Category: Longform
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In the Departure Lounge
Here we are, then, on the last day of the UK’s membership of the EU. We fought, we lost, and now we’ve got to live with the consequences.
Which won’t really start to take effect until the start of next year, of course, because we’ll be in the transition period until then. Until 2021 we’ll still be able to travel freely; there will be no added tariffs on goods; food standards will still be the high ones we’re used to.
Ah yes, food standards. Just the other day I had a realisation — no, it was something that I already knew. More a dawning fear of how close a bad thing was. What brought it home was this headline in the Independent: “Brexit: US insists chlorinated chicken must be on menu in any UK trade agreement.”
Obviously no-one’s going to force anyone to buy or eat chicken, chlorine-washed or otherwise. But remember why chicken in the US is washed in chlorine, and why importing it into the EU is banned: it’s because the food standards are significantly lower than those in the EU. The chlorine washing is to kill off bacteria and make the meat fit for human consumption.
So what that headline means is that a US trade deal could depend on the UK lowering its food standards. That’s what Brexit means: our government could choose to lower the standards of hygiene required in food production. Sit with that thought for a while.
There are a couple of good things to think about on this bleak day. Both of those are also from America, and neither has anything to do with Brexit. But I’ll leave them for later posts. Stay tuned.
I leave you with this delightful snippet of Alex Andreou, on the Remainiacs podcast, suggesting how to cope with today, and the future.
Irony Failure Among Elite Headteachers
“Private schools criticise plans to get more poor students into university“. Of course they do.
Sally Weale writes in The Guardian:
Leading private schools have challenged plans to widen access to the most selective universities in England, warning they could lead to discrimination against young people “on the basis of the class they were born into”.
Which doesn’t happen at the moment. Not at all.
Who, Yes!
After my highly negative assessment of episode 3 (“the worst episode of Doctor Who ever“), episode 4, “Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror,” was fine, if forgettable.
And then last Sunday, we got — wait…
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Don’t read on if you haven’t yet seen episode 5, “Fugitive of the Judoon.”
OK. Last Sunday we got “Fugitive of the Judoon.” Which is without doubt the best episode of Chibnall’s time as showrunner, so far. And may well be the most important episode since the programme came back in 2005. Or at least, be the start of the farthest-reaching changes since Russell T Davies brought us the concept of the Time War.
Two genuinely surprising reveals! Jack’s back; and… so is The Doctor? Whaaaattt???!!?
Fandom is, of course, rife with speculation as to where Jo Martin’s Doctor falls in The Doctor’s timeline. Future? Past? Or an alternative universe? And what of this “Lone Cyberman”?
Halfway through this, season, and it’s shaping up to be something very special. I just hope they don’t let us down.
Little Women, 2019 - ★★★★
Greta Gerwig’s dual-timeline approach makes this more interesting than a straightforward adaptation would have been.
Brazil, 1985 - ★★★★★
I first saw Terry Gillian’s weird dystopia at its premier, at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1985. I feel I must have seen it again since, but watching it last week, much of it felt unfamiliar. It stands up really well, though.
JetBrains Mono: Equal or Not
I just installed the JetBrains Mono font. We programmers need monospaced fonts, and this is a very nice one. It comes installed with recent versions of JetBrains’s IDEs. My copy of IntelliJ was not recent, it turned out.
Anyway, the most interesting thing is ligatures for programmers. Take a look at this:
You see that “not equals” sign? The crossed-out equals that we were taught to write back in secondary school? That’s not a character in any normal ASCII typeface. Plus, this is Java: even if it were a character (there is a Unicode character for that symbol), it’s not part of the language. The compiler wouldn’t recognise it.
What that actually is is the standard not-equals of C-based languages: !=. But the font has detected it and replaced it with the more attractive and traditional symbol.
It’s a setting you can disable, and I’m not sure I’ll keep it that way, but it’s impressive and unusual.
Who the What?
You probably want to know what I think of the new series of Doctor Who so far.
It got off to a really strong start with ‘Spyfall’ part 1. Not least with its genuinely surprising reveal at the end. And then part 2 followed up on it. Not everything made total sense, but what the hell, it’s Doctor Who. There were some complaints about the way the nazis and The Master were handled, and I get that. And it had the memory-wiping thing. But all in all, I found it a strong, promising start to the new season.
And then we got ‘Orphan 55.’
Oh dear. Oh dearie, dearie me. This was, for me — I’m not going to sugarcoat it — the worst episode of Doctor Who ever. At least in the modern era.
The story was confused and confusing, the direction was incoherent, the character motivations made no sense… Oh, and the message — admirable though it was, to say it was beating us over the head with a stick is to understate how heavy-handed it was.
I thought it must be a first-time writer and director. But no: it was written by Ed Hime, who wrote ‘It Takes You Away’ last season, which was very good. And it was directed by Lee Haven Jones, who directed ‘Spyfall’ part 2, just the week before.
So what went wrong? Hard say, but I’ve got to hope they pick things up again on Sunday.
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa (Books 2020, 1)
This is a sweet little story, exactly described by its title. The professor in question is an elderly mathematician who has had a brain injury that has left him with only 80 minutes of short-term memory. The housekeeper, therefore, has to introduce herself to him every morning when she arrives at his house.
She has a son who comes along sometimes, and there are maths puzzles and baseball.
It doesn’t sound like much from that description, and it’s very short. But it’s thoroughly compelling and enjoyable.
Christmas Day by the Lea (or Lee)
It’s our family custom on Christmas Day to go for a walk down by the River Lea (usually shown on maps with the addition “or Lee”, as both spellings have been used historically). Often it’s been cold and dreich and we’ve seen almost no-one. Two days ago it was a gorgeous sunny day, and there were hundreds of people out.
And some boats were moving:
While others were just parked:
And this is us; Frances, me, and our two young adults, who don’t normally like to be photographed, and who have never appeared here before:
