A Boy and a Girl, by Eric Whitacre, sung by Voces 8 – recorded in 2020 as part of their 'After Silence' concert and album project, and re-promoted now as a prelude to their Eric Whitacre collaboration 'The Sacred Veil'.
The Windemere Children – BBC drama, plus a documentary, on the children liberated from the Nazi death camps to be rehabilitated in the Lake District. A good example of what a drama can do, over a documentary. In the documentary, those still alive reminisced as you would expect about what a paradise it was and how it brought them to their new lives. The drama could show how it wasn't that simple: show us the fear and mistrust they brought with them, the night terrors, the conditioned response to take and hide any morsel of food they were given. Also an interesting early example of the use of art therapy.
Science Fiction Film: A Critical Introduction by Keith M. Johnston – very readable survey. Demolishes some critical old hat and popular myths, such as that the definition of the genre has some kind of objective reality, that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was "really" about fear of Communist infiltration, that SF films are all about spectacle rather than narrative and character, and that one can talk about SF films without reference to the rest of culture (even SF culture). I especially liked the chapters on cinema trailers and audience reception and participation, especially since the rise of the internet, and the useful history showing what SF films were called before the term was widely used. (Trick film. Comic short. Scientific romance Thriller. Romance. Scientific melodrama. Horror.)
When the Past Was Around – charming and touching wordless adventure game from an Indonesian studio, in which a young woman beset with grief recalls her lover. She used to call him Owl, and as he gradually takes form in her memory he appears as a man with an owl's head - slightly weird but also beautiful. The visual and musical motifs acquire meaning upon meaning as you play through their story: the musical symbols, the scarves, the music box, "their" tune which they hum and play on their violins and which provides the key to unlocking her healing memories. A beautiful romance; you feel for her, and for both of them.
'Words to avoid' – gov.uk style guide. "Agenda (unless it’s for a meeting), use ‘plan’ instead. Deliver, use ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘provide’ or a more specific term (pizzas, post and services are delivered - not abstract concepts like improvements). Key (unless it unlocks something), usually not needed but can use ‘important’ or ‘significant’. Transform, describe what you’re doing to change the thing. Utilise, use ‘use’. Going/moving forward, use ‘from now on’ or ‘in the future’ (it’s unlikely we are giving travel directions). One-stop shop, use ‘website’ (we are government, not a retail outlet)."
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro – classic Ishiguro novel: quietly powerful, very moving. Klara, who narrates the story in the first person, is an AF or Artificial Friend. Bought from a department store to be a companion to the teenage Josie, she becomes drawn into the individual hopes and plans of not only Josie but her mother, her friend Rick, and Rick's mother. Klara is very sophisticated in her perception of humans and understanding of emotions, but she has trouble navigating unfamiliar physical environments and her knowledge of the world is very limited. Her simple quasi-religious faith in the power of the sun (which has a direct physical basis - she is solar-powered) runs throughout the book, possibly naive, possibly profound. In the end, I was left with a sense of a life well-lived, reminded of that other great AI, HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, who said, when being interviewed for TV: "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."
Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Gavin Francis – nice booklet by a GP, essentially lamenting the demise of convalescence as a medical concept (let alone healthcare provision),and the consequent reluctance to see recovery as something which may (1) take time, a lot of time, and (2) not necessarily lead to a restoration of things as they were before. My favourite two quotes: "Don't plan anything within an hour of eating" (p. 22) and "It's a journey that changes the trajectory of your life, your priorities, your values, your hopes and ambitions, your sense of who you are in the world, and your relationship with those around you.... You are entering a new and unknown country, with an unfamiliar language and no map" (p. 90).
Encodya – sweet and beautiful cyberpunk adventure game (see review). Very well voice-acted and visually impressive. The setting is pure Bladerunner – the flying cars, the jangly giant advertising screens, the perpetual nightime – but the emotional heart of the game is the relationship between little nine-year-old orphaned Tina and her giant protective robot Sam. You guide Tina around the streets of Neo-Berlin as she discovers a hidden message from her father and sets out to reveal and complete his work. A very satisfying experience – or it would be, if only there weren't so many nearly-invisible crucial objects hidden on the ground and on the walls.
Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure, by Dennis Duncan – continuously interesting and amusing and scholarly. Like many readers I think, I was taken aback by aspects of the literary technology I had never before considered, such as the order of the alphabet (why that order? he doesn't really say, though he traces its early use) and the invention of page numbers - both essential pre-conditions for the index as we know it. Particularly revealing to see the laborious instructions-for-the-use-of which used to come with indices when they were new. (See review in The Guardian, review for the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading.)
Content Design, by Sarah Richards – great little primer, from the woman whose team worked on the gov.uk website between 2010 and 2014 and turned it from the usual government information dump into a quiet triumph: quiet because when a website works properly you don't notice it. The principles are familiar to anyone who has worked in or with usability: you need to start your design with users, what they need and what journey they are on when they come to your material; everything else follows. But this covers the whole process very well, and very necessary it is too. As she says: "We don't need more content. We need smarter content." "Content design" was the term she came up with to describe what she and her team were doing, which included writing and editing but going far beyond that. (See also review on Medium, interview with Sarah Richards.)
The Ipcress File – classy ITV adaptation, which confirms my view that the way now for James Bond films is to make them period pieces, from a time when foreign travel was exotic, fashion was stylish, and technology was cool. Joe Cole as Harry Palmer is no Michael Caine, but he stands up to the toffs with agreeable working-class cheek, and Lucy Boynton is very believable in her fairly unbelievable role (for the 1960s) of a female senior intelligence officer. Both are outclassed, though by the excellent Tom Hollander.
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