I don’t know much about cinema, and the critics seem to have enjoyed this film, so you may want to take my view with a pinch of salt… but I did not enjoy this “psychological thriller”.

The film is set on an island where a unique flower grows. This flower induces amnesia in those who come into dermal contact with it or ingest it. In an astounding coincidence, ingestion or injection with the venom of a species of snake native to the same island acts as an antidote.

A tech billionaire hires a workforce to kill the snakes on sight, lures women to the island, exposes them to the flower, and violently rapes them, leaving them with no memory of the event. These are not the actions of a criminal mastermind. You can already see the slithering flaw in this genius’s plan—I suspect you are not psychologically thrilled.

You may even have exported from that scenario a neatly packaged solution to the genius’s oversight—but, alas, you’re in danger of spoiling a plot point in the very last scene of the film.

But plot isn’t everything: perhaps I enjoyed the cinematography, the emotional set pieces, and the allegory? I’m afraid not.

The cinematography was poorly matched to the script. Extremely violent, distressing scenes were graphically realised, only to be undercut by lines of dialogue that made the cinema audience laugh out loud. There is something maniacal about about filming scenes disturbing enough to warrant a trigger warning before the start of the film and yet undercutting their impact to this degree.

The script also didn’t deliver on emotional set pieces. There’s a scene in which the antagonist repeatedly yells ‘I’m sorry’—a moment that every cue suggests is supposed to tense and emotionally charged—yet it is so utterly absurd and overcooked that it, too, raised a notable titter from the audience at my screening.

Allegory, it seemed to me, was absent. Or, at least, in light of the peculiarly pitched ending, there was no allegory I was interested in unveiling: it seemed to be sailing close to suggesting that financial success represented outsized recompense for suffering unfathomable trauma—and that inflicting abuse was a reasonable trade-off for securing that reward. Others have mentioned the film’s sharp take on gender politics and wealth inequality—I didn’t see what they saw.

I’d say something about the acting, but the script was so leaden that I don’t think even the world’s best actors could have saved it. Those who were cast certainly couldn’t, but it feels wrong to criticise them for that.

As I say, this interpretation seems to swim against the mainstream of critical opinion, so I might be talking nonsense—perhaps I missed the point.

But for me, the biggest failure of all in this film was that it was mindlessly boring. It’s been a long time since I last walked out of a film partway through, but I came close to doing so during this one. I can’t recommend it.

This short 1994 novel has been on my ‘to read’ list for a very long time. I think the ‘quirky’ title slightly put me off; I perhaps expected something consciously ‘different’ and ‘off beat’ that I was never quite in the mood for. I’m not sure why I made that assumption, especially given that I previously enjoyed Lorrie Moore’s Terrific Mother.

This is a much quieter, simpler and brilliant story than I had imagined. This is a novel, like many novels, about how memory is a complicated thing and how we change throughout the course of our lives. It also has some interesting observations on life in small town America, where the narrator grew up, and city life, which particularly comes across in a section featuring a school reunion.

The narrator of this book is a grown woman, Berie, looking back on her teenage childhood and, in particular, her relationship with her best friend Sils. The majority of the novel is set in childhood in the early 1970s, but there are some sections in the narrator’s present day.

Berie and Sils both have part time jobs at a local amusement park, which provides the backdrop to a good portion of the novel. Without spoiling too much of the plot, both the adult narrator, and the child of her recollection, seem a little lost—as though they are searching for meaning and purpose. There’s a sardonic humour throughout which reminded me of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.

The blurb says that this ‘is a poignant and evocative novel that will transport readers back to the carefree summers of their own girlhood.’ I obviously don’t have a girlhood to be transported back to, but I’m not sure that nostalgia for childhood is really a gendered issue. I very much enjoyed this beautifully written novel, and think that there’s a lot to like here, regardless of the gender identity of the reader.

Some passages I highlighted:

In his iconic way our father remained very much ours. And in the long shadows of his neglect, we fashioned our own selves, quietly improvised our own rules, as kids did in America, in the fatherless fifties and sixties. Which was probably why children of that time, when they grew up, turned out to be such a shock to their parents.

I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right – wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.

