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30 things I learned in April 2020

1: In terms of the response of many governments to covid-19, David Runciman suggests that “For now the war is all there is, and the peace will have to take care of itself.” I hope that’s not true. If there’s one lesson we always say we need to learn after every crisis, it’s that we need to do more planning for the “recovery phase”, the return to normality (even if that is a new normal). I hope the UK’s government is thinking on that.


2: Contrary to everything I thought I knew about myself, it turns out that I am the kind of person who stands in a queue outside Asda. Covid-19 has done strange things to us all.


3: Doctors often spend a lot of time moaning about the involvement of politicians in political decisions about healthcare. I appreciated this article from Political Violence at a Glance for giving a brief but thoughtful answer to the question: “In pandemics, should the experts or the politicians be in charge?”


4: Dies Irae is quoted in a lot of films. Who knew that Gregorian chant is so relevant to modern cinema?


5: Teacher training in England is a mess.


6: Mario’s moustache is there for a reason.


7: There’s a great article in the April/May 2020 edition of Courier—not online as far as I can tell—about what a company learned from deciding to pay all their staff the same salary. It didn’t work out for them. Courier does these articles on failed business experiments really well: it’s great to see failure embraced and learning shared rather than just pretending everything works all the time.


8: “There is no sweeter moment than passing a middle-aged man in lycra on a carbon-fibre road bike when you’re riding a Dutch bike in a dress.”


9: According to a lecture by Dr Mary Rogers who manages the Abbott Global Viral Surveillance Programme, from all the SARS-CoV-2 viruses genetically sequenced to date from over twenty countries, there is only variation in 149 positions in a 29,000nt virus (i.e. very little mutation and variation).


10: “Whether one agrees with Trump’s policies or not, his administration has accomplished much of what it set out to.” I sometimes think that the collective outrage at Trump’s policies obscures the fact that he delivers on them. I would never have believed on 9 November 2016 that Trump would still be in office today, let alone that he would have actually delivered on his outlandish promises.


11: Bats have weird immune systems.


12: Stoking anger and resentment in difficult times still sadly brings gainful employment for some, according to Andrew Tuck: “At the park there’s a man lurking by the bushes. He’s got a camera with a telephoto lens as long as his arm. He’s here not to spot a rare bird in the trees but to try to catch out people sunbathing, sitting on a bench, talking to someone who does not live in their household (I know this because a few hours later I check the tabloid sites to confirm my suspicions and there are his pictures). He’s also got a series of people allegedly cycling too close to one another. But they are not what they seem to be. He’s simply used the lens to make it look like people are super close by shortening the field of vision. With a country on edge, it’s incredible why anyone would try to sow unease.”


13: In the context of the Prime Minister’s covid-19 diagnosis, “Donald Trump described Johnson as a man who ‘doesn’t give up’. Which is about as disrespectful a thing one could say in the face of the tens of thousands of people who have died of the virus, and presumably just couldn’t be arsed to hang around.”


14: Canine life coach is a career option.


15: I read a lot of library books and have never really worried about catching infections from them. But Gill Partington seems to think I should worry (and according to this article, Public Health England has guidance on cleaning library books, which was also news to me).


16: It’s easy to forget the unprecedented pace of social change over the last hundred years, which means it’s easy for a news report from a century ago to knock my socks off with its attitude to gender politics.


17: The Government’s latest covid-19 graphic feels strangely reminiscent of certain 1990s weekend shopping trips.

Staying@ 
for Britain 
All in, au together.Stay@

18: It’s “unlikely in the extreme” that covid-19 will delay November’s US presidential election.


19: The Economist reckons that “apps built using Apple’s and Google’s new [covid-19] protocol ought to focus on providing information to technologically empowered human contact-tracing teams, not on automating the whole process.” I agree; I’m not sure whether or not that’s PHE’s view.


20: Streaming funerals online raises interesting theological questions.


21: By dint of being in the second half of the decade, I don’t think I can describe myself as being in my “early thirties” anymore. In Misbehaving, Richard Thaler suggested that people can no longer be considered “promising” once they turn forty. To wit: I’m now a “promising thirty-something.”


22: According to this headline, the ideal moment to invite more people to attend NHS services is the moment of greatest pressure on those services.


23: Some pigeons have their rectums checked for incendiary devices.


24: Some days, I just despair.


25: Van Gogh’s isolation in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum influenced his art in interesting ways.


26: A Time-ly reminder that hospitals are only as strong as their domestic workforce.


27: In The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker argues that “style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily.” Events over the last few days have made me think a lot about how consistent and accurate advice is crucial for outbreak control, but I had been thinking in terms of ethics and efficacy. Trust is, of course, especially important too: people don’t follow advice they don’t trust. It’s normally the sort of thing I bang on about a lot, so it’s interesting to reflect on why it was so far from my mind this weekend.


28: “The rich world has no modern precedent but a 2017 paper by Keith Meyers, of the University of Southern Denmark, and Melissa Thomasson, of Miami University, on a polio epidemic in 1916 in America, made the lesson clear: closing schools hurts kids’ prospects. The younger ones leave school with lower achievements than previous cohorts and the older ones are more likely to drop out altogether.” (But but but…)


29: Today, I’ve had Adam Buxton’s take on the Quantum of Solace theme stuck in my head. It must be twelve years since I heard it on 6music, so I’ve no idea why my brain dragged that up!


30: I didn’t realise I was tired tonight until I woke up having falling asleep while reading in an armchair. I’m not sure this is correct behaviour for a promising thirty-something.

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What I’ve been reading this month

Here’s what I’ve been reading in April.


Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

“You two are in something. I don’t know what it is, but you guys are in something. Some people call it a relationship, some call it a friendship, some call it love, but you two, you two are in something.”

It’s rare to find a book that grabs hold of you from the first page and just doesn’t let go. Yet the exquisite, intense, poetic writing of Caleb Azumah Nelson’s first novel, published only a few weeks ago, does exactly that. It’s hard to believe that it is only 145 pages long.

The plot, narrated in the second person, centres on two young Black British artists, one a photographer and one a dancer, trying to find their way through London and through life, while falling in love: real love, strong and fragile, comforting and tormenting, easy and hard.

This was stunning, in every sense of that word.


Writers & Lovers by Lily King

I can’t remember what made me pick up this 2020 novel by Lily King, and I initially found it slightly hard to get into. But I ended up enjoying it.

Set in the US in 1997, the protagonist is a woman, Casey, in her early thirties who works at a restaurant while trying to find her way as a novelist. She is also dealing with the grief associated with her mother’s recent death. She begins to date two men, both also writers, and tries to decide which she wishes to enter a longer term relationship with.

I enjoyed this for its light discussion of the process of writing, and also enjoyed the development of the protagonist over the course of the novel. The relationships were well-written and closely observed.

The ending of the book felt tonally different to the rest of the novel, and it left me feeling a little disappointed. I suppose this means this is a rare example of a book where I enjoyed the middle but didn’t especially enjoy the beginning or the end!


