the app is built only to meet the needs only of the legislation and not of broader public health management of complex situations, it may turn out to be considerably less good than just keeping a written log of customer details to which judgement can be applied.
17: The Aston Villa football team is based in Aaron, near Birmingham. I have spent the last 35 years thinking it was a London-based team. My knowledge of football (and English geography) really is woeful.
19: Matt Hancock, proponent of the Government’s “act like you’ve got covid” guidance—an act which includes playing rugby in a park—is self-isolating now that he’s a contact of someone who had covid. It’s an odd state of affairs when “acting like you’ve got covid” includes being out in public and in close contact with others, while acting like you are a contact of a covid case means self-isolating.
23: “One morning in 2002, while walking his daughter to school, forensic psychiatrist Dr Richard Taylor ran into an ex-patient, who waved to him cheerily. Years earlier, the man, a talented musician, had beaten his father to death during a psychotic episode, then set fire to his body before sticking a meat thermometer into his stomach (‘To see if he was done’). Taylor had assessed him in custody. He was ‘incredibly disturbed and violent’, he says. But having undergone years of treatment, the man had been freed under close supervision. ‘Who was that, Daddy?’ asked Taylor’s five-year-old daughter, as they walked on. ‘Oh, just someone I used to work with,’ he told her.” (from The Week magazine)
24: The commonest cause of fire in UK hospitals is arson, at least according to the fire safety mandatory training which has been frustrating Wendy this afternoon.
27: Sometimes, something I read makes me feel regretful through association with and on behalf of medical colleagues who I’ve never met. It’s a strange feeling. This is one of those times:
Every medical staff member we met along the way has asked my wife how she’s doing, not just once but on every occasion they’ve crossed paths with her. She’s spent a lot of time telling them she’s fine. None of them ever did get around to asking me the same question.
I am being OK; I want to make that clear. I think that, by now, I’m getting it down pat. But am I OK?
29: It’s a year since we set up our Incident Co-ordination Centre for ‘Wuhan novel coronavirus’ response at work, and I’ve learned that—as in life—some years in health protection can be substantially more challenging than others.
31: Many of the organisations involved in the covid response are corporate members of the Plain English Campaign. Avoiding jargon is a key part of good communication in incident response. Yet my inbox is now full of emails talking about “two-week sprints”, “playbooks”, “taskforces”, “canvases” and more besides. Management-speak seems to have taken over to an alarming extent. I despair.
A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The fourth post of a series, which is looking increasingly like a regular thing, inspired by Jonathan Rothwell.
Mention of the phrase “fat head” in AJ Pearce’s Dear Mrs Bird made me miss my grandma, who died last month, and whose rare use of that insult was the stuff of family legend.
The cheapest standard single adult fare on Metro, paid by a contactless debit card, rises to £2.30 from 1 April, compared with £1.70 on the London Underground. But the Metro doesn’t offer a contactless discount, whereas there is a discount for paying with the Oyster-ish Pop card, which reduces the fare to £1.65.
Median weekly earnings in London are £736 compared to £533 in the North East, which might suggest that fares here should be cheaper, but Tyne and Wear isn’t the whole North East, and it’s not necessarily fair to assume that the ridership of the Metro and the London Underground are similar segments of the population.
Parking in free in many Newcastle car parks after 5pm, while there’s no Metro discount in the evenings, which doesn’t reflect the environmental impact of these forms of transport. But not all Metro journeys are destined for Newcastle City Centre, the Metro has higher marginal costs to run in the evening versus opening a car park for a bit longer, and active transport is effectively free.
It’s really hard to define what “right” means in terms of transport policy, let alone to achieve it, and I’m glad I’m not in charge.
The second series of Diane Morgan’s Mandy on BBC iPlayer was just as fun as the first.
I don’t listen to BBC Radio 3, but somehow stumbled across and enjoyedPiano Flowthis week, which introduced me to Tokio Myers.
On a web search, I found out that Myers won Britain’s Got Talent in 2017. I don’t regularly watch that programme, but would have confidently said that I was ‘generally aware’ of it, unavoidable as it is. And yet: I had no idea that a pianist had ever won.
This recently published non-fiction book looks at the future of humanity’s relationship with computers generally and artificial intelligence specifically. Winterson draws lessons from the past, in particular from the industrial revolution, and sketches out how our future might look.
I learned a lot from this book and found Winterson’s absorbing. Her arguments about how the future might look are compelling. As with any great writing, Winterson brushes by fascinating tangential ideas which cause a lot of thought and reflection. Two of these ideas stood out for me in particular.
The first was Winterson’s discussion of effective immortality, or the idea that we could upload our consciousness to a device and continue to think forever. The thought horrifies me: the idea of living forever, of going on and on and on without any sense of progress or completion, totally repulses me. I hadn’t realised how strongly I felt about this until I read this book. And Winterson gently challenges that response, pointing out that it is essentially selfish, denying humanity the benefit of infinite life experience (and perhaps wisdom). A lot to chew on and unpack there!
The second was Winterson’s impassioned plea for science to involve writers. Precision, and perhaps even beauty, is essential in scientific communication, and is a dying art. This chimes with my own ideas about the field of medicine, where clinical guidelines are increasingly poorly and imprecisely expressed, often leading to competing interpretations. This ought to be a key lesson of the pandemic, but I strongly suspect it won’t be learned.
(An aside: I was once involved in writing some national guidance, and suggested a simplified reworking of over-complex advice. Others on the committee felt like it read too much like common sense. I asked what was wrong with guidelines that reiterate common sense if that’s what the evidence supported. I was told quite plainly by the Chair that “common sense” wasn’t the sort of thing this particular national body produced; which raised far more questions than it answered, at least in my mind.)
Additionally, publications in the medical literature are ever-more narrowly targeted as sub-sub-specialities talk to themselves in their own coded language. This has, perhaps, been more broadly recognised, but the response is typically an inelegant press release for public consumption, rather than much-improved writing in the first place.
I think you can probably tell that I thought this book was brilliant, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I put it down.
This 1977 semi-autobiographical novel is chock-full of dark humour. In the post-war period, a teenage girl is sent to convalesce after an illness with her great-grandmother, who she barely knows. Great Granny Webster turns out to be an ice-cold matriarch, seemingly to the point of caricature, at least when seen from the teenager’s viewpoint.
Yet, as the novella progresses, it becomes clear that the titular character is just one among many remarkable and off-beat women in the family, and we begin to understand a little of their background. It may be a “youngest child” thing to find this reminiscent of family conversations about unknown and unplaceable distant relatives—but that’s how it felt to me.
I found this funny, macabre, and strangely moving—it feels like there is a lot in its 108 pages.
I used to avidly read Lucy Kellaway’s Financial Times column, and even listened to the podcast version after that launched. When she announced in 2016 that she was leaving to become a secondary school teacher, I was surprised and intrigued.
Re-educated is a recently published memoir of this period of Kellaway’s life, in which she also left her husband, moved into an architecturally notable house, and stopped dyeing her hair. As with Kellaway’s columns, she injects wry humour throughout, while also writing with emotion and honesty.
I enjoyed this, but it’s a little difficult to disaggregate my feelings about this book from the fact that I already liked Kellaway and her writing.
Winner of an English PEN Award, and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, I read the 2020 translation by Adrian Nathan West of this book—novel?—by the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut.
The book consists of five stories about major scientific discoveries and the many unexpected negative consequences that flowed from them. The first of the five stories is almost entirely factual, and the amount of fiction in each account gradually increases. It is a book about the boundaries of science and thought, and the personal and worldly consequences of pushing them.
People much better-read and more intelligent than I have found much to love about this book. I found its premise intriguing, but the book itself really quite dull. It had some nice imagery, including a great passage about the life cycle of citrus trees (which I don’t know whether was fact or fiction), but I found much of the prose really quite wooden. I was also surprised by how much the integration of fact and fiction annoyed me: I wanted to know which bits were true, and found this a bit of a barrier to immersion in the story.
I think this is perhaps a book that would reward close study far more than my disappointing casual reading of it.
This is a novel which was published in 2018. I picked it up after reading some press coverage of the release of the sequel: it was explained that Pearce had been inspired to write the novel after gaining insight into the lives of women who lived through the Second World War through her study of women’s magazines of the period.
