Book Review: Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, by Alexander McCall Smith
So, after re-reading the series so far and de-duplicating the second-hand copies I bought by mistake, I returned to the travails of Mma Ramotswe. As usual, the agency's cases are more often puzzles and problem-solving than crimes, but right now seems at least as good a time as any for a bit of light escapism. The ladies are investigating possible match-fixing in one of the local football teams, and they find themselves with little background knowledge to fall back on; meanwhile, one of Mma Makutsi's fellow alumnae from the Botswana Secretarial College (who scored much less than 97%) is up to no good. This is a series that makes most sense from the start, so I imagine the audience has become self-selecting by now.

Yesterday we went to the British Museum's Hiroshige exhibition. Like pre-Raphaelites, I tend to think that Japanese prints are a money-spinner for museums and galleries. This one was reasonably busy but hardly packed. For the most part, the pictures are enchanting landscapes, townscapes, birds and flowers. There's a fair amount of background and technical information included, such as the reuse of woodblocks with different colourations to produce prints from the same master indicating different times of day or season, or simply to cater for changing tastes. I found the depiction of rain particularly interesting, a heavy diagonal overlay that sometimes almost looks as if it has been scratched into the print. One or two prints of actors or courtesans reminded me of the Edo Pop exhibition from last year, and in the section on Hiroshige's legacy there was also a reference to the Yoshida dynasty.

Mount Fuji and Otodome Falls

Cherry Blossoms on a moonless night along the Sumida river

Pheasant and Chrysanthemums

First Shono from Fifty-Three Stages of the Tōkaidō

Portrait of Hiroshige by Kunisada

Book Review: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
This was a random discovery in a National Trust second-hand bookshop, although I'd already been aware of it and was mildly curious. Klara is an Artificial Friend - we don't get many details, but enough to confirm a human form - and the story begins in a shop where she is for sale. Eventually she encounters teenager Josie, and her mother buys Klara for her.

Josie is home-schooled and sometimes ill, and Klara spends some time caring for her among other activities. Klara meets the neighbours. Josie's parents are separated, but eventually Klara meets Josie's father.

There are many twists in the story, and the ending was, for me, unexpected. Throughout, there is a combination of humanity and dystopia. It's accidental: no-one is seeking to be evil, but everyone is living through the consequences of their and others' actions.

( Spoilers )

Book Review: Floyd Uncorked - A no-nonsense guide to French wine, by Jonathan Pedley with Keith Floyd
This is a TV tie-in book from a Channel 5 series, published in 1998. Plainly the writing is mostly by Jonathan Pedley, but the serious business of French wine is lightened by Floyd, who adds a handful of recipes. It's an informative book, covering wine regions and grapes, and also the growing and producing processes. The format is a bit uneven, with sidebars on topics appearing at random, and although the chapters are structured geographically, there isn't a clear pattern. The recipes are interesting but I'm not sure all of them are practical, particularly in smaller quantities. But it was good fun to read.

Yesterday we had a quick post-work dinner at Erebuni (which I'd previously visited in 2017) - this time I had the Armenian dolmas - before heading over to the Barbican for a concert given by Jordi Savall (whom I'd previously seen in 2014) and Hespèrion XXI. The programme was inspired by the travels of Ibn Battuta, and as such ranged from Morocco across the Mediterranean, north and east Africa, the Near and Middle East, the Black Sea, India and China. Loosely following his travel writing, with a narration given by Assaad Bouab, the programme also included references to contemporary historical events such as the outbreak of the Hundred Years War and the coronation of Pope Benedict XII. I'm not a great fan of the amplification used but in a large venue, it is a practical necessity for a band such as this. Savall's recordings always feel eclectic and well-researched, and though the geographic spread of these works meant that some of the concert arrangements featured unlikely combinations of instruments, there was an essential sense of authenticity.

Book Review: The Primacy of Doubt, by Tim Palmer
Poor Michael Fish. He will be forever remembered as the forecaster who dismissed the possibility of a hurricane hitting the UK in 1987. He features prominently in this book, but not alone. Ironically, the Met Office was developing its own ensemble forecasting at the time, and running the data with hindsight through those models, the forecast was unusually chaotic and unpredictable.