There were three cellos in the house; one had belonged to my grandfather. The other two belonged to my grandmother, who often gave lessons in town, and whenever we visited she got out one of the cellos and played a piece for us, while we sat on one of the davenports, squirming and pinching each other when she couldn’t see. Later, when I was older, I realized how beautifully she played. But when I was little most of the interest such an event held for me was in watching such a formal woman – ‘a true Victorian lady,’ as my father worshipfully described her – place this large woman-shaped object between her legs and hold it there with her knees, her finger vibrating along the neck in an insectlike movement up and down, the bow in a slow saw across the strings, angling this way or that, gently, to find the note. My grandmother always gazed down upon her cello, like the Holy Mother upon the Holy Child, or perhaps like one woman beholding another at her knees.

For a while I was still telling my flat-chested jokes. But as my own breasts grew larger, so did the disjunction between my body and my jokes, and when I would tell them to people they would look at me funny. I was in a time warp. My breasts had become larger – they were large! – and I was still referring to them as mosquito bites. For a semester, an embarrassing, amphibious semester when I didn’t know who I was, what I looked like, what jokes to tell, moving from water to land, I tried to stop telling any jokes at all. I waited until I’d accumulated enough amusing lines about having big breasts, armed myself with enough invented descriptions, amassed enough self-deprecating remarks about top-heaviness – knockers, blimps, hooters, bazooms – to get me through a party, and then I told those. Getting stuck in elevators, toppling forward, not being able to see the forest for the cleavage.

Now, returning to Horsehearts, I realized, I no longer knew what sweetness was. By comparison to what I found there, I had become sour, mean, sophisticated. I no longer knew niceness, was no longer on a daily basis with it. I no longer met nice people, I met witty, hard, capable, successful, dramatic. Some vulnerable. Some insecure. But not nice, the way Sils was nice. She was nice the way I had long imagined I still was, but then on seeing her again – strangely shy before me but illumined and grinning, as ever, her voice in gentle girlish tones I never heard anymore – instantly knew I was no longer.

We sat in lawn chairs, drying in the sun, and smoked quietly, with Randi, who seemed just the same as always except that, recovered from her Mary Kay days, she had changed her named to Travis, which she’d written on her name tag, with Randi in parentheses underneath. (Could one do that? Could one put one’s whole past, the fact of its boring turbulence, in parentheses like that?)

To go from turmoil to tranquility is excellent for music. To go from an iniquitous den to a practice room is a respite given to us by God.

Opened across the Tagus in Lisbon in 1966, this was originally the Salazar Bridge. During the Carnation Revolution in 1974, the lettering was ripped off the bridge, and it was renamed to commemorate the date—which leads to the curious fact that the 25 April bridge opened on 6 August. The Lisbon half-marathon crosses the bridge each March.

It originally carried four road traffic lanes, later expanding to six lanes. To minimise aerodynamic forces, the cars in the two lanes in the centre of the deck drive on metal grating, which means that the bridge emits a distinctive hum.

The bridge’s original design also called for it to carry trains on a lower deck, but cost constraints meant that this element was dumped. It was subsequently un-dumped in 1999, when the original builders were brought back to re-engineer the bridge with a second deck after all.

In 1983, King Olav V of Norway presented this rock to King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. It symbolises Noway’s thanks for Sweden’s support in the Second World War, because nothing says ‘thank you’ like moving a 15-tonne rock 300 miles. It sits near the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Stockholm.

Not far away, there’s a very different rock: Space Seed by Bigert & Bergström. This bronze sculpture, inspired by a meteor shower, is intended to reflect both the destructive power of meteorites but also their suspected role in the origin of life. While the outside is burned and dark, the inside has a shiny golden finish. I rather liked it.

Apparently, Bigert & Bergström envisages people sitting on and crawling through their rock. I suspect the same behaviour would be frowned upon for the memorial rock. It’s so hard to keep up with rock etiquette these days.

It’s hard to know what to write about this 2022 novel. It is a reflection on a female writer’s lifelong relationship with her mother, who has recently died. The writer shares some characteristics with McCracken, and there is a lot of reflection in the text about the boundary between a novel and memoir.

This is one of those books where the standout quality is not the plot, nor even the memorable characterisations, but the writing itself: it is lyrical, evocative, funny, and clever. It is a complete pleasure to read, and I found sections of it to be deeply moving.

I have a strong suspicion that this is a book that would divide opinion: some will be turned off by the meta discussion of what it is and isn’t, the ambiguity about fact and fiction. But I found it beguiling, and perhaps you will too.

Here are a few of the many passages I noted down:

The least appetizing words in the world concern English food: salad cream, baps, butties, carvery, goujons.

