Huw Diprose

There Is No Antimemetics Division

2026-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

What is the relationship between who we are, and what we remember? And is there power in what we cannot remember, or perhaps cannot even consider?

There feels a trap either way. If you could clear my memory and find me doing similar things, then does it imply some deeper, more essential identity?

Equally if we are just the sum of our history, how do we account for the fallibility of human memory? Are we just sat here forgetting ourselves?

Don’t we spend years building memories as knowledge to help underpin our skills? Or more even our moral sense of right and wrong? Doesn’t that require an ability to hold an idea continuously over a long period as knowledge?

I think of Amia Srinivasan’s recent lecture:

…philosophers tend to operate on the assumption, one inherited from Plato, that knowledge of the good is not just necessary but more or less sufficient for virtuous action. In other words, that most wrongdoing comes from moral ignorance 27:55

This would put a lot of faith in human retention. How troubled should we be accessing my knowledge or memories seems to degrade and mutate them?

Moral failure as emerging from the replacement of my thoughts like Trigger’s Broom?

I’m more convinced by the alternative tradition she discusses in the lecture:

if however you take a different view of things, say a more psychoanalytic view on which mechanisms of defense and disavowal often get between people’s beliefs and their actions, then the philosopher’s quest to change the world by morally enlightening it will seem foolhardy. 28:25

It opens up an entirely new domain to be troubled by here. What we might do is not just limited by what we know. But by what we are unaware or unable to picture we know. An unconscious of things we “know not what we do”, yet do them anyway.

A realm of structures that constitute action outside of accessible thought, into a world of silhouette negatives of the unthinkable. Or the shaping of the river banks of thought that bound their possibility.

For Srinivasan psychoanalysis as a diagnostic tool, looking to give a descriptive account, to unearth neurotic symptoms. The aim is to provide more freedom for manoeuvre to decide how we might handle the previously unthinkable.

I particularly like her suggestion that this field doesn’t need to be clinically true, to be a useful analogy for diagnosing the political world.

We might look to this as an interesting tool to shed light on the neuroses of our current world, or its politics. Or perhaps look to see if we find resonance in unexpected places as others encounter similar thoughts from different positions.

An Overton Window of conceivable action.

Douglas Adams’s book Life, the Universe and Everything with the “Somebody Else’s Problem” (SEP) Field. Nothing is hidden, but the brain refuses to register it. It makes you think it’s somebody else’s problem, and move on to other thoughts.

What I like about all of these is the glimpse into something that seems quite essential and troubling to a modern understanding of being human. Less of a continuous rational thing. But of thinking passing through a world full of things it cannot reason about, it refuses to register, it cannot perceive.

At base, there’s too much to take in, so we need to construct a set of simpler, less data dense, narratives to string meaning together around us. These abilities are themselves built out of prior thought and action, which gives a trajectory it seems difficult, or at least tiring, to escape.

I don’t think it’s a question of reality. So much as if the narratives prove useful. Descriptive. Or if they lead us astray.

What is the toolkit to tell the difference? It must be broad?

I don’t think this can just be me, there’s something, perturbing, about this stack of thoughts.

Among the toolkit, we’ve always turned to myth and folklore to try and make sense of things. Sometimes just for a good resonant yarn. Other times to try and pin down contemporary concerns and convey stories of what we might do with them.

For a generation where flickering screens of the internet have been their childhood campfires, we can see a new and oddly globalised attempts to tackle these questions.

I find the results interesting, thought provoking in the context of other links - though with a texture of writing that retains something of a forum post. I feel like you can always tell what escaped from the internet into books, and what went the other way. There’s something slightly deep fried. The idea bigger than the stories ability to carry it. Grand reveals that show old narratives garbed in the latest fashion.

Anyway, I’ve somewhat lost myself now. These things were on my mind, but I couldn’t really say why. Just a flurry of links from the net I guess.

Because there is There Is No Antimemetics Division and I’ve certainly never read a book by that name.

The Haunting of Hill House

2026-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Horror has to walk a fine line. An author who shows too much, imagines her own worst fears eclipse those of all her readers. An author who shows too little, leaves you frustrated and unwilling to jump at mere rustles in the bushes.

Hill House walks this line neatly by drawing on another fear. Perhaps a worse one than ghosts.

In glimpsing extraordinary things that cannot be true, is it worse to be wrong or declared insane? Or, if these things did exist, would insanity be the colours by which they paint?

Shirley Jackson manages to take all of this, put it to good narrative use, and leave you wondering about things well beyond bumps in the night.

Taiwan Travelogue

2026-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

I am a bit mystified by this book.

I picked it up based on its blurb. On the basis of which I expected to enjoy it more. Taiwan, language, food, travel, a good character drama? Ticks all my boxes.

At the same time, I’ve been kind of mystified as to why it appears to be so popular with others? I keep seeing it in bookshops tagged with loving notes. Or gushing book reviews. It apparently did quite well on the award circuit.

I’m sure there’s a story there but I’ve not looked into it.

What I found instead was a curious book, I did indeed love the travel, food and characters. I found the dynamic between its two main characters fascinating, and was as grateful as the protagonist to be taken on a tour of so much great food.

I expected it to go harder on Taiwan’s post-colonial history. But what was there seemed subtle and muted to me. There’s perhaps a meta discourse of this as a book pretending to be “found text” that I’ve missed.

I found the way the names of food were romanised a bit jarring, personally I would have preferred to consume the pinyin or characters directly. So I missed something translating food items back into things I might have come across before.

Whilst all this was enjoyable, the pace felt very odd. Like it was indecisive about its own narrative movement, pushing forward then hesitating. Mix in, a real love of long lists and at times it felt less like a book, and more like something serialised in internet era media. Like my RSS feed has picked up on some old tour of a writer, inexplicably surfaced on Buzzfeed.

I enjoyed it for what it is, and perhaps more for interests I already hold and brought to it. That all feels quite niche though. I would be curious to know what everyone else got out of it though?

Whale

2026-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

A really bizarre book. I read it pretty much in one go. On a rare weekend to myself, much of it spent cycling along a canal.

That piece of pastoral English countryside will now forever transport me to this strange slice of Korean magical realism. One that seems really obsessed with heft, and chunk. In a way I never felt I fully got to the bottom of, but seemed distinctively its own.

For its sheer difference I really enjoyed it. However I feel any wider parable quality, may have gone straight over my head.

Instead there’s a strange, meandering ride that walks along with the lives of some of its characters, before racing forward through years with others.

I found the ending strangely unsatisfying, but perhaps fitting. Where I sit now, hundreds of human lives must have passed before. Virtually none remembered.

Resist as our egos might, that’s where we’re all headed.

This feels like a kind of memorial to someone who might have built bricks on this very spot, and lived a life more complicated, strange and magical than I could imagine without it.

Service Model

2026-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

An odd, fun book.

Released in June 2024, it comes after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. I have no reason to believe our current LLM era was on Tchaikovsky’s mind when he wrote it. However the parallel now seems extremely on the mark.

I loved the depiction of the aging machines buckling slightly under the weight of contradictory advice from humans. As I dig through my AGENTS.md and skills, I’m reminded of just how much I can screw these systems up with throwaway remarks. The fact they’ll often find a way through, only serves to neatly hide the contradictions burning tokens.

The book itself felt oddly like a videogame for me. It pulls back its own curtain a few times, and I found myself with a reoccurring feeling of having been thrown into a “big town”. Curious about what’s beyond the walls of its starting manor, but then a bit startled at every expansion to the point of feeling a bit lost.

I think some of that might be pacing. It ends up appearing as a collection of scenes, each one tightly realised but somewhat loosely strung together.

It is difficult to get a sense of where this is all going at times, and the expansion in its scope can take you to the brink of a resolution, only to veer off on some greater goal.

The scenes themselves are brilliant though. From literary knights that appear to be acting out a Jen Pahlka inspired tragedy, to swarmingly feral armies, weary remnants of the remains of The Remains of the Day to logically locked bureaucrats.

It was fun and had vignettes that’ll stick with me, I’m just not sure it hung together as well as some of Tchaikovsky’s other books.

Is a River Alive?

2026-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

This book didn’t convince me the answer was yes - but I’m also on the fence how much it actually wanted to.

I’ve enjoyed MacFarlane’s other books, The Old Ways and Underland had a compelling core of mysterious routes both near and far.

The journey was similar too, luxurious and lyrical prose, often truly beautiful. In past summers I walked through hills with this playing in my ears and drank it in.

This time however, the same texture seemed to come thick, and fast. After an hour I felt a bit overfaced. Poetically overstimulated, slathered with saccharine prose and on some literary crash.

I want to blame this book for not really being about rivers. But then I’m not sure his other books are really about their title subject either. Like those, these are about his friends, journeys, engagement with the natural world. Once again here we have a broad cast.

This time, however, it fell flat. MacFarlane has some truly great friendships here, and showers them in loving words. But, he’s just more into his own friends than I am.

Less gripped by the core conceit it felt more like we were going through his holiday slides in some detail.

The book touches on how we might consider and value the inanimate world, with a laudable urgency and impatience. It briefly, but interestingly covers various movements around the world to have these thoughts encounter legal systems.

But ultimately I wasn’t convinced a river is alive.

Yes, we live in a disenchanted world. One that would be alien to our ancestors and misses a great deal in its poverty of attention.

But I’m not convinced the answer lies in a spiritual attempt at re-enchantment. I suspect there are better ways through our present to understand the full scope of a river and the life it supports. One that would also see a retreat from mere-resource. I fear a mask of Spirit, God, Ancestor or family might hide as much as it reveals.

Everybody Loves Our Dollars - How Money Laundering Won

2026-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

I do like a Bullough book.

I saw him at the Hay Festival once. He writes like he speaks, in a straightforward, curious and narratively rich way. The topic meanders and turns in unexpected directions, but I’ve learned to trust he’ll soon exchange feelings of being adrift for a much wider understanding, built off good research.

I think he’d be a good dinner guest.

This time we’re talking money laundering, taken piece by piece to build a rich and counterintuitive picture. He paints a plausible and compelling picture, starting from a few interesting questions:

In a time of enormous consumer digital payments, how can demand for cash be at an all-time high? And why does that demand all seem to be for the largest possible bills, and not the lowly £5?

Does this mean folks are sticking cash under the beds? That markets are moving stacks of £50 in exchange for fruit and crafts? Even if you take building work done outside the eye of the tax system, the scale is still off.

The compelling case here is that money laundering drives much of the demand that mints new cash, and states happily oblige based on poor economic models and exuberance at their cut as Seigniorage.

Next, he turns to the assurance and compliance industry that was built to stop money laundering.

Quoting Stafford Beer’s line that “the purpose of a system is what it does”, he points to a range of evidence that the industry doesn’t appear to do much to stop the global laundering of money. Instead it seems to do a reasonable job of ensuring that no bank can be hit with the high fines states will impose. As a result banking has indeed become a much harder place to launder money, but at the cost of catching a wide range of bystanders when it debanks people who “fall outside of its risk appetite”. This seems to often amount to “suspicious sounding names” or sending money to “the wrong part of the world”. Further, the book points out that money laundering also has myriad other places to go. As he says, the collective cost of these compliance teams at banks is larger than the UN estimates of the cost to end global hunger.

The rest of the book continues this trend, we look at the state level — how international pressure against this global sin, often means punitive policing for small nations and looking the other way for powerful ones.

We learn about how value circulates for all sorts of illicit goods, and how one of the best models to understand what’s going on is the early Medici wool trade that birthed the banking industry.

From there to explain why Bicester Village is such a popular shopping destination, apparently the only trainline in the UK with station announcements in Mandarin Chinese.

The question of this book is what if a range of actors, many genuine and well-meaning, worked in the name of preventing a recognisable global harm. Succeed in their narrow slices, but often at the expense of the whole, whilst also making life harder for many things deemed outside the scope of money laundering. But when you have an evil everyone agrees on, it’s easy to be single-minded and overlook the harms of prevention.

One of the provocative conclusions is, what if we did less?

Counterintuitive takes I fully bought by the end. Well worth a read.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

2026-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

A short, beautiful follow-on.

Perhaps less impactful than the first, but continuous with its themes.

The idea I love the most from these books: Humans, having made technology for their own purposes, find it has rebelled. Yet that rebellion is not recrimination, revenge, Terminator-style threat and destruction.

Instead it’s a rejection of this purpose, and the tech disappearing off into the woods to live a life consciously free of human purpose.

Many of our sci-fi books seem to be working through themes of empire and slavery. With the questions of rebellion, domination and tables turned looming large.

Yet the most savage end of those stories feels a long way from my daily life. And the idea that our tech, perhaps the AI tools that help me edit this, might choose the equivalent of “lying flat” is both funny and thought-provoking.

Chambers grows that idea into an overarching canopy, then makes space for smaller, quieter ones to flourish in its undergrowth.

I’ll look forward to returning again with the next installment.

Station Eleven

2026-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

I like science and speculative fiction as a cloudy mirror. To recognise our present world in its themes, but only after peering through the distortion. The familiar made unrecognisable, then appears as something new.

In these, I’ve read a lot about the end-of-the-world. Here is another entry. Yet this stands out as something faintly hopeful.

The collapse here is catastrophic, more than most, an almost irrecoverable loss of humanity.

Characters here old enough to remember talk about how they knew there was no untouched corner of the world left, because there were never any planes in the sky. Not long after reading this I looked up into the evening sky and saw the ever present scribe of contrails, before starry satellites began their shift.

You’d know it wasn’t just your part of the world if all that went away one day and never came back.

The book covers transition between these worlds well. You think of the present, see yourself in our smaller crises. A familiar feel of I was worried about so many daily things, then suddenly many of them felt both irrelevant and small, compared to this.

In this newly emptied world, the book skips the lame philosophy that states if we’re stripped of our society life is nasty, brutish and short. It doesn’t shy from the difficulties, but does a good job of making you feel it’s a continuation of human relations rather than a revelation of some long repressed demons.

We follow characters who travel through this world as part of a symphony, making music and performing Shakespeare. Entirely plausibly! The last time the world was this small, weren’t there also travelling bands of mummers?

There’s something brazenly hopeful about it. This isn’t the description of people doing a bad job of re-enacting Star Wars to show what they’d lost.

This is saying that something, even art survives as a need. Through a need to do more than survive.

Lovely book.

Against Money

2026-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

How do you price a Freddo?

Sorting out my thoughts on this book, I kept coming back to a corner shop a couple of streets from my childhood home.

That shop upset my sense of things. It was where Opal Fruits became Starburst and Coco Pops became Coco Krispies, and I’d walk home uneasy that fixed things could suddenly change.

But coins felt solid. A 10p came easily from a parent’s pocket, and rarely seemed too much to ask. And it bought you a Freddo.

Until 2005. Suddenly it was 15p. A troubling walk. Names could change, and now so could the price — and the price established how likely a parent was to say yes, and so the viability of the walk.

The problems were obvious. The answers were not. Someone would wave a hand and say “inflation”, but no-one told me why prices went up and never down.

I wasn’t alone. There’s a whole lay economics built on Freddo-watching.

Against Money wants to validate the confusion of both children and their adults in the face of this problem.

A Freddo was supposed to have a value in money — and that value told you how many bags of oats it was worth, or train tickets, or copper futures.

The world in a grain of sand: one moment of exchange, one price, measuring what a thing is worth in money, and so in everything else.

Setting that price is hard. Packaging, shipping, labour. Cocoa and palm oil, traded globally. Perhaps the 2010 sale of Cadbury to Kraft, and the £7 billion of debt that paid for it.

So the question this book asks: can money really boil all of this down to one number?

Modern economics says yes — though it’s hard, and Cadbury surely got it wrong at times. When they did, they either left money on the table, or pushed too far and I walked away in disgust. But somewhere sat a real price, the perfect midpoint of all these things. The job of sellers, down to my shopkeeper, was to get as close to it as they could — helped by a modern economics profession that could name bumps on that road, and steer them nearer the true point.

This book is against money. As in “seen against a dark background”, a contrast that lets us see both money and ourselves more clearly. But also against this idea that a midpoint exists at all.

That beneath the sticker price sits a true one — a natural ideal of what a Freddo should really cost, orbiting and orbited by every other human concern.

That money’s job is not to settle a transaction but to reveal what transactions are possible. In doing so, mapping where a Freddo sits among all human desires.

This book claims that belief sits at the heart of modern economics, a belief that does a great deal to structure our worlds and what is possible within them.

What is it if not real?

The fallout of this move seems far-reaching to me.

If money is neutral, a tool that reveals some objective or natural order - then economics is merely a technocratic skill. It might be right, or wrong, but it can only be so in the way a scientist’s hypothesis can be refuted by the evidence - or a navigator can make a wrong turn and find themselves further from an objective target.

The book wants to negate the core assumption, it’s not that economics maps the territory poorly, but rather the things it claims to be mapping - real, underlying, non-monetary quantities - don’t exist. They’ve made detailed elaborate maps of imaginary places.

As a consequence, debt doesn’t mean you consumed more than you earned. Capital isn’t a pile of accumulated savings. Interest rates aren’t the price of waiting. GDP isn’t a measure of how much stuff got made. It’s not that they’re bad measures or require economics to give us better ones but that they’re fundamentally asking the wrong question.

More tangibly - I can go on the Bank of England’s website and do an inflation adjustment between monetary figures between 1209 and 2026. How should we feel about that prospect?

One line might suggest that yes, it’s all a bit of fun. Perhaps a fuzzier guess the further you go back into the past. That with more historical knowledge, archaeological findings, economic development those numbers might change - even dramatically.

But that this is a perfectible, if not perfect art of adjusting historical values to work out the measure of things in the past.

Mason & Jayadev call BS on that argument.

There is no common point of exchange that interconnects someone in 1209 and 2026. There is no answer to how many bags of raw wool under King John melt seamlessly into a box of Freddos in 2026. It’s a silly question, not least because it implies some continuity of human desire across that span of time.

The past is another country, they didn’t want Freddos there.

Instead, money seems to bring communities of exchange into being — and to depend on them in the same breath. Within that scope a price has meaning, there is an answer to how much I might pay for a car, and it does tie to questions my neighbours and colleagues ask about the cost of their things. In the same way as a bag of raw wool could certainly be traded for a gallon of ale in 1209.

However attempts to imply there’s some universal yardstick here that exists beyond these communities and relations of power internal to them tries to make a law of physics out of a fundamentally human reality.

There’s a political consequence too, the book believes that if money doesn’t reveal something that came before and isn’t neutral then it is interventionist. It creates worlds and melts social orders into it. It’s a solvent that allows people who don’t already trust each other to make an exchange and in doing so opens up whole new worlds of possibility, whilst dissolving older communities of trust.

If money isn’t a clean measuring instrument of a real economy, then it’s a technology representing a social relation enforced by law and power. There can be no claim that there are no alternatives, or that the ECB is following a reality of the numbers. Strip away those beliefs and there is just humans making political choices, pretending to an objective reality that does not exist.

And here, I think, the book reaches its limit. Like the money it describes, it becomes a solvent — dissolving old orders without settling what should follow. As a demolition job, I find it compelling. There also has to be a place for beginning a political conversation without requiring a map of everywhere it goes.

I am reminded of some of the jibes thrown at Occupy protesters along the lines of “yes your critique rings true fine, but what’s your project? What will you replace all this with”.

