Thing 1: How Good is the Place?
The first positive thing about today that I was talking about earlier is that tonight brings the final episode of The Good Place.
As this programme progressed it got hard to imagine how they were going to end it. And that remains true for me: they’ve already given us two good endings in the last two episodes, either of which would have been fine as a way to close the show. So how will they do it for real?
We’ll find out tonight.
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.
Deviate. Hesitate. Repeat. 😟
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.
I joined the Fabian Society recently, mainly so I’d get a vote in the Labour leadership election (I’m not rejoining Labour, at least for a while). So today I’m at the FEPS-Fabian New Year Conference 2020. Or #FEPSFAB20, as they’d like us to tweet.
I ate the last piece of our Christmas cake today. Christmas is now definitively over. If there was ever any doubt of that.
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.
I don’t know if online petitions do much good, really, but with Trump trying to drag America into yet another war in the Middle East, the very least we can do is try to stop the UK from getting involved.
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:
Transition by Iain Banks (Books 2019, 25)
This post was written in the new year, but the book was read in the old, and accordingly backdated.
This is a strong as it was ten years ago when I first read it, but still has the same narrative flaw. That’s not surprising, but the flaw in the universe-hopping detail is so jarring that I read it half-hoping to pick up on something that I had missed the last time.
It was not to be. Our heroes and villains still hop to uninhabited Earths, and yet find a body there to receive them.
And of course, the ethical question of possessing another human being remains barely addressed.
All that said, though, it’s still a great read.
Eyes Full of Tinsel and Fire
Christmas is the time of year when the devil doesn’t have all the best tunes. The other side gets some of them too.
I love Christmas songs. Not all of them. of course, but many. And that includes some of the Christmas carols. A full choir singing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing,’ or ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’? I’m there.
The best Christmas songs, though, do belong to the — let’s say — secular side of things. I have a hierarchy of my personal favourites. Things move around a bit, and very occasionally new ones arrive; and you won’t be surprised to learn that ‘Fairytale of New York’ remains unassailable in the top spot.
One of my other favourites is Greg Lake’s 1975 hit, ‘I Believe in Father Christmas.’ Now, if you haven’t listened to the words too closely — written, I’m surprised to discover, by Peter Sinfield, of whom I had barely heard before researching this — you might think it’s a simple celebration of Christmas, set to a jaunty tune, much like Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody,’ from a couple of years earlier (and every year since). It’s not, though. It’s much darker and more interesting than that:
They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a Silent Night
They told me a fairy story
Till I believed in the Israelite
And that closing couplet:
Hallelujah, Noel, be it Heaven or hell
The Christmas we get we deserve
Lake and Sinfield have argued that it’s not anti-religious or atheistic. Well, you can have your interpretation, guys. I know what I think.
I mainly wrote this because I’ve wanted to use the line I’ve stolen as a title for years. And I’ll leave you with the wishes the song provides:
I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year
I think we’re all going to need some hope and some bravery in 2020.