Concretopia by John Grindrod

Published in 2013, and on my to-read list for some considerable time, this is John Grindrod’s tour of post-modern British architecture. Grindrod’s evidently abundant enthusiasm for the topic shines through, and carries interesting but detailed discussions of topics that might seem superficially rather dry—approaches to town planning and battles with Local Authorities, for example!

I was slow to read this book as it often had me hurrying off to search the web for some of the developments discussed. That was partly because Grindrod’s introductions interested me, but also partly because in the paperback edition I have the pictures are a little small and sometimes hard to make out.

Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed this, learning more about developments that I’m somewhat familiar with, and plenty that were new to me.


Dear Reader by Cathy Rentzenbrink

Published last year, this is Cathy Rentzenbrink’s book which reflects on the effect books have had on her own life, as a reader, bookseller and writer. It includes a great many recommendations of books she has enjoyed.

This was short enough to read through in a day. I found it surprisingly heartwarming: the premise seemed a little off-putting—I often find that people who define themselves as “readers” are not particularly good or engaging writer—but the book came on recommendation, and I enjoyed it. The insights into bookselling were particularly fun.


The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

My read-through of all the Sherlock Holmes stories has reached The Hound of the Baskervilles, first serialised in 1901-2–and I was fortunate enough to read this 1902 edition courtesy of The London Library. This is the third novel in the series, coming after two volumes of short stories.

I note that in my review a year ago of the previous book in the series (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes) I commented that I was looking forward to getting engrossed in a proper full-length novel again, but I’m afraid this left me disappointed. The plot seemed absurdly far-fetched and there seemed to me to be very little new characterisation.

I know many people love this book, but I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Given that none of the volumes so far have bowled me over, I think perhaps that my plan to read all the volumes might have been a little hasty.


Pandemic 2 by Slavoj Žižek

I picked this up because I enjoyed the first volume a few weeks ago. Like that, this book consists of Žižek writing angry philosophical reflections on the pandemic.

Despite the similar premise, I enjoyed this volume much less than the first. This volume is much longer than the first, and doesn’t have the same sense of capturing a moment: the first was published just as the pandemic was taking hold and the first lockdowns in Europe were being implemented. This second volume tries to take a longer view about “time lost” but isn’t very successful as it was published last autumn, which we now know to really have been in the ‘middle’ of the pandemic rather than at the end. It isn’t helped by large passages on why Trump will win re-election.

Žižek also goes much deeper into pop culture references in this volume: I know that’s his usual style, but my pop culture knowledge is a little lacking, so much of it went over my head. I preferred the lighter touch of the first volume.

I still think that the first short volume was fun and worth reading, but I’d advise skipping this second one.


The Future of British Politics by Frankie Boyle

This is the last book I’ve read in Tortoise Media’s 2020 FUTURES series, and for good reason: I didn’t think I’d be very interest in comedian Frankie Boyle’s view of The Future of British Politics. I wouldn’t have bought this had it not been part of the five-piece set.

It turned out to be a book which wasn’t really about the future of British politics at all, but a 59-page comedic essay about British politics as it currently is. Clearly, the Goodreads average score shows that this has brought a lot of joy to a lot of people, but this style of offence-as-humour just isn’t my cup of tea, and I took nothing from it.

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31 things I learned in March 2020

1: Talking about how to influence politicians, Professor Dame Sally Davies told the HSJ ”You’ve got to think ‘where are they coming from’ and frame the issues so it has salience for them.” When I was lucky enough to work alongside her, I learned a huge amount from just watching how Sally worked. It still strikes me as notable that many doctors take the approach she describes with their patients but don’t do the same in political discussion. 


2: Leaving portfolios until the end of the appraisal/CPD year is a bad idea. This isn’t really a lesson specific to this year, but I never seem to learn it regardless. 


3: Some days are longer and busier than others. 


4: In Grandeur and Greed, Giles Smith refers to Bassano’s painting The Animals Entering Noah’s Ark as having “the worst depiction of an elephant in any exhibited artwork in a major gallery”. It took me a while to spot it, which rather says it all: I think he might be right


5: It’s always lovely to reconnect with an old friend. 


6: Just as the first casualty of war is truth, the first casualty of pandemics is common sense. 


7: The more intensely I work, the more I lose perspective. This is a useful trait, great for total immersion in complex projects, for trying to untangle a complicated outbreak or for trying to make a useful and structured text from lots of conflicting ideas. But I’m learning that it’s not a helpful trait when working intensely to others’ plans, because it’s easy to become fixated on the flaws and fault lines of my little corner rather than seeing the bigger picture taking shape. Rest helps to restore perspective. 


8: I’m not sure whether I actually learned anything from it, but David Marchese’s interview with Aaron Sorkin in The New York Times Magazine was brilliant. 


9: I’ve learned what book reviewers think is the point of book reviews


10: Being woken in the middle of the night when on call seems to get even less fun each time it happens, and covid-19 means it is happening a lot. 


11: Sleeping for 12-and-a-half hours straight is still a thing that happens when I’m tired enough. 


12: The Electoral Commission recommends postponing the May elections until the autumn, and I’m surprised by how conflicted I feel about that. 


13: Mind-gardening is a thing. Apparently. 


14: I can’t remember the last time a cartoon stopped me in my tracks like this one by Ella Baron


15: Philippe Descamps’s article in Le Monde Diplo on cycling in Copenhagen was interesting—particularly the bit about having predictable provision according to the road’s speed limit. The article suggests that only 6% of daily journeys in Copenhagen are on foot, which I suspect is an artefact of the definition of “journey”: almost everyone will walk some distance on foot each day, and on the occasions when I’ve visited Copenhagen, I’ve enjoyed the fact that provision for pedestrians is as thoughtfully considered as the provision for cyclists. 


16: Despite it being (apparently) very commonly taught in schools and universities, it is only at the age of 34 that I’ve first heard of the “five paragraph essay”


17: The good people of Newcastle are, it seems, panic-buying chicken. 

Empty shelves

18: Snail facials are exactly what they sound like. According to Race Across the World, there are 52 species of hummingbird in Costa Rica. This came as a particular surprise to me as I thought ‘hummingbird’ was a species. I know nothing. 


19: Even a fairly crude “guy walks into a bar joke” can be a delight when it’s well written. 


20: I usually walk to work: it takes a little under an hour, which is only a little longer than it takes by Metro or car. Today I learned that if the rest of the world self-isolates, it actually only takes nine minutes to drive. 


21: Traveling from London to Mallorca by train, foot and ship is easier, but less environmentally efficient, than I’d have guessed. 


22: I’ve never thought before about the fact that escalator machinery on the London Underground wears unevenly because of “the weight of those who dutifully stand on the right”. 


23: This time three months ago, I thought it was extraordinary that a Government would remove the right of citizens to live and work in any country in the EU. Never did I imagine a British Government could remove citizens’ rights to the extent that they have to stay indoors. I’m living in extraordinary times. 


24: Most of the time, letters responding to articles in medical journals add very little. Sometimes, though, they add completely new insights which change my perspective on an issue: pointing out that health improvement interventions that go along with screening tests are usually ignored in analyses of the effectiveness of screening programmes is a great example. 