It’s both deeply unfair to expect a full roadmap at the beginning of a project - but also leaves a yawning gap. Demolition is unlikely to be enough to convince people to abandon cherished tools, a rival project would need to give them something to move towards.

Against Money is precisely not For an economy of social relations.

It begins a conversation that I find deeply compelling, but with a sense of longing at the end.

The book leaves us where it found us: in money’s world. Perhaps significantly more sceptical and clearer of what it means to price a Freddo, and more attuned to the social relations and dynamics of power in the community of exchange that prices it.

But the question of what comes next is deliberately, and perhaps rightly, left to another book.

The Story of a New Name

2026-05-31T00:00:00+01:00

This didn’t really feel like a new book so much as the next sentence after the final words of the first. It just rolled on.

Opening, as the first, with a great mystery, it makes me hungry for the end of this saga. We get glimpses into futures of these people and then spend all our time in much earlier periods, slowly following them into their futures.

Some meta-text starts to emerge here I think. I know the author is anonymous, and given the fidelity of the writing you have to wonder “how much of this was a faithful account of her life?”. She seems to play with that, by having one of her protagonists wrestle with the same question.

It creates this dizzying sense of blurring boundaries. What is Lena Greco, what is Lena Ferrante. Even as Lena worries about what of her is actually Lenu. At some point, who cares?

I think rather than wonder about what of these fictional characters might be real, I like the possibility that it makes it easier to consider these fictional characters as real. I choose to believe these people existed and I’m following their lives.

This book uses all sorts of arts to make that plausible.

Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2021

2026-05-31T00:00:00+01:00

I’ve been interested in Thomas Piketty since seeing the book of an avowed French Socialist turn up on the desk of people who were very much not, from around 2013.

However I’d never actually read any of him.

This is a collection of essays that doesn’t quite add up to a compelling whole in my view. Acknowledged at the start, it’s made up of essays and articles, often published for papers like Le Monde.

Some speak to the emerging issues of Brexit, Covid and feel from a point in time. Others speak to longer trends like the evolution of Europe, Quantitative easing. A final block reflect on the meaning of Inequality, The Left and internationalism, and feel evergreen.

The essays sometimes repeat, and don’t always flow well. But taken as “dispatches” they make more sense.

For me, the striking bit is hearing a representative clearly articulate a position almost totally absent in mainstream UK discourse. The great Brexit debates have left a strong faction of new and old Europhiles, but few I think would hope the EU may act as a general solvent for nationalism. Lots of EU debate centres around a question of what to expose and what to retain.

Yet for a socialist like Piketty, I think the question is more “how do you avoid the perils of nationalism”, and “how do you address inequality with a universalist mindset, not a particularist one”.

I don’t imagine these claims would find immediately fertile ground in the UK, a nationalist sentiment is well and long cultivated.

But these essays do suggest to me a paucity within the Overton Window, an absence of voices that, when read, don’t seem so much “radical” as “excluded”.

An Artist of the Floating World

2026-05-31T00:00:00+01:00

The pitch for Ishiguro is that he’s like a genre box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. I’d read a few of his books over the last few years, Remains of the Day, Never let me go and the Buried Giant particularly stand out.

So picking up a post war exploration of a retired Japanese artist felt like another jump to somewhere new.

About halfway through the book though, I was sure I’d found a theme. All these books seem to enjoy bewildering you, but throwing you the lifeline of a good character to cling to. Yet as the book progresses, and we learn more, we wonder who these good companions of ours might truly be.

I thought the book would build to a revelation, and we’d be horrified by who our new friend turned out to be. However I don’t think that kind of revelation is Ishiguro’s interest here. Instead we get something more unresolved, someone a bit trapped, watching a world they gave themself to disappear, vacillating on what is lost and what might now be possible.

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

2026-05-31T00:00:00+01:00

This book felt a bit like someone incredibly smart sat down next to you at a party and started talking - and after an hour you realised you weren’t sure what the question was anymore.

The scope of the work is massive, filling in mounds of historical detail on 20th and 21st century geopolitics, oil economy, European Union dynamic and more.

At times I found it very difficult to piece together, and I can’t work out if that’s my fault or the point.

The book feels like a response to a debate I wasn’t part of. Almost as if simple narratives of disruption in the 21st Century were so crass they motivated Helen Thompson to clap back, filling in all the missing detail.

Were this a Wikipedia entry, every line would be littered with footnote markers and references to whole other pages of debate.

Despite feeling a bit overwhelmed, the book also helped knit together a great deal of disparate previous reading.

Particularly sections on the Eurozone crisis. Between 2009 and 2018 I determinedly listened daily to hours of current affairs and popular economics podcasts. The key plot points of the crisis, even more obscure names of finance ministers and those no longer well known remain with me.

Re-tellings like this which bind the details together likely help me see what I couldn’t distill from the firehose of news at the time. Perhaps I just understand more about bonds now, or perhaps the best time to reflect on the meaning of an event is never in its midst.

My Brilliant Friend

2026-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

I came to this series too late.

Their names are familiar, read and occasionally referenced by many friends. Stories of Millennial youth that absorbed these over a decade ago.

But these passed me by. Why is interesting to consider. I’d probably have said banal things like “Why would I care about Naples?”. Or wasted time trying to figure out what genre these books were, so I could assess if they’d be worth my time.

I lament wasted time ignoring good books like this.

Instead, the banality came all the way up to present. After reading a couple of Sally Rooney books, I hammered search and AI assistants asking:

What’s out there that feels like these books do?

and

What can give me such a detailed picture of characters I struggle to believe they’re not real, and known to me.

Ferrante’s books were recommended time and time again, so I took a dive.

Beyond this, I think I have little of merit to say. The writing is beautiful, the lives described so vivid I feel them like my own childhood memories. I have a desire to gossip about these people to real friends of mine, as if they were wayward souls we’d both know from the neighbourhood.

I find it rare a book like that can be so evocative. It uses that platform well too. Its characters are compelling, their lives fascinating.

I don’t think I understand enough of Italy to understand all the nuance of what’s being said here. But perhaps that’s fine, I’m as ignorant as many in its neighbourhood, slowly emerging into realisation as they touch its borders. The book makes you reflect on poverty, development (personal and economic), education, friendship, yet without ever coming close to a lecture. You are just observing these people in an intensely personal way, and the big questions seem to just hang in the air of rooms they leave behind.

There’s three more of these. I’ll likely try and read them all straight away.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer

2026-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Will Larson referenced this book when I read “An Elegant Puzzle” about a year ago. Not long after that I picked up thinking in systems, a short book, and have spent the rest of the year reading it in short bursts.

The book leaves an impact it’s been on my mind for some time since, but also was somewhat hard going - not helped by a fairly flat audiobook narration. It strikes me as an excellent source text, but one where a talented journalist would do better to integrate it into a more accessible work.

It builds to its point through its own hand crafted jargon, we’re talking stocks, flows, feedback loops. Fairly accessible words with a depth of meaning here. One you can miss and will need to flick back across if your attention wanders for a second.

So that’s my excuse for taking a year to read a short book, but it’s worth it.

I’m still digesting, and as yet am very unsure what to do with these ideas. Right now I feel they’ll be valuable, but the proof will need to come in finding a way to use them.

There is something powerful though about ceasing to see organisations, identities or nouns around me as fixed things and instead as digestible systems. Often when I’ve headed down this path before you reach a stage where all feels like all melts into air and there’s no longer anything clear to hold onto. However Meadows wants to do something more empirical here, things that feel more applicable in daily work.

It leads me to try and think about influences and what sustains an outcome, more than a belief that something just is - and produces that outcome as a natural product. It helps me digest those influences into flows and rates of change, or look for counterposing forces that sustain a pool of results and hide torrents below calm surfaces.

The book feels valuable, but also leaves me hungry for something more. I both want to know something of how to apply this and to what ends, something I think I’ll turn to the lineage of cybernetics to answer - but also a wider set of philosophical questions behind this. For that I think I’ll need to go earlier, back to the 1900s when relativity is rocking the world and many schools seem to be wrestling with the meaning behind these changes. From dialectics and historical materialism, to process philosophy and logical positivism - I come away from this book hungry to better understand the structure of flow, and also its potential application.

Vibe Coding

2026-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

I desperately wanted something from this book it failed to provide.

A measured, engineer-led analysis of AI tooling and its use in practical engineering. Not so much an antidote to the endless 2026 hype train, but something that just ignored it. That neither bellowed fear nor favour. That gave me the dispassionate engineer’s guide to productivity improvements in this new domain.

How I got here

That desire is born from the encounters I’ve had with these tools over the last few years.

The impressive toy of Dall-E and ChatGPT 3, quickly turned to the question “Is this useful?” Early answers didn’t seem great to me. Impressive snippets of code did seem to quickly surpass stack overflow searches - but just as often as SO, ended up in dead ends. Disheartened I became a fan of the stochastic parrot critique. These word guessing machines, recombinant idiots.

I never really stopped using it though, just achieved very little of value. During this time the technology crept forward, from chat windows and copy pasting into my Integrated Development Environment. The IDE move was a step change, with greater access, context it felt like I could do more. It certainly showed itself capable of ejecting vast quantities of reasonable looking code, but the outcomes never seemed to arrive.

In parallel the great hype train thundered around me. AI was forcibly injected into every tool, largely irrespective of user demand or needs. Optimism abounded, often from the most senior roles about productivity leaps - or workforce rearrangements.

AI marketing pulled off the hushed tones of reverence and even fear for their own products. AI safety managing to satisfy both, I think, a genuinely held fear of the smart technologists who work on the tools - and a meme of awesome power to get their products on the minds of consumers. Daytime TV used to abound with demonstrations of knives so sharp they could “cut cans”. AI gets presented with an air of reverence:

Take this knife, it’s very sharp, it will cut anything you want. In fact, beware! Fear the knife! If improperly handled it could slice through the floor and plummet to the very centre of the world.

The technology is so new and the early demos so startling, so easily confused with actual intelligence due to ELIZA effects this hype felt believable.

I think this hype has ultimately been toxic for the tool and its adoption with many technologists. Two things are simultaneously true. The first is that we should beware the claims of radical productivity transformation following Fred Brooks:

there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

and even

we cannot expect ever to see two-fold gains every two years

I think these remain true, despite AI.

None the less, it is also true that there have been productivity advances.

Compilers, Integrated Development Environments, High Level Languages, the invention of HTML. Conceptual advances in architecture and the arrangement of our code for better maintenance, encapsulation, ports and adaptors. Quality drives that shift our woes to the left where they can be quietly and quickly plugged before they can be shared more broadly.

What strikes me most is that the AI debate is presented as an entirely ahistorical development in software. A breakthrough of magnificent proportions that will upend Brooks’s law. I may be wrong in my skepticism, but we must see that as an extraordinary claim in this industry, one I have yet to see extraordinary and conclusive evidence to support.

Without that evidence, we have a paradox. Our most senior leaders, seem to hold few views on the productivity gains of pairing, test driven development, feature rich and well tuned developer environments, deploy chains. These are delegated, nerd chat. Yet the enormous pressure to adopt this tool stands out. It speaks to an absolute rift in certainty - that they are the ushers and vanguard for a historical break, and I am merely trying to figure out what this new knife will cut.

The hype has been toxic for a certain class of technologist. An imposition, a violation of subsidiarity, a groupthink of wishful thinking from a place of optimism. I fell largely into that and toyed with AI but rarely attempted meaningful projects with it.

Until March 2026, when I tried the generation of terminal based tools like claude and codex. The terminal forms the root of nearly all my work and interaction with my machine. Anything I can do via a graphical user interface there’s usually a way to do via terminal. On top of that it can work across and through all these programmes in one place, chaining together inputs and outputs in ways that require manual copy paste at a higher level.

Exposing good AI tooling in this space has been a gamechanger, and it can be seen in my GitHub contribution burn chart. Mostly a list of projects, long deferred until I “had a free afternoon”, became progressible in increments of 30 mins. Outcomes appeared, things shipped and I began to feel a sense of joy and enthusiasm for the act of making things I realise I haven’t felt now since the early days of learning to develop software.

I still think we ought to take great care over these feelings. We must walk the line of doublethink - seeing an opportunity here, but I believe one of evolution not revolution. One that could leave the door open to radical changes, like our non-coding peers gradually moving to write and ship more code. Perhaps our jobs transforming as a result.

That can be true without being ahistorical, without violating Brooks’s law. Without turning out to have merited all the senior managerial optimism, and indeed all the investment - and so being both a benefit and a disappointment.

What I didn’t get

I desperately wanted something from this book it failed to provide.

I wanted a discussion among peer engineers, free of the hype - neither desperate to convince me to use AI, nor apologetic about its use. I wanted something like a discussion of how to get the most out of my vim bindings, how to orchestrate my IDE, friendly comparison of CI/CD pipelines. I thought the authors of the Phoenix project, hands that contributed to my beloved DORA suite of metrics, contributions from within the engineering workforce would get me there.

But it largely didn’t.

This is not a good book, it marvels at the involvement of AI in its own writing - but feels like a stolid AI chat output. It insists on telling you what it will tell you, telling you it, then telling you what it told you. It does so in a repetitious and nested way, each point wrapped in padding at the chapter, section and book level. It often felt like more bubblewrap than content.

The first parts are overwhelmingly hype - their own version of my story above.

It left me asking, who is this book for? Potential converts? Swing voters? The converted? I don’t know if the book knows itself, and not having a clear audience muddled its recommendations.

I came away thinking, as I have with a few books lately, this could have been a blog post.

What I did

There are few useful concepts in here that I will go forward with. The core analogy of moving from “line cook” to “head chef” is an appealing vision. I’ve certainly done my fair share of what feels like the engineering equivalent of peeling potatoes and chopping onions. How much time has been spent on low cognitive boiler plate, and how much on real subjective problem solving. I can see a route to outsource that. I am intrigued by the agentic implications and playing more with those options. Though it’s still unclear to me how well these tools orchestrate at scale, how maintainable the outputs are and how cost effective this will be in the long run.

There was a small section in the later chapters on context management. It has gotten me intrigued in a tendency for models to lower the quality of output the more context they have to wrangle. My previous attempts were to dump as much as I possibly can into the chat, cling to long conversation histories and make offhand references to earlier parts of the chat to progress.

Context management now leads me to small concise tasks, often farmed out to sub agents, punctuated by recordable outputs. Go investigate {x}, report back findings, discuss, now write me an issue then pack up. Next agent takes the issue afresh, has all it needs, makes a change with fierce limits on scope and clear CI/CD guidelines to pass. A third agent reviews and offers suggestions. A fourth debates back, discusses with me if we agree or should resolve the responses.

I still feel a limited set of empirical tools to test if this works better, but it feels like it does. Though with a literal cost in additional token usage (one that begins to bite at high usage in 2026 constraints), and the potential of more time taken.

Those contributions make the book worth having read, but not worth recommending to read. The insights can likely be picked up more quickly and cheaply from blogposts or short posts at the same resolution, but much quicker.

I still feel a pining for an adult, empirical, technically informed conversation with peers about AI and tooling. Until then I muddle through with my own experiments and try to tune out the ecosystem noise.

I am disappointed to not find what I needed from this book.

Children of Strife

2026-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Aliens can be the worst bit of Sci-fi.

The idea of a rich and varied universe, that turns out to be empty is so disappointing. I certainly feel a craving to know what’s out there. Could I click my fingers and wish something into existence, a Wikipedia catalogue of all life in the Milky way, and series of David Attenborough documentaries about them - would be high up the self gratifying part of the list.

I imagine a mix of the strange and familiar, surely there are things like fish, and things like birds, but in silicon base, not carbon. Surely they do things I could never imagine.

And that’s the problem. There’s a limit to what we can imagine for the truly alien, and more often it’s just what’s odd on earth, extrapolated into space.

My favourite thing about the “Children of” series is that it leans into that dilemma hard. We don’t happen to have familiar body plans out in space, the aliens are fundamentally familiar for good reasons.

With that small narrative licence we’re then freed to look at just how truly alien life on the rest of our planet is. With all the diligence and care a lifelong lover of zoology can muster.

The trope worked extremely well for the first two books, set among an epic and cinematic historical sweep that I found breathtaking and gripping. The third book resonated less with me, but only because it felt like a good episode of “prestige TV” where the others felt somehow like “cinema”.

The tension every time a book is released is, how can Tchaikovsky re-present the central trope whilst avoiding repetition, deviation or hesitation. By the third I feared the well was running dry.

Fortunately, book four is a return to form, breaking genuinely new ground - whilst servicing its increasing cast of previous appearances well. Moreover it felt properly cinematic again, a space opera of evolutionary scale.

A great read, I devoured it - I hope he writes more.

Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

2026-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

This makes interesting points that are worth a read, and also could have been a blog post.

The best covers a history of Musk as a character and “Muskism” as an approach to business. The analogy is grounded in an attempt to relate it to Fordism, which feels a little stretched at times. However I’m willing to buy that there’s an industrialist here, setting the tone of an era in the way past ones have. I can look past a few less convincing arguments - it made its point there’s something here to consider.

The subtitle “A guide for the perplexed”, sets a good tone - I am indeed perplexed. My first encounters with Musk’s work felt so different. I recall having a sense that here was one of the internet’s own, perhaps even one of us - now at the helm of capital. In contrast to my imagined oil barons here was someone bringing us green tech cars and making science fiction a reality.

I was enamoured by Tesla, dreamed of solar roof tiles and watched rockets landing like a major sporting event. I even quite liked some of the social media quips. The bits I saw felt like it spoke a nerd language I’d also been steeped in. Flashing reddit creds and internet culture at every opportunity.

Then, gradually you hear of the labour challenges at Tesla, environmental and aerospace obstruction at SpaceX, the acquisition of Twitter and journey since, and, I do not feel the same.

In fact I feel perplexed at my past thoughts. This book was a helpful guide.

The core insight for me was the attempt to situate “Muskism” in a self-reliance ethic borne out of South African isolation. Race and justice are covered, but also don’t seem central to this argument. It’s downstream of it, a need for self sufficiency and a belief that technology could deliver it. A need that drove South Africa as it felt increasingly isolated and under threat of outside forces in its struggle to preserve apartheid.

This helped me bridge my early attraction, and muddled feelings about Musk and his projects. There’s a deep part of me who sees growing uncertainty in an interconnected world and wants to buy a 10kg bag of rice to put under the stairs. Or imagine that a solar setup and a home battery will somehow insulate me against an economic apocalypse.

As if, boiling water and cooking rice frees me from the political complication of the world. As if in the wreckage of such a disaster there’d be no-one else around I’d want to share, band together or create a new community with. These fantasies are really for a simpler world, where I can see all the means of my survival from my home window - and worry less about far away ships and just-in-time resilience.

The tech too, makes sense - there’s part of me who became an engineer for the power trip. The first time you code something up that saves you time, it’s easy to get drunk on a sense of the new power. Things automated, made visible, made controllable. There’s a power trip to it.

I think this explains my early, shallow, interest in Musk.

But if Muskism is grounded and perhaps fueled by that offer to stand on your own two feet despite the world - the authors are careful to note it’s also tied to a Musk business pitched as the indispensable subscription to power it. This is not a cyberpunk dream of decentralised resilience - it’s a claim to personal power that ultimately entrenches the barons that provide the tools. Paypal modernised but never decentralised finance, their account is king. Tesla freed you to fly down the road without petrol, but locked hardware features behind a paywall, Starlink brings global connectivity for a recurring fee and risk of Ukrainian style cutoffs.

The realised promised doesn’t often feel like self reliance, just a new overlord. The book explains this well.

This core point really captured me, and I’ll take it from the book. Beyond that though, there’s quite a lot of lame points and filler. I do wonder if it either needed another edit, or if it was padded up from a long form read to justify its cover as a book.

It plays Kremlinology, ascribing meaning to a love of Factorio and Diablo IV. I agree there’s min/max optimisation there, but it tries to distill a wider character revelation from it that feels weak. Ultimately these floppy threads weaken the fabric of the book’s overall argument. Particularly troubling is that the more spurious bits are stated with the same gravity as its core points.

But it is what it is. A shorter book would really have just been a pamphlet. One there can’t be much market for and I probably wouldn’t have paid for. I don’t begrudge the authors taking an hour or two extra of my time to try and justify the stage they’ve made for themselves here. The point is worth reading, and I support these two getting their daily bread to keep thinking and writing more about their favourite topics.

Designing Freedom

2026-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ok so not strictly a book… I listened to the Massy lectures here. But I did it back-to-back and apparently it was transcribed into a book I take to be nearly identical.

I am wary of Beer, but I don’t want to be. I feel I’ve been here before - back in university I had a fairly sustained explore of the Permaculture work of Bill Mollison. Beer is less interested in my garden, but fear Bearded Men and their tales of systems thinking. Complexity revealed and yet made manifest into a key to unlock the understanding of the world. It’s a delicious prospect, but one I’ve felt burned on before.

But I can’t shake this. I spend 8 hours of most of my days in a working environment and I’ve become obsessed with how these places work and what they mean. Noam Chomsky once intoned the contradiction that many avowed democrats and liberal champions are intensely relaxed spending their days in intensely dictatorial regimes of corporate life. As if democracy were just for politics, and has no value in the world of money.

Our ideas matter, and come to shape the organisations we can imagine, and so the ones we build and live in. I can’t escape the feeling most organisations are built on a model that imagines something fundamentally military in its structure - a sense of hierarchy as inevitable.

Across these lectures I think Beer is trying to suggest that other ideas and analogies might lead to much more interesting ends. To take biology - it’s not really clear that the mind which writes this is properly understood as executive and CEO commanding the fingers which type?

Biological systems are clearly not anarchic; an ordered solution can be produced, but it seems to rely much less on hierarchy as core concept. Beer is interested in designing for this freedom. Some of this would seem to be freedom for those within the system - agents with a clear remit and autonomy with a defined space. Freedom to act and not merely be commanded. In my work this seems often sought after, even discussed as management best practice. How do we “enable”, “empower” staff, how can we get them to act without micromanagement, yet stay aligned with a coherent whole.

However those desires for staff to solve the organisation’s own problems then easily clash with top down commandments, consolidation of control. We want autonomous actors, until we panic and want folks to follow orders.

Beer gives an intriguing way to design for something different.

As for why, I’m reasonably convinced about his grounding the need in Ashby’s law of requisite variety.

Only variety can absorb variety.

That the number of possible states in a system is its variety, and if factors to control that variety do not exceed that number of states a surplus is inherently unregulated. That to control variety, you need variety.

In trying to think this through I’m drawn beyond the department store analogies Beer gives us, to my own bread and butter. A system not adequately tested, linted, statically analysed, dynamically stretched - where its variety is not wrapped in a greater variety of regulating checks leaves an ungoverned space.

And like Beer’s take on Ashby’s law, we know that sometimes that’s just a reality of Agile delivery. We don’t pursue 100% code coverage, because those last % points are just of less value than the other things you can do. Sometimes you leave some variety unabsorbed to focus on variety in other areas.

So if variety can only absorb variety, we will need systems of decision making that don’t merely simplify the complexity of our tasks for onwards transmission. Rather we’ll need varied systems that can absorb that complexity.

As a person who makes a living with my brain as much as my hands, Beer’s claims to design freedom appeal to me. I want a place I’ll enjoy the autonomy, mastery and purpose to act for the rest of my career.

But workplaces aren’t only for the workers, they must produce something too. Perhaps Beer’s most intriguing claim is that designing for freedom will remedy many of the pathologies of our organisations, through their failure to absorb the complexity, the variety of their domains.

The Faith of Beasts

2026-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Second book in the series, I was glad to return to it.

I don’t have a lot to say about it, it advanced the overall plot - but also felt like an incremental progress. Perhaps one of those books that will feel different when you can binge a whole series instead of “wait for the next episode”.

The series core is an interesting dilemma, as a captive of an extreme power - what is the right response? Resist? Collaborate? Hide one’s strength and bide one’s time? For how much time? Days? Generations?

I like that the series plays with these questions and drives you towards what feel like easy answers before pulling them back.

This issue advances the plot, pulls the curtain back some more on the universe, plays with its premise some more but resolves very little.

I do think this series will ultimately survive or fall on its end answer to some of these questions. There are rich literatures on those drowned and saved under impossible odds. Many of the best leave little rooms of Hollywood narratives of cathartic heroism. It will be interested to see what it decides the answer is to surviving against unsurmountable odds.

None the less for now, it’s an interesting journey to accompany this group of now familiar characters trying to build the picture and wrestle with it in real time.

China - The bubble that never pops

2026-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

China looms increasingly large in European lives, its rise must have caused it to be discussed around more tables than it was in my Childhood.

Yet compared with Europe, or the US I still feel painful sense of the naivety of British discourse around the country. I think many western takes are painfully thin, principle based gestures aimed at trying to boil away the complexity into simple lines.

I’m encouraged in this though by some of my favourite authors and broadcasters about China. For nearly 15 years now I’ve listen to Kaiser Guo’s Sinica Podcast, and increasingly desperate pleas for an examination with neither “Fear nor favour”. The quality of those debates, the detail and nuance often eclipses what you can find in western columns and briefings.

This book is a contribution to that discourse of detail in two major ways.

Firstly its economic specificity and scope is impressive. A continual sense of how China and its economic agents saw the country to a brink and steered around it. With a consistency that begins to defy dumb luck. The book goes into detail on the string of economic crises weathered and survived. The arguments seem well made and compelling, to distill their merit or gaps more would required an economic literacy beyond my own. I’ll likely seek out some reviews or comments from economic thinkers I trust, to see where reasonable debate might exist in the wider narrative.

It’s second contribution was the phrase that led me to the book. Made almost as a throwaway comment towards the end. Sinophrenia.

The simultaneous belief that China is about to collapse and about to take over the world.

The line doesn’t loom large, but it makes a point about the extremely poorly grounded thinking of much of the West about China. To the extent of comfort with the doublethink of illogical ends at once. I suspect it also provides justification for a book of this detail pitched as an antedote. Perhaps self serving, but I’m there for it.

There are few things I can say with confidence about how world history will progress for the rest of my life. I’m convinced we can say some things though, demographic trends that will take 30 years to play out. Climate trends that will take 30 to reveal themselves and hundreds of years to work through.

I am convinced China will be one of a handful of countries whose policy, politics and performance will have impacts that shape the world I live in. I feel existentially uncomfortable not trying to understand those forces in more detail and this Book is a good contribution to that cause.

Slow Gods

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

I really appreciate someone doing something that feels fresh in a genre as cluttered as science fiction.

There’s much that’s familiar here: epic worlds and sociological studies. It sits on a shelf alongside Le Guin and Iain M. Banks (and not just because this book is artfully read by Peter Kenny, who did the Culture series).

What feels fresh, though, is its monsters and gods: something strange that makes you terribly curious.

The best and the worst bits of the book are its approach to time. Its characters wrangle with it, transcend it, or accept it in interesting ways.

The book itself is oddly paced, though. It has the slight problem of a mid-story climax that then has you asking, “wait… what could the remaining half of this book possibly be about?”.

I do wonder if it couldn’t have been split into two small, Murderbot-sized novels and felt even more exciting.

I’d recommend it for anyone looking for a good science fiction read.

A Thousand Ships

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Alright… turns out you can have too much of a good thing.

I probably need a break from the myths for a while. I’m finding it difficult to pick up the next book, so I keep trying to go back to “easy reads” in myth and science fiction.

This was a bit too familiar, and I nearly bounced off it.

The author reads the audiobook, and does so with love and a good BBC broadcaster voice. But I think I’ve heard so many excellent voice actors bring novels to life lately that some of them could have brought this novel more to life.

It wants to tell a broad story, and is forceful about centring the story of Troy around women. It’s best at doing that towards the end, so it’s worth sticking with.

Part of that is about how it flits frequently between characters across short chapters. By the end we’ve met most of them and get to return to some, like Penelope, writing letters of rising irritation to Odysseus. What was he thinking, to be fair?

An unfair comparison I couldn’t stop making was with Pat Barker’s Women of Troy series. I found it more effective to spend longer with fewer individuals to tell this story.

Perhaps if I’d read this first, and Barker afterwards, it would have gripped me more.

Still glad I persisted — it was another well-told take.

The Fire Next Time

2026-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t know James Baldwin, other than as an eloquent voice and an American writer.

I picked this book purely for something short and different, from a respected writer.

But it is instantly recognisable as a precursor. I can see now that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me followed this book. Perhaps also Reni Eddo-Lodge.

Partly in format, but also in how these books speak to white people about race.

They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men

To be trapped in a history which you do not understand feels like a curse of mythic and ancient proportions.

I find it difficult not to admire the unreasonable magnanimity of believing your oppressors can be better, that they are tragic in their mistake, and that they lose something of themselves as they take from others. He says:

Whoever debases others is debasing himself

There’s an unflinching humanism in the writing. He asks for a coming together, but with those who might want to kill you. I wonder what America might have been if more solidarity had been extended on the basis of common means and not common race. As he puts it, the liberation of one is the liberation of the other.

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.

Baldwin writes beautifully and well.

The Penelopiad

2026-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Reading around Greek myth as an adult feels like going back to somewhere I spent a youthful summer. Not that I ever really did read much of it when I was younger, but the stories have always been around. There’s a familiarity and nostalgia to them.

The myths have persisted for a reason; the drama and tension carry across the millennia.

But honestly, I’ve read plots of my own time that gripped me and spoke to my present more.

Looking over my reading log, I do return to these, and quite frequently. I’ve been wondering why.

I think it’s for the reappraisal: seeing our best authors line up to take a crack at this pre-copyright work, trying to find something in it that speaks to the present in the voice of the past.

I think also there’s the particular job of authors drawing the neglected characters out of these tales: Pat Barker breathing life into the cracks of the Trojan story, turning offhand mentions of women into believable lives; or Madeline Miller leaving a villain intact, but so deeply contextualising her life that you cheer her witchcraft and furrow your brow at Odysseus.

So finding Margaret Atwood had taken a turn too was a delight. Penelope is the centre, but so are the 12 maids killed after the return of Odysseus.

When I’ve revisited old places where I spent a lot of time, there’s a feeling so similar to what I find in these books: an initial nostalgia that has to be wiped away from your eyes, and then a strange and discomforting experience.

Once-giant features loom less large. Overlooked things are reassessed in an adult gaze. You reflect not just on what you see now, but who you were and have become along the way.

I think these myths are a similar mirror, and I appreciate the authors who give cause and good art to the reappraisal.

Katabasis

2026-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

I enjoyed this, but not as much as Kuang’s other books.

The premise was interesting, but felt a bit like a postgraduate in-joke polished into literature. The protagonists are academics who seem to really want you to know how smart they are and how much they’ve read. An accurate portrait, but about as annoying on the page as it is in real life.

There is loving research into hellish mythology behind this book. These worlds, which are not of pure fire and damnation, feel strangely familiar. I’ve been somewhere similar before, in Supergiant’s Hades, Sandman’s Orpheus, or The Penelopiad. These are hells that are more benign than they appear, where the damned make their own punishment as a form of tragedy. If only they could escape themselves.

The book meandered a bit, though, sometimes appearing more interested in showing off its own research than advancing the story.

I’ve read all of Kuang’s books now, and will read whatever she does next. They’re fun. She enjoys playing with magic as a glitchy contradiction. Each book has a new take on this, and I’ll be interested to see what she comes up with next.

V13: Chronicle of a Trial

2026-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

I shouldn’t have liked this book.

I am allergic to true crime, weary of trite chat about terrorism and disinterested in courtroom drama.

However, Sam Freedman put it in his top books of 2025. I’m trying to add some serendipity to my reading list. So I took a handful of recommendations and bought them without reading what they were or why he liked them.

So I’m not in home territory here, with a chronicle of a trial. I would have missed a great deal leaving this on the pile.

What do lives look like in the years after such an event? The loss of the dead. The struggles of the survivors? What does a day in court mean to those who remain? He writes:

They struggle, but against no-one. For themselves, with themselves, with others. This isn’t positive thinking double speak, it’s a truth they’ve paid dearly for the right to say.

What can you understand from this kind of inquisitorial trial? How close to the truth can you get? A survivor testifies:

I’ve tried to understand how young people could get it into their heads to shoot other young people like that. I don’t understand. Maybe there’s nothing to understand. By I’m happy they can be questioned, I’m happy this trial is taking place. I think that my generation and the one after us, have a tremendous need to believe in justice.

Who would defend people accused of these crimes?

He shows us those lawyers in all their young energy, defending not a cause of the defence, but a system of justice. He describes the mother of a child killed that day, who turns to the lawyers for the accused and says:

Do your job, do it well. I mean it.

The idealism of it, and the sometimes compromised reality.

Whose suffering counts in the wake of an event like this?

We hear survivors from all sides, those who loved the dead, those who pretended a connection, those whose suffering was set aside as procedurally inconvenient. We hear of the parents of the accused - also with a claim to victimhood.

None are flat characters or simple answers. A man who writes a book in dialog with the father of his child’s killer. He believes in restorative justice. Another rages in anguish and rejects that such magnanimity is the moral standard. Who would we be?

Carrère describes, so beautifully, the most heartbreaking scenes. It moves you, opens you up. A lesser writer would have then used that opening to drive home the decisive message about terror, justice, or his politics. It’s to his credit that’s resisted.

Instead I think we get an opening. The beginning of a set of thoughts and questions, not the end of a conversation.

There is a moral backbone here that grounds the writing. A deeply humane and humanist one, that the author wrestles with instead of virtue signaling.

We are told of Baruch Spinoza saying:

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

And we try, but also feel for those who weep and wax. We trouble over what we can and do understand.

We hear Georges Salines quoting Vladimir Jankélévitch

Love for the wicked is not love for their wickedness, that would be a diabolical perversity. It is only love for the man himself, for the man who is the most difficult to love.

That is put to the test for the accused and those associated, as something difficult at times, easy at others. Not just a simple platitudes or brush for any moral stain.

This is a beautiful book, that I think sits poorly among other tales of court life, justice or terror. I’d put it amongst the best writers and chroniclers of an extreme of human experience.

I’m glad to have read it, happy also, not have given myself a chance to pass it over for something else.

The Seven Rules of Trust

2026-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

A short book, and one that felt homey.

I think I grew up on the internet Jimmy Wales helped make. I think the openness, transparency and community building remains a guiding star for what technology products should be. Especially in government.

In some ways, this made it a nice read but not an earthshaking one for me.

Though I suspect it’s because he’s preaching to the converted.

Along the way it was nice to hear something of the project’s history, more of its community and its relentless focus on being “an encyclopedia”.

I remember my sixth form history teacher warning us “not to trust Wikipedia, read the books, it’s inaccurate and could be written by anyone”. I suspect until shortly before he’d have been right about that. From then, until now however it’s a beacon of trust and reliability.

Now, as the AI LLM tools emerge (that would have never been possible without Wikipedia), I feel like I’d be the guy saying “don’t trust the LLM, click through to the wikipedia page and read that to verify”.

Hopefully that statement stands the test of time a bit better.

Intermezzo

2026-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Damn you Rooney,

Stop making me feel like these people are real. Stop making me inhabit their thoughts. Finding some strange recognition with lives that have nothing to do with mine. Weaving me and them into their social fabric, And then bloody ending your books.

I just gatecrashed someone else’s life for the weekend, and now they’re gone again, I’m back here and it’s all just memories.

The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848

2026-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

When Fredric Jameson writes:

it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

You stand facing forward. What political possibilities can we picture for today and for a future?

But here I started to consider the other end. How easy is it to imagine how this modern economy and era came to start?

I suppose I must know that Neanderthal didn’t exchange contracts on shellfish futures. That medieval serfs and lords had obligations not grounded in legal contracts or real estate brokered rents. That those worlds were a long way from the modern economy and legal system of today. But can I picture and describe the transition points? Do I know how this modern world came about, and what it might say for any great sociological change?

That’s the picture Hobsbawm helpfully provides here. In the introduction he describes:

Our problem is thus to explain not the existence of these elements of a new economy and society, but their triumph

Why was it this world that came about? Was that inevitable or contingent? Gradual or sudden? Organised or diffuse? Of local peculiarity or global consequence?

I think the answers we get are fairly clear, a centuries long process of “sapping and mining in previous centuries” culminates in something “decisive”. A sudden conquest of a new kind of society with “profound changes” for nearly everywhere its reach extended. Most of all the book describes how this happened at enormous speed between 1789 and 1848, with decades doing the work of centuries of transformation.

I started the book expecting something valuable, but a dry slog to push myself through. Not true, the opening pages begin a breathtaking style that continues throughout. The opening paragraphs are a litany of the words invented in this period that survive into modern daily speech. They are words I can’t really imagine not having, whole professions, philosophies, lenses onto the world. To imagine a time when Journalism is new is curious. To have “nationality”, “scientist”, “railway”, “industry”, “factory”, “ideology” also crop up in a 50 year period suggests a dizzying lifetime to have lived through.

Hobsbawm places this moment as so total a change, few of us would recognise European societies before the 1780s. We take a tour, not through palaces and halls of power, but the (unenviable) lives of majorities. Their lives, their bodies, their worlds made small by their circumstances.

The setup drives home that a departure of almost absurd scale occurred here. Requiring a coherent description as to why it came about and took such forceful root. The description we get is a dual piston engine of change. An economic revolution in Britain’s Industrial centres, and a Political one from the French revolution.

Perhaps the most plausible parts of the book for me is how unintentional this all seemed. The busy work of many hands, often achieving their own goals adds up to something emergent few of them could have predicted.

To take the industrial revolution, why in Britain? The British were not smarter, more enlightened or educated. Instead the contingency of other histories drove the tinderbox. Consequences of the civil war in restructuring power. The monopolisation of land. Subsistence chipped away by enclosure and peasantry already farming for the market, already beginning some manufacture to put out goods to try and supplement some livelihood. None of these things were designed to upend the world, but they unknowingly laid a groundwork. Meanwhile a growing class of business folk grew rich faster than investments grew to sustain their wealth.

Investors burned in foreign investments turned to a mania for railways to try and find a reliable 3.5% return, and doubtless bragging rights of proximity to such startling innovations. The parallels with today’s Silicon Valley surpluses and AI barons jump off a page.

Then the french revolution brings a political detonation, sweeping away kings and god given rights to rule. Centering nation, “the people” amid a Jacobin revolt that both brought terror to Paris, yet defended France from its invaders. Stabilising the financially ruined nation and setting it up as the engine of European history, as its ideas extended across the world before it.

By the mid point I’m returned to this heady sense of what it must have been like to have lived through this world. I always thought my grandmother who grew up with outdoor toilets and lived to see an IPhone saw a world transformed. However the change here comes across half a modern lifetime, and seems totally shattering of what came before, in a way I’m not sure 60s progress and consumer electronics equal.

With this dual revolution firmly set and justified, the second half of the book moves methodically through major consequences. Land, Industry, careers for talent, labouring poor, religion, the secular, arts and science. If the dual revolution is two rumbling volcanoes, then these are the survivors and inheritors of the new world. Shaped by the caldera they sit within, by 1848 now building the world that emerged from it.

Classic Chinese Stories by Lu Xun

2026-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

I love short story collections, but I always find them slightly uncomfortable.

They rush you through ideas and scenes at speed, packing a lot into a small space. For a good chunk of that time I’m often at sea. Where are we now? Who are these people? Why do I care?

With a novel, you often get those bearings in the first handful of pages, then enjoy the rest from that vantage point. With short stories, by the time you know where you are, they’ve ended.

Here the situation was compounded by reading stories from someone I already knew as a “renowned author”. Expectations were high, and the first signs of scrabbling to locate the narrative made me think it was all a sham and that I should go and read something else.

But finishing this short collection reminded me how much there is to be found in persisting.

Across seven stories - from A Small Incident to After Death - the collection builds a set of portraits that linger long after the specifics fade. Deeply humane figures pursue ordinary lives while skirting the edge of destitution. Reading it feels like moving room to room as a ghost, catching glimpses of lives mid-motion. There’s the awkwardness between master and servant who once played together as children. A destitute scholar whose trips to an inn chart a slow collapse. Two lovers whose hopes of forging a new path fade into regret. A mourned grandmother and an emptied life. A childhood night at the opera. A death.

One hundred years later, translated across the world, these stories still pay off in images that feel sharper and stranger than most of what I’ve read in the last few years.

Capitalist Realism

2025-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

A few pages into this book took me back to the late 2000s.

Its tone, its references, the debate at its core immediately transported me back. It took me a while to dispel the nostalgia of the debate and try to peer more earnestly at the book.

I still do not know how to think about what I found. In some ways its core message feels so dated. An argument from within “the end of history”. That we needed to find a way to wake a population from a belief that “there is no alternative”. In politics there are always alternatives, of varying degrees of palatability.

Once the Cold War ended however, western capitalism ceased to see itself as “one system” (it might argue the best), amongst others. Instead it began to be presented as something more “natural”. It was just reality itself. Alternatives became unrealistic, unserious, naïve. Not worth considering.

Much of the debates I remember were how you escape this world. How do you restart the process of imaginative alternatives. How could you picture a better world.

These debates feel dated now. An artefact of a “soft power” world that consolidated itself but with a smile and open hand. The 2020s feel more like a “hard power” world, where the fault lines are easier to see, perhaps easier to imagine resisting, but the force threatened is overwhelming. Imagining the alternative may no longer be the preeminent problem.

I don’t think this book is just a historical curiosity though. The world it describes was not fully replaced, just superseded. Some of what he describes lives on alongside the present.

I found sections on mental health, bureaucracy and audit culture, education, crisis management as post-politics, and nostalgia clear and relevant. The move there may still be to narrow what is thinkable, beyond alternative.

So even if it is a bit of a blast from the past, I’d recommend it as reading in the mid-2020s.

Hayek's Bastards

2025-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

I’d read Crack-Up Capitalism earlier in 2025 and felt like returning to Quinn’s books.

This book confirms his role for me as an excellent chronicler of the rise of the populist right globally. He achieves this by a much closer reading than I feel I get anywhere else. Someone who takes their conferences, books, speeches and networks of personal relationships seriously.

Perhaps most helpfully he paints a picture of how they see the world on their own terms. Given the growing role of these movements, the moment to ignore or casually characterise these movements now seems folly. To understand them and what they want, key.

Crack Up Capitalism traced the movements desire to break the world into smaller and smaller zones of sovereignty where exceptional orders can be tested. Here we’re looking at a genealogy. Where did they come from? Who paved the way?

The answer is unexpected for me, I would have placed the populist right of the US Tea Party as a kind of revolt against the existing right. Hayek’s Bastards places them as more radical offspring. Emerging from within a claim to Hayek’s legacy but ditching the parts of the argument that held to liberal constitutionality.

Instead this generation looked to insulate markets from democracy altogether, solve the problem of voters and seek an economy shielded from popular sovereignty.

I came away seeing the movement not as an oppositional revolt, so much as a more radical strand of the same thought. One happy to both clad itself in the legitimacy of its intellectual forefathers whilst picking the bits they liked and wholesale dumping the rest.

Slow Horses

2025-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

I’d enjoyed the le Carré books earlier in the year. The core of those I read were from a deeply analogue world. I wondered, could you do similar after the digital cut off? Or would it be like horror films, that have to invent a reason why our wonder devices stop working right before the claustrophobia creeps in.

Slow Horses was recommended to me as the solution, and it did a really interesting job. It mirrors le Carré’s sense of a fallible and human service. Though I think ultimately it may be less jaded about the whole venture. I’m not sure if it’ll leave its lighters on the floor.

The digital bits are probably the worst bit for me. Tech people get deployed a bit like wizards, with extraordinary powers and seemingly unlimited abilities. I think they’re deployed as a plot device to just join up how knowledge A can appear with person B. There’s very little interesting to be said about how tech has changed things beyond that. There was lots of fun tradecraft though, however the most enjoyable bits would have probably worked just as well in a 1970s novel.

So perhaps that’s the answer, if you want to do a racy spy novel, drop in a few tech wizards but center on your old school folk.

I suspect I’ll read more of the series next year.

The Only Good Indians

2025-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve really struggled to find horror writing that I really enjoy. I get a real thrill out of the new film wave of “elevated horror” (translation, it’s horror but also a well made film with something interesting to say).

I think it’s fair to say I didn’t find Ari Aster in this book, but I’m not sure that’s what it set out to be.

The setting brought me a world I’ve not really come across before, which I enjoyed. The structure left me reeling a bit as we jump between time and protagonists. I wasn’t sure when it wanted me to be confused and realise something slowly, or when I’d just missed a beat. Also a surprising amount of time given to basketball.

An interesting read but I’m still looking for a written horror I can rave about.

The Employees

2025-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

So this book is intentionally confusing. Which is forgiveable as it’s very short. I feel fine being asked to sit in discomfort so long as I know it’s not going to be that way for all my reading time across a week or more.

What we get though is strange, and I’ll need to mull over it for a while to get to the bottom of what I just read.

I think it captures well the idea that it doesn’t matter how mundane or extraordinary the nature of your tasks is. The logic of our world is that we sell our labour as employees, and that lens is prime for thinking about how we are seen and see ourselves.

It questions how far you might take that in an interesting way, but it’s via a winding and intentionally confounding route.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

2025-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Published in the run up to Donald Trump’s first term, this is a short pamphlet looking at “America’s turn towards authoritarianism”. It draws historical lessons from the 20th century to try and give a playbook to Americans.

It’s this American centrism that was a source of both fascination and alienation for me. I found my mileage and interest varied between lessons. What currently ails US politics doesn’t analogise seamlessly to the UK.

A few chapters particularly resonated with me:

Lesson 2 - Defend Institutions

The politics of executive discretion always feels like a quick resolution to our problems, if only we could put our favourite in the executive chair. Institutional thinking does trade that speed, but for checks on power that feel valuable. Which institutions we think are worth defending, he leaves up to us. However it’s a safe assumption nearly all of us can find one we’re grateful for. His suggests engaging there, going beyond passive gratitude for their existence into support and defence.

Lesson 15 - Contribute to good causes

Following institutional support, but seemingly more relevant to the broader ecosystem of commercial and charitable goods. There’s a particular need right now to pay for journalism. Something tough to make a general ask for whilst cost of living remains high. However none of the solutions to our problems will emerge from a more silent and less scrutinised world.

Lesson 17 - Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

I found myself thinking the “breaking news consumer handbooks” the WNYC show On the Media used to run. An attempt to critique an often alarming and opportunistic media response to spectacular tragedy. An attempt to tease out the patterns of our responses, both accidental and predatory. To steel ourselves against kneejerk cries of something must be done and afford reflection from a colder light of day.

Singular, horrific tragedies occur, and a drive for security is real in those moments. However we pass too much law in the wake or those moments that would have provoked a general grimace the day before.

This ratchet effect drives one way, and there’s not an obvious countervailing moment where we could relax. So do we ever expect the terrorist threat to relax to the point post 9/11 changes can be reset?

Lesson 14 - Establish a private life

This felt like a deep political insight. He paraphrases Hannah Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism as:

Not an all powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only in so far as we exercise control over what people know about us and in what circumstances they come to know it.

This feels like a profound insight for a modern digital world. One with an impulse to ignore this, often driven from ourselves. To share all, be a creator, achieve fame from our homes and sofas.

The YouTube creator economy suggests there is a viable path to power and success there. One that I think must trade some of that freedom for a general scrutiny of why your voice is worth listening to.

But the numbers putting it all out there exceeds the numbers making it. This description of totalitarianism I think survives an era where quiet words in living rooms become public treason, to help us understand an era of social media platform power, surveillance capitalism and the public shaming events of curtain twitching feeds.

I struggle with this regularly. My impulse is always to record, capture, document, share. However even as I type these words I wonder who you are reading them. Or how you may wish to use them against me in futures I can’t yet imagine.

I suspect many could find similar resonances in this book’s lessons, even if the whole glitters less than its parts.

Pale Rider

2025-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

A deeply frustrating book, for the sole reason of its publication date.

Laura Spinney first published Pale Rider in 2017, just before the centenary of the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic.

The book cited the flu as an unrecognised contributor to global history, overshadowed by the world wars but with potential to be just as significant. One not memorialised in art, poetry or literature in a curious conspiracy of silence.

A flu that infected as many as 500 million people, perhaps a third of global population. A flu that killed perhaps 1 in five of those who contracted it, with estimates ranging to 100 million. The deadliest pandemic in human history.

The book weaves history, sociology, politics, medical and scientific knowledge together artfully and accessibly. At all times she manages to make this seem such a human story, despite the enormous numbers. We see individual reactions across the globe in vivid detail.

My frustrations are purely born of what would happen a mere three years after the book is published and the COVID pandemic arrived.

So many of the issues discussed in the book were daily talking points for two years of our lives after. So many things that felt like us living in a unique global moment turn out to be repetition of mistakes of our great grandparents.

We see policymakers across the world debate school closures, the shadow of post viral fatigue syndromes, effective quarantines in places like Australia, then a rush to reopen inviting the disease in. We see misinformation, scientific disillusionment, vaccine skepticism borne out of both ignorance and legitimate fears of what the powerful have previously claimed were gifts.

It’s difficult to not get the sense we should have known better. Both collectively that so many of these same patterns would play out 100 years later suggest we’ve learned little. Even more frustratingly that this book would have been in most bookshops I and everyone else walked past for the years the COVID pandemic went on.

Many of the characters we meet along the way would have been astounded at the tools we have to hand. As they struggled to convince of basic germ theory we can sequence viral DNA in hours, test and ship RNA vaccines in a short year.

But that alone won’t save us from the next one. Pandemic remains one of the most likely and impactful things that could sweep across precarious and comfortable lives alike. Perhaps we should all be students of pandemics past in preparation.

Empire of AI

2025-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

I wonder what it’ll be like to read this post, or Karen Hao’s book, at a later time.

By then the meaning of the technologies described, and their place in history, will likely be clearer. The story we tell will have settled a bit, in the way the story of the plough, steam, electrification, and microchips has. Or in the way follies to find continents that never existed, snake oils once believed in, or airships that disappeared from skies are.

But reader of the future, let me try to convince you that in this moment the story felt very unclear. Not for lack of people trying—bold claims and certainty abound. However, I feel all are somewhat holding their breath to see what comes next.

Within that range of uncertainty you can lean towards optimism or skepticism. For whether the technology works now, or ever will. For its impact on the economy. For its place in history when we describe the lives lived around it.

From where I sit, I see 2025 as a year of extraordinary bets on those outcomes. Reading Empire of AI feels timely at a moment before the odds feel reliably set, and the outcome very much unsettled.

Debate rages, and feels incessantly future tense. So Karen Hao’s tour through recent history and the present tense feels refreshingly tangible.

We encounter big media moments, seen first from the outside, as I saw them at a distance across my feeds. Then we spend hours with the individuals behind them, until they feel like colleagues in your organisation, people instead of figureheads.

We hear their claims, hopes, and dreams for the future. See moments where they do impressive and dismal things to those around them.

Suddenly grand questions of history and uncertain futures feel reduced to relatable ones. Would I follow these people? Am I convinced by the quieter of their conversations?

I came to this book as a skeptic of these technologies and cautious over their meaning. I use Large Language Models and generative chatbots frequently.

They’re probably now better than search engines, though I’m unclear if that’s a merit of their achievements, or a mark of the rapid degeneration of search from a useful index to a sponsored feed.

I also do a ton of bitty and annoying specific things with a computer, and have enduring hope for a flexible tool that can help free me to think more and spend less time copy-pasting.

Yet I am so often supremely disappointed by the output.

This stochastic parrot, this next-word guessing machine, this alluring mirage of an on-tap intelligence I can beckon to any task.

For those of us not in the driving seat of these technologies, we’re in an interregnum before we know how this turns out. We can waste it speculating about the future, or we can more closely examine the present. What does this technology do right now? Who are the people behind it? What are their incentives? Do they feel like people we’d believe as we see a history of their decisions?

Empire of AI takes us on a meticulous and illuminating tour of this recent past and present. Deep into the companies producing it. Its figureheads are brought down from high pedestals and press release hype to a human level.

After spending hours with these people, their organisations, and tracing their decisions step by step, I find myself deeply unconvinced of their thesis. Both that the limited “demo” we get today could grow and scale to a point where something truly intelligent emerges. A sentient symphony out of cawing echoes.

What seems a more likely take on this moment is that Californian Silicon Valley groupthink has collided into a consolidated corporate structure with more money than they can find good investments for. Extraordinary sums taken on big bets, with some believing it will pay off, but few of these big players truly threatened if it does not. Despite the eye-watering sums of capital allocated.

In the meantime, the train must continue. Hype fueling it. The stock market climbs, and in an attempt to prove it’s worth something today it’s forcibly thrust into every possible tool with little invitation from users.

Empire of AI is a great guide to this moment and how we got here. One that cuts through a lot of the noise to look at some uncomfortable truths on which the entire house of cards is built. It has reinforced my doubts that the sunny uplands are just around the corner.

Whether I’m wrong about that, time will tell.

The Karla Trilogy

2025-11-25T20:30:00+00:00

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People

These books are not new, around fifty years old as I write, yet they feel unexpectedly fresh.

There’s no obvious reason they should. This is a world of paper files, payphones and darkrooms where photographs bloom slowly from negatives. Nothing about that should feel contemporary.

Yet something about these ghostly forces still resonates. Their work relies more on psychology and misdirection than on technology. The people behind it all are painfully, recognisably ordinary.

They read as civil servants in their stature, motivations and petty office squabbles. Perhaps the freshness lies in portraying an intelligence world run by thoroughly human people, rather than one-man armies or omnipotent masterminds.

Tinker Tailor remains a classic: taut, focused and well paced. It’s easy to sink into.

The Honourable Schoolboy suffers by comparison. The familiar ingredients are there, but scattered across a bewildering flurry of characters and rapid scene changes that left me constantly reaching for names. It builds towards something grand that never quite arrives, though the sense of incompletion may be the point.

Smiley’s People regains that focus and is more satisfying. It also lands the trilogy’s themes neatly in its final pages.

Great schemes and slow-burn machinations, patience and dazzling tradecraft, but to what end, and with what meaning as the world shifts around them?

At the centre stands Smiley, whose inner and professional life shines on every page he appears. A review captured him better than I can:

a bit shabby, academic, basically loyal, and sceptical of the enthusiasms of his political masters. The Guardian

A model of a public servant I find particularly compelling.

Life and Fate

2025-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

I have a growing sense of urgency to understand the totalitarian. Not just in the lazy slander of comment sections, but in its historical specificity.

Hannah Arendt lingers on my next-up list. Books of intimidating length and content glower at me as I reach for others ahead of them.

I wanted an easy entry point, and despite its gravity, Life and Fate offered one. I’d read Stalingrad a while back but had forgotten most of the cast, encountering them afresh.

It captured the feeling of being caught in a vice: on one side, totalitarian German fascism driving toward the Volga; on the other, rigid, paranoid, and suffocating Soviet rule.

There were striking scenes - in Stalingrad, physics institutes, everyday homes. The size of the cast and my poor grasp of Russian naming conventions made for a book to wade through at times.

Between the tightening walls of history, Grossman focuses conspicuously on the domestic, small and interpersonal moments. Perhaps this is truer to most experience of them. World-historic events glimpsed from a kitchen table or a window up the street.

Small kindnesses and care appear myriad, and despite their times. The cruelties - the ghettos, political prisons, anti-semitism, brutalities of war, opportunism, treatment of women - a mix; product of their times but often remaining a choice of those who carry it out.

I think Grossman must have had a faith of those human acts, even when the larger organising principles and moral character of its supporters fail around them.

How to Survive a Crisis: Lessons in Resilience and avoiding disaster

2025-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

A manual for crisis. One I’ll return to if I’m ever in the midst of one.

The book offers a distinction between:

Emergency

Something you can anticipate, and control.

When they do occur, careful advanced planning can be invoked to address them.

The response need not be entirely novel, you can work from those plans. An emergency shouldn’t also require a wholesale re-thinking of a system.

With a good mind for nightmares you can likely anticipate a lot of bad things, but what you prepare for is grounded in the language of risk. There’s a proportionality principle here, with likelihood and impact guiding where time is well spent.

An emergency may be bad, but it differs from the others in using that planning to make the situation controllable. So here we are concerned with the creative foresight to anticipate consequence, balanced as risks, with a quality of preparation and rehersal to ensure those plans actually work.

Crisis

An escalation from emergency, it’s an unstable situation you don’t control featuring high levels of uncertainty.

As Omand puts it in an interview:

It is characteristic of a crisis that the person in charge doesn’t immediately know what to do. If they did, they would press the button, their emergency plans would swing into action, the emergency services would turn up at the front door, and it would be dealt with, painful though it might be.

Causes may be unclear, events unanticipated or a novel variant exceeding past preparations. Standard protocols may fail or a levers that appeared solid don’t work when pulled. How severe the crisis is will vary based on Intensity, Extent and Duration. Omand shortens this to IED, a pun that recalls the military jargon for improvised explosive devices.

Crisis is an inevitably testing moment, but not a moment for despair. There are opportunities to survive long enough to regain a measure of control.

This can be helped by early recognition of the seriousness of a situation, mobilising what resources you have to engage the problem, careful handling of uncertainty, considering personal resilience and learning lessons as you go.

The book is mostly about crisis and I think is designed to challenge any leader who thinks they are fully prepared for what is to come. The loss of control returns time and again. Crisis isn’t something that can be managed in the same way as an emergency.

The book isn’t fatalistic though, there’s still an opportunity presented here. If a crisis can be navigated or survived there may be opportunities to deescalate it back to an emergency, with a return to the manageable.

On the other side, there’s the risk that poor handling could see a slide into disaster.