Everyone knows that it’s noble to go to museums unaccompanied. Look at us solitary exhibition gawkers: We pause to read the captions, we wander the rooms at a thoughtful speed, we think things, and therefore we’re allowed to drink early and often.

“You never told me that your mother was a cripple,” a seventh-grade friend once said to me, and I said, shocked, “You never told me that your mother was fat.” I didn’t mean it unkindly. I had a fat father. The shock was partly the nineteenth-century awfulness of the word but also that she thought my mother’s physical self was something I should have mentioned. The point was that neither of us had described our mother’s body to the other. What twelve-year-old girl would? How would we have even brought it up?

I didn’t believe in hell or an afterworld of any sort. What netherworld could be more nether than this one?

I won’t point out the obvious—that my mother never said she loved me—because it’s academic. My mother loved me. It’s not a question. I knew it and she knew it. Her inability to say so felt no different from her inability, her refusal, to speak French.

When you’re old, safety is overrated. Safety is the bossy Irish lady, who is, after all, your employee, taking away your wineglass, saying, “That’s enough, that’s enough now, that’s enough now, darlin’.” Safety puts you in a nursing home and turns you over regularly so that you do not die in your sleep. You could be kept for years if you weren’t careful, like a roped-off chair in a museum that nobody is allowed to sit in, which makes it only something shaped like a chair. Watch out for safety. It will make you no longer yourself, only an object shaped that way.

There was plenty my mother didn’t tell me about being disabled and Jewish in small-town Iowa. Her memory for unhappiness and misery was terrible. Maybe she willed this into being and maybe it was neurological, but somehow I have inherited this tendency—of all my inheritances, it is my favorite, the most useful, though I do remember some grudges. She was (have I mentioned this? my mother herself would joke) stubborn. It served her well. She hid a lot of hard work and heartbreak. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, but that doesn’t mean people didn’t say no or you can’t or don’t or we can’t, all the time. I don’t know what doctors advised her about having children. At some point she decided she wouldn’t be deterred from a single thing she wanted to do, and she did it with good cheer. Not the good cheer of the storybook cripple (as my seventh-grade friend had called her), looking on the bright side, a bird in a cage. My mother’s good cheer was an engine that would burn you if you tried to touch it, hoping to switch it off. Her body was her body. It wasn’t something to overcome or accept any more than yours was.

I remember she was once presented with a piece of toast spread with Marmite, and she ate it all, and when asked how she liked it, she said, “I’m not eager to repeat the experience.”

Wife, daughter, mother, friend, some people write in their social-media biographies. Why on earth? Applying any words to who I am feels like a straight pin aimed at my insect self. I won’t have it. I can’t do it.

Here’s Stockton Town Hall, which dates back to 1735. That’s the market cross standing tall in the foreground… and, erm, Shoe Zone squatting in the background. I posted more about the history twelve years ago, when it seems that the lower windows had window boxes, and there wasn’t and industrial bin sitting outside.

I’m given to understand that the Council chamber in the Town Hall is still in use; I had previously assumed that it had moved to somewhere in the nearby municipal buildings, which just goes to show that one should never assume…

When I came across this Peter Linde sculpture in Djursgården in Stockholm, I understood it to be called ‘woman of peace’ and assumed it to be an anthropomorphic representation of the idea of peace. I liked it, but I had a sneaking sense of discomfort at the underlying gender politics of representing ‘peace’ as a woman: it felt very vaguely misogynistic for a sculpture created as recently as 2016 in a country as forward-thinking in gender equality as Sweden.

I should have known better.

The English title is, in fact, ‘statue of the lady working for peace in the world’. It was presented by Swedens Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. It is dedicated to the memory of Alva Myrdal and Inga Thorsson, both Swedish women who did notable work in the field of nuclear disarmament. They are pictured on the base. The statue also serves as a tribute to all women—known and unknown—who are working for peace in the world.

I can’t remember who recommended this book to me, but it was a great recommendation. Published in 2021, it is a modern American novel written in a similar style to, say, Eliza Clark’s British novels: of its time, snarky, funny, and with quite a lot of sex—but also with a beautiful clarity of expression and a lot of relevant things to say about the modern world.

Border is better-known for her five poetry collections. I haven’t read any of them, but the poetic style of writing, where every word is weighed and considered, seems to me to feed through to this novel.