25: I don’t think I’ve ever seen an episode of Doctors


26: There’s a reason why it feels strange to walk on a stopped escalator


27: It’s been too long since I last listened to Reply All


28: “Self-sacrifice has always been an implicit part of being a doctor. It is a source of both pride and pain, and why, on the whole, doctors and nurses deserve our respect. Rarely has it been so called upon as in the covid-19 crisis.” 


29: It’s tough to be a spy in a country in covid-19 lockdown. 


30: An article by Peter Blegvad in the latest Brixton Review of Books made me think quite a lot about the relative accuracy of each of imagination, observation and memory: a theme explored in quite a few novels I’ve read, but which I don’t think I’d really considered in art before. 


31: “Pineapple is the smell of masculine.” Apparently. 

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What I’ve been reading this month

As the daylight has begun to stretch into the evening, I’ve read seven books this month.


Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is Ishiguro’s recently published novel set in the near future (or perhaps an alternative present). It is narrated by an “AF” called Klara, a solar powered artificially intelligent robot of sorts who is bought to be a companion for an unwell child, Josie.

Like all of the Ishiguro novels I’ve read, I absolutely loved this. As in Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro makes deft use of science fiction themes to explore universal experiences and emotions, and avoids getting drawn into the “science” bit (we don’t really know what sort of technology powers AFs, for example). This novel explores all sorts of questions: the universal aspects of the life course; the nature of religion; the meaning of service; the lifelong impact of childhood inequality; the fundamentals of the human condition; the meaning of friendship and love. As with his other novels, Ishiguro explores all of this gently rather than forcefully.

Honestly, to me Ishiguro is one of those authors who could spin a thoughtful and spellbinding novel out of a telephone directory. 

This was brilliant.


A Promised Land by Barack Obama

This first part of Obama’s Presidential memoir covers his political life up to the point of election to the Presidency, and his first term through to May 2011. For me, it was a Christmas present from mum and dad.

It is nothing short of exceptional. Obama has a rare talent for prose that is both readable and elegant: quite apart from his extraordinary experience, he is a truly gifted writer. He deftly combines everything from personal anecdote to political theory and from introspective reflection to lessons on statecraft to essentially spin a really gripping yarn, which also provides deep insight into what it is like to be a President of the United States.

Obama’s much-expressed and clearly deeply-felt frustration with the Republican Party and the early ascendency in the political sphere of Trump portends a rather darker second volume. As I will definitely be reading it, I’ll be interested to see whether that can be as inspiring and hopeful as this volume, despite the different circumstances.


Pandemic! by Slavoj Žižek

Published in April last year (which we now know to be fairly early on in our collective experience of COVID-19), this is Žižek’s short (146 pages) philosophical reflection on the pandemic.

It was clearly written quickly, and include things that would usually be very irritating (some long quotes from Wikipedia, for example). However, I really enjoyed looking at something which has consumed my work and personal life for more than a year from a different perspective.

I found it fun and refreshing.


On Connection by Kae Tempest

Published last year, this is an extended reflection (144 pages) by poet Kae Tempest on the importance of “connection” which is defined as “the feeling of landing in the present tense. Fully immersed in whatever occupies you, paying close attention to the details of experience.” This sounds similar to “mindfulness” yet Tempest’s discussion seems to have an added element of human connection to it, and recognises the importance of creativity in bringing people together and finding common ground.

I came across this through some Faber Members marketing, and I found it insightful, perceptive and timely. I hadn’t come across Tempest’s work previously, but will seek it out having read this. It was well worth the small time commitment given its short length, particularly to gain a new perspective on the impact of covid-19.


The Future of Seduction by Mia Levitin

This is the fourth I’ve read in Tortoise Media’s five-book FUTURES series published last year, which is a modern day attempt to follow in the footsteps of the 1920s series of To-Day and To-Morrow essays.

Levitin’s 60-page essay concerns the future of seduction, though is really mostly about dating in the modern world. As Wendy and I have been together for the better part of 17 years, the world of dating apps has really passed both of us by. I remember learning the hard way that it had passed into the mainstream after making a comment to a colleague about it being “geeky” about a decade ago, only to hear that she had met her husband online.

All of which is to say… this book was an education. Whoever knew the difference between Bumble and Tinder? Who knew that most people just chat on these services? Who knew that “progressing to WhatsApp” was a stage of a relationship?

I’m not sure I really needed to know any of this, but it was eye-opening!


Fatherhood by Caleb Klaces

This is Caleb Klaces’s 2019 ‘experimental’ novel combining prose and poetry. It concerns a young couple moving to the countryside following the birth of their first child, with the father taking on much of the childcare responsibility.

To me, the experimental form (shifting between history, biography, poetry, stream of consciousness, memory, and probably other things too) was a bit beyond me, and a bit of a barrier. This is probably in part because this isn’t the sort of thing I usually read. There were bits of observation and philosophy that made me think in this novel, but the whole just wasn’t up my street.


The Magnificent Sons by Justin Myers

I picked up Justin Myers’s novel as it was recommended somewhere or other as a good option for those who enjoyed Exciting Times, which I read and recommended last summer. From my perspective, this was a bad recommendation as I felt the two books had very little in common.

Exciting Times is a literary love story filled with warmth and wit, whose central character happens to be bisexual. The Magnificent Sons is a modern melodramatic Bildungsroman focussed on a bisexual man coming to terms with his sexuality. The very positive reviews for The Magnificent Sons speak to the fact that it is an accomplished work, but it’s really just not up my street.

I was a little distracted by poor editing (the relocation of the Canadian National Tower to Seattle was one of the less forgivable errors) and some of the idioms were a little too wild for me (emotional pain that “hurts harder than Lego underfoot” or a character “retreating to their mental holodeck”). I had also expected more reflection on and development of the fraternal relationship given the title. But the real point is that I probably noticed these “flaws” because this book just wasn’t my kind of thing, rather than them being major issues. This sort of dialogue-driven sentimental story contained mostly within a small friendship group just doesn’t do it for me.

But, by all accounts, if this is the sort of thing you like, you’ll probably like it a lot, so please don’t let this put you off.

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29 things I learned in February 2020

1: Newcastle in County Down is nice, but I still prefer Newcastle upon Tyne.


2: Belfast International was ranked as the worst UK airport for passenger satisfaction in 2019, which feels reasonable.


3: My optician offered me “retinal screening” using optical coherence tomography, claiming that “the only downside is that it costs £25”. Cost is never the only downside to medical screening. I declined, but didn’t argue.


4: Someone has printed a map of China and put it on my desk. Hubei seems further East than the last time I looked. I’m pretty certain it’s my memory that’s faulty rather than the map.


5: Co-ordinating annual leave between Wendy and me isn’t easy.


6: After a 48hr run as Incident Director with an Incident Coordination Centre running, I can confirm with certainty: it’s exhausting. National colleagues doing longer stints with bigger ICCs under more pressure have some serious stamina.