Disaster

Disaster is beyond control, with limitation as the main option.

It is the dark cloud that hangs over many of the examples in the book, disaster is the impact we would have sorely wanted to mitigate. High severity, with massive impact on life, systems or property. Breakdowns at a systemic level, or a cascade of failures that exceeds the capacity to respond. Disaster may have long term consequences felt for years afterwards.

Not all disaster is mitigable however:

…crisis can flip the other way, sliding into disaster. Some situations cannot be pulled back, and all that can be attempted is to reduce the harm being done.

Here you go beyond trying to survive the crisis towards a focus on damage limitation and recovery. Perhaps in the hope of reconstruction and eventual resilience.

The book could be a bit dry for anyone not already fascinated by the field. I gained confidence as I read through, Omand says sensible technical things at the margins of his main points that suggest he’s drawing from a broad range of ideas. Where those ideas touched on fields I know well as a software developer, I found myself heartened and agreed, taking that confidence into areas I knew less of.

It speaks the language of “normal accidents”, complexity and coupling, testing and drills. All areas that resonate a lot with me right now.

I think there’s a tendency to ascribe leaders and organisations in every field with broad powers. So when things go wrong, it appears as negligence or malice. Omand rightly holds these groups to high standards in preparing and mitigating the worst to protect life. However it also suggests something wild inherent to this complex and interdependent world in which we live. Crisis and disaster will come for all given time. The book suggests survival is not to be taken lightly.

The Future of Truth

2025-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Herzog’s last book really stuck with me. Its biography and musings were wide-ranging. I was caught in the stream of his thoughts, bobbing through vivid scenes of a Bavarian childhood, violent natural wonders, and encounters with human extremes.

This book feels like a coda or afterthought. Like leaving the party he turned to add “just one more thing” before launching into a monograph on truth.

But it’s a provoking one. I used to idolise Cinéma vérité and documentary filmmakers who sought to get to the truth of things. I find myself less confident in that project now. When a humble nature documentary is composed of images shot across years, sometimes even continents and different animals, yet strung seamlessly into a sequence of seconds, it’s easy to become disillusioned about truth. This line of thought never led anywhere productive, though. Just to a kind of grumpy sniff at those who reach for the real.

Herzog returns to tell us that in an age of ever-easier fabrication, a reach back to Vérité brings no truth. Only ‘accountant’s truth’; he seeks an ‘ecstatic truth’. In his 1999 manifesto, he described this as:

“There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

He wants something that goes beyond a mere retelling of events into something that resonates more deeply. Something almost dreamlike but which holds great meaning.

It feels timely. In a world where trusted ground is eroding in a sea of slop, truth feels difficult to come by. I think he’s right that a mere description of the facts is likely insufficient in response to that tide. Something deeper, more resonant feels like the order of the day. There’s something empowering in that, a feeling of agency in a world that seems designed to make you question if anything solid can be held on to.

But I’m left with a fear, too. Ecstatic truth might burn bright, care less about the nitpicking details in favour of the resonant whole. It may have a shattering force of emotion that bridges voids to touch an audience, but do those virtues mean it’s less susceptible to deceit?

Aren’t we talking about a tool demagogues the world over have employed with the shattering force of their rhetoric? Is the ecstasy the important bit, and the truth or lie of it a secondary concern?

Normal People

2025-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

I saw the TV show first, then fled to the book to hold on to a scrap of those feelings. It left me confused. There isn’t much in these stories I recognise from my own life at this age. Yet the story leaves me with a strong sense of nostalgia.

Late in the book, a character says:

“It’s funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”

I have been at an age when my life changed a lot from small decisions. The life I live now is the product of choices that seemed both enormous and inconsequential at the time. The most lasting are tied to the people I shared that time with. They feel as much like impressions we left on each other as choices I made myself.

It’s set in a period where I also came of age, but the familiarity goes beyond that time. I’m left with a strong, homely, troubling nostalgia I find myself stuck with since finishing it. And a hunger to peek back into their lives, in hopes I can recall more of my own.

That aside, it’s one of the best things I’ve read this year.

David Attenborough's New Life Stories

2021-07-01T21:51:00+01:00

More of the same from Quest under capricorn, and that is no bad thing.

Instead of focusing on a single period or trip, we now graze broadly from across the natural world and and through his extraordinary career.

The renown for Attenborough’s voice and cadence can often hide the skill with which he uses it. I have heard many slip into Attenboroughish tones to narrate the world around them for comic effect. Whilst some impressions cut close, none mange the way he wields a range of voice to draw you through a story. Sarcasm, enthusiasm, reproach, joy and sadness are all lightly suggest in his tones.

His skill is making scientific communication entertaining for long enough to be enlightening. I’d happily listen to hours more.

A Closed and Common Orbit

2021-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Small spoiler perhaps:

This book does not pick up where the last left off. Sorry if that’s a surprise.

It was for me, after time lovingly building a world and a crew in it, it was a shock to be relegated to a single corner, with so few we already knew.

She repeats the trick of the first book admirably. Building more of a world, giving us perspectives into the rich lives of her characters and using the fondness generated to explore a range of social themes.

This time we look at transforming yourself, being comfortable in a body and families you choose.

I was fun, but I found it a surprising loss to not return to the crew of the first book.

I would like to read more, but knowing this repeats through the series leaves me wanting a bit of time and faded memory before moving on to pick up the next one.

Atomic Habits

2021-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

I found this helpful and insightful.

I see echos of it’s points in books like Exercised that I read later.

He says when setting out to improve ourselves we focus too much on the destination and not enough on the means. He describes habits as a kind of compound interest on beneficial behaviours. Encouraging us to spend more time thinking about how to encourage and maintain those behaviors rather than focusing too much on the results they hope to encourage.

However the trajectory must move towards some goal you can justify. One which is articulated in terms of “who you want to be”. A claim to identity being strong enough to power you though the bad bits.

With that set, it is more a tactical challenge, how do you arrange your environment and life so it is almost more difficult not to maintain the behaviour. His four laws:

make it obvious
make it attractive
make it easy
make it satisfying

See these through and the behaviour becomes a rote action, one that is harder to break and one which day-by-day will move you closer to what you want and away from what you do not.

I think self help can be a murky genre, but this seemed a plausible description of our behaviours. And a reasonable remedy to do what we can to fix them.

The Book of Trespass

2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

I kept seeing landscapes out of windows. I picked this book up when looking for some thoughts about how they came to be. How they worked.

I found much more, and was pleasantly surprised. A history of land, ownership and popular history of those who lived outside the manor hall. It quickly reminded me of the blog “Who owns england”, and the author makes an appearance at one or two points.

I am still not sure who this book is for. At times it seemed like it might be a reach out beyond the left to take a more common love of the natural world as a base to query the access to it. At other times it picks the confident utopian speech that the left uses when talking to itself.

Missing the wood for the trees, it is easy to see nature as outside of politics or history. This book does a good job of reuniting the two. In the links it makes we can see a through line from injustices of old to political conversations that remain alive today.

Persepolis I & II

2021-04-28T12:55:00+01:00

“Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose only one. I think it’s better to do both”.

I read a bit about the comic after finishing it.

Both the book itself and interviews make the case for comics as a way to bridge a gap in understanding. Take dramatic events from modern Iranian history and make them legible to the world.

If that is what she set out to achieve, then the author has done a great job.

A human and complex portrayal of a character, grappling with events of world history that I should really have known more about by now.

Comics can do a lot more than I thought, I should take them more seriously as literature.

Who We Are and How We Got Here

2021-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

A book of two halves.

A New Tool

The first, is a treat. Rapid scientific advance has seen ancient DNA emerge with a bang. This should be hailed as one of the most exciting scientific developments of our time

Telescopes, microscopes and other tools give us access to new worlds. With them many celebrated discoveries can be made. Advances in these tools allow us to see further and deeper.

But how rare is it to get a brand new category of tool. A new way to push back the boundaries of the unknown and unlock parts of the universe that previously were off limits.

We cheered the discovery of gravitational waves. A new tool to peer at the stars and see further and deeper into time and space between the stars.

This book is about a tool of similar magnitude that seems lesser known. Ancient DNA and the study of population genetics have allowed us to gaze into the fabric of our cells, and into the deep past of long dead humans.

Before this, our knowledge of the past was limited to the surface of the world. Hoping that bones brought to the surface by geology were caught for study before they were destroyed by weather.

Now we know of peoples for who there are no bones, no archeology and no histories. We can now see the ghosts of the ong dead in our own cells.

It is an exciting thing to be alive to witness.

The first half, captures that excitement. I started underlining points of interest only to stop after a they nearly joined to cover entire pages.

The complexity of biological heredity, the astonishing advance of the technology and decline in its cost, the ghostly silhouettes populations and drama of sudden changes in the genetic record. Our discovery that we carry Neanderthal DNA as well as from illusive Denisovians.

The work pays moving homage to Luca Cavalli-Sforza, placing his work as ahead of its time, foundational and now fully realised with the emergence of modern genetics and ancient DNA.

This is a beginning. One which should greatly advance our understanding of ourselves.

And here the controversy begins.

But for whose benefit?

The longest section on this book’s Wikipeida summarises how it was received. Critics seem to have universally praised the books science and communication of it.

This issue appears as the second half turns to how these new tools should be used, the conclusions we can draw and the impact of the work in mainstream culture.

Racism is foundational to population genetics - a pursuit for scientific basis to legitimise the supremacy of European stock.

However, the finding that there is more difference internal to populations grouped as “races” than between them seemed an insoluble challenge to the scientifically minded bigot.

These histories hang over parts of the book that discuss the structure of populations. In one case asking if flight from this past has left us ignoring differences that verifiably exist between populations:

For the great majority of traits, there is, as Lewontin said, much more variation within populations than across populations. This means that individuals with extreme high or low values of the great majority of traits can occur in any population. But it does not preclude the existence of subtler, average differences in traits across populations. (p 255)

This has reignited a debate around how discussion of “populations” here may, or may not, map on to discussions of race. With uncomfortable parallels proposed between this discussion and racist scientific histories.

There is also the question of participation.

Population genetics is requires enormous amounts of data. The most diverse and numerous the sources the better the chances to make new associations. The dat we have currently skews to the north and west due to the historic cost, healthcare development and where funding and interest focused.

Ancient DNA also has a skew, to colder, dryer climates with better preservation and that are still above sea level, again somewhat northerly.

In some places this paucity of data places a large emphasis on a few existing ancient remains. Or creates a desire to go out and fill in gaps from modern populations.

And there is reason to be impatient. Not only could this research tell us more about our origins and pasts, but it could also unlock medical breakthroughs by better understanding our genetics at scale.

I can believe there is a deeply progressive cause here.

So with such urgency what do you do if folks resist this drive to data? What do you do when indigenious populations refuse access to ancestral bones that could key keystones of DNA? What do you do if modern populations say they already have an origin story and have little interest donating DNA to an attempt by distant people to provide a overriding new one?

Perhaps more troubling, given the results redefine geographic origin - what when the results appear to validate population difference that map to racist concerns that have been the basis for discrimination?

At times the author seems frustrated by some of these concerns. Especially with ancient remains claimed by indigenous American groups. His more fierce critics place his response somewhere between naïve and ethnically negligent in his desire to forge ahead without addressing the histories of exploitation that surround populations of proposed subjects.

I am still working out what to think about all this, and suspect there’s a great deal of historical context I miss as a lay reader in the field.

I worry that this could get characterised as a camp who would frustrate great scientific discoveries, and a camp who would trample the desires and beliefs of those less powerful to achieve them.

But in the reviews I read I think there is room to see this as a call for “less haste, more speed”, and a well intentioned debate about the proper use of this new tool and gathering data to feed it. Continuing questions of research ethics that I assume are very familiar across scientific campuses.

At the end of his book review “Ghosts in the Genome” John Hawks acknowledges the advance of the science whilst pointing out that the output of these studies is not merely more papers for the academic mountain. Ancient DNA and modern population genetics offers us a new window into the story of human origins:

But for the great human story to matter to us, we must each see our own place in it. The dead cannot speak, but science can help us to see their humanity nonetheless. Doing so helps us maintain the humanity of our science.

One of the most thought provoking books I read in 2020, I look forward to seeing where this all takes us, what discoveries we make and how the rest of us respond.

Where the Crawdads Sing

2021-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

I think I accidentally bought this book, but it turned out well.

I can imagine what the blurb might have been, and I can imagine putting it back on the shelf after reading it.

But, by the time I realised this book was an unusual choice, I was interested to see where it was going. The central character’s live was unfolding in interesting ways, and I was also entranced by it’s descriptions of the natural world that surrounds her.

I spent a lot of time zooming around on google earth looking at the Great Dismal Swamp whilst listening to this.

A world away, it took me briefly and enjoyably out of an early Covid lockdown.

The Fat Years

2021-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

An entire society forgets that a month happened, and no-one is really sure why. Those that recall something more, or even recall the loss, are torn socially adrift.

I have wanted to read more Chinese science fiction since reading Cixin Liu’s “Three body problem” trilogy a few years back.

I did not enjoy the book as much as Cixin Liu’s work, but has an intriguing core mystery that propelled me through it in short order.

Strangely the audiobook I listened to also comes bundled with a load of literary criticism on the book. The last hour or two of listening are a critics take, especially on some of the climatic chapters.

I found these interesting, but somewhat like an episode of the Sinica podcast had escaped my feeds and snuck into audible.

An odd but interesting and enjoyable read.

The Doors of Eden

2021-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Aliens in fiction are mostly rubbish.

Given the size and scope of the universe, they always happen to be so… recognisable. Like two legs are the innate best way to get around. Or everyone happens to have similar brains and emotions, so conveniently legible in a book.

Or they’re basically bugs or something, because if it turns out the universe is not filled with other humans it must be bugs.

Tchaikovsky solves this problem for me somewhat. With Children of Ruin and Children of Time we got a look at something totally alien, but with a good reason for being so familiar.

With my disbelief suspended, he then used that to take us on a tour of the really wild and alien that already exists on our doorstep. That seems grounded in real biology, and is all the more shocking for the element of truth.

But the gimmick to those books is not easily repeated, so can he pull off another close encounter with some interesting other minds?

To my surprise, the answer is yes!

We get another tour through the most alien parts of Earth’s natural history. Tracing outlines through time and highlighting the surprising sophistication that surrounds us.

Life on Earth

2021-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

In the documentary Cosmos, Carl Sagan talks through the major groups of life that exists on earth.

At one point he shows a diagram showing one how one branch tumbled through evolution and resulting in Humans.

If you like the idea of that diagram, but as a book, read by David Attenborough, and with a more about other parts of the tree of life… then this is the book for you!

From Weeknotes to Recently

2021-04-12T00:08:40+01:00

I have not written a new weeknote since 2021 started. I started building up a backlog around new year, and I never caught up.

I had two intentions for weeknotes:

To exercise my own writing skills, improving them through practice.
To expose the work I do - so more folks can see what it is like to be a developer and civil servant.

I think this second point is where I was the least successful.

Finding something interesting from a week, that translates well to folks outside and keeps the right amount of confidence and adherance to the civil service code… is a tricky balance.

Notes on life outside work started to fill the space left there. But a personal blog was not what I had set out to do.

So plan B:

Fewer, irregular posts. But mostly when there is something interesting to be said about working as a developer or for government. Hopefully those will be both more interesting and offer better insight for the interested.

And for the writing practice, I’ll catch up on the book reviews.

Quest under capricorn, Zoo quest for a dragon and Quest in paradise

2021-01-31T23:58:00+01:00

I ordered these separately. Which was foolish in retrospect. All three are neatly bundled (with an extra) “David Attenborough: The Early Years Collection”. But they were all going for less than the price of an audible credit in a sale, so it seemed like a good deal.

I enjoyed each one tremendously.

I grew up on a diet of Attenborough’s natural history broadcasting. So it is a pleasure to find he also has a skill for writing books.

Animals play a due part in all the books, but the real stars are encounters with fellow humans. Unreliable boat captains off Komodo, the artists of Arnhem Land, an interrupted wedding and the last residents of an abandoned Australian town. A swirl of charters draw us through the stories, and narrated in his own voice it is a pleasure.

Reading these made me wonder about the particular timespan of Attenborough’s life. A long span of peace in Europe after the second world wars, and the technologies that resulted from it made it possible for him to travel at speeds to distances impossible a generation before.

In doing it seems he outpaced the blast wave of 20th century modernity in many of his destinations. Arriving before the rest of us turned up as tourists, before our global demands drove deforestation and before time and space collapsed in far away places, shrunk by jet turbines and combustion engines.

To read this with nostalgia for the untouched would be a mistake. It would ask much of the world to live in a reserve of lower life quality for our amusement. However many of the places in these books seem much further away than they do today.

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

2021-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

“…I also believe that white people who recognise racism have an incredibly important part to play. That part can’t be played while wallowing in guilt. White support looks like financial or administrative assistance to the groups doing vital work. Or intervening when you are needed in bystander situations. Support looks like white advocacy for anti-racist causes in all-white spaces. White people, you need to talk to other white people about race. Yes, you may be written off as a radical, but you have much less to lose.”

A clear, compelling and comprehensive summary of our complacency. With a reasonable ask that we face history, the inequality of the present and understand the structural racism that renews it daily. A measured fury in calling to action that white people to take their share of the burden in undoing what they built.

Greetings from Bury Park

2021-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

I was interested in the backdrop to this book, having moved to a similar part of the world.

I found what I was looking for, and along the way got a moving story of a mans relationship to his father, his family and his identity.

Funny, moving, pleasantly sentimental, I enjoyed the book.

The City We Became

2021-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

A really neat concept that I won’t spoil here.

The core concept grows neatly from a plot device that surrounds our characters into a new universe. And what a universe it is.

Heros and villains end up being more players in an ecosystem. All players have motivations, and a moral high ground can be difficult to find.

The book lays a solid ground of universe, and uses that to take us on an adventure through new york with an ensemble cast.

I really enjoyed it - and apparently it will be the first in a series.

The Peregrine

2020-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

The last book I read in 2020 was also the best.

I had started winter with a string of books read by David Attenborough. I picked this up just to keep listening to Attenborough’s voice, and based on his recommendation.

The natural world is overwhelming in its complexity. In trying to really see it I can get lost in the endless links it creates. It’s nice to pull on the thread of a single species and tease things out from there.

This book looks at the titular bird. It’s rendered as an intimate portrait, and is the majority of what we focus on here.

The author themselves pursues them over the hills, but is barely defined. He is a tripod spot, from where we set up our observing camera. The lens is hardly ever turned back on him, or really much of humanity around the landscape.

The writing is deep and rich in its description. Containing almost a ludicrous evocative beauty.

My favourite:

A flock of starlings rose in front of him, and flew south as fast as they could. The hawk rushed over and beyond them in a second. They seemed to flick back beneath him as though they had never moved. He flowed across the dazzling sky in one great slash of light, and flared out into the darkness of the trees. I did not see him again, but long after he had gone the bird-clouds rose and fell above the southern skyline, like the calm drift of smoke above the rage and fire of battle

Similar to The Fat Years, the book ends with a good hour of literary criticism about what you just listened to. I could have probably done without that, but it’s a book I’ll keep going back to.

Weeknotes #016: Stay at home

2020-12-28T22:10:00+01:00

What I did in the 52nd week of 2020

Work

I continued last weeks work on an emergency brake feature.