The protagonist, Emmy Lake, is an aspiring journalist in her early 20s who gets a job typing the ‘agony aunt’ page of such a magazine. Unfortunately, she’s also intensely irritating, though the author seems to see her as sympathetic. Interfering, overbearing and terribly earnest, Emmy is a character I simply couldn’t warm to, which rather spoiled the book.
The writing style also grated, with Unnecessary Capitalisation of Random Words, and a frightfully annoying use of adverbs that came to feel like a parody of BBC radio announcements of the period.
The plot was astonishingly predictable and most of the characters barely have two-dimensions, let alone three.
A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The third post of a trio, which may or may not become a regular thing, inspired by Jonathan Rothwell.
Thanks to a leisurely trip on the Caledonian Sleeper this week, I’ve showered on a moving train for the first time. Reflecting on the experience, I think a quick late evening trip up to Scotland to catch the sleeper is probably preferable to those pre-pandemic early mornings when I occasionally had to catch the 0526 to London for a 0900 meeting (and still often arrive late as it only gets into King’s Cross at 0839).
One of the many thankless duties of the most junior of junior hospital doctors is to write a summary of a patient’s hospital admission to be faxed to their GP at discharge. At least it was a decade or so ago, when I was in that position.
On one occasion, I summarised that a patient had been admitted with “dehydration secondary to a diarrhoea illness.” I was surprised a couple of days later to find the GP on the phone to remonstrate with me.
The GP wanted the note to be amended to clarify that they had sent the patient into hospital because of the diarrhoea, not because of dehydration. The dehydration had only been detected on blood tests that I had done as part of the patient’s clerking on arrival at hospital.
My fellow junior doctors and I found this hilariously pedantic: after all, people with diarrhoea don’t necessarily need to be in hospital; people who are unwell with diarrhoea, perhaps because they are dehydrated, may need to be in hospital. It was a distinction without a difference.
In retrospect, the GP was correct about what had precipitated the admission, and was entitled to make their view known given that they had arranged it and knew what information they had at the time.
This experience has been swirling around my head this week because of the media discussion of admissions to hospital ‘for COVID’ and ‘with COVID’, as though the two are completely distinct entities. For most patients, this is patently untrue.
Suppose a patient has been admitted in a diabetic crisis after being thrown off their routine. Suppose a patient has been febrile, a little confused, and has broken their hip in a fall. Suppose a patient’s mental health reached crisis point after months of social isolation. None of these patient needs admission ‘for COVID’—they don’t need antivirals or monoclonal antibodies or respiratory support—but all of their admissions are, at least in part, because of COVID, rather than merely ‘with COVID’.
Many patients in hospital ‘with COVID’ rather than ‘for COVID’ wouldn’t be there ‘without COVID’.
Medicine is rarely black and white.
Wendy and I are both really lucky to live within walking distance of where we work, and also to have a lifestyle that allows us to walk. We’ve both walked for years, and in fact have changed home and work locations and carried on regardless. There’s nothing that clears my mind as completely or reliably as a decent walk.
That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.
I don’t think we’ll ever again speak of that first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK without mentioning illegal parties at Downing Street. They made no difference to any of us at the time—we didn’t know they were happening—but we all feel the gut-punch now.
Parties pale into insignificance compared to the unfathomable loss of life, a blow we have not yet collectively absorbed. Perhaps we can’t absorb it while continuing to grieve more COVID-19 deaths in the UK each day than terrorism has caused in the century to date; a Lockerbie of life lost each day.
But that insignificant image has such emotional weight that it will stay with us, and—I suspect—become a prominent dark thread in the tapestry of the history of the pandemic in the UK.
Wendy and I enjoyed dinner at Hibou Blanc for the first time this week. Neither of us could remember the word hibou from French lessons, which is not at all unusual. Neither of us looked it up out of curiosity before we went, which is very unusual.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to think that public health agencies, and probably healthcare providers, should disengage from (e.g.) Twitter. We have ample evidence that most social media is harmful to the public’s mental health. As agencies charged with improving health, we shouldn’t be driving people to engage with something we know to be harmful for many.
