I have mixed feelings about my reading this year. On the one hand, I only managed 22 books, which is very few. Part of this is just down to our travelling patterns: mostly short weekend breaks, and no long holidays affording lots of precious reading time. On the other hand, when I did find time I’m pretty pleased with my selection. It was a good range, with lots of highlights, a nice mix between old and new, and plenty to recommend to others. So, here’s to another year of books!
Fiction
I loved The Fraud, my first book of 2024, not least because Zadie Smith has returned to writing about London rather than New York. Gloriously, even in this nineteenth century historical novel she manages to include the fields, farmers and ‘grassy Willesden Lane’ of Kilburn, Kensal Rise and that patch of North West London where we both grew up. I even loved the book itself: a signed, chunky hardback in a gorgeous cover and enigmatic black-edged pages.
Contained within those pages is a story based on the real-life Tichborne case, a fascinating example of Victorian populism in which a working-class man, and obvious fraudster, claimed to be the long-lost heir to a wealthy family fortune. Despite being convicted of perjury – or, rather, thanks to coverage of the trial- he received enormous public support, symbolising the empty claims of the justice system when the interests of the rich and powerful were challenged. Of course, the central conundrum is that if he really had been the missing heir he wouldn’t have been ‘a man of the people’ at all. So his folk hero status actually relies on the fact that, at some level, people must know that he’s lying to them, while still acting as a tribune for public anger and disaffection. The political parallels for our era are obvious, but this isn’t a preachy book, just an invitation to think deeply about what it means to be a fraud.
I also really, really enjoyed reading The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, although I have no memory of how it ended up on my to-read list so I’m not sure who to thank. This is a dazzling fantasy about a magical travelling circus, which also serves as the stage for a sinister contest between two young magicians who have not chosen to play and do not know each other’s identity. The only thing I wasn’t totally spellbound by was the romance at the centre of the plot, but then again, perhaps a romance isn’t always supposed to make sense. Regardless, this is highly recommended, and images of the night circus have lingered in my brain long after reading.
Sticking with fantasy, this year I also started NK Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and my reaction was a resounding hmmmm. This was Jemisin’s debut novel and it very much reads like a rougher, first-draft version of her later The Broken Earth series, which I adored. A lot of the same ideas are there but it just coheres less well together, with certain elements – such as the love between Yeine and Nadahoth – happening too quickly. Yeine is meant to be investigating her mother’s murder, but the tension isn’t high enough because for most of the book she’s just waiting to die. With all that said, I’m still excited to keep going with the series, and perhaps my only real problem was reading Jemisin’s perfected version first.
I also did not love Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen. Dare I say it, but I think it was just too dark for me; or rather, too claustrophobic, with a very slow build up to a grotesque climax. It’s usually very annoying when a reviewer complains about “unlikeable” characters – it’s a book, not a date – but this really is the ultimate test of a novel constructed entirely of deeply, deeply unlikeable characters. Reader: this makes me feel old, but I failed the test. You may have better luck.
Talking of books being ‘too dark’: for years I’ve wanted to read a Stephen King novel. Since I’m really not a horror person, I picked 11/22/63 way back in 2017 as a nice time-travelling historical compromise, and this year I finally got around to reading it. Despite being long – really long – I did really get into this, even though the minutiae of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life never particularly grabbed me, and the central premise of the time traveller’s escapade – that preventing the assassination of JFK would lead to a transformationally better America – is so obviously ridiculous. Perhaps if Jake Epping had been a high-school history teacher, rather than a high-school English teacher, he would have figured this out sooner. Still, it was a lot of fun to read (barring the odd descent into overly-graphic violence) although coincidentally Trump narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while I was midway through, which was very weird.
Continuing some series from previous years – The Bullet That Missed was my favourite entry in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club mysteries to date, and I (mostly) enjoyed the characters much more than I normally do. The plot was also the right balance of ‘clever, but not so clever that I couldn’t follow the ending’. Meanwhile, in Maya Angelou’s autobiographical series, I’ve reached book four – The Heart of a Woman – and my main takeaway is that her relationships are always so terrible!
Ben Aaronovitch’s latest Rivers of London novella, The Masquerades of Spring, was a lot of fun. Set in 1920s New York City (but not in an objectionable Zadie Smith way), the main character – Augustus Berrycloth-Young – is an entirely undisguised Bertie Wooster clone, so much so that it feels like an official crossover. And who wouldn’t want to read Augustus/Bertie bumbling around with Nightingale investigating a haunted saxophone?
Over in rather more weighty universe, this year I also read the second book of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwellian epic, Bring up the Bodies, and the good news is that the sequel fixes her annoying writing habit from the first book of making it really ambiguous who is speaking half the time. Overall, I think I enjoyed this more than the first, helped by a tighter focus on a singular event. This novel is squarely about the downfall of Anne Boleyn, and while obviously her execution for adultery is horrific by modern standards regardless of what she did or didn’t do, all of the intrigue and plotting leaves me very curious about whether any of the confessions from her lovers – extracted under torture – contained any kernel of truth at all. A master study in the orchestrated downfall of someone who once seemed so powerful.
Stuart Turton’s The Last Murder at the End of the World is still not as good as his debut – The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – but Emory is such a great hero to root for that I still kinda loved it. It also helped that the island setting was so vivid and evocative to me. It reminded me of that time in primary school when you have to draw a map of an island with coordinates, and I loved the idea of a single place with all of the world’s natural features – mountains! volcanoes! jungles! quicksand! – all crammed together. Anyway, this story is about the curious, inquisitive villager Emory trying to solve a murder in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone’s memories have been wiped. There’s also an omnipresent AI narrator, Abi, a countdown to humanity’s extinction thanks to a deadly advancing fog, and so many twists and turns that I would have to re-read the book to remember everything properly. But I can think of worse things to do…
I wish I had a better memory for plots in general, because then I would have enjoyed linking up the characters from Emily St John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel with its sorta sequel, Sea of Tranquility, which I accidentally read first in 2022. As it is, I still really enjoyed this novel about half-siblings Paul and Vincent, whose lives briefly converge while working at a hotel on Vancouver Island in Canada. Mostly, however, their stories are separate but intertwined, as Paul is forever haunted by a terrible incident from his student days and Vincent becomes trophy ‘wife'(ish) to a Bernie Madoff-esque character running a Ponzi scheme. To be honest, I’m always nervous writing about Emily St John Mandel books, because I fear Todd will come running to ask what it was “really about”. I don’t know exactly, Todd, but I’m still down for another one.
I have so much to say about Naomi Novik’s Uprooted. This is partly just because I read it shortly after Randi, so we could actually discuss it while it was still fresh in our minds. But I was also struck by a well-written review on Goodreads by someone who absolutely loathed it thanks to the ‘abusive’ relationship between the ‘Dragon’ – a cold, seemingly ageless wizard who guards over the local village from his tower – and seventeen year old Agnieszka, the latest in a long line of village girls who is selected by the Dragon to live with him in the tower for ten years. Of course, in an obvious sense, the reviewer is clearly right, and I respect anyone who decides this book just isn’t for him. But fundamentally, the most magical thing about Novik – just as with Spinning Silver – is her ability to draw you in to a completely different, much more feudal mindset of interlinking rights and obligations which is utterly alien to how a modern character would experience the world.
If you can embrace this, then Uprooted is a gripping story about the development of Agnieszka’s own magic and the terrifying menace of the Wood. I loved the descriptions of magic being performed – the best I’ve ever read – and although the contrast between the Dragon and Agnieszka shades a little close to the ‘women are more natural and intuitive’ trope, Novik avoids making anything too one-sided. My main criticisms of the book are two-fold. Firstly, I did not buy Agnieszka’s friend Kaisa as a character. She seemed surprisingly underdeveloped compared to everyone else, and seemed to exist solely so that Agnieszka could be protective of her. Secondly, the magic system itself was too vague for me, so it was never quite clear why some things were possible and others were not. I also feel that the ‘corruption’ of the Wood could have been pushed even further. But these niggles just illustrate how strongly Novik’s writing implants itself in my head. Highly recommended if you enjoyed Spinning Silver (looking at you, Reema).
This year I’m also proud of myself for finally reading The Odyssey. And by gigantuan good fortune, I wasn’t far along before Randi and I happened to stay with a bone fide classicist over the weekend, so all I had to do to get answers to my dumb questions was look up from the sofa and ask. To be fair Emily Wilson’s translation (which we may affectionately term the ‘woke translation’ for its emphasis on slavery) is superb for rendering Odysseus’s adventures in crystal clear English. What really surprised me is how early his voyage seems to conclude; Odysseus is back home long before the final verse, and his long, drawn-out process of elaborate disguises and endless loyalty tests – before, spoiler alert, murdering all of his mother’s suitors in a massive bloodbath – is less engaging. Well, less engaging to me. I don’t think anyone is reading this blog for an original take on Homer. Although, personally, my gut feeling is that since Odysseus is continually shown to lie about everything – to everyone! – that actually all of his stories are made up.