Palmer's career has weaved between quantum physics and meteorology, and I suppose it's therefore natural that he finds the connections between those two topics. "Sensitive dependence on initial conditions" - the unpredictability popularly known as the butterfly effect - features large, and is well explained. The solution - at least as far as understanding the potential for error in a forecast - can often be to run an ensemble model, with a range of close but not identical initial conditions, and consciously to throw in a bit of noise, to discover whether the predictions lie on a smooth part of the phase space, with little variation, or in a more chaotic realm.

Palmer stretches out into other areas more or less connected to the above, such as climate change, the Covid pandemic, and economics. In the first two areas, scientists find this approach useful: it indicates the degree of uncertainty in predictions, as well as showing plausible worst cases. There's an amount of separation here between science and policy: "Following the science" is a bit rubbish, as well as mendacious, because the science only offers projections on likely outcomes if a particular path is followed. On economics he finds tougher ground: although some theorists have found the ensemble approach useful, it is not in vogue and hard to get such research published. The implication is of faddishness or denial in some academic circles. It's certainly true that Mandelbrot considered himself an irritant to the economic establishment.

The fundamental problem with models in various areas is that of agency, so that the predictions or projections of a particular model influence behaviour, providing feedback into the model - it's exactly this non-linearity that gives rise to chaos. Chaos, in the sense that our mathematical frameworks aren't very good at handling this. The three-body problem is an early example - chaotic and ultimately unpredictable motion, yet somehow nature does its sums and finds a path. In the third section of the book, which Palmer marks as "more speculative", he investigates quantum uncertainty and free will. There are some interesting ideas about chaotic attractors and fractals, which earlier parts of the book have explained well. The Cantor set somehow fills a space, yet it is empty (insofar as picking a random point in that space almost certainly does not lie in the set). Synthesising these ideas as an explanation of quantum uncertainty, giving rise to probabilistic observations, is clever, as is the idea of quantum noise as a source of inspiration and free will. We are in the same zone as Hofstadter's strange loops. Some of the most speculative ideas in the final chapter seem off, but credit for trying.

Yesterday we headed off to Dulwich Picture Gallery for the Tirzah Garwood exhibition. As usual, there's quite a lot packed into a relatively small space. As well as works by Garwood, there were a few by her more famous husband Eric Ravilious, and portraits of both by other artists. I think I perhaps found Ravilious more consistently to my taste, but Garwood offers more variety. The works on display included woodcuts, pencil drawings, oil paintings, marbled papers, and collages, often of children's toys or houses and shops - including one with a Meccano mechanism apparently intended to circulate ducks on a stream. The subject matter varied from drawings of her children to almost surrealist renditions with curious relative sizing and perspectives, almost reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland or James and the Giant Peach.

The Vicarage, by Eric Ravilious

Portraits of Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood, by Phyllis Dodd

Etna, by Tirzah Garwood

Brick House Kitchen, by Tirzah Garwood

A Crane Fly and Spider, by Tirzah Garwood

Erskine returning at dawn, by Tirzah Garwood

Book Review: Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
This has been a popular book for several years, and I received a copy at Christmas. The first few chapters reminded me a bit of The Ascent of Man, with a little (probably improved) of The Selfish Gene thrown in for good measure. Epic in scope, the author shows us that, since the beginning of our species, we have been destructive; although he notes it as depressing, it is in some ways reassuring, that it is not a particularly new trait. What is new is that we're at least somewhat aware of, and concerned about, the extent of our own destructive powers.

So we begin with other Homo species, some of whom went extinct long before us, and others with which we coexisted for a while. It may be of some disappointment, particularly to those intent on a paleo diet, to discover that our ancestors were much more gatherers than hunters. The cognitive revolution allowed us to imagine things, and since then, almost everything has been to a greater or lesser extent imaginary. We thought the agricultural revolution would make us happier, but it tied us to the land and made even more work for ourselves.