7: The engineering challenges for high speed rail lines are more interesting to me, as a lay reader, than I would have imagined.


8: Americans report that they go to libraries almost twice as frequently as cinemas, averaging close to one library visit a month. I last visited a library two days ago and last saw a film in a cinema thirteen months ago.


9: “Amtrak recently announced that it’s getting rid of tablecloths all together because research suggested that millennials didn’t respond well to linen.” As far as I can tell, Amtrak hasn’t said anything about millennials’ response to linen, and the story about removing dining cars is four months old, so the lesson is that columnists can find straw men in the strangest places sometimes.


10: Boris Johnson’s government has started examining the feasibility of a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland. Anyone mentioning the offshore engineer’s view that it “is about as feasible as building a bridge to the moon”, or Johnson’s previous Garden Bridge fiasco, or indeed his proposals for a bridge between England and France will probably just be branded a doubter, a doomster or a gloomster.


11: It has a name, and that name is covid-19. I didn’t hear the press conference, but assumed ‘covid’ rhymed with ‘Ovid’ (ɒ); others at work are pronouncing it more like ‘cove-id’ (əʊ). It’s the culture war over French vs Latin pronunciation of “difficile” all over again.


12: I’m currently reading Pale Rider by Laura Spinney and my addled mind is getting confused between things that happened in the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak and things that are happening now in the covid-19 outbreak. There is a surprising amount of overlap.


13: The M96 is unique, and some people get very excited by a road which I use regularly and to which I’ve never paid a great deal of attention.


14: Infrared thermometer guns, currently much-photographed in connection with covid-19, are not always terribly accurate, especially outside of controlled clinical settings.


15: Twenty of our Prime Ministers went to the same school.


16: The number of ministers in the UK government is capped at 109, but Governments frequently find ways around that limit (mostly by appointing people without paying them). For comparion: in 1900, there were 60 ministers; in 2010, India had 68, South Africa 66, and Canada 63. I’m sure every one of our UK ministers is appointed based on merit and public service value, and not as mechanism to force people to vote with the Government line.


17: “Since the Lunar New Year holidays concluded, many pupils in Hong Kong have been required to attend lessons via video conference. But some have become a bit too comfortable with the home-learning set-up, leading schools to introduce a strict “no pyjama” policy.” It’s interesting to ponder how outbreak control measures can influence social norms. Will we all have dress codes for working from home in future? I suppose it seems likely as videoconferencing continues to become more common.


18: The Brit Awards, which haven’t really felt relevant in years, can still unexpectedly deliver immensely powerful moments.


19: I eat meat. It’s not a strong part of my personal identity in the way it seems to be for some people, and I’ll happily eat vegan dishes when the fancy takes me (hello vegatsu). Nonetheless, I eat animal products every day, and I thoroughly enjoyed being challenged by reading an excellent Michael Huemer essay from which I learned more about the libertarian counter-arguments to intensive farming of animals: “If animal suffering were even one thousandth as important as (qualitatively similar) human suffering, factory farming would still be among the most serious problems in the world today. (Imagine that 74 million humans were being tortured in factory-farm-like conditions each year. Unquestionably, this would be among the world’s greatest problems.)”


20: “Burke Trend – a career civil servant in the Treasury before he became cabinet secretary in 1963 – once remarked that whatever the prevailing economic theory, the general ethos of the Treasury was fixed: ‘Spending money, like eating people, is wrong.’”


21: “Kinks and Convolutions” by James Lasdun in The LRB sold me on the book it was reviewing and also introduced me to the word “concupiscence” (Eager or vehement desire; in theological use, the coveting of ‘carnal things’, desire for the ‘things of the world’.)


22: In London, some people have now turned “entire new-build apartment blocks into de facto hotels designed for the short-term rental market”.


23: I’ve never thought before about how the basics of computer programming rely on a knowledge of English.


24: Gretchen McCulloch’s book Because Internet has made me realise that I use emoji as either “emblematic” or “illustrative”. I like it when books make me realise something about my own behaviour that I hadn’t fully noticed myself!


25: I’d never really thought about the association between certainty of opinion (“everyone knows Tories are scum”) and decisiveness in terms of action planning (“I know exactly what I need to do here”) until I read this Diamond Geezer post. I now see that they are both facets of decision making, but I hadn’t previously spotted that thread between things that I have previously thought of as distinct attributes of character.


26: I’ve been musing for a while that use of the word “skyrocketed” to mean “increased quickly” has been increasing quickly as compared to use of the word “rocketed” for the same meaning. I initially thought this was misuse of “skyrocket” which I’ve always taken to mean “destroy” or “blow up”, a near synonym of “torpedo”: amusing because its almost the opposite of the sense in which people are intending it to be taken. But then I came to think it was used too commonly to be an error, and thought that it was perhaps an Americanism. The OED reveals that I’m right in one sense: use of “skyrocket” to mean “increase abruptly or rapidly” is marked as being of US origin, while “rocket” to mean “increase suddenly and very rapidly” appears to be of less certain origin. But I’m more wrong than I am right: “skyrocket” to mean “destroy utterly” is marked as rare and obsolete, which makes me wonder where I picked it up from in the first place.


27: Laura Spinney’s brilliant book taught me that the respiratory tract of pigs is generally vulnerable to influenza viruses which affect the gastrointestinal tract of birds and influenza viruses which affect the respiratory tract of humans. Hence, swine are often the sources of recombinant strains of influenza which can cause large outbreaks in humans.


28: This is hardly an original observation, but I was nonetheless dumbfounded at The Louvre to witness the neverending line of people spending the entirety of their allotted 30 seconds or so in front of the Mona Lisa with their back to it, the better to take a selfie. If Dadaism says changing the context of an object can transform it into art, does changing how people interact with the Mona Lisa transform it into a different artwork?


29: “A writer in Gentleman’s Magazine in 1789 proposed charging a ‘sin tax’ on novels (like those on alcohol and cigarettes today). Taxing them—but not ‘books of real utility’—would bring in valuable government revenue and encourage better reading habits.”

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What I’ve been reading this month

I’ve read some really good books this month, and also some I liked a little less…


Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

The 2020 Booker Prize winner was, for me, a Christmas present from Wendy. It is one of those books so universally praised that it doesn’t really matter what I write about it, because the tonne of critical and popular opinion far outweighs the thoughts of a person on the internet.

For what it’s worth, I thought it was brilliant. It is the story of the relationship between young Shuggie Bain and his alcoholic mother Agnes. It follows them while Shuggie is growing up, from the age of five to fifteen, against the backdrop of impoverished Glasgow in the 1980s.

It has everything: deep characterisation, moving plot, social commentary, beautifully lyrical writing, profound insight, and more. It is superb.

I’m reminded of Jeffrey Archer whinging through one of his characters that literary prizes are never given to “storytellers”: this book conclusively proves him wrong.