This week, I changed my mind. I would have always said that it is crucial that public health messages reach people; it’s self-evident that social media allows us to do just that. It’s a weak argument to suggest that people stick around on social media for the public health messages, so engagement with these sites isn’t really promotion. The risks of the small degree of acceptability conferred by the appearance of trusted organisations are almost certainly outweighed by the benefits of reaching people who would otherwise not see relevant messages.
I’m not sure what made me ponder these issues this week, but it’s an issue on which I’ve entirely changed my view, almost overnight, based on no new evidence.
Inspired by Jonathan Rothwell, here are a few things I’ve been thinking about this week. This may turn out to be one of those things that never appears again, or may turn out to be a regular thing.
The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) regulations mean, in broad terms, that anyone selling electronic goods has to pay for environmentally friendly disposal at the end of the product’s life. My top tip is to take any electrical recycling to Currys, as they accept all of it without question and without purchase, and it’s generally less hassle than trying to get to a council recycling site.
The practical implementation of WEEE regulations isn’t perfect, and a lot of equipment still ends up in landfill. However, it is a reasonable baseline standard of the sort of environmental responsibility we should expect: you produce it, you fund safe disposal of it.
It seems strange to me that we don’t have similar regulations for product packaging. Why, for example, can food manufacturers get away with selling products in non-recyclable single-portion packing and not have to fund safe disposal? How is it societally acceptable to sell stuff with the expectation that it will be used for a few days, then buried underground for thousands of years?
As a public health doctor, I’m as much an advocate for the value of vaccination as anyone. Yet, it’s hard not to think that we’ve lost any sense of subtlety and nuance in discussion of anything COVID-19 vaccine-related.
Asking sports stars to publicly disclose their medical history to compete in a tournament is uncomfortable. There is reasonable uncertainty about whether an unvaccinated doctor is better or worse than no doctor. Mandating vaccination inevitably hands a megaphone to those choosing to resist, with predictable negative consequences.
The balance between personal choice and public protection will always be delicate and ethically complex, even moreso in countries with tax-funded healthcare. Balancing those risks is basically my professional role, every day, across myriad health threats (though I’ve no real say on COVID-19 measures).
None of this is black and white; except the fact that almost everyone will benefit from a course of COVID-19 vaccination.
My car insurance was due for renewal just after Christmas, and I moved to a new provider who promised to beat my renewal quote and to provide an Amazon voucher on top. I automatically assumed that the voucher was a workaround to the new Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) rules which prevent people who are renewing policies being charged more than existing customers.
I expected that January would see a slew of voucher offers for people switching providers. When this didn’t happen, I investigated further. It turns out that I am entirely wrong: the FCA rules require insurers to include incentives for new customers in their calculations.
This is a bit of a cheat because I read it in the paper LRB rather than online. John Lanchester’s article on the pandemic is well worth reading for both its detailed analysis and its snark about our wholly unable Prime Minister.
It isn’t always possible to draw a straight line from someone’s personal life to their public works. Johnson’s private life is his business. But one thing you can say about a man responsible for at least nine pregnancies by at least four different women is that he is prone to wishful thinking. That wishful thinking is the common theme in the government’s failures from spring 2020 to autumn 2020 to now. Johnson doesn’t want certain things to be true, so he acts as if they can be ignored. That strategy has worked for him in domestic politics. It was at the heart of his advocacy for Brexit. But it doesn’t work in economics, and it doesn’t work in dealing with a pandemic.
I listen to quite a lot of speech radio, but without wanting to disappoint Auntie, I have been a bit of a BBC Sounds refusenik. It’s a stupidly named service with a hard-to-navigate app that has never seemed relevant to my life.
Yet, when searching for something completely unrelated online recently, I discovered that Jon Ronson had made a radio series for BBC Sounds, which has also had an edited run on Radio 4. The series began in November, and despite being a fan of Ronson’s work and therefore presumably within the target market, the Beeb’s marketing didn’t reach me until after it had finished, but the whole series remains available.
Once I knew it existed, I enjoyed this series. Each episode investigates the ‘origin’ of a particular aspect of the ‘culture wars’, which sounds tedious, but with Ronson’s gentle humour and humanity, it becomes a collection of interestingly strange and moving tales.
The relationship of the USA to guns is one that always feels difficult to grasp from a British perspective. This chilling Atlantic article from Nicole Chung describes her experience of a receiving a text from her 13-year-old daughter in the middle of the morning telling her that she is sheltering at school as there is an active shooting threat.
I was in high school when Thurston and Columbine happened, which means I was in high school before it occurred to me that I could be shot in my school. This knowledge is something that American schoolkids of all ages live with now. My 13-year-old has been participating in shooter drills since she was 3 years old—though when she was younger, her teachers couched them in vague, less frightening terms. I remember the day she came home from preschool and told me, “We practiced what to do in case someone is in the school who shouldn’t be.” She described her teacher locking the doors, turning off the lights, and herding all the students into a small bathroom, where they were told to sit still and stay “very, very quiet.” “It was hard. We weren’t very quiet,” she admitted.
This is one of those articles that just stopped me in my tracks.
There isn’t a line in Manuela Saragossa’s FT story that isn’t worth your time, but this one particularly spoke to me:
The meds were to treat schizoaffective disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar, the worst of both terrible worlds. In Steve’s case, his illness manifested as persistent delusions, mania and depression.
“It’s just in your mind,” I would tell him, uselessly, after an episode, once the volume had turned down on the recurring, persecutory thoughts that tormented him. “My mind is all I have,” he would rightly reply.
This is a moving and direct account of living with a partner with severe mental illness, and coming to terms with his untimely death. In another universe, I’m a psychiatrist: I came very close to applying for specialty training in psychiatry, before opting for public health. I don’t think I would have been all that good at it, in retrospect.
1: The national lockdown unlocks tomorrow, so the time feels right for another deeply ill-advised prediction with potential to make me look like an idiot when you read this next year.
Here in Tier 3 country, the “great unlock” means that non-essential retail is to re-open. That is, people are going to be able to take public transport into their nearest city centre or shopping centre, and spend spend spend in poorly ventilated indoor spaces where the main control measures are stickers on floors. Indeed, Councils are planning to string up their regular Christmas lights to really draw in the crowds. This seems to be because it is assumed that the transmission risk associated with retail remains consistent even during winter weather and with Christmas crowds, which seems deeply unlikely to me.
On top of that, the Government is lifting lockdown at a point where the country is still seeing more than 14,000 new covid cases per day, which means we have a large pool of people ready to act as sources of infection: the 14,000 only counts confirmed infection, there will be many additional people each day with undetected infection because they are asymptomatic or choose not to be tested.
It’s hard to see any outcome other than case numbers bouncing up rapidly over the next three weeks: and with case numbers getting towards / as high as / even higher than the numbers immediately before the latest lockdown, it’s hard to see how the planned lifting of restrictions over Christmas can possibly go ahead… but it’s also impossible to see how, politically, this is something on which the Government can reverse ferret.
Even without the lockdown and tiering decisions, the Government boxing themselves into a decision a month ahead of time looks crazy to me: it may have been more prudent to announce conditional principles backed up by work with retailers and the travel sector to guarantee refunds for cancelled travel plans if the relaxation can’t proceed.
Though, perhaps with a larger dose of optimism than realism, Wendy’s Christmas flights to Northern Ireland are already booked.
2: From this book, I learned that it was only in 1938 that an Act of Parliament required every local authority to provide a fire service. If you’d asked me to guess, I’d probably have said it became a requirement after the Great Fire of London, putting me about three centuries out
11: The Prime Minister who, a year ago, offered the electorate an “absolute guarantee” of securing a trade deal with the European Union by the end of 2020 says it is “very, very likely” that he will break his promise. Even if we ignore the bluster and accept that it’s pretty likely that a deal will be done in the end, it’s hard not to see this posturing as deeply damaging to trust in politics.
15: I’ve never before clocked the (obvious) fact that bone china isn’t vegan or vegetarian friendly. I wonder if there’s a vegan crockery alternative to William Edwards for First Class passengers on British Airways?
16: On my rainy walk to work this morning, a group of 12- or 13-year-old boys ran past me with their teachers (or perhaps coaches) riding bikes alongside. As the stragglers slowed to a walk, one of the faster kids aggressively shouted, “Come on you lazy bastards, get moving!” Something about this scene jarred with me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.