It's not all ultra-nostalgia. Although the book does imply why we so often hark for a simpler era, it also highlights what may loosely be called progress. Lifting the lid on various religions is quite interesting. Later sections deal with commerce and the scientific revolution. There are some choppy waters on fact-checking: I had to look up St Brigid, and I have doubts she would come top in a vox pop to name an Irish saint. The author seems to reckon hydroelectric power is a source all of its own, independent of the sun. (But how did the water get there? From the weather, driven by the sun. It's the same energy source, with a rather longer process, for fossil fuels. The only ultimately non-solar energy source on the planet is from naturally occurring radioisotopes.) On the whole, though, the writing is thought-provoking and entertaining enough.

Written in 2011 with the English language translation dating from 2014, the book is weakest on its optimistic futurology. The sense of progress in the book is inevitable; it hasn't feel that way for some time now. The author focused on the potentials of genetics and cybernetics, but missed out on AI. The difficulty with the future is that it's hard to predict.

Book Review: The Noh Mask Murder, by Akimitsu Takagi
A surprise Christmas present, this comes from the same publisher as The Honjin Murders and others, but it's a different author, translator, and detective. Nonetheless, the writing shares some elements of style and there are commonalities in the period (just post-war Japan) and the self-referential framing to Western "Golden Age" crime fiction (this time perhaps more Agatha Christie than Arthur Conan Doyle).

The storytelling mostly takes the form of a journal, written by Koich Yanagi, a chemist staying and working in the Chizui family mansion, whose friend, Akimitsu Takagi, happens to be staying locally and is called upon as a private detective by the present head of the family in fear of his life. The Noh Mask of the title is a family heirloom, but supposedly cursed.

As the bodies pile up, Takagi, Yanagi, prosecutor Hiroyuki Ishikari, and the local police proceed with their investigations, among a family overflowing with motives and issues. Although there are strong suggestions as to the identity of the killer, there's no clear evidence, and the novel uses the persona of Ishikari to probe this quandarous stalemate. The conclusions require some suspension of belief, but it's a neat and cumulatively original ending, and overall it's quite a page-turner.

It's time for an end-of-the-year post. Lots of things happened in 2024.

At last we got rid of the Tories, although Starmer seems almost as tone-deaf as his predecessor (in either government or party dimensions). It's true, of course, that things can't be fixed overnight, but he doesn't seem to do "hope" particularly well. Locally, the Tories lost the seat to Labour, with a disappointing Lib Dem result, although recently I reflected that perhaps we had taken some votes from the Tories, which would have been important in the final result. I suspect there are quite a few places where the margin of victory wasn't particularly high, and as a result the parliamentary landslide is shallow. Reform are emboldened by Trump's victory in the US and the Tories seem determined to track them rather than attract voters by returning to more central ground. I have the feeling this won't end well.

Given my post from last year, I should observe that since November we've been connected with full fibre. So far, so good. It turns out, in a repeat performance of digging up the roads, Virgin Media is also an option now. It seems everyone apart from BT/Openreach think it's worth laying fibre here. There might be regulatory reasons for that.

A friend, who is a few years older, retired early from their job, precipitated by changes to USS. It was bound to start happening at some point, but nonetheless it was a psychological jolt. For me, work has been a mixed bag and there are definitely some things I don't like about it. Over the holiday period I have been researching, planning and playing what-ifs with spreadsheets. I can't quite access my SIPP yet, but it's getting close enough that I think it's worth contacting Pension Wise in the new year, probably following up with real financial advice. Things would be a lot easier if I thought there were benign economic waters ahead in the next four years.

Anyway, here are some highlights from my year:

• Fiction - The Assassin of Verona, by Benet Brandreth


• Non-fiction - You're Him, Aren't You?, by Paul Darrow


• Music - Henry Wood's orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition at the Proms


• Film, TV and Theatre - Ludwig (unblogged)


• Museums, Exhibitions and Visits - Yoshida at Dulwich Picture Gallery


• Food and Drink - Kinnie Spritz at Aaron's Kitchen in Valetta

Honourable mentions for
The Devil's Flute Murders (fiction); The Subterranean Railway (non-fiction); The Britten Sinfonia and the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble at the Barbican, and Jonathan Scott's Organ Recital and two Kanneh-Masons at the Proms (music); One Life and Moonflower Murders (film, TV and theatre); MUZA in Valetta, the Tarxien Temples and the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum (exhibitions and visits).