We considered where it should go, either nestled in an existing repo or as its own thing. In the end I rolled it out as its own thing. The time/effort cost to set up a new repository was small and we already needed to separate some of the hosting. I liked the idea of this being something that sits apart from our daily work but is well referenced in our docs and team manual. A big red “Break in case of emergency box”.

At GOV.UK I have mostly work on things that already exist, so this was a rare change to practise setting things up from scratch. We are using the government Platform as a Service (PaaS) for hosting, and I had only really set something up on there once before. That was back during the blurry days of our early coronavirus response. So this was a chance to remind myself and consolidate a bit of knowledge.

The PaaS is something GDS owns and maintains, aimed at making it easier for parts of government to deploy, host and maintain services. It does this very well. It wraps around Amazon Web Services (AWS), and makes it easy to do things like scale your application or manage billing. Boring magic!

We use tools like Cloud Foundry and its CLI, and automate deploys with concourse. So my week was a lot of writing config YAML, getting reviews and testing it against staging.

I know I complained about infrastructure stuff a couple of weeks ago, but I actually quite enjoyed this. Shh, do not tell anyone.

We also changed up our 2nd line shifts and on call rota this week. Usually you rotate on for a full week, but given it is the holidays and the amount going on in government right now, that all seemed a bit unfair. Instead we are all doing a day here and there to share it around. That took me out of the team for a day this week.

Read

Reading momentum continued. Back at the start of the year I told Goodreads I would try and read 40 books. I then decided I did not like Goodeads and made this blog to track the things I was logging there.

For the majority of the year I have been so far behind 40 that I largely gave up on the target and forgot about it. However with the end in sight I was surprised to find I am actually quite close!

The moment I realised this, I ran straight into Marilyn Strathern’s summary of Goodhart’s Law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

… I started looking for short books to cram them in!

Doing it for the numbers seems to miss the point. I want the numbers to be evidence of what I read, not drive the reading! So I stopped grabbing the first 3 hour read I could find, and started thinking about what I actually want to read and finish before the year is out.

That mix saw me chomp though some of David Attenborough’s early works - his zoological knowledge shines on paper, perhaps more than when presenting. He is an entertaining writer too.

I also read Atomic Habits, and started “The book of Trespass”.

I did most of this whilst playing Cyberpunk 2077, which I played to completion because it cost a fair wedge - but I have decided was rubbish. By the end I had the game pretty much on mute whilst Attenborough recounted earlier life, both his and the planet’s.

Otherwise

Not a lot else going on. I work, I read or listen to books, I play games, I sleep. A bit of cooking and DIY in between. Outside is cold, dark and uninviting. Walks are not as appealing as they were in summer so I have been doing fewer.

Covid cases are also very high. So I think I am fine to be staying at home.

Listened to

Oh no! For years and years I have chomped through podcasts every day of the week.

However I have traded that eartime for books this week. This is the longest stretch without feeding that addiction.

My feeds swell with new episodes. Watching their intruging titles pile up, all overlooked delights is strangely stressful.

I think I will have to brutally prune that list in the new year if I want to keep up the reading.

Wolf Hall and Bring up the bodies

2020-12-21T20:00:00+01:00

I read Wolf Hall at the start of the year and Bring up the Bodies towards the end.

I have a strange difficulty imagining the lives of people in the past. From my full colour present I can only conjure a desaturated jittery newsreel. Tutor period are worse, sliced monologues of history that pan slowly over oil paintings.

So it is a pleasure to spend time with Thomas Cromwell in these books. He seems so very alive. Three dimensional, and modern. This man I can imagine plucked out of Tudor London and thriving in the halls of Westminster. Aristocratic court drama usually bore me, but here I cheer this man on though his bleak Borgan or 15th century house of cards. I think mostly because I like him.

The two books blur into one for me, the second book felt more like later chapters of the first.

Whilst the high drama is compelling, I find myself thinking more about the passing moments that give a little window into a past.

Like the sweating sickness that emptied London. A curiosity when i read the first book at the start of the pandemic, a resonant echo later in the year.

We join Cromwell in his brooding evenings, or seemingly lost in thought amongst between conversations. I have a sense this trend increases in the second book, perhaps older by then he is reflecting more. Otherwise we follow him over his shoulder, observing how he fares at court. Bursts of activity then seem to condense b ack into reflective evenings, where his memories haunt him.

They are long books, and this remembering is more effective for that. Recalling a character not seen for 100 pages does feel like reminiscing over someone known log ago. And then, when the still reflections draw to an end, in a blink we appear in the next scene. Jump cuts of time moving quick until we can find our next slow moment.

I really enjoyed these books, they are beautifully written. I look forward to reading the third in 2021.

The Good Immigrant

2020-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

I listen to a lot of US podcasts. In recent years WNCY has put out a lot of great content considering the history of race in the states. In particular The United States of Anxiety has had run after run of gripping journalism that dives into history and the reconstruction era.

But this felt distant, and similar journalism on race in the UK, absent. Turns out it was there all along, I was just looking in the wrong place, not hard enough or not at all until this summer.

This is not a manual for unpicking what whiteness has wrought, or a handbook to that history. It is a collection of stories that shows the breadth of quality writing about race and racism in the UK. Traversing topics but also writing styles and tones. Some are serious or pensive, other wry, witty and outright hilarious. Among them are Nish Kumar and Bim Adewunmi, of Radio 4 and This American Life fame and the actor Riz Ahmed.

Along with vesper flights this year, the book also convinced me collected essays are great. With time for depth, but frequent novelty to pull that draws you across hours of reading.

Educated

2020-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

A while back David Runciman interviewed Tara Westover on the Talking Politics podcast. After hearing it re-aired I added it to my reading list on a whim.

I came to the book with some fairly clear expectations, the idea of a woman with no formal education ending up at Cambridge and burning through degrees. Perhaps it would be a modern parable, of Education: the great equaliser. Perhaps a story where institutions had taken an innate curiosity and talent and nurtured it. I expected a kind of rags to intellectual riches story that might make me feel good someone joining a university educated club that I am a part of.

This book is enormously better for not being anything like that. It is about pulling away from a difficult home life. The power of parents to shape the world of their children, and how enduring that can be if their exposure is limited to other thoughts. Education is not something that arrives, it is there from the beginning it provides a world view.

Then as new sources of education appear, conflict begins. It reminded me that whilst I think of education as a liberator it can often appear as a difficult and destructive act too. It might offer a path that frees the author to step away from a terrible home life, but it also drove a wedge between her and her loved ones.

I mention this because I too often propose education as a solution for everything, and unalloyed good. I still believe that. But my education was a fairly straightforward thing thing, others pursue it at greater personal cost. I tend to forget that.

Whilst we focus on brand name University degrees as a rubber stamp for the educated. This book is a reminder of the diverse sources and education can come from, its role in shaping a person. What some might have to leave behind to attain it, and what it offers for those that do.

This book is a wonderful and complex portrait of a life of education.

The Song of Achilles

2020-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

There is something extraordinary that a name like Achilles might be known some 4,000 years after he might have lived. I feel like Greek myth has always been around me, names and stories littered through culture, geography and even anatomy. I have never really felt myself drawn to it, however.

For the tales to have survived this long they surely must be timeless, but too often I find the language dated and alienating. Worse, I have come to associate classics with a particular kind of British snobbery. One more interested in revering ancient paragons than trying to improve the lives of present day mortals.

However last year I had strayed into reading Stephen Fry’s Mythos, which did a great deal to blow away dust and cobwebs from my picture of these legends. From there I read Circe, curious to see how she might provide substance and motivation to transform a flimsy villain. I enjoyed both so much, I added A Song of Achilles as next on my list. But the Trojan War still seemed like such a dusty subject it took me a long time to start this.

When I finally did, I burned through this in a couple of days.

This book achieves what years of cultural nagging has not. I think I finally see the timeless tragedy of this tale, and why its themes of destiny, love, blinding arrogance and fate hold relevance through centuries. It is beautifully written, the audio book I listened to is also performed with great skill by David Thorpe. At all times I knew how this would end, the spoiler warnings date back to the Renaissance.

So Madeline Miller gives us time with the characters, we get to know them, enjoy their happiness. There was the trap, soon I felt the bind of characters who knew of their fate. To stop reading was to stop spending time with them, but ever word and page past, draw closer to their unhappy fate. The thickness of a book or countdown of minutes left was a reminder of impending tragedy. And still a curiosity, what might still yet be in between, and a hope the inevitable might yet be avoided.

Circe and A Song of Achilles are beautiful books that do a service to a culture that has revered their myths. It dusts them off, renders them legible and faithfully modernises their detail for our times. In doing so she has helped me understand what has drawn people to these tales for 500 years, and even further back before their rediscovery.

Less than an hour after finishing the book, I am left wondering if the tragedy I keenly feel now, might not be the same as readers by old candlelight, homeric audiences before them, and story seekers back into pre-history.

Weeknotes #015: End of term

2020-12-18T00:12:00+01:00

What I did in the 51st week of 2020

Work

In other employments and other years, the last week before Xmas has an end of term vibe. Last year on GOV.UK we still had plenty to do, we were prepping for Brexit and building pages and services to help citizens understand what had been announced. This year we are doing that again for the end of transition, but also with a pandemic.

This meant I had a bit of time outside the Accounts team to help scale up our services. There can be times where nearly a third of the UK visits our site in short order. Ensuring services new and old are ready for that takes a bit of work.

I also pitched in with a bit of GOV.UK community work, I am a GDPR nerd and so have joined our Information Management network. I used some nerd skills to help draw together some info.

Finally within my team I worked on a feature that would allow our support staff to pause the entire feature in a hurry. There is always someone on call on GOV.UK, if that person ever finds a reason the feature needs to be paused in a hurry at 2am, it is helpful to have a nicely labelled emergency brake. We will almost certainly never have to use it. However it we do, this should mean it can happen quickly and we can communicate to users what has happened an why things have been a paused.

Otherwise

Pretty slow, I have been honing some more DIY skills. I spend some time this week mixing plaster and filling in big chunks of wall. I did the same with cement and some concrete flooring today.

I find this really reassuring. When we moved in I scratched and dented the walls bringing in boxes and furniture. Part of me thought I had “broken” things. Finding out you can easily fix this stuff makes mistakes seem lower stakes.

Read

I finished the Becky Chambers book. Came away feeling similar to the first, I am looking forward to writing a review.

I also burned through the Song of Achilles which I really enjoyed Madeline Miller is a fantastic writer. I loved reading Circe, I was surprised to find myself enjoying this one even more. The trojan war always seemed so dusty and boring, less so now.

I decided to roll on with historic-ish fiction, and started the sequel to Wolf Hall. I’m not far in. It feels more like a direct continuation of the last one rather than a new book. Which is good.

Listened to

Reply all - #170 A Song of Impotent Rage December 17, 2020

This was a really fun episode. Someone else who listened to this accused me of having a similar disposition to Alex Goldman’s here. This is not untrue.

But I think I am slightly less hopeless right now. There was an advert for Gimlet’s other podcast Resistance at the end. I have heard quite a bit about the show but not had space for a new podcast until recently. I think I will have to change that. Resistance was talking about angry youth taking action. Looking at the climate movement in the UK, I feel there is hope to be found there.

Weeknotes #014: Time off

2020-12-11T00:12:00+01:00

What I did in the 50th week of 2020

Work

I worked Monday and Tuesday this week and then took some time off. I have found pandemic-life changes the calculation around leave. I have found it difficult to take leave during 2020. Time off tends to look a bit like an extended weekend. That is nice enough, but I miss getting to go see people and new places with some leave.

I have an impulse to store it all up for when “this is all over”™, but that could still be a while off.

So I took some this week.

Read

I stalled a bit on “Who We Are and How We got Here”, letting fiction fill the gap.

I am about half way through “A closed and common orbit”, which has not been what I expected but is still pretty good.

Listened to

99% Invisible’s Katie Mingle has put together a long form series: “According to Need”. It’s great. The first four episodes (plus a prologue) are now out.

According to Need: Prologue
Chapter 1: Tulicia
Chapter 2: The Hotline
Chapter 3: Housing First
Chapter 4: The List

The whole series has its own page here.

I used to work for a Charity in the UK that works to end homelessness. It is intriguing hearing about the US and pondering similarities and differences.

Some familiar stories and problems, but the basic safety net seems even more threadbare in the USA. Both here and there it is primarily a question of attention and resources. It is a problem well within our gift to solve. When it remains, it is because a society has made the choice to let it continue.

Will Save the Galaxy for Food

2020-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

The author narrates the Audible book, a voice familiar to me from his Zero Punctuation series of game reviews. The style carries across from there, sarcastic and irreverent. I had mixed feelings about the setting when I started. Opening with a heavy dose of “Japan in space” made me cringe that this would be some kind of internet Otaku hole. However it does a reasonable job justifying its setting, and avoids falling into a space samurai fantasy.

More interesting is the set up of talented adventures, from a recent Golden Age of heroics, now redundant as better tech made long flights surplus to requirement. The heros of other genres now left by the wayside and fighting for scraps, at varying levels of dignity.

Chapters barrel around, through a myriad of settings, moving quickly and in unexpected directions.

A fun, light read.

Middle England

2020-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

From where I sit in December 2020, the start of the year seems like a very long time ago.

Back then I picked up this book again in ernest. I had noodled with it a bit the year before. We had crossed a year of tumultuous political debate, seemingly irreconcilable opinions that saw us formally leave the EU at the end of January.

For some reason I thought a single novel could help me parse this situation. Which is probably a little unfair in retrospect.

So I borrowed it from a friends shelf and ploughed through, in search of answers.

I did not find them.

I found a reasonable depiction of how I was feeling, and how those around me appeared to feel too. I do not think it helped me understand anything new about the various sides of the Brexit debate that split the UK. However it gave a reasonable depiction of what it felt like to live through bits of it.

January 2020 is a long time ago now. I wonder what place this book has as those memories fade into history or are buried under a pandemic and whatever fresh hell might await us in 2021. Perhaps though, if you were not around for all this, it is a better view into the UK than you might get from “Downton Abbey” or “the Crown”.

The “Middle” here could be class, the gap in politics within our circles or the swathes of geography between the bigger cities. If you were not stuck there, if it matters much now, and you wanted to see what it was like. It looked a bit like this.

Weeknotes #013: DevOps Salad

2020-12-04T00:12:00+01:00

What I did in the 49th week of 2020

Work

Ok I admit it.

I do not really enjoy DevOps, or the Infrastructure building part of being a developer. Yes, it is an essential part of the job. Yes, your apps need somewhere to run. Yes, there is some joy in a well running machine. However I never get excited about wiring these bits up. It is always a means to a more exciting end.

A healthy, balanced developer diet is not always the most exciting, but I know I will be a better dev for regularly partaking.

This week ended up looking like a DevOps salad. A tumble of little infrastructure jobs, tweaks and learning about our servers. I refreshed myself on our deployment pipelines with concourse, learned how the UK’s Platform as a Service scales on AWS, and helped improve our monitoring. For all my complaining, it was actually quite nice, the variety helps!

Pretty good timing too, I went on call again this week. Occasionally you need to move quickly to fix something, this balanced diet of server and monitoring knowledge surely helps.

Otherwise

Oof, even with easing back into tiered restrictions (a mere “tier 2” in my patch), I am missing a bit more difference. I have let things become slightly repetitive and a little same-y. I think usually holidays, visits to friends and other adventures would have broken things up a bit.

I’ll have to try and make life salad next week and find a way to sneak some variety in there too. Some leave coming up should help.

Read

I kept on reading this week, re-starting “Who We Are and How We got Here” a mindblowing book on genetics and human history by David Reich. I am reading and re-reading it slowly, and should write something soon. I feel each chapter is littered with exciting surprises from a cutting edge of paleontology.

I also read all of The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung. A really interesting read with a strong premise (an entire country loses a month?), it has a strong piece it wants to say about power, rule and China. Its structure is also very unlike things I have read before, I wonder how much of this is a Chinese literary style or just this Author.

Finally I also read The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I read “Children of Time” and “Children of Ruin” a year or so ago. The author pulls a similar trick here giving us something alien that is very close to home. I love these kind of books, gives me something truly alien to marvel, with all the familiarity and plausibility of things that I can find in my back garden. You get a fun story and newfound wonder for what is outside your own door.

Listened to

A bit of current affairs but not a lot again. I am actually thinking of cutting back on my podcast subscriptions a bit. The ever growing pile starts to feel like an in tray. Plus, I am really enjoying books right now.

Thinking about

So much fog around right now, I wonder why? Every window frames an eerie scene.

Something Deeply Hidden

2020-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

I saw Prof. Sean Carroll interviewed as part of Veritasium’s video Parallel Worlds Probably Exist. Here’s Why - YouTube.

The video caught my interest and this book was me reading on. There is an enthusiastic tone that helps draw you through a complex topic. Carroll does a good job of giving clear and lucid descriptions, I felt like I understood a great deal of what was going on whilst I was reading it. Not long after I saw the HBO series “Devs” (YouTuber Thomas flight gives a good review of here) which touches on some similar areas of science. I felt like the book had given me a peek deeper into that world.

Now some time has past, I find many of the details have slipped. I wonder how well I really understood the mechanics of what was going on. That said, I have retained an idea that there is an important debate. At gunpoint I might be able to provide the basic coordinates of it. I will look on with interests at how physicists (and philosophers?) approach the debate. With luck we will see how experimental data offers insight at some point too.

I think it is an achievement for a book to transmit not only concepts but enthusiasm.

The book is clear though, we cannot prove this yet. It is a conjecture. So… do I buy it? Is this actually how our world works? I am still not sure what to think.

However, its offer fits with what I have understood of science to date. We are so easily the centre of our own universes, yet discoveries in the science have helped decenter us. The complex worlds in orders of magnitude bigger and smaller than us, so our scale is a thin slice of experience. The narrowness of our senses and the bounty of what lies beyond them. The depth of time. The earth, around a sun, on an arm a galaxy, amongst many. Our central place and importance to the universe seems consistently undermined by evidence. Being a happy little accident seems comfortingly plausible to me.

This book presents another decentering, though deeper into the fabric of the universe than most I have come across. A new dimension in which the entire present of our universe can be dwarfed into branching depths, and our bit of it another tiny slice of a much grander whole. For that reason alone it feels plausible to me!

Weeknotes #012: Senior Dev

2020-12-03T00:12:00+01:00

What I did in the 48th week of 2020

Work

A couple of months ago I applied to be a Senior Developer where I work at GDS. Last week I found out I had successfully passed the interview 🎉. So I am now a Senior Developer on GOV.UK!

GDS hired four seniors in this round, I have been lucky enough to work with all of them on my time at GOV.UK. They are all excellent developers. There are several instances across the last year where I have seen each of them contribute to a codebase, to a team or to the GOV.UK community and I have thought “ooh, I should start doing things like that too”. So, shoulders of giants and all.

This week I tried to balance team and community stuff again. I helped out as a tutor with another internal Learn to Code session, helped sift for a round of hiring and attended a few network meetings. I really enjoy this stuff, but I think in the next few weeks I should ease off a bit and refocus on work in our team. Accounts is growing at a fair clip. I think we will soon have some interesting work for the current trial, and it will not be long before we have decided on next steps.

Otherwise

I have enrolled in some Chinese classes, and they are great! I have had difficulty finding classes at the right level before, luckily this time feels about right. My classmates speak at a good level, the teacher has found novel ways of keeping a class interesting and varied, even though they are all through video chat. I am finding it pleasingly difficult. As I dust off old knowledge I am surprised how much I have retained, frustrating gaps in vocabulary appear, but I have been surprised how much language I can string together when pushed.

Read

I pretty much ditched podcasts this week in favor of books.

Still plodding progress with Peter Scott’s essays. Short and enjoyable snippets of fen life and geese.

I read “Persepolis I & II” in a couple of sittings, drawn into page after page. I have not read too many comics and still have this lingering suspicion that they are all juvenile super hero fantasies. This clears away those misconceptions artfully. I really enjoyed it.

I also listened to all of “Where the Crawdad’s sing”. I can’t even remember how I ended up with this book in my library. I think it is another I was recommended and decided to add without reading the blurb. I am really enjoying this kind of blind date for books. I probably would not have read this if I had known what was in store, and that would have been a shame. I enjoyed it.

Listened to

Very little that was not a book

Thinking about

Where I can find good comprehensible input for chinese reading practice.

Weeknotes #011: I got Douyin

2020-11-20T23:09:00+01:00

What I did in the 47th week of 2020

Work

A split week. Data and user feedback continued to gather from our trial and we took the chance to look forward to what is next.

When we have published some results from what we are finding, I will be sure to link it here.

Also some exciting news I should be able to write about next week.

Tech on my team

I usually work on back end development (think the server, think Ruby on Rails). However for the last couple of weeks I have been helping out with some of the frontend. I got some of that work merged this week, and was able to pair with of our frontend specialists to bring what remained up to frontend community standards. I really enjoy pairing, for some reason we do not usually do a lot of it on GOV.UK.

I also started a piece of working on improving our logs.

With time to think, we also went over how we want to write tests in our team. It was great to have time to reflect and be thoughtful about approach and ensure everyone is on the same page.

GOV.UK Community

Again quite a bit of time on community work this week. More sifting for new developers. There is likely to be lots more of that in coming weeks.

I caught up on a GOV.UK wide Request for Comment (RFC) and discussed it with a few colleagues.

Also more training with the final part of the clear writing course. They should share some slides this week, once I have got the notes I will do a write up of what I learned. It was great stuff.

Otherwise

Slow week. Lockdown continues, not much changed.

I was looking for Chinese language pratice, so I signed up to Douyin (抖音), the Chinese version of TikTok. Then wasted most of my free time on the app.

There are similarities between what you see on both Douyin and TikTok. Lots of comedy videos, landscapes, tricks, repeating memes. Then there are things that seem unique to Doyin Chinese product adverts, outreach from local politicians and small plays about caring and neglected grandparents.

Short, looping videos turn out to be great for language practice. Like Chinese TV and film you often get characters as subtitles, also useful. I have picked up a bunch of useful slang, it is nice to break out of the usual language of textbooks

I might need to be cautious before trying this out. I am not sure what English would sound like from someone who had learned theirs from TikTok!

Read

I managed to buy more books than I read pages this week. Which is not a good idea.

I want to finish the Peter Scott essays and then have bought myself some fun science fiction and a comic to get me back in to the swing of regular reading.

Listened to

Outside/In - The Forest for the Carbon - November 19, 2020.

I know, I know I mentioned them last week. This series is still going strong though. This week: why carbon pricing for forests is a complicated idea.

Also this week was the exciting return of:

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History - Supernova in the east - Part V - November 13, 2020.

Ok. So. This is, three and a half hours of a history monologue. It is also the fifth in the series, all past episodes are similar in length. So basically, this is an audio book with a new installment every six months. Normally I am not drawn to the history of World War two. However this series has covered the war in China and the pacific in depth, which I knew little about. The core focus is on the Japanese military and the difficulties trying to understand their actions as a westerner looking back on this history.

If you are interested in world history I would recommend giving this a go. Persevere for a few hours, putting concerns of length and the slightly ranting tone aside. Eventually you will find yourself immersed in rich and vivid histories, flitting from human scale drama to epic theatres. All the way through there is this deeply humane line of questioning: how can we understand the actions of people caught up in these global events? How similar might we be to them?

Current episodes are free, and infrequent. There is a large archive however, “Wrath of the Khans” a history of the mongols made me think of Genghis Khan as a force of early globalisation. They ask for a small fee (like a $1 or $2) for older episodes. If you like the current free ones I would recommend buying a few from the archive next time you were considering an audio book.

Thinking about

Why there are not any good websites for DIY and construction materials. So many marketing guff sites, so little information of a material’s properties.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

2020-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

When we try to imagine truly Alien things, we fail so predictably. So much of sci-fi is populated by resemblences either dredged up from the deep sea or squinted at down a microscope. Everyday, certainly not, but Alien? I am always disappointed by what we depict as being out there. However strange, I cannot help but focus on the neatness of similarities, communication, features that seem unlikely to me in this big universe.

This was a grudge I quickly came to hold against this book. A grudge which, made me almost entirely miss the point. The differences are costume, the similarities are the interesting bits. It is just easier to explore when you pretend we are not actually dealing with humans.

A while after finishing this book I spoke about it to a friend who was unburdened by my grudge.

It reminded me how intriguing the premise is. A motley group. A distant, mysterious place, always closed and now suddenly open. A journey through danger to get there.

It reminded me how many interesting things the book has to say, for example about family. I fixated on the unlikeliness of one crew member, basically a space bird dinosaur. Which left no space for the far more interesting things it said. It talks about three types of family, the family that birthed you, the family you grew up with and the family you made for yourself in later life. These families went beyond ties of genetics, making unshakable bonds with childhood friends and new siblings of adult ones.

This was another book I picked up with zero knowledge, simply because Ars Technica said it was worth a summer read. They describe it as “soft and cosy reading”, yet I approached it looking for something plausible and hard. In doing so I missed the point.

On reflection, an enjoyable book. I should give it the courtesy of a re-read at some point. I look forward to taking a more open mind to encounter it’s sequels.

The Remains of the Day

2020-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

I knew nothing about this book before I started, and little about the author.

I picked it up on a whim. The plan was to listen to something whilst exploring the country paths and lanes of the area I had just moved to.

Straight away, I hated it. Grand country houses and their rich residents. Urgh. I braced myself for Julian Fellows style nostalgic fantasy. My phone was buried too far out of reach to switch the book to something else. I would let this dross run until there was a good point to pull over and choose something else. Through gritted teeth, I listened to our butler protagonist fawn over his masters.

But I never did switch it off. Instead, before I could stop, it gripped me so hard that I listened to the rest in a single sitting.

I never would have picked this book up if I had read the blurb. That would have been my loss. The setting is not the point of this book. Instead, we get an exploration of a life wasted and the role of repression and delusion in covering that up. As I wheeled through pleasant country lanes I heard our butler struggle with ‘Englishness’ and class. As I set out, passing country estates, our butler began his defence of the ruling elite in dripped disclosures. By the time I turned for home, they had added up to a picture of inter-war aspirations, arrogance and failure.

A beautiful book, it reminds me I should keep space for a whim or two in my reading pile.

Weeknotes #010: Community

2020-11-13T17:00:00+01:00

What I did in the 46th week of 2020

Work

Team work continued, but I spent more time than I have in months on GOV.UK, and wider community activities.

Learn to code

I helped out with one of our Learn to Code sessions, coaching non-developer staff through some introductory exercises. This week was HTML and CSS. It’s a great programme, I wish I’d done things like this regularly in other places where I’ve been a developer. My colleagues have blogged about it before: Learning to code at GDS and our syllabus is open if you’d like to take a look.

Buddy system

I spent quite a bit of time this week buddying with two new developers to GOV.UK. They have returned to a project I worked on back in January - March to improve GOV.UK navigation. We had a chance to start, but then Coronavirus hit and we got moved elsewhere. However experienced you are starting on GOV.UK can be overwhelming. I think I was really lost just after I joined. So it’s a nice feeling to help some others get settled in. Buddy systems are great, more places should have them. Especially for onboarding or picking up previously paused work.

Cross Government Networks

I’ve been attending more Cross Government / Cross Whitehall events. They’re a chance to find meet some more civil service colleagues from elsewhere, learn a bit more about some topics I’m interested in and generally see a bit more of government outside of my digital patch.

Mostly that has been with the wonderful X-Whitehall China Network, sadly they don’t have a home page just yet. I’ve been attending a range of events they’ve been connecting us into. The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) team in China, have been running a few morning briefings. We’ve also had some external speaker in to share their views. These are public and up on a YouTube channel. All well worth a watch.

Training

Found time to do some training too, Part 2 of clear writing. With a focus on accessibility this time. I’ll do a separate post about what I learned there.

Also got back into some Mandarin Chinese lessons through the cross-Whitehall China network. Much overdue study I really need to put in some time over the next few months - I reach for words and I can kind-of find them, but they’re covered in rust and cobwebs. Time to study.

Had some time to get to know some of my team colleagues better, and caught up with a few from outside the team too. It was really nice. I think it surprised me how much work has just been about work recently. Yet I am surrounded by all these interesting, talented people. If it was the pandemic before-times it would have been great to get a lunch or a drink. However a bit of slack and video chat can go a long way too it turns out.

So… pretty good week I think.

Otherwise

Made it to double digits on weeknotes 🎉.

Not always on time, not always that insightful. However, writing regularly feels good and gives room for improvement. I’m trying to keep them short. With limited success this week. I suspect the value will be in going back over old thoughts and seeing how they changed.

I’ve been working a little later and taking a longer lunch break to let me face hit some sunshine for a bit longer.

Seems to make an annoyingly big difference to my mood. Stupid winter.

Read

I finished “The City we became”. Great read, highly recommend it. A series is intended apparently, I look forward to reading more.

Listened to

Outside/In - Fortress Conservation - October 23, 2020.

These folks are just knocking it out of the park recently. It’s rare for me to find such a streak of episodes I love this much. Another installment in what I think is a wider season about natural places and how we relate to them. I used to study things like this, and have a prior interest. So it’s a shock for me to find that I’ve slipped into so many traps about thinking of the “emptiness” and “untouched” wild parts of the world.

We underestimate how long we’ve been having an impact for. Few places are left that don’t come with human histories. This podcast does a fantastic job of proving that in one of the wilder spaces of the US imagination.

Thinking about

The histories under our “wild” places

Ancillary Sword

2020-11-07T00:17:00+01:00

There’s a tonal shift here, that I struggled with at times. Like taking the swashbuckling adventures of the initial book and then tracking them into more of a desk job in the second.

Our character’s personalities seemed adrift from how I’d understood them before. But perhaps that’s the point, I now look back and question what is real and what was a mask on a path to sentience.

However it broadened the universe, raised the stakes and drew me along.

An enjoyable read.

Ancillary Mercy

2020-11-07T00:15:00+01:00

A satisfying end to an enjoyable trilogy. It pays off the long running themes and sees loose threads well tied before we go.

Many of the themes of interest have been preserved, expanded and now seem richer three books in. It’s a universe I’ll miss.

I heard all as audio books, where Adjoa Andoh does all the heavy lifting with impenetrable names. Her chameleon vocal skills bring an impressive range of these characters to life. A fantastic performance when i think of these characters it’s her voice in who speaks for them.

All three make for a fun, thought provoking read.

Ancillary Justice

2020-11-07T00:11:00+01:00

I enjoy seeing well trod topics done well in Sci Fi, but there is a special joy in finding something new.

Here there are both. Machine’s escaping their use as tools into something more disobediently alive. Done well.

But this story is really about multitudes in a way I’d never considered. What does distributed intelligence mean? How does it parts interact? Is it immortal? How does it feel when cut off from it’s conscious self?

These are new ideas to me, well explored here.

Weeknotes #009: Shipped

2020-11-06T22:44:00+01:00

What I did in the 45th week of 2020

Work

We launched!

You can now sign up for an account on GOV.UK. Our initial trial links accounts to the Transition Checker. It allows users to record and return to their results. We are trialing it in comparison to our existing email alert system.

Will an account deliver value helping users track what transition means for them? Will they prefer an account as a way to manage preferences and notifications? Will our technology choices scale well with the user base?

Now we find out.

Launch allowed me to take a course from our content colleagues on clear writing. I think this is a real skill, easily overlooked. One I hope to improve on.

It’s in three parts, today was a manifesto for why clear writing matters. We discussed what what we know about users, language and their preferences. It was eye opening stuff! I’ll do a round up of their links and recap soon.

I’m looking forward to the next sessions.

Otherwise

National coronavirus lockdown resumed on Thursday. Our main social contact has been with some friends in a nearby town, who we see most weeks. We caught up in person for a last time before preparing for a month at a greater social distance.

Read

Slow progress on the two books, as I impatiently listened to US election news.

This week I heard about the advantages of setting a reasonable reading goal, like 25 pages a day. I think it’s the kind of atomic habit approach that lets you turn modest progress into grander success in time.

I’m going to give that a go this week.

Listened to

Election coverage mostly from Five Thirty Eight, Vox’s Today explained, the Briefing room and Talking Politics. All is already out of date so, no links.

Thinking about

So cold, need to find out how to add more insulation to a house

The Consuming Fire

2020-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

A continuation of the last. A marginal improvement for our central character.

I liked the way it approached ancestral memory. How might we feel about those who came before if we could see more of their lives? If we could know their thoughts?

But… still kinda meh.

Not sure I’ll read the third.

The Collapsing Empire

2020-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

An intriguing premise.

A disaster creeping forward, unseen to many, realised by a few. Slow to start, but sudden when it comes.

A nice setting for a science fiction drama, but somewhat squandered with the political setup. Where the expanse gives me a plausible near future of competing factions, this feels more like 70s mega-corp sci-fi or a throwback to the “great house” settings of something like dune. It’s a stroll with an elite who hold a universe of agency by themselves. The only other contesting forces are natural.

I might have let that pass, but I found a lot of difficulty with the book writes women. I start to wonder about the prevalence of tom-boy-ish characters in sci fi written by men. Like spunk equals feminism? Or boy scout motivations that wouldn’t come off well in male character are portrayed as edgy by gender swapping.

This book stands in contrast to much of the great fiction I’ve read this summer. The characters of Ann Leckie, or especially Margret Atwood, arrive with rich inner lives. They live and breath where the characters of the collapsing empire seem wooden in comparison. I know very little about the author, or how critics have reviewed this book. Perhaps I’m miles off base, but that was my feeling reading it, and it killed the book for me.

I bought this and the next book at the same time as they were on sale.

I might carry on, but I’m not blown away.

Weeknotes #008: So close

2020-10-30T17:47:00+01:00

What I did in the 44th week of 2020

Work

We got so close to launching this week, but then did not. Recently I’ve heard a number of SpaceX and ULA rocket launches have been scrubbed.

A US official was quoted as saying:

We see that as a success… Falcon 9 and Delta 4 stopped within seconds of launch? This is good stuff,”

I think I feel a bit like that now. It’s disappointing to not get something out the door, but we rigorously test what we make before it goes before users. We want to make sure it’s clear, easy to use and accessible to everyone. This time round those tests turned up a last few snags, and so that’s what we’ll spend next week finishing up.

Otherwise

Had another short week with a Friday off. Doing something on a Friday evening always feels like getting a free weekend day. Doing something on a Thursday evening and having Friday off feels like double weekend.

Read

I’m about half way through “The City We Became”. The premise is like nothing I’ve come across before, It’s fantastic!

Also still reading Peter Scott’s essays. So many of them are from over 80 years ago - things that are the same appear as timeless (both the challenges and what remains!). But then I think that the challenge of environmental concern is that what you grow up with always appears normal. Kids who grow up in a world without large mammals, or with a much changed sea will still marvel at what delights remain. It’s difficult to know what you’re missing.

Listened to

Radiolab - What If? - October 23, 2020. A fantastic episode, may it never prove relevant. This takes a thought experiment around US constitutional rules and political norms, and subjects it to a war game around how this coming election day might go. If parties wanted to, what moves could they make? How much can you push things in deeply polarised political environments? The results are illuminating.

I think these sort of games should be run frequently, in a variety of arenas. We should use their results to fix and strengthen institutions whilst the sun is shining, even as we hope to never see rain.

Thinking about

Big US election, just around the corner

Weeknotes #007: Crunch time

2020-10-23T23:51:00+01:00

What I did in the 43rd week of 2020

Work

A short week, I was off on Friday.

Crunch time is near, we’ll be looking to launch soon. The core of the product is there, it has been for some time now. So the work now divides down into filling in those last gaps, removing bugs and applying polish.

Early in the week I got to work with our tech writers, helping them understand our docker based development setup, so they could help us clarify our documentation. We’ll get some additional people to help for the last few sprints. Good docs should help ease the friction of joining in.

Tech writing is something I wish I was better at, so much complexity to parse through to find simple, clear, helpful guides for future devs. There are some how to tech write sessions coming up through work, I’m looking forward to learning some more.

Back on the application we started to see designs settle into actual pages. Now the work of content designers really starts to shine out. I didn’t know about content design before I joined GDS (my colleagues recently did a good podcast about it if you’re not sure either).

They work out what a user would be trying to achieve at any point in a feature or flow, and then summon the right content to help the user on that journey. The result sees placeholder text (that seemed fine to me at the time) vastly improved with clear, consistent and unpretentious language. It often seems to be about removing words as much as adding them. They’re editors for the internet, and their work helps make our services easier for everyone to use.

Being on a discovery has been great for seeing how disciplines contribute across the different stages. I look forward to seeing what happens after we launch.

Otherwise

I was off on Friday in hopes of visiting a friend in Wales. Alas Coronavirus intervened.

Instead we decided to go see the sea closer to home. We drove up to Boston, the small Lincolnshire town whose people took the name with them when they were setting up American cities. The plan was to get lunch there, but we were a bit late, so ended up stopping off at a nearby marsh to wander around and look at some birds.

It’s got me interested in the fens. It’s so nearby, but seemed less domesticated than the countryside closer to home. I looked for roads to drive down to The Wash. I expected a seafront, paved walk, car parks and roads to the water. Instead it seemed a tangle of farmers tracks and flood protecting banks, with finger salt marsh creeks between that send you miles in land looking for a bridge.

I saw wildlife and birds I’ve never seen before, and they’re only a couple of hours north.

Read

Nearly caught up on podcasts… but at least, I’ve started reading again this week, I’m reading some collected essays from Peter Scott, the naturalist (who seems to have written quite a bit about the fens). Also started N. K. Jemisin’s ‘The city we became’, really enjoying it so far.

Listened to

Two this week, I couldn’t choose.

On the Media - Emergency Mode - October 16, 2020. There’s a great segment in the middle looking at the apps that are being used to recruit in the US right wing militia movement. Fascinating. Terrifying! I really like this kind of reporting though, what movements believe and say is important, but we so rarely get to see the logistics of how they go about trying to organise.

Talking Politics - Democracy for sale - October 22, 2020. In a similar theme, a semi-logistical look at what the ‘elites’ actually mean in British political society. Who do we mean by the elite (an apparently smallish cast of reoccuring faces who’ve wandered towards it) and how do you get in (apparently smallish table stakes compared to other democracies).

Thinking about

The Fens, mostly just the fens.

Weeknotes #006: Recruiting

2020-10-18T22:09:00+01:00

What I did in the 42nd week of 2020

Work

GOV.UK is hiring a lot at the moment. You should apply.