I think it may be something to do with rarely hearing this sort of hectoring in everyday life. Had I been one of the stragglers at that age—quite likely, if I hadn’t found an excuse to get out of running in the first place—this would have been the least effective strategy to get me moving faster, and perhaps the most likely to make me roll my eyes and snigger.
It also made me wonder whose behaviour the shouty child was modelling. Perhaps it’s a sports thing. I’ve chaired three outbreak control team meetings for elite sports teams in the past week, and I don’t think I’ve felt as culturally out of my depth since working at the Department of Health around Glyndebourne time.
17: If you asked me to name words that typically follow “agile” then “lighthouse” would not previously have featured among my answers. Yet the phrase “agile lighthouse” has been crowbarred into my vocabulary by people involved in the covid response who seem to speak a different version of English to me, and searching online reveals that it is genuine management speak.
Cummings is possibly the only man in Britain who needed to spend time in Government to appreciate that people who dedicated their lives to winning regular public popularity contests are people who dislike being disliked—and Alexander “Boris” de Pfeffel Johnson dislikes it more than most. It’s hard to conceive a more fundamental misjudgement of character than assuming this Prime Minister to be one who wouldn’t worry about short-term unpopularity in pursuit of more noble goals.
19: With the number of new confirmed covid-19 cases in the UK each day now similar to that at the introduction of the November lockdown, the planned lifting of restrictions over Christmas is cancelled. But, please guv’, it’s nothing to do with the Government’s decision-making, it’s all to do with a new variant of the virus.
20: In quite possibly the most bizarre bit of Government messaging to date, the Secretary of State for Health is urging everyone to “act like they have the virus” while imploring them to continue attending school, workplaces (if they can’t work remotely), take outdoor exercise in public spaces, visit essential retailers, and more besides—all of which are not allowed nor remotely sensible for people who have covid. Marr really ought to have asked, “Would you be sitting here in my studio if you had the virus?”
24: “In the 1960s, NASA went to huge expense to contain possible pathogens from the Moon” but the measures were so disastrously poor that the effort would have had little effect. This is a great story: particular highlights are the choice to base control measures on spread of Yersinia pestis and that “NASA’s plans stipulated that quarantine at the LRL could be broken in the event of a medical emergency. Ironically, if a lunar microbe made an astronaut really sick, that astronaut would be removed from quarantine.”
26: I’m currently really enjoying The Heart’s Invisible Furies. The novel (at least as far as I’ve read) has vignettes from Cyril Avery’s life aged 7, 14, 21 and so on, every seven years. This has made Wendy and me reflect on how this structure would reflect our own lives: both of us have collected five vignettes so far; each vignette would see us living in a different house, each at a different school or workplace. We’d both have few recurring characters outside family—though we’ve been together for the most recent three vignettes of each other’s stories.
28: There’s a direct line of succession from the Acorn processor in the BBC Micro which sat in the corner at school to the ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) processor in the iPhone I’m typing this on.
29: The iOS Reminders app has got much more fully featured since I last used it (around iOS 5).
30: A Government which claims to be keen on parliamentary sovereignty is ramming legislation through without time for proper parliamentary scrutiny and then shutting the doors on the House of Commons for an extra week. Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition is supporting the Government in implementing legislation it disagrees with, because it is unable to figure out a better approach. And in the world of 2020, all of this feels like par for the (lamentable) course.
31: At the stroke of 11pm, the Government’s actions stripped me of more freedoms and opportunities than at any other moment in my life so far.
Instead of having free pick of the job market across 28 countries, I’m limited to one. Instead of having the automatic right to live in any of 28 countries, I’m limited to one. No longer can I travel at will or whim across Europe; and no longer will I be guaranteed a lack of roaming charges.
Brexit is regrettable for much bigger reasons than those that affect me directly—not least friends born in other EU countries who have dedicated their lives to the NHS now being made to feel like second-class citizens (if even ‘citizens’ at all)—but when Government rhetoric is all about victory and celebration, it feels like tonight’s a night for self-indulgent melancholy.