There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli

Published in English last year, this is physicist Carlo Rovelli’s collection of newspaper and magazine articles, mostly from Italian publications over the last decade and translated here by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell. As the author says in his preface,

the pieces collected here are like brief diary entries recording the intellectual adventures of a physicist who is interested in many things and who is searching for new ideas—for a wide but coherent perspective.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, from the columns on (what seem to me to be) minutiae of physics to the wider social and cultural commentaries, though the latter held more appeal for me. Rovelli writes engagingly and insightfully on everything from the covid pandemic to activism, and from his experiences taking LSD to his atheism. There is always something interesting about hearing people with a huge amount of knowledge and understanding of one area of life applying their perspective and approach to something different… though the three-part essay on black holes also sparkles and his tribute to Stephen Hawking moves.

I haven’t read any of Rovelli’s books before now (despite them selling in their millions), but the quality of his writing and the clarify of his imagery has got me adding them to my “to read” list.


Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

This is Julian Barnes’s 2013 genre-defying short book. It consists of three essays which are thematically connected in myriad unexpected ways: ‘The Sin of Height’ is a biography of the first aerial photographer, Nadar; ‘On the Level’ is a fictional romance between adventurer Fred Burnaby and actress Sarah Burnhardt; and ‘The Loss of Depth’ is memoir, dealing with Barnes’s experience of grief following the death of his wife.

Altogether, this makes for an exceptional portrait of love and grief. It is deeply moving and feels at times painfully honest, and even has the occasional sparkle of humour. It feels both raw, yet also thoughtful and considered. It deepened my understanding of both love and grief.

It’s no secret that Barnes can write, but it is almost impossible to grasp how he covers such expansive territory with such emotional depth in only 128 pages. Exceptional.


Banking On It by Anne Boden

Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank, recently published this book about the experience of launching her own bank. Through the press, I’ve followed the story of Starling and it’s competition with rival Monzo over a number of years: indeed, I am a Starling customer. I picked up this book as I was keen to learn more.

This turned out to be a real page-turner, giving a lot of insight into what it is like to develop a seed of an idea into a huge business. Boden, a woman in her 50s from Wales, is not the typical model of a financial technology entrepreneur, and faces a number of challenges as a result of her “outsider” status and her desire to challenge the status quo of the banking world. The book opens with the story of her taking her final job in traditional banking as Chief Operating Officer of AIB, and her decision to take on a job which she knows will be unpleasant yet extremely challenging sets up many of her persistent character traits.

Boden reflects at length on the transition from working as a senior banker in traditional firms to setting up her own business. Boden openly discusses her strength and weakness, and the missteps she has made along the way. It was also interesting to have some insight into the regulatory processes that accompany setting up a new bank, all of which were new to me.

Boden talks in some detail about the events which led co-founder Tom Blomfield, along with other senior members of staff, to leave Starling and form a rival bank, Monzo. Clearly, Boden can only ever give her own side of the story, she couldn’t avoid discussing this pivotal point in the story of her bank, and she couldn’t have foreseen future events; but equally, in early 2021, it is a little uncomfortable to consider Boden’s one-sided and unflattering portrait of Blomfield in the light of his post-publication resignation from Monzo and disclosures in recent weeks about his mental health. I suppose this is something of an occupational hazard when writing about fairly recent events involving real people.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this peek into a professional world which is so far removed from my own, and Boden’s humour combined with the pacy plot kept me racing through the pages.


The Future of Stuff by Vinjay Gupta

This is the third essay I’ve read in the Tortoise Media FUTURES series, and my favourite so far. Written by Vinjay Gupta, the violinist (and social activist), it is a hopeful account of how our behaviour around purchasing and consumption is likely to change as we become more aware of the systems that support products.

Gupta’s central argument is that we can’t just buy a widget, for example: we are supporting a much broader system which produces said widget, which might well include supporting disgraceful labour practices on the other side of the world. As the world moves towards greater information flow and transparency, and—crucially—as we get better at managing and processing that information, our perspective on purchasing is likely to change.

As a basic example: if an online supermarket were to introduce a simple site-wide filter allowing customers to opt to see only “vegan” products, that would be enormously helpful to individuals and drive sales of those products. As our social conscience moves forward, perhaps there will be similar filters for ethically produced products and so on. And as data on product provenance becomes more widely available and codified, the same data can be used for better advert targeting, and so on and so forth.

I found the argument convincing, and it’s nice to be convinced by something so hopeful these days!


Naked by David Sedaris

I’m still on a bit of a Sedaris binge, having read many of his books over the last few months. This is the earliest collection of his essays that I’ve read, published in 1997. 

I found the essays in this volume to be a little more hit-and-miss than the later collections, as though he was still trying to find his style, but I still laughed frequently.


Daddy by Emma Cline

Published last year, this is a collection of ten short stories by Emma Cline. Seven of the ten have been previously published in either the New Yorker, Granta or The Paris Review.

I have previously read the author’s first novel, The Girls, which was a best-seller but left me a bit cold. I enjoyed this collection more than the novel, though the stories all shared a similar structure, consisting mostly of characterisation around an unspoken central event or situation. There’s also a theme of gender running throughout, particularly a theme of unpleasant men. Having a similar structure and a similar theme to all of the stories struck me sometimes as interesting (different facets into similar issues) and sometime as a bit dull, I think largely depending on my own mood.

The final story, A/S/L was my personal favourite, perhaps because the unspoken nature of the central fact fitted into the setting the author created so naturally. I think, though, that this collection might be better read as individual stories than as a single collection.


Why Don’t We Learn From History? by BH Liddell Hart

I was lucky enough to read this famous essay in an original 1944 edition. 

It starts off well: Liddell Hart gives a lot of interesting theories for why we seem not to learn from history, with a central tenet being that we aren’t very good at truthfully recording events in the first place. 

He then lost me for the second half of the essay by going into some detail about the Second World War and perceived problems with the Christian church, which I’m sure would be interesting to many people, but don’t seem obviously related to the titular question.

It’s only short—58 pages in my edition—so I got my effort’s worth from it anyway.


Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li

This 2019 novel by Yiyun Li imagines a series of conversations between a mother and her teenage son, who she has recently lost to suicide. It is a short book at 192 pages.

My first impression of this was strong. The imagined conversations are true to life (or perhaps true to death) and interesting philosophical. The mother character writes novels, while the son was a budding poet, and there’s a lot of ‘philosophy as language’ in here: the conversation is often taken deeper through discussed reflection on the etymology of chosen words, for example.

However, my interest in this waned over time despite the short length. It felt a little emotionally flat to me, and there wasn’t a great deal of progress in the conversation. Perhaps that is intended to reflect something of the lived experience of the aftermath of a child’s suicide; I’m not sure. 

It came to feel to me that the desire to dissect language as a way into the emotion was limiting rather than enlightening. Perhaps others will feel differently.


I Hate Men by Pauline Harmange

Published in English for the first time this month, this is Harmange’s 2020 essay on hating men. 

Lest we think the title is just a rhetorical device, Harmange is emphatic:

I hate men. All of them, really? Yes, the whole lot of them … Hating men as a social group, and as individuals too, brings me so much joy.