The central character is a young woman who works for a Hollywood talent agency, though does not enjoy the work, and does stand-up comedy on the side. She obsessively counts calories in an attempt to maintain a slender figure. She is from a Jewish family, though has strained family relationships, especially with her mother—who was a major driver of her disordered relationship with food.

The main thrust of the plot is in this character falling for another female character, with a closeknit family who places no weight on maintaining a figure or watching what she eats— but, like us all, has her own psychological demons.

Broder makes this an enormously engaging tale, suffused with humour, and which I both raced through and didn’t want to end. It is certainly one of my favourite novels of the year so far, and the characters will live long in my memory.

Some passages which I noted down:

My mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.

At least two days a week, I was forced to join my boss—Brett Ofer—for lunch with clients, agents, and other industry people. I didn’t like eating with others. Lunch was the crown jewel of the day, and I preferred to savour it solo, not waste it on foods I hadn’t chosen. Ofer always made us go to the same restaurant, Last Crush, which shared a parking garage with our office. He insisted we get a brunch of small plates and split everything, “family style,” as though sharing a meatball made our clients feel like brethren. Who wanted Ofer as a relative? He acted like family was a good thing.

“Setting boundaries doesn’t always feel good,” said Dr. Mahjoub. “Just because it feels bad doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

I would not have called Jace a star. A glow-in-the-dark sticker, maybe.

Above all, she was fat: undeniably fat, irrefutably fat. She wasn’t thick, curvy, or chubby. She surpassed plump, eclipsed heavy. She was fat, and she exceeded my worst fears for my own body.

But it was as though she didn’t know or care that she was fat. If she were concerned with hiding her body, she could have worn something baggy and black. Instead, she’d stuffed herself into a straight-cut, pale blue cotton dress, modest in its long sleeves and ankle-length skirt, but otherwise revealing every stomach roll, side bulge, and back fold of her body. The soft fabric stretched and sheered as it detoured her hips and ass. Her breasts were enormous—an F cup? a G cup?—but the dress did nothing to flatter them. The dress was there and the breasts were there, and neither was cooperating with the other.

As a child, I’d seen a wide range of nonterminal illnesses amongst my young friends, as well as the delicious food cures their mothers provided. I’d prayed that I would contract tonsillitis (ice cream), a stomach virus (ginger ale), chicken pox (oatmeal bath), the flu (chicken noodle soup), swollen glands (lollipops), tooth pain (Popsicles), the common cold (more chicken noodle soup), strep throat (raw honey). But I was cursed with perfect health.

People in LA were always recommending things that were more about themselves than the recipient. They recommended obsessively—films, Netflix series—as though their association with a piece of media imbued them with sex appeal, intelligence, an irrestistable whimsy. When I felt a recommendation coming on, I’d lie and say I’d already seen the thing: just so I didn’t have to hear the plot explained. Did anyone genuinely like anything? So much art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren’t on Twitter.

My apartment was newly renovated, painted white, and existed in a timeless vacuum of nothingness. I had only my white Ikea bed, my white Ikea night table, my black Ikea sofa, and that was it. I’d thought about getting a rug, but I couldn’t commit. I felt that committing to a rug would mean I existed on the planet more than I actually wanted to exist.

From a technical standpoint, Jace was a good kisser. But making out with him in my living room felt like being under slow siege. He moved gently and caringly and that was the problem. I couldn’t tell what disgusted me more: him feigning tenderness, or the possibility that it might be real.

This miniature statue, high up on a building, has the dubious honour of being Newcastle upon Tyne’s only statue of a non-royal woman. In fact, I can be even more specific: it’s Newcastle’s only statue of a woman who isn’t Queen Victoria.

The subject is Dame Eleanor Allan, who died in 1709. She is commemorated as a philanthropist who founded an eponymous school, initially for providing for the education of sixty poor local children per year. Remarkably for the time, these weren’t all boys: a third of the places were reserved for girls. These days, her schools charge about £15k per year.

As with many historical figures, Dame Allan doesn’t necessarily live up to the moral standards of the twenty-first century: her wealth came from the tobacco trade, which was of course money earned in large part of the back of slave labour on American plantations.

Dame Allan is, perhaps, an unfitting choice given that Newcastle’s most famous statue is probably that of Charles Grey, most famous for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. But then, to only have a single woman recognised in a city with such a storied history of famous women is also unfitting. But who am I to say?