This 2016 debut novel is appropriately titled: the protagonist, Maya, is a married New York bookseller writing an MA thesis, while also having an affair with her former college professor, living with an addiction to heroin, and making questionable life choices in pursuit of money to fund her habit.
This book is gritty and explicit, with some bits which are stomach-churningly disgusting. It is also full of dark humour, which occasionally made me laugh out loud. The dialogue is especially sharp.
Sharma’s writing made this book feel true. Her close observation and vivid description feel real. I was particularly taken with the description of the protagonist’s shifting perceptions of.a psychiatric hospital.
The overall effect—despite the dark subject matter—was strangely uplifting, though it was certainly not a ‘light’ read.
Rachel Ingalls’s 1982 novella in which the titular character falls in love with a giant man/frog/monster called Larry has recently been reissued with a lovely Faber Editions cover. It is a book with an engaging surface plot, which very funny in places, but whose subtext deals with a whole range of sociocultural issues.
There is a load of gender politics in here, which I expected from a sort of background cultural awareness of the book. Ingalls also has interesting observations to make about psychiatric illness, both for Mrs Caliban and for Larry. The latter aspect resonates with a lot of the themes explored in Frankenstein.
The writing is also sublime. At a little over a hundred pages, this could be comfortably read in a single sitting, and it is well worth that short time investment.
I confess that I went into this much-recommended recently published book with some trepidation and quite a lot of cynicism. Everything about it screamed “self-help” including the cringeworthy subtitle (“Embrace your limits. Change your life.”)
Nevertheless, Burkeman won me over. This isn’t really self-help, this is engaging philosophy which happens to be relevant to the moment. Burkeman argues that life is short and our time ought to be lived, not seen as a resource to be ‘used’. We should recognise and make peace with the fact that there will never be time to do everything that we want to do, nor everything that is demanded of us. Being more productive will not substantially alter that fundamental fact, but the effort might distract us from living.
I really enjoyed this, and will search out Burkeman’s other books.
This 2020 biography was a Christmas present last year, and I’ve been reading it in chunks through the year. It is an exceptionally detailed account of JFK’s life, up to the point where he decided to run for President.
Unfortunately, this is one of those astoundingly well-researched biographies that contains so much detail that it feels like it loses its thread. It is only 654 pages long, but feels much longer, and it felt a little like the sense of the subject’s character got lost among the weeds.
At one point, Kennedy is invited to a house to watch some film footage he is to narrate. Logevall insists on telling us that this was a “twenty-room beachfront home” which was “built in 1936 for film industry titan Louis B. Mayer”—details that add precisely nothing to a visit that lasts one sentence, beyond exhibiting the research.
I’m uncertain whether I’ll read the second volume.
First published in Italian in 2014, I read Allen Lane’s 2015 translation. The book consists of six numbered brief lessons on aspects of physics, followed by a somewhat philosophical closing section called ‘Ourselves’, which serves as the seventh lesson.
Somewhere into the third lesson, I came to the shuddering realisation that I simply wasn’t all that interested in physics. Rovelli writes with lyrical clarity about complex subjects. I used to very much enjoy reading popular science, yet I found myself struggling to be astounded that general relativity and quantum mechanics sometimes disagree. Nor was I moved to really care whether black holes are hot or cold. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.
The final section was a little more absorbing, partly because it involved Rovelli introducing his physicist’s perspective to wider questions such as the future of our species, which, I think, is what I enjoyed about There Are Places…
Essentially, overall, this was beautiful writing about a complex subject that doesn’t really interest me. There is enjoyment and value in that, but perhaps less than I was expecting to find.
This 2021 bestseller was a bad purchasing decision on my part, and one driven by online shopping during lockdown. I enjoyed Haig’s previous books, Notes on a Nervous Planet and Reasons to Stay Alive, though as I noted at the time, I preferred his personal reflections on his experiences rather than the aphorisms and superficial psychology.
I think others may have had exactly the opposite opinion, as The Comfort Book is essentially a compendium of short ‘inspiring’ texts, some extending to only a few words, others to a couple of pages. None of this is up my street, and had I flicked through the book in a physical shop before I bought it, then I would have known that.
I’m confident this will book will bring a lot of comfort to many people, but it wasn’t my sort of thing.
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