I’m still working my way through Sherlock Holmes – in a process which has been ongoing since 2010! – and this year I reached Doyle’s fourth and final novel, The Valley of Fear. This was a good one, actually, with its sinister second half about a murderous Freemason gang set in 1870s Pennsylvania. Even more fun was Eric Ambler’s Uncommon Danger, which is like all other Eric Ambler thrillers (amateur hero becomes embroiled in international intrigue) but is a particularly good specimen of the genre. Set in 1930s Austria and Czechoslovakia – including some genuinely tense nighttime border scenes – the indebted freelance journalist Kenton comes into possession of some incriminating Russian documents before alternating between capture (boo) and escape (phew). You’ll wish you were on the run, too!
Finally for fiction this year, I read my uncle’s second novel: The Bard’s Trail! This is quite different to his first one – a fast-paced political thriller featuring murder on a plane (which I read on a plane), competing spy agencies, international terrorist plots and (unsurprisingly) an excuse to feature a Champion’s League final match. I really enjoyed this, although I miss being able to pull my usual trick when reading thrillers: a reference plot summary from Wikipedia on hand to keep all of the characters and plot strands straight in my head. But it was a fun way to close out the year!
Non-Fiction
OK, so I’ve owned a copy of The Writers Tale for a very long time – ever since Russell T Davies autographed it for me and my sisters when it was first published. But I hadn’t sat down and read it cover-to-cover until this year, with all of my renewed excitement about Russell’s return to lead Doctor Who. And it’s a fascinating text. Davies is so unflinchingly honest – at times, you can just imagine an editor emailing to check “do you really want to put this in print?” – but I’m left with even more appreciation for the man who saved my favourite show.
It’s very rare for me to read any books in the work-related realm, but I couldn’t resist Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software, which is really just a compilation from years of his Substack posts. (As a result it’s overlong and would have benefited greatly from editing – but this seems to be a signature Sinofsky trait. He’s always writing memos!) Sinofsky had a long career at Microsoft in product management, climbing the ladder to lead the development first of Office and then Windows, and I’m really 90% here for nostalgia for the era when these products were exciting and “releases” meant something. For the days when dad would buy a new computer, and it would come with Windows 98 rather than Windows 95, and there were new and shiny things it could do. That said, even though the context of my job is very different, it’s also fun to be able to emphasise with challenges and dilemmas which are universal to building any software product.
I’ve wanted to read High Risers for a long time. Published in 2018, it’s a book about one of Chicago’s most famous public housing projects: Cabrini-Green, home to somewhere between 15-20,000 people at its peak in the 1960s. The thing which makes this different to the other books about Chicago that I’ve read (Gang Leader for a Day, There Are No Children Here) is that Cabrini-Green wasn’t “over there” on the South Side, it was “right here” where I used to live and work in Chicago, and not very long ago at all. I mean, I literally shopped in the Target which was built over one of the demolition sites. So I’m implicated, in a sense, as the type of person who was “made room for” when these buildings were torn down and its residents were displaced.
And yet… the book is clearly not written as a simple elegy for these large housing blocks. I don’t know how anyone could do that in good conscience about a place where, by the end, children were in such danger from stray bullets. One of the uncomfortable truths which comes up again and again in these books is that in the heady early days – when the homes were fresh and new, when the political atmosphere was optimistic, when new residents were excited to escape abusive landlords – the authorities exercised a high degree of selection about which families exactly would be allowed to move in. So while the initial community may be poor relative to the general population, it still benefits from not being the “housing of last resort” that it later becomes. One of the most hopeful parts of the book is a brief period when residents of individual buildings are allowed to take control of their own blocks and self-organise: an experiment which is sadly cut short by demolition. But it could have been a more sustainable model.
David Runciman’s The History of Ideas was an easy read because it’s just a written version from the second series of his ‘History of Ideas’ podcast, which I’d already enjoyed and recommend to anyone interested in political thought. Conversely, I’d never listened to Andrew Copson’s What I Believe podcast, but given that he was hosting me it felt rude not to pre-order his new book. This is an engaging series of discussions with prominent humanists about their philosophies on life: a quick read, and a nice tour through a lot of very reasonable people’s heads. My favourites were Nichola Raihani on cooperation (because I’d already heard about some of the research here about why different cultures have different attitudes about loyalty to kin, and it’s fascinating) and Ian McEwan on the novel being a “fundamentally secular” form. “If you want literature to worship God, then poetry is, I think, the perfect form. Otherwise, the monograph or the prayer and the hymn. The novel is too pluralistic for religion, too tolerant. It is indeed the ultimate humanist form.” I don’t know whether this is true or not, but it does give me a nice excuse for my lack of poetry.