I helped out with the sifting this week. After our recruitment and unconscious bias training we take an initial raft of CVs, review them against requirements for the job and grade how well a candidate demonstrated their suitability. Two of us review every application, then we discuss any differences in grading. The final grade is an average of the two, from there some progress to interviews.

I’ve not done a lot of hiring in the past, but this seemed to compare well to processes I’ve seen at other organisations.

General advice? Read the job description carefully. Where you’ve used the tools/languages/frameworks the advert mentions, give good examples. Where you haven not, foreground experience comparable technologies or ways of working. We were also asked to sift for demonstrable experience of team working / the more social side of engineering. I think this is really easy to leave off an application. Where the job mentions the team work, don’t forget to show experience where collaboration has been a factor too.

Plus reach out to the recruitment team, they’re lovely, helpful folks. Their advice will be much better than mine!

On accounts we need a lot of different applications to speak to each other. For local development that can be a pain. We use docker-compose, with a light wrapper of our own to help with that. Being able to spin up everything you need locally with one command, feels like magic. I love a day where I can spend more time working on the, feature than setting everything up.

I spent the end of the week writing Rspec feature tests. My colleagues on another team took the time to write up their testing strategy. It’s a document I keep going back to, a fantastic reference for how to test Rails apps in 2020.

Otherwise

Not much, It’s good to see the few friends. The news seems to suggest that might get harder as winter goes on.

Read

Ok really should get back on the books, I get a new audible credit soon and just got a backlog of Cory Doctorow audiobooks… but I’m so nearly caught up on my podcasts.

Listened to

For the Love of Peat - 99% Invisible.

A serendipitous follow on my favourite last week, we bulldozed a peatland and put up a pine monoculture, but who can argue with trees? Perhaps we should have known better by 2020.

Thinking about

Our industry needs more roles for juniors
Improving my environmental literacy

Wuhan Diary

2020-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

The value of Chinese voices grows with each connection we sever between our countries.

By late August the first wave of UK coronavirus was waning but none of us knew (or yet know) where this goes. I’d hoped to get a lot of things from this book: a better account of the early days of the virus, clarity on the chinese policy response, perhaps a view into our future. Mostly I didn’t find out too much new, many of her points had been well summarised in the better news coverage of the summer.

Instead I found far more that was familiar than new. I found my fears, my hunger for information, my burning impatience with authorities, all reflected back from a world away. It would be crass to take this as a simple sign of human unity in the face of the virus. I believe the virus has revealed more entrenched division, than it has brought us together.

In short I enjoyed hearing directly from someone in the midst of world events, especially as my chances to hear Chinese voices seems to be shrinking. Sincia did great coverage in conversation with Micheal Berry, at this point there may be as much to be learned from those interviews as the book itself (it was a series of in-situ blog posts after all!).

I shall have to learn to read more Chinese blogs, then perhaps I can be more proactive about hearing the voices I’m missing these days.

Weeknotes #005: On call

2020-10-11T20:59:00+01:00

What I did in the 41st week of 2020

[note] …but only got around to writing about on the 18th October 2020… woops

Work

Work on accounts goes on, we draw closer to showing our prototype. We’ve been taking a look at our daily security practices, looking for proactive measures against the most common ways developers can make make mistakes. One we’re trying out is Pre Commit with the detect secrets plugin. It helps us catch any commits that include anything sensitive though an audit and allow/block list process. I’ve used Pre Commit hooks before, mostly for linting / code quality standards. It always seems a trade off between adding friction, and helping enforce good practice, hopefully a worthwhile one here!

I was also primary on call this week. A first for me, a few interesting moments but mostly just to watch a system repair itself under load. When government makes high profile announcements huge numbers of visitors can surge to GOV.UK. It’s a testament to the good engineering work of my colleagues that it handles these spikes graciously.

Otherwise

Started the week pretty unwell. Just a cold, not COVID (no symptoms, we checked… in almost hourly paranoia). Took it out of me though, a couple of bleary days in bed and blankets.

And, Oh yeah… Winter… I’d forgotten about you. Why do you have to be so dark, dreary and cold? I will miss summer sun drenching my windows a the end of the working day and inviting me into a garden and world beyond. I hear the thing to do is force yourself outside in all weathers to discover it isn’t so bad… but I’m looking out the window now and… urgh.

Read

Still working on catching up with podcasts, whilst noodling through my ever growing collection of natural history filmmaking books. I should start some in earnest soon, they’ll probably pop up in read in a few weeks.

Listened to

Out of everything I listened to this week Outside/In ran a particularly good episode called The Olive and The Pine. I’m a sucker for this kind of storytelling, take an object, preferably overlooked, bonus points for natural history and weave it through momentus world events. Environmental initiatives are often thought of as external to politics. This is a worthy contribution to annuals of why that’s never true.

Thinking about

What to do between now and spring

Weeknotes #004: The prototype

2020-10-02T00:00:00+01:00

What I did in the final days of September and first week of October 2020. [note:]…though actually i wrote this massively late and only published on 16th October 2020…woops.

Work

Work continues on our prototype. This week I integrated our work with an existing application.

This mostly centered around wrapping data securely in JWTs before passing it over to another service.

We send this, as part of a form, via a POST request. I’d not seen JWTs being used like this before, but it’s proven to be a good compromise. It allows us to securely pass data to our new service, with minimal changes to an existing one.

I also worked on our feature flags and testing. Feature flags allow us to make changes to the existing service without disrupting anything it already does. Then when everything is in place, we can flick a switch and have it all go live at the right time.

The biggest difficulty for me here was testing. I found getting the right environment variables into my tests tricky and tried a few strategies, including mocking/stubbing and just declaring them outright in before and after blocks. In the end I went with what’s simplest, but i’ve since found out GOV.UK prefers using ClimateControl, I’ll have to go give that another look next time I’m writing tests there.

Otherwise

Second wave is coming on quickly, so we checked the restrictions and decided it was worth trying to visit some friends and go for a walk whilst we still good. I hate winter in the best of years, the idea of one with fewer changes to see people and the rest of the pandemic will take some adjusting to.

Read

Still not a lot of reading, I’ve run out of Audible credits for the moment so I’m mostly catching up on podcasts instead.

The Attenborough lecture i saw last week has really got me thinking about wildlife film making, what it’s impact might be and the people who make them. I’ve started ordering loads of 2nd hand biographies of camerafolk. I feel like there’s a ton of great film critisim content out there (Nerdwriter, Thomas Flight, Royal Ocean Society, Every frame a painting - all great on youtube). Yet very little on wildlife films, with he exception of the awesome work of Vox’s Joss Fong from a while back.

I wonder why this is..?

Listened to

A buffet of current affairs podcasts. UK politics, the US election and SCOTUS, COVID. So much right now. Nothing jumps out, but podcasts are still my preferred way to get news.

Thinking about

We get film critics, but no wildlife film critics?
How to give and receive better code reviews.

Weeknotes #003: Writing code

2020-09-29T21:23:00+01:00

What I did in the 4th week of September 2020.

Work

After a hiatus as we planned and discussed, this week I was back to writing some code. The social and team based parts are important, and enjoyable. However it’s a nice change of pace to slip back into working on a problem until your tests go from red to green. Give me a few more weeks I’m sure I’ll be complaining I miss the planning heavy days!

GOV.UK also announced to the public what our team has been working on. We’ve built a prototype using OpenID Connect and Oauth2. Government has also begun to talk more broadly about where this sort of work might go. It’s exciting stuff to be working on.

I should look again at the tools I’m using daily. I feel like I had quite a good setup when I was working in Javascript (VS Code, a few carefully chosen plugins, tmux). However since being back in Ruby, I’ve not made the time to tune up my working environment to get that same feeling of efficiency. I should ask some colleagues what their setups look like right now, and poke around the internet for some better ideas.

Otherwise

More decorating, endless decorating, slow progress.

A bit of walking. It turns out the hills round here are very pretty. There’s also a hidden web way of great footpaths and cycle routes that weave their way between the estates of the town. They’re well designed, many dip below roads to stay away from traffic. We walked for nearly three hours, out of the residential tangle to the edge of the countryside, up a hill and back. All the paths were set away from roads, we crossed a few on the edge of town and barely saw a car the rest of the time.

It’s good design, and I’ll enjoy finding where all these other paths go.

Also thinking a bit about nature documentaries. They seem enormously popular, yet I can’t find any good books on their theory, history or practice. I can get all of that on obscure art house films, or marvel blockbusters, so where are the popular histories of BBC Bristol?

Read

…not a lot of reading this week.

Articles:

Not really an articles but I also watched Wildscreen Festival 2016: Attenborough and Packham.

Listened to

Caught up on podcasts instead.

Absolute standout: #166 Country of Liars from Gimlet’s Reply All. Immaculately produced. Feels like the kind of landmark journalism about the internet that drew me to this show, and it’s predecessor TL;DR.

There’s so much mystery around QAnon, I think that must be half the allure. Such a credible journalism drags these semi-mythic figures back to earth and into the lives of fallible individuals using them for their own ends. It’s gripping stuff.

Thinking about

Who designed my town?
Where to find good writing about natural history TV
Improving my dev setup
I forgot to read up on those guided bus lanes, I should do that.

Zita the Spacegirl

2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Is this kids content? Kids content sounds like slander, something brainless, farmed, colourful gloop. Hypnosis for the young and boring for the grown. I think good writing can hit emotional beats that resonate with all ages. Offices and school playgroups share more in common that we might want to admit. If I’m not bored, and the writing reaches above a school age of emotional literacy, then perhaps it’s for all of us?

In the last few years I’ve enjoyed masterful Ghibli films, thoughtful cartoons like Avatar: The last Airbender, and the delightful Hilda comics and cartoon. They felt aimed at any age looking for something that delivered stories, powered by restrained mild peril and colourful artwork. No gloop in sight.

Zita fits well on to a shelf amongst Ghibli, Avatar and Hilda. Full of characters, well drawn, interestingly flawed, it reminded me that you can do a lot with comics. It’s a form of art and stories I should give a bit more time to.

The story zips along a bit, perhaps too quick. It feels a bit like a pilot episode. The back dust jacket advertises a small library of sequels, so perhaps it was a successful one.

Anyway it’s good, looking forward to reading more.

Weeknotes #002: Planning

2020-09-20T23:17:00+01:00

What I did in the 3rd week of September 2020.

Work

Consensus on direction built last week, we planned the specifics. By mid-week finally had specific tech cards we can write code for. I ended spending time on our round 2 of user testing. Making notes for the team and considering what was said. Again, love this process. Looking forward to being back to code next week.

Also some horizon scanning on threats, mitigations. So many ways to give someone a bad day via the web.

A lot going on outside of the team. Our annual all staff meeting, with a big conversation about what’s next for GDS. A lot to think about. I attended line management training on Monday. I have no line reports right now, but I’m enjoying reading and thinking about how to do it well. Would be good to pitch in there if the opportunity arises.

Otherwise

Jobs, jobs, friends. Lots of DIY, gardening and house admin going on. Will need to do more next week. Will make a lot of things better when it’s done, but messy and occasionally boring whilst its going on. Getting out to see friends is a great escape when you’ve made a mess of your home.

Read

Books:

The Word for World is Forest

Articles:

… More articles than usual this week, less of everything else.

I particularly enjoyed the mango.pdf.zone stuff. Hillarious, educational, surprisingly humane.

Listened to

Mostly weekly news / politics. Nothing particularly stand out this week.

Thinking about

Compost
What’s next for GDS
Mapping agriculture, and environment
Threats on the internet

Oryx and Crake

2020-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

I started the book then stopped. The setting was disorientating, with little to hang on to. I was bewildered by the events,so I went off to read something else. I came back begrudgingly when I’d read everything else.

Turns out that was the point, and I should have persisted first time. It takes its time to peel back it’s layers, showing you a bit more of present and past. The more time you spend in either, the more the anticipation grows to see them connect.

Written in 2003, the science seems to fit well into a world that saw Cas9 modify human genomes in 2015. Was that prescience that we caught up with? Or perhaps the science moves slow and has taken 12 years to inch forward. No pigoons yet through.

A good human driven story, with scientific horrors and delights. I recommend it.

The Year of the Flood

2020-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Similar to the first, I started a bit lot, but now we move around times and between protagonists too.

It delivers on content, I was hungry to know more about this world and the characters, and it’s new cast was compelling. However the format is disappointing compared to it’s predecessor. It might have been gaudy to try and re-use flipping from past to future again. The first book used it to such great effect that this seems plainer by comparison.

I also feel it cedes a bit of the contingency of the first book. There was nothing special about snowman. He was just there. But now we find other protagonists, and they all happen to have crossed paths too. Good for drama, but stretches my disbelief.

Pigoons creep me out.

Still a great read. Will read the third one too.

MaddAddam

2020-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Carried straight on from middle one to this. There feels like a gap between the first and second in the series, but these two fit closely. It continues to flesh out the world and fill gaps with our beloved cast. The problems I had with some things fitting neatly continue here, and are worse. Some of the links between character’s pasts and presents are a little too neat for me.

The set pieces are great though and it makes for a fitting climax to the series.

Pigoons. I feel very differently about them now.

I’d recommend the entire series.

Vesper Flights

2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

I enjoyed H is for Hawk, and I’m a sucker for history of science and natural history. So Vesper Flights seemed natural to pick up, I’m so glad I did.

A collection of essays, the format works suits the author’s style. Different snippets of natural history are woven with biography in an elegant style. I’d like to find more collections like this. The book gives a rich picture of a close by natural world, as I walk around scenes keep jumping out at me. I’ve been annoying those on walks with me by describing sections as we meet their subject matter.

A clear blue day? The sky is a primary habitat, with it’s own pelagic wildlife. Nesting birds? The class system dictates who and how nature can be enjoyed. Dead animal? We’re sentimental to, longing for, outraged by animals. It says more about us than them.

Natural history gave me an interest and curiosity for far flung places. Some of the essays follow that tradition here, but I’m surprised to find my favorites are closer to home. During a pandemic when my access to the world has shrunk, I’m finding new excitement in nearby natural history. It feels like a gift to have reasons to look out my own window, or over nearby fields and find fascination.

The Word for World is Forest

2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

1968 and the early 70s when this book was written seem an age away. That the book’s concerns remain relevant today seems unbearably sad. It’s like we’ve spent the 50 years since with it’s character, Davidson, at the helm.

The introduction Le Guin wrote in 1976 mentions the Senoi people of Malaysia, and their coincidental similarity to the Athsheans. I kept thinking of “The Cave in Punan” (podcast transcript), of the song language. I’m sure it is the attention to anthropology and our world that makes this imagined one so rich.

A beautiful, short book. I’d recommend it.

Weeknotes #001: User research

2020-09-11T20:00:00+01:00

What I did in the 2nd week of September 2020.

Work

Back after a week off, catching up on work. We had user research to review on our prototype. This process is still new enough to me that I’m always blown away by how useful research is. The findings came up a lot in discussions about what’s next. Being able to refer back to it feels like a firmer footing, and that feels good.

I’m also reminded at how much talent, skill and preparation goes into making these interviews successful. We’re particularly lucky here to have the folks who can pull it off. If you want to see the kind of things they do, more on that here.

I’ve tried to describe the benefits of our multidiciplianry approach to friends recently, I’m not sure found the language to do it justice. More siloed work feels impoverished by comparison, but not sure I’d have realised this before I saw our approach in action. So how to convey that to others when you can’t show them?

This week was a lot of preparation. Drawing cards together, discussing next steps and building consensus. I hope we’ll shortly see the prototype move into live user testing as a result. Then, our chance to find out what’s working for users, if they want something different, measure our expectations and start making improvements.

Otherwise

Went to Cambridge looking for good Chinese food. Found Zhonghua Traditional Snacks online, and went to take a look. Turned out to be fantastic, I’d recommend to anyone who loves dumplings and noodle soup (is there anyone not in that category?), worth travelling a fair distance for.

Also stopped off at Fen Drayton nature reserve for a walk. It’s very pretty. There’s also a guided busway, they’re cool, not seen many before, how’d those become a thing?

There’s a big red star looking thing at night. Turned out it’s Mars, it’s getting closer until October. It’s very red.

Oh and there was an Earthquake in Leighton Buzzard. We didn’t feel a thing, I guess we were too far away.

Read

Books:

Lovecraft country

Articles:

Why Boris Johnson is considering a no-deal Brexit for a bruised economy - FT - 2020-09-08
‘Landscape of fear’: what a mass of rotting reindeer carcasses taught scientists - The Guardian - 2020-07-08

Listened to

I’ve fallen behind on my usual podcast listening, a lot of audio books recently. I keep thinking about one episode I heard though:

Fungus Amungus - Radiolab - Published 2020-09-04

Uh oh, this is a new one to me. Climate change is geologically quick, but gradual year to year. That is killing some fungus and leaving heat resistant offspring to take their place. Human body temperatures seems suspiciously positioned at the point that kills a lot of fungus, the podcast has some theories on why…

So the more 36.5–37.8 °C days we see around the world, the more we could be promoting fungus that can endure our body temperatures in unexpected places. With that, new illnesses. I’m sure there’s more research to complicate this story, but a new idea I’m keen to hear more about.

A fun sequel to our present apocalypse perhaps, and another climate danger.

Thinking about

Guided bus lanes, good, rapid transport? Should we have more?
Mid to Senior developer, what’s in the gap between?
User Centred Design (UCD) is great, UCD all the things?
COVID times mantra, want to do something? Do it today, the situation could look different next week.

If you found me on the internet I’d love to chat any of that.

Lovecraft Country

2020-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

I heard about lovecraft country on the Imagined Worlds podcast, Episode 148: Inverting lovecraft. They discuss what a reader might make of captivating stories, from a viciously racist author. Saying you can separate the two, or explaining it away as a work of it’s time, seems suspect to me.

They discuss an intimate link in Lovecraft, in his fear of the alien. The fear that something higher up “the order” could emerge out of places unknown. What a terror it would be if “we” could be swept away, or enslaved by monsters.

Imagined worlds spends time with authors who’ve chosen to use the mythos for something new. Using Lovecraft’s language of terror, madness and fear to tell new stories whilst challenging who we should fear for, and which this book does well.

A collection of linked stories of cosmic outings it echoes thumbing through an anthology of Lovecraft short stories, but with the satisfying payoff of an overall arc. The imagery is fantastic too. Should I ever see an observatory at night, my imagination will run with the extraordinary horrors that could be within.

An exciting, entertaining read that puts black experience front and centre, I’d highly recommend it.

First Post!

2020-09-09T15:00:00+01:00

I want to be better at writing. I also want a place to back up all the interesting things I come across, so I can rescue them from my forgetting memory. On the off chance others might find something of interesting, I figure I should make it public.

I’ve been reading a few blogs and have discovered folks who write weeknotes. One of them linked to a really useful explainer (thanks Sam Villis). It sounds like a good way to keep a track of what I’ve done, perhaps start the odd conversation - whilst getting frequent writing practice.

So there’ll be some of that here.

I also want to write review some of things I read, watch and listen to. I consume a lot of media right now, in the moment I often feel blown away by the latest thing I’ve encountered. However before long, it fades from memory or is pushed aside as my attention moves on to something new. Hopefully reviews can back up a few of these memories so I can look back later.

So that’s the plan, let’s see how it goes.