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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only.

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

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

I’ve deleted it now.