Finally, I also read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Song of the Cell. I’d still recommend The Emperor of All Maladies as his greatest work, but you’re always in good hands with Mukherjee to guide you through the wonders of human biology with a reassuring doctor’s touch. As always there are lots of interesting facts which I quickly forget, but the overall impression is of the incredible ecology of cells working together to form one person like you. We’re used to thinking of the heart as “a muscle which pumps blood around the body”, but how do individual cells possibly form a mechanical ‘pump’? How does the immune system differentiate between the self and the nonself? We’re so fortunate to live in a world which has made so much progress in understanding how this works, but also has so many people dedicated to taking us further still. And to be able to curl up with a book which summarises the past century or two of these discoveries is its own special joy.
Happy Christmas Eve! Since I’m in the US until New Year, I thought I’d post this ‘lost blog’ from 25 years ago. It was my second-ever visit to the States, and the first time I kept a diary…
Day 1. Wednesday 31st March 1999.
My mum and I were given a lift to Paddington Station by my dad and my two sisters. We caught a very nice train with a T.V. in it to Heathrow airport. Then we caught a Virgin plane to Washington DC. On the plane it was wonderful, there was a T.V. and games console on the back of every seat! I watched the Rugrats movie and played a lot of games. It took a while to be immigrated but when we had got all our luggage we saw our friend Sharon and drove home. I watched The Simpsons then went to bed.
Day 2. Thursday 1st April 1999.
Today we went to the Smithsonian ‘Air and Space Museum’. We saw lots of planes and space rockets and we saw two movies called ‘To Fly’ and ‘Cosmic Voyage’. These are special movies because the screen is so big you feel you are actually there, as you can’t see anything else. These are called IMAX films. The Smithsonian is actually a block of 16 museums and a zoo, but 2 of these are in New York. The museums range from the ‘Air and Space’ to the ‘Portrait Gallery’, the ‘Natural History’ to ‘American History’. After that we went home, watched The Simpsons, had tea and went to bed.
Day 3. Friday 2nd April 1999.
Today we woke up at 6:30 so we could go to the White House, where all the presidents of America live. The current one is William Jefferson Clinton, the forty-second president. You get free tickets for the White House, mine is stuck in the yellow section of this book. We got a guided tour and I bought a book all about the different presidents. After that we went to have lunch in an ice-cream parlor in the museum of American history. As entrance to museums is free, we didn’t look at the exhibits, we went straight on to the Natural History Museum\Museum of Man. We saw dinosaur bones and a real life tarantula eat a beetle. After that we went home, watched The Simpsons (one of them was a Treehouse of Horror!) and went into the car again at 7:00. This was so we could see America’s famous buildings in the dark. We saw Abraham Lincoln’s (the sixteenth president) memorial. It’s like a temple with a statue of him in. Then we saw the Vietnam memorial, which is a big wall with the names of the people who died in the Vietnam war inscribed on it. Then we drove back home and went to bed.
Day 4. Saturday 3rd April 1999.
This morning we woke up at about 7:30. I had breakfast, an egg and a roll, and then at 10:00 we went to the zoo. I saw lots of things, like giraffes sitting down, kangaroos with babies in their pouches, a gorilla family and birds. But, my favourite animal was definitely the panda bear who was eating bamboo. I also saw an exhibit about teaching chimpanzees a language, and I spotted a mistake. They were teaching it numbers and they had written down: 0 1 2 3 4 5 5 6 8 9 instead of: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. When I told the man in charge of the exhibit about it he said he knew but he said I was the only one to spot it in 3 years and he gave me two free magazines. When we got back we were quite busy because Sharon had invited her mum (Pat,) her dad (Leo,) and her brother (Paul) to dinner. We talked about alot of interesting things, and they left at 9:30. If they came at 6:00, that’s 3 and a half hours. Luckily The Simpsons wasn’t on on the weekend so I went straight to bed.
Day 5. Sunday 4th April 1999.
On Sunday I woke up at about 6:30, but because they had moved the clocks forward it was now 7:30. My mum gave me an easter egg and then we drove to the train station. It was very big and fancy and we got on a train to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It took about 2 hours to get there. When we got there we met Roger and Lily-Ann, my grandmas cousins. We drove to downtown Philadelphia and had lunch in a fairly posh restaurant. Then we went to the Franklin Institute, which is like a science museum. It’s really fun, I saw another IMAX film, mysteries of Egypt. I also had my picture drawn by a robot, I saw a robot playing basketball and I went inside a huge heart, which is quite dark. In Philadelphia, I also saw Independence hall and Liberty bell. When the train arrived back in Washington D.C., I had supper in a pizza restaurant, drove back to Sharon’s flat then went to sleep.
Day 6. Monday 5th April 1999.
I woke up at about half-past 7 on Monday, the first thing we did was to get tickets for the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, then we walked around the tidal basin a big man-made lake. We saw the cherry blossoms in full bloom, and we also went to the Jefferson memorial. Thomas Jefferson, third president of the U.S.A., was the one who gained independence from Britain. After that, we went to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, where they make all of the money in the U.S.A. and most of the stamps. I actually saw the old $10,000 note! After that we had lunch at the Holocaust museum and then we saw a very moving exhibit about German Jewish children. After that Sharon and I rented a paddle boat while my mum went to an art gallery. We had alot of fun and when mum had paddled for an hour, we went home, watched The Simpsons and went to bed for a wonderful night’s sleep!
Day 7. Tuesday 6th April 1999.
This morning we got on the train to go to Capitol Hill. Sharon wasn’t with us because she had to go to work. We queued for 4 hours because the line moved ever so slowly, l……….. i…….. k…….. e……. t……… h…. i……….s! When we finally got in the tour guide showed us lots of things including the whispering chamber, where you whisper into the floor and people hear you across the room. We also saw the place where President Clinton was on trial. After that we had lunch in a restaurant near the capital. I had a cheeseburger and french fries. We went home, I saw most of The Simpsons, (but I missed a bit of the first one,) then we went to the Queen Bee, a Vietnamese restaurant. I didn’t have any food, but my mum and Sharon did. Then we went home and I went to bed.
Picture the scene. It’s Wednesday evening. Randi and I are sitting on the sofa together under the warm glow of the Christmas tree lights. The night before we were both out at work-related Christmas parties; in my case, a big bash at Freemasons’ Hall organised by Fora (our shared office space provider) and DJed by Annie Mac. Surreptitiously, I’m trying to organise a surprise weekend break for January as a Christmas gift, but I can see in Randi’s eyes that she’s hungry for one thing… a Christmas market, ASAP.
Soon, I’m accelerating my plans into an emergency Christmas trip that very weekend to… *rolls European getaway dice*… Gdańsk!
I’ve always been very curious to visit Gdańsk. Today it’s part of Poland – as it has been many times before in history – but after being invaded by Prussia in 1793, and subsequently becoming part of Germany, Gdańsk (or ‘Danzig’, in German) later spent a remarkable period between 1920 and 1939 as a rare remaining example of a European city state: the Free City of Danzig. My family has a lot of connection with Gdańsk during this period; my great-grandmother was born there. Of course, the reason this independence ended in 1939 was thanks to Nazi invasion, and the entire Jewish population – including my family – either escaped in time or were wiped out. The same is true of many non-Jewish Polish families, and as a result the modern city of Gdańsk, which was almost entirely physically destroyed by 1945, is very much a post-war reconstruction in terms of both its buildings and its people. Still, even though all this means I was never going to find a plaque commemorating my great-grandmother on a wall, you can see how I was primed for a lot of historical resonances.
Our late-night flight from Luton airport was trouble-free, despite being a bit of a trek to get there, but since the moment of booking I’d harboured doubts about whether we really had a room at the Hotel Gdańsk Boutique and when we finally arrived at 1.30am, the subsequent ten minutes of the receptionist’s hardcore keyboard tapping (interrupted only by “can I see your reservation again?”) only confounded my suspicions. Nevertheless, we waited patiently and were eventually rewarded when he finally looked up and handed over the room keys to a much, much bigger room than the one I had booked. Relieved, we hurried to bed before he could change his mind.
Randi also has Polish ancestry, and the next morning she began to experience a growing love for her long-lost motherland when she discovered that the breakfast buffet included both pickles and fish. Having both stuffed ourselves, we walked off our breakfasts on a nature path along one of the branches of the river before turning towards the Old Town for our first foray into the Christmas Fair. Gdańsk is very proud of winning the Best Christmas Market in Europe award for 2025, and if it was ever a ‘hidden gem’ type of place it’s certainly not now! The market is absolutely packed with people, but there are also tons of stalls and we barely had to queue for our latke lunch. (They had a different name, but same thing.) We also tried the delicious little Oscypek dumplings served with cranberry sauce which – I later learnt from Klaudia! – are filled with sheep cheese. Another win for Gdańsk.
You’ll be glad to hear that we took a break from eating in exchange for a two-hour afternoon walking tour, which did get a little chilly as the sun went down. I could have done with a little more historical context from the guide as he was pointing things out, but he redeemed himself at the end with a useful overview of Gdańsk’s history combined with an impassioned defence of Polish democracy against both Putin and the native Law and Justice party. It packs a punch when you’re standing in a courtyard where one of the first battles of the Second World War took place (the Defence of the Post Office); afterwards, the captured Polish prisoners were executed by firing squad.
It is worth saying that, just as in Warsaw, the architecture of the Old Town is truly extraordinary. You’re walking around a medieval city – cobbled streets, protected from cars, flanked on either side by beautiful painted buildings – and yet almost the entire thing has been resurrected from rubble in the 1950s and 60s. As a British person, Poland’s success at recapturing the beauty of its pre-war architecture makes me so envious in comparison to some of the ‘modernisation’ which took place in the UK around the same time. Why?!
Also – fun bonus Gdańsk fact – the physicist Daniel Fahrenheit was also born here, inventor of the historic also-ran Fahrenheit temperature scale, and to commemorate him they still broadcast the weather forecast in Farenheit here… for one day a year. (Note to the US: this is an appropriately limited usage of the Fahrenheit scale.)
After nipping back to our hotel to warm up, we dined on pierogi and salmon (although it turns out that lard is a step too far for Randi) before returning to the Christmas market for a spot of Secret Santering, dessert and a spin on the ‘Spinning Barrels’ fairground ride on which (a) we were definitely the oldest people not accompanied by any children, (b) Randi wasn’t certain if she was going to make it without throwing up or not. (But she didn’t!) Finally, we returned to our hotel to redeem our free beers from the inhouse brewery (see, there’s a reason they were actually fully booked) and enjoyed the live music before bed.
If I claimed we didn’t spend a hearty chunk of Sunday morning down at the breakfast buffet, I’d be lying. (I mean, c’mon, they had honey from the honeycomb.) But then we marched up to the Góra Gradowa hilltop lookout, through the gorgeous Gdańsk Główny railway station and onto the museum which made it to the top of the museum wishlist: the European Solidarity Centre. This was a close call – yes, the other museums were very tempting! – but here you’re spoiled for choice, as on top of everything else Gdańsk was also the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union in the 1980s. This movement led civil resistance against the Soviet-aligned state, precipitating the imposition of martial law in 1981 in Poland and ultimately contributing to the remarkably peaceful downfall of Communist rule. So, of course we had to see this.
Plus, on the walk there we stumbled across a near-infinite stream of motorised Santas to boot…
I won’t recap the entire history of the Polish trade union movement (stifle your disappointment, please) but suffice to say the exhibition was very immersive, and you could really feel the pride not just in the movement’s ultimate success but in how the transition to democracy unfolded in Poland. As Randi noted, it gave us both a new perspective on how painful the democratic backsliding of the last few years must have been for those who opposed the Law and Justice government. The 1980s was never the period of history I had in mind when visiting Gdańsk – my family were long gone by then – but learning more about this era was an unexpected bonus of our trip.
With our emergency Christmas Market mission achieved, we flew home on Sunday night feeling very satisfied and festive. Over the following week, Randi treated me to dinner in Strangers’ Dining Room at the Houses of Parliament (while the abolition of the last hereditary peers was debated down the hallway). The following night we hopped over to Queen’s Park to see Randi’s colleague Dan play a gig at Worldly Wicked & Wise, which in my day (!) was a trinket-filled gift shop but is now a minimalist art gallery with space for a band to play. This was a super-fun night, my favourite song being the adorably silly cover In Spite of Ourselves, which gives you a sense of the vibe.
Finally – and to complete the circle of my last post being drafted on the Friday night train to Edinburgh – this weekend we were back in Scotland! Many thanks to Katie and James for hosting us and also for Katie’s stellar gingerbread men, which were quickly devoured when we all made it over to Kirsty and Roger’s on Saturday night for a really wonderful evening together. We also met Katie and James’s friend Dan over brunch, who patiently answered my dumb gardening questions without rolling his eyes, and later shared some great growing facts with us at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital’s Community Gardens.
In addition, Katie and I completed not one but two classic Doctor Who stories on this trip: 1987’s Paradise Towers and 1964’s Planet of Giants. The former is the first classic story I’ve ever seen with Mel as the companion – a gap I was keen to fill after her triumphant return in the most recent series. It’s safe to say the writing of this character has improved. Poor Mel: back in the day, more than half of respondents to a BBC audience research survey wished she’d been eaten by the cannibalistic couple in this story! Cannibals aside, Paradise Towers is partly a satire about brutalist housing block disasters. I really should love it, but it made me somewhat depressed, especially since I can all too vividly imagine the Twentieth Century Society fundraising to support the Great Architect Kroagnon’s legal defence fund. In contrast, Planet of Giants is more whimsical and fun: the Doctor and his (original) companions are accidentally shrunk down to be very small, and have to escape terrors such as ‘cat’, ‘matchbox’ and ‘plughole’. What more could you ask for?
I have a bit of a pre-Christmas blog backlog to clear before our upcoming holiday to the States, so for once I’m actually using my laptop as a laptop (!) and trying to make productive use of the 20.27 Lumo train to Edinburgh. [Editor’s note from the future: I failed, because I don’t have Randi’s superpower of being able to work from a train. But hello from Katie and James’s sofa the next day.]
To start, let’s hop back a few weeks to the outskirts of Regent’s Park, on another dark and wintery Friday night, as I made my way to join Randi outside the shuttered entrance of London Zoo for one of the most amazing and generous couple gifts we’ve received: a sleepover in the zoo itself!
“But wait…” you ask, “where in London Zoo can you sleep?” The answer is in one of a small cluster of little cabins just opposite the lion enclosure. After a brief pit stop here for welcome drinks, our group assembled for the first part of our exclusive nighttime tour of the zoo. Spoiler alert: this is absolutely the best way to see the zoo. Our guides were not only super friendly and knowledgeable but they were also happy to bounce around between biology, sociology, architecture (mostly in frustration at the absurd rules over listed buildings) and the philosophy and ethics of zoos and conservation in general.
It’s just quite wonderful to be led around by people who are so passionate about what they do, and could explain so much more about the animals we were looking at than a self-guided visit. We also took part in some of the ‘enrichment’ activities to keep the animals stimulated, such as stuffing nuts into logs for the porcupines to find. If you have the money, I couldn’t recommend this experience enough.
We broke for dinner served in the main zoo café but fancied-up with bonus mood lighting and music. Afterwards, our tour continued – including a peek into the backstage food kitchens – before settling down for the night in our cabin. Finally, after breakfast, we had a final hour to ourselves with one last daytime tour before the gates opened to the general public. Our favourite might have been the gibbons, Jimmy and Yoda, whose spot overlooks the Saturday morning football matches being played in the park. But here’s a short compilation of some of the others too, including the naked mole-rats which – Randi was entranced to learn – are led by a Queen who viciously smashes all of the other rats to prevent anyone from growing too big to challenge her. “Better to be the smasher than the smashee,” as I recall.
(Not included: the Komodo dragon, although she was awesome and we learnt amazing things about parthenogenesis, and the gorillas, because they are so close to humans in their mannerisms that it felt genuinely uncomfortable to film them.)
A massive thank you to Kirsty for such an amazing gift!
On the way home we also stopped by the Tube Map exhibition at The Map House, because of course we did, of which the coolest thing is probably this annotated proof of Harry Beck’s original diagram from 1932. (Note that almost every article I’ve read about this exhibition refers there being a note about ‘Willesden Green’ at the top, because this is what it says in the gallery notes, even though you can see with your eyes that it says ‘Willesden Junction’.) Sadly, the original costs £75,000 so we declined to purchase one, although in pure value for money terms that makes more sense than trying to flog a Tube map from a few years ago for £35.
Talking of Tube maps, the new Overground line names (which we started spotting in October) have now officially rolled out and we are loving life on the Windrush line. Seriously, for everyone who’s visited us in London over the last few years and has had the same criticism about confusing Overground line maps: your problems are solved.
Last month we also saw our final play at the Bush for 2024, Wolves on Road, about two enterprising crypto chancers whose wild rise and inevitable crash was predictable but fun to watch. This was a mostly light-hearted affair, of which the best part was the chemistry between main characters Manny and Abdul, although not all parts of the production met the same high standards.
In November we also braved stormy weather for the (very short) walk over to Angela’s for drinks one evening – which were lovely – while I very much enjoyed a work lunch at Granger & Co and am making a mental note here to go back.
Next time on dom.blog: An emergency flight to a Christmas Market…
Spoiler alert for anyone who’s still saving the US election night for a streaming binge over Christmas: Trump won. And, as Randi says, if Trump was going to win then we should be glad it was clear and decisive, because it’s always unhealthy when the losing side can sooth itself into passivity because it “won the argument” or wasn’t “really” beaten. There are a million arguments about why the Democrats lost – and I have my favourites! – reasonable people can disagree. What irks me is when people start from the question “…but how could people vote for Trump?”.
The answer to that question is really simple: Donald Trump was the Republican candidate. His voters pulled lever A rather than lever B, and that’s it. It doesn’t work to claim that you’re not allowed to vote for one of the two candidates on the ballot, or that you’re guilty of pathological character flaws if you do. It’s not just that blaming the electorate is a bad idea. It’s also absurd to claim that you’re defending democracy by leaving the voter with only one valid choice. That’s not a vote, it’s a threat.