Even her nearest and dearest are hated:

We need to be vigilant, we have to keep an eye on the genuinely decent ones, because anyone can stray off course, and all the more so if he’s cis, white, wealthy, able-bodied and heterosexual.

I’m a man. It’s fairly clear therefore that Harmange hates me, even though I followed her advice:

The very least a man can do when faced with a woman who expresses misandrist ideas is to shut up and listen. He’d learn a great deal and emerge a better person.

I really don’t know what to do with this book. It’s full of justifiable and passionately expressed anger. But if anger begets only hate, where does that leave us? 

I’m not sure I learned a great deal, and I’m not sure I emerged a better person. I emerged mostly as a slightly sadder person, and one that’s a little less hopeful for the future of humanity now that I know that books that actively promote hatred on the basis of unchangeable innate characteristics can become bestsellers in the twenty-first century.

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Some aimless rambling

I’ve read Diamond Geezer’s blog for many years. He’s been blogging for a similar number of years to me, though is much better at it, not least in terms of consistency of posting.

For yesterday‘s post, on one of his many lockdown walks around his part of London, he decided to take a picture every twenty minutes. It sounded like a fun diversion, so I thought I’d do the same: an aimless ramble starting in Gosforth, my part of Newcastle, in somewhat less than clement weather.

20 minutes

Twenty minutes after leaving home, I found myself at Dentsmires Bridge across the Ouseburn. Just out of shot to the right are two men from the Environment Agency, looking concerned about the water level.

This bridge connects Woodlea Gardens, a residential street, to Heathery Lane, a now mostly pedestrianised track originally so-called as it cut across heathland, but which now mostly cuts across golf courses.

The proportion of Gosforth’s green areas which are given over to golf courses, serving a small minority of the population, is a topic I occasionally find irrationally aggravating. Not today, though: not only are golfers barred from enjoying the course by covid restrictions, the week’s rainfall has left the course so waterlogged that it may be some time before it’s usable again.

The Ouseburn is significant not just because I’ll pass it several times on my route today, and not just because I’ve blogged about it plenty of times, but also because it underlies the name “Gosforth” (though not obviously). The name comes from “Gese Ford”—a ford across the Ouse.

40 minutes

A flooded footpath on my rambling route beyond Heathery Lane meant some unplanned doubling back and a diversion through Whitebridge Park, a relatively recent addition to Gosforth which started to be built in the 1980s.

When house-hunting, Wendy and I were put off this area because of the slightly uncanny quietness of its many cul-de-sacs, and this remained true today: the only evidence of human life as I ambled through was a man eating a sandwich in a broadband van.

Whitebridge Park is also home to a play area which I think may be in the running to be Britain’s most depressing.

1 hour

After meandering through the 1960s Melton Park and past the thousand-year-old ruins of North Gosforth Chapel, burned down some five-hundred years ago, I found myself in Newcastle Great Park. With a grand plan from the early 2000s to build more than 4500 homes over a forty-year period, Great Park is a massive development—and not without controversy.

Here at Warkworth Woods, the first bit to be developed, the developers decided to cobble parts of the roadway, presumably to add to a ‘village-like’ aesthetic.

1 hour 20 minutes

Having crossed the A1, I reached the newer part of the Great Park development. Here, the world headquarters of the software giant Sage occupies a huge office—though not for much longer—and a school catering for thousands of pupils is due to open later in the year.

I skirted around most of the housing in this part of the development, sticking with the paths through the green areas (or, as the developers would have it, the “diverse mosaic of woodland, meadowland and network of drainage systems with hills, vales and streams”). These include a few patches of reedy bodies of Ouseburn water. On nicer days, this area is frequently busy with dog-walkers.

1 hour 40 minutes

With unfortunate timing, twenty minutes of further walking brought me to this rather unexciting pedestrianised route across the area known as Brunton Bridge. Speaking of bridges, however, I did have to cross the raging Ouseburn once again to get here.

2 hours

The two-hour mark saw me crossing the Metro line near Fawdon, with an excitement only slightly tempered by having previously crossed a different part of the line only ten minutes earlier. This track route dates back to the Ponteland railway constructed in the early 1900s, which closed to passengers in 1929. It continued to serve freight, however, including the then-Rowntree now-Nestlé factory which is just behind the trees on the right of the photo above. It now makes Toffee Crisps. It might also make other things, but Toffee Crisps are unbeatable in my book.

The line carried passengers once again from 1981, when the Tyne and Wear Metro started operating along this stretch.

To get here, I also had to nip across the A1 again. The history of the A1 in the North East is surprisingly involved. When this section opened in 1993, it was the third bit of road on this latitude designated as the A1 in just sixteen years.

2 hours 20 mins

Red House Farm is an area whose history is all in the name: a residential development on what used to be a farm, of which essentially all that remains is an eighteenth-century farm house, which today’s route didn’t pass.

The Red House Farm Junior Football Club does what it says on the tin gates, having started in 1990 and since taking on hundreds of 6-19 year-old players, many of whom have gone on to be professional players.

2 hours 40 mins

Twenty minutes earlier than DG, I’m back home and slowly drying out.

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31 things I learned in January 2020

1: Alan Bennett had open-heart surgery in Spring 2019 and the news completely passed me by.


2: A paucity of Papal patience provides problematic publicity for a Pontiff preaching peaceful pacifism to pious pilgrims.


3: Norovirus probably causes about two-thirds of care home outbreaks of gastrointestinal disease.


4: Fewer than 20% of schools in Texas teach children about safe sex. Texas is among the States with the highest teen pregnancy rate. Any connection is disputed by conservatives.


5: I’m reading Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive at the moment, and there’s a line advocating for greater ‘mood literacy’ which I found a rather lovely turn of phrase. It reminded me of this blog post advocating examination of one’s own response to the outside world to better understand one’s mood. Both taught me something about self-examination.


6: One of the room booking systems at work requires me to “invite” a given room to attend a meeting. I’ve now learned through bitter experience that rooms can decline invitations… which felt a little humiliating, even if it does open up a whole new seam of entertaining insults (e.g. “that meeting sounds so pointless that even the room declined the invitation”).


7: Populist ‘knee-jerk’ reactions in politics are commonly discussed and clearly dangerous. I’ve been reminded today by an article on the lack of legislation around in vitro fertilisation research in the USA that the opposite—a complete failure to react because issues are complex and divisive—can be just as dangerous.


8: Merely possessing a placebo analgesic, without even opening it, has been shown to reduce pain intensity.


9: The average age of a BBC One viewer is 61. If one considers that a problem, as the BBC seemigly does, then I suppose one might conclude that removing children’s programmes from the channel was not the right approach.


10: The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is only a short walk from the city centre and is a great place for a winter stroll. The uphill walk back to the city centre is a touch more tiring.


11: Over the past decade, the proportion of the UK’s electricity generated from wind and solar power has increased from 2.4% to 20.5%. The proportion from coal has fallen from 31% to 2.9%. (As reported in Positive News, though the specific article isn’t online.)


12: Aspiring comedians often go on ‘introduction to stand up’ courses. I’d never thought about these sorts of courses existing, but of course they do.