I know this is disempowering because none of the Democrats chose Donald Trump to be their opponent. So what can they do? Well, one answer is to keep trying to win elections. Political parties which keep getting beaten have a strong incentive to change. But the Democrats do try to win elections, of course. Everyone’s entitled to their own pet theories about how to increase the odds. Here’s my list: Biden announces he won’t seek re-election after the 2022 midterms. An open primary selects a candidate with outsider energy and a popular theme. Internal coalitional groups stop being so self-destructive and weird. You can pick your own list, and it may be completely different to mine. Bernie would have won! Michelle Obama would have won! Taylor Swift would have won!
The point is, believing that Democrats could have done things differently is not the same as believing that victory can ever be guaranteed, especially in a world where all incumbents are losing. ‘Sometimes losing elections’ is really, really normal. I’m not writing this to be sanguine. Trump winning is very bad. But the alternate universe hovering most closely to ours is the one where Democrats lose to someone else, not the one where Democrats always win every election. If you care about a democracy in a two party system, you have to care about the health of both parties, not just your own side. To use an overly British metaphor, they are the neighbouring flat in your terraced house. You should not expect to share their taste in music. A good neighbour is not the same as a good friend! But if they have rising damp, or a leaky roof, it’s going to get you both in the end.
Ranty introduction over! If you made it through all that, I promise I’ll move on to other things too, just after recording how strange my actual 5th November turned out to be. After a day on a stationary boat – for an unrelated work event! – I ended up at a watch party with Randi’s colleagues featuring not just the usual CNN (gotta love John King’s magic wall) but also a dedicated desk of hardcore election analysts just for us. So while CNN cut to commercials, we could just wander over to the number crunchers to get the real story. Sadly, of course, none of this did anything to change the outcome and by the time we got into an Uber home at around 1.30am the trends were starting to become clear. By the end of our ride, it was obvious. Still, I’m grateful for the invite and it was certainly a memorable election-watching experience.
In between all of this Randi and I also did some emergency kitten-sitting for Za’atar at Tash and Cormac’s place in Leyton, where we also enjoyed a very tasty Italian dinner with mum later in the week. That Friday night I was also very excited for a catch-up with Jill at The Island (where I feel like she had to endure an early draft of the opening to this post) and we somehow managed to drag out our last half-pint for nearly two hours.
But, fun things aside, by the end of that week Randi and I were itching to get away somewhere and so we settled on… Bath!
The honest reason why we ended choosing Bath is because at Matt and Rachael’s wedding, several weeks earlier, I had been reunited with ex-Groupon colleague Ben and his wife Steph. When I learnt that Steph runs her own bakery and brunch place – Good Day Cafe in Bath – I sent the menu to Randi as a note for the future, and this seemed like a good time to be sharing some delicious French toast and loaded hash browns. Which we did, for brunch on Sunday, and it was great!
We also arrived with enough time for a long Saturday afternoon walk, which we both found invigorating even when Randi made a rare slip-up in her directions and we had to climb under some barbed wire to avoid a 25 minute walk through a long, dark tunnel. (Which, to be fair, looked really cool. It just wasn’t the outside-in-nature experience we were looking for.)
That evening, we met up with Randi’s friends Will and Zoë for dinner at an excellent pizza place, followed by drinks elsewhere, followed by an oh-my-god-we-can’t-get-rid-of-them walk back to their house for even more drinks around the kitchen counter. They’re both super fun to hang out with, and when we eventually took ourselves back to our BnB (by phone torchlight) we were both suitably uplifted about the world.
After brunch at Steph’s café we thought it would be silly not to visit the Roman Baths of Bath, which (I later learnt) I apparently visited as a child but have no memory of. There have been no swimmers here since a child was killed by a waterborne infection in 1978, but there is a decent audio guide which guides you through the Roman development of this hot spring into a full-blown leisure complex featuring hot baths, cold baths, gyms, wine and poolside snack vendors.
The best part are the curse tablets: bitchy notes inscribed into metal by ordinary people asking the goddess Sulis Minerva to curse someone else, usually after a theft. For example: Docimedis has lost two gloves and asks that the thief responsible should lose their minds and eyes in the goddess’ temple. (Very level-headed, Docimedis.) Our absolute favourite author wasn’t actually sure who had stolen his property, but named about eight potential suspects like a stressed-out supply teacher. It’s wild to still have access to this bottled-up rage nearly 2000 years later.
On the way home on Sunday night we had some engineering works on our Overground and did what any normal couple would do: split up to race home via two completely different routes. Sadly, I don’t think this record will last 2000 years, but here’s a teaser in case I can somehow fool the far future into thinking that everyone did this:
Finally, while Randi is in Wales for the weekend, I met up with Josh, Anna and Cora for lunch and a stomp around Golders Hill Park . A perfect way to spend a Saturday afternoon, even after being magically transformed into a rabbit-frog-tree.