13: More than half of Luxembourgers speak four languages. The best-selling newspapers in Luxembourg have articles in two languages. This makes me feel inadequate.


14: In the 1990s, John Major mooted renaming Heathrow airport after Churchill, while Lindsay Hoyle and William Hague fancied naming it after Diana.


15: I have long known the North East is an outlier for antibiotic prescribing in primary care, but hadn’t fully realised until a meeting today that the North East isn’t an outlier for antibiotic prescribing in secondary care.


16: I was surprised to read that a survey suggested that only one in three people on the UK knows the standard VAT rate is 20%, and one in ten knows the basic rate of national insurance is 12%. But then, on reflection, my own surprise surprised me, because I don’t really know how or why I know those figures myself. I’m sure there are plenty of similar figures on which I’d have no idea myself!


17: Since last September, Monday to Friday, the City of London Magistrates’ Court has been filled by Extinction Rebellion defendants from around the country.


18: The developers of Morecambe’s Central Retail Park have “put an extraordinary amount of effort into stylising the car park” including quirky themed artworks, sculpted steel waves and effigies of seabirds diving for fish.


19: In the US, a broadly similar amount is spent on treatment for back pain ($88bn) and treatment for cancer ($115bn).


20: Office for National Statistics Travel to Work Areas are an interesting way of dividing up the country.


21: Civil servants in China cannot ordinarily be dismissed. One wonders what Dominic Cummings makes of that.


22: Over 70% of 12- to 14-year-olds in China are short-sighted. The Communist Party has set targets for reducing that, leading to some slightly strange practices in schools, including compulsory twice-daily eye massages and dressings-down for those whose sight worsens over time.


23: It’s not a public health emergency of international concern.


24: Blinded trials are not always best. I remember having to write an essay or answer an exam question on this topic at some point in the past, but haven’t really thought critically about it in years.


25: The attendance fee for the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos is 27,000CHF (£21,400). I will never complain about medical conference registration fees again!


26: Luxury branded homes—as in, “I live in a Bulgari residence” or “I’m in the Porsche apartments”—are now a thing. Is it possible that this is a global conspiracy to see how far the definition of “gauche” can be pushed?


27: “We fill our days with doing laundry, replacing our brake pads at the auto shop, or making a teeth-cleaning appointment with the dentist, in the expectation that everything will be fine. But it won’t. There will be a day that kills you or someone you love.”


28: “To err is manatee. A manatee might mistake a swimmer’s long hair for shoal grass and start munching away, oblivious to the attached figure. To err is baby elephant, tripping over her trunk. To err is egg-eater and moonrat and turnstone and spaghetti eel, and whales, who eat sweatpants.


29: Pulmonary tuberculosis can be detected in babies by doing PCR tests on faecal specimens. Sensitivity of the test varies according to the exact methods used, and this is an active area of research.


30: It’s a public health emergency of international concern.


31: The TV series Love Island has an unexpectedly innovative business model which involves selling items seen on the show via the app which viewers download to vote for contestants.

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What I’ve been reading this month

I haven’t got round to any of my Christmas books yet! Here are the seven books that are first on my “read in 2021” list.


The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne

It takes a certain pluck to choose as an epigraph a quotation from a fictional work ‘written’ by a character you created, as Boyne does for this exceptional 2017 novel. His quote is from Maude Avery who, a novelist and adoptive mother to the protagonist, proved to be a new addition to my list of favourite literary characters.

Characterisation is at the heart of this book. The book follows the life of Charles Avery from his birth in the months after the Second World War, through seven-year intervals to his seventieth year. Charles is Irish, but spends parts of his life in a number of different cities.

This book reminded me a little of opera, in that the plot is faintly ridiculous and jam-packed with slightly absurd co-incidences, but this didn’t really matter. The plot served only as a device to allow for deeper characterisation and to string together moments of high emotional drama, all set against the accelerated pace of change in social values which characterised the second half of the twentieth century.

Boyne deftly moved between very funny passages (even a little slapstick at times) and deeply moving scenes in a way that never jarred.

I feel like I’ve made this sound terribly dry, whereas (more than anything else) it was riotously good fun.


The Imaginary Museum by Ben Eastham

Published in 2020, this is Eastham’s creative essay on the appreciation of contemporary art. It is structured as a tour around Eastham’s imaginary museum, and weaves together elements of his own history with art, discussion of specific pieces, and the big contemporary debates about what ‘counts’ as art and who funds it.

This was a highly readable and enjoyable essay which covered many of the main talking points in contemporary art in a manner which was friendly to me a something of a novice. I thoroughly enjoyed it.


The Future of Serious Art by Bidisha

This is the first of two books I’ve read this month from of a series of five essays in the FUTURES series published by Tortoise Media in 2020. The series take inspiration from books published in the 1920s which attempted to give a broad and constructive view of the future in different spheres of life, with the aim of generating new ideas and stimulating thought and discussion.

This essay, by Bidisha, considers the future of ‘serious art’ (which isn’t particularly clearly defined). It is a clear and passionate argument about the importance of art. Bidisha reflects on the ‘Cool Britannia’ era of Labour government, and contrasts this with the approach to the arts during austerity and all that has followed.

I enjoyed this mostly for the opportunity of reading an artist’s take on the future, which I suppose is the point of the book!


The Future of Men by Grace Campbell

This is the second in the series of Tortoise Media FUTURES essays I’ve read. This is Grace Campbell, comedian and daughter of Alastair Campbell (who features heavily) on ‘the future of men’.

The book read a little like stand-up comedy, interspersed with three transcribed interviews (one with the author’s father, another with her boyfriend, and another with a gay best friend). The central arguments around feminism and toxic masculinity are agreeable enough, but covered to such a comprehensive extent elsewhere that I didn’t really feel this volume added much.

This was a short and funny read, but the better-known books by Ngozi Adichie and Grayson Perry are, to my mind, better guides to the same territory.


Art Deco Britain by Elain Harwood

Published in 2019, this was the Twentieth Century Society’s book by Elain Harwood on the finest Art Deco buildings in Britain. It was a coffee table format, with each of about a hundred buildings presented in facing pages with a full-page photo on one plate and a few paragraphs of text on the facing plate. The book is arranged into sections according to the original designed purpose of the buildings, starting with residential buildings (which I found least interesting – I would have basically reversed the order of the sections). There was also a good fifteen-page introduction to set the context.

I picked this up because I’ve been a member of the Twentieth Century Society for a while due to a mild interest in late c20 architecture, but didn’t really know anything about the British architecture associated with the earlier part of the century and the interwar period. I picked up quite a bit from this enjoyable introduction: there were quite a few buildings in here which I wouldn’t have recognised as Art Deco without Harwood’s explanatory text.


The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt

This was Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt’s book published earlier this year. It covered frequently overlooked aspects of urban design, based on the 99% Invisible podcast.

The book is structured in short sections, each giving a few paragraphs to a design element. I found these a bit frustrating: they were frequently far too short to include any real analysis. The book was also US-centric to a disappointing degree.

However, perhaps the most frustrating part of the book was the design decision to include line drawings rather than photographs. The elements of design discussed would often have benefitted from photographic illustration, and the line drawings often seemed completely disconnected from the text: they frequently didn’t even show the aspect of design under discussion.

As a result, while there were interesting parts, this book didn’t really work for me.


The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Good grief, Pinker’s 2011 oft-mentioned tome on why violence has declined was a slog and a half. I should have known better: I didn’t enjoy Pinker’s style in, erm, “The Sense of Style”, so I’m not sure what convinced me to embark on 724 pages of his writing (plus 1,955 endnotes for good measure).

The central arguments in this book were interesting, and there were nuggets of gold to be found. But Pinker has an exceptionally irritating habit of citing way more examples to illustrate a point than I really want to wade through.

At the micro level, this is merely eye-rolling (eg listing ten common expressions where a couple would do, or four generic names where ‘Tom, Dick and Harriet’ would be good enough for most writers).

At the macro level, it starts to undermine his case. He uses the original published findings of the Zimbardo prison experiment and the Milgram experiment to illustrate a couple of his points, despite these having been roundly debunked, and it becomes hard to engage in the cognitive dissonance necessary to take the 72 other examples cited for each of these points on trust.

The style was so annoying that it’s taken me months to get through this, reading bits between other things. But I suppose there were enough points of interest to keep me coming back. I don’t think I’ll be reading any more of Pinker’s books, though.

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31 things I learned in December 2019

1: Cotton creases because it contains cellulose fibres which are held in position with nothing more than hydrogen bonds. Non-iron shirts are coated in formaldehyde to effectively fix the hydrogen bonds. And hence, A-Level chemistry is relevant to office wear.


2: The Times of India publishes an astonishing fifty-six localised daily editions, and is the most widely circulated English-language newspaper in the world. It’s a slightly deflating sign of my unconscious cultural bias that when I saw the cover promotion for this article, I automatically assumed that the most widely circulated English-language newspaper would be a US title, despite that being completely illogical.


3: When fire service colleagues are at a multi-agency meeting, there’s no option to sit back for a minute to see if the fire alarm interrupting the meeting is real: all are out in the freezing in the car park within seconds.


4: Colleagues from Teesside University told me that the campus now hosts more than 18,000 residential students: that’s more than 10% of Middlesbrough’s population.


5: I had forgotten how much I enjoy Erland Cooper’s Solan Goose album until it popped up in my Spotify review of the year. It’s extraordinary.


6: It takes less time to walk from Middlesbrough Town Hall to James Cook Hospital than I imagined.


7: UNESCO has a list of Intangible Cultural Heritage—a philosophical minefield if ever I heard one.


8: Buying Christmas cards a year in advance is only a great idea if you can remember where you put them.


9: CDC’s definition of emerging infectious diseases is “those whose incidence in humans has increased in the past 2 decades or threaten to increase in the near future”. I’m sure I must have learned this in specialty training at some point, but honestly… I don’t remember.


10: I would feel a little less stressed if I’d started my Christmas shopping before now: I usually have it done and wrapped way in advance, but not this year.


11: If people voted for Brexit because they felt that “the establishment” ignored people like them, then the failure to “deliver” Brexit in a timely manner following the vote reinforces the preconception that their views are ignored. That might seem like an obvious point, but it hadn’t really occurred to me in such concrete terms.


12: The General Election result shows that being sacked for lying twice is no barrier to gaining the public’s trust.


13: One of our registrars explained to me that recommendations on management of clusters of pertussis differ to a surprising degree between countries.


14: 90% of interactions between members of the public and healthcare workers are with nurses. 2020 is the ‘Year of the Nurse’: if you’d asked me, I would have said that was 2019, but I guess that must be because I’ve heard so many conversations about planning for it rather than celebrations actually happening.


15: Mycobacterium tuberculosis kills more people each year than any other single pathogen. I think I would probably have guessed that, but still arresting to see it there in black and white.


16: Italy has closed all of its forensic psychiatric units.


17: At work, our team has dealt with nearly 1,000 more queries this year (so far!) than last year: a 40% increase. I knew it had been busy, but that’s mad.


18: Jameela Jamil, who I previously knew only as a star of The Good Place, is quite the controversial ‘social media activist’.


19: If you’d asked me to name the biggest film of 2019 by box office revenue, I couldn’t have told you it was Avengers Endgame, even if you’d given me the first word of the title. I didn’t know that Avengers films were made by Disney. I’ve no idea even now how many Avengers films there have been. I haven’t seen any of the other movies in the top ten. In other words, I’m culturally illiterate.


20: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material. “The results are surprisingly consistent in undermining the specific claim that trigger warnings allow people to marshal some kind of mental defence mechanism. There is also a solid evidence base that avoidance is a harmful coping strategy for people recovering from trauma or dealing with anxiety.”


21: The Telegraph‘s reviewer really didn’t like the movie version of Cats. Zero stars.


22: I really don’t understand what separates good contemporary poetry from bad. In other words, I’m culturally illiterate.


23: When asked what he planned to give his girlfriend for Christmas, Boris Johnson replied “Get Brexit done”, which is—give or take a waffling peoration—the same answer he gave to a question about banning firework sales to the general public, a question about 500 public libraries closing, and a question about abuse of female MPs. It seems it might be a sort of reverse ‘supercalifragilisticexplialidoucious’: something one can always say when one doesn’t know what to say, but which makes one sound anything but precocious.


24: I rather naively believed the much-reported story that Netflix developed House of Cards on the basis of insights gleaned from the data on what aspects of other shows attracted an audience. It turns out, in fact, that the show was developed before Netflix became involved, and was just part of a traditional bidding war between broadcasters.


25: The path of 2019 has, at times, felt quite bumpy.


26: In the post-war years, there were ‘British Restaurants’ set up by the government “to serve cheap hot food for everyone so that people had enough to eat”.


27: The Premier Inn in Bangor is a surprisingly nice place for a Friday night drink.


28: The Starfish at Cairn Bay Lodge is a lovely place for lunch.


29: London has two branches of Ballie Ballerson, a cocktail bar set in a ball pit with more than a million balls. Learning of this reminded me that someone once asked me, in a professional context, how to clean a ball pit with many thousands of balls. It turns out that there are machines which claim to do that. In trying to find that answer, though, I found out that some international clinical settings have ball pits which is mind-boggling from an infection control perspective.


30: Only about 20% of bodies in England are buried in the UK as a whole; most people are cremated. The opposite is true in Northern Ireland. In most of the UK, ‘a funeral is typically held around one or two weeks after the death’. In Northern Ireland, ‘bereaved families hit out at not being offered a [Cremation] until four days after their loved one dies’. These statistics would be news to me if I hadn’t had the sad duty of attending two funerals in Northern Ireland this year: I’d far rather these had been lessons I wouldn’t have to learn for many to years to come.


31: Smokers have an increased risk of developing influenza compared to non-smokers: as much as 55% more likely to catch flu.

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