✮Five Brilliant Things✮
On different kinds of literacy
Hello,
I wrote this weekend about being unwell, and the tangles it makes in your head. So many of you were incredibly kind about it - so I wanted to say thank you first of all. I’m still not feeling great, but I now have much better medication and I can breathe again. I’d like to reiterate that it’s really, really nice to do so.
I’m doing as I’m told and resting, which for me means catching up on movies. Today I watched Anatomy of a Fall, which was excellent, and also the 2015 film Colin Farrell film, The Lobster, which was one of the strangest and darkest things I’ve ever seen. Have any of you seen it? I’d love to know.
Anyway, enough from me. Here are five brilliant things I’ve read lately. Please share your Substack picks in the comments!
‘As soon as I arrived at the hospital, odd things began to happen. Someone tossed me their car keys as I walked through the revolving door. On the elevator, a nurse told me everything she’d done that weekend in extraordinary detail. All day, I was late for my sessions because receptionists kept asking me to pass messages to departments in distant wings of the hospital. I didn’t get a bite to eat at lunch because a janitor made me mop up someone else’s spilled fruit juice. When the program ended, I was pressed into service wheeling clinical waste bins down to the loading dock.’
Hanif Kureishi on what book collections really mean
‘Occasionally, when people come to the house to fix things, they say, almost in wonder, “You’ve got a lot of books, have you read them all?” I always say, “I’ve started a lot of them.”’
The Shriek of the Week comes from my favourite: the starling
‘You might think of it as a bag full of random clockwork pieces, all whirring, wheezing and clicking.’
Poorna Bell makes a searing case for women’s financial literacy
‘My husband Rob was a heroin addict, and for three years, I had no clue. When you tell someone something like this, their first reaction is How could she not have known?’
‘Yes, all of these lack precision, so they’re useless for modern science, and would be incredibly dangerous if used for engineering purposes. But they also tell a story of people’s relationship with the space they moved through.’
Take care,
Katherine
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Katherine! Thank you so much. And I'm glad you're gingerly but hopefully inexorably on the mend. Breathing difficulties? The panickiest. I'm so sorry, ghagh.
As for Imperial measurements, before I researched and wrote that piece, I was firmly Team Metric - despite using inches and miles and pounds and stone without thinking. But now I feel like...like...
Well, it's the same feeling as when Europe adopted the Euro. I *know* that it makes perfect sense in 95% of cases, and it makes things easier and it's more rational and so on. But I think about the hard-to-pin-down joys of handling those new coins and notes when you go travelling, the coins with straight sides, or holes in the middle, or notes that are HUGE or all these weird colours, plastered with images I don't understand and people I don't know. I know that nobody's going to make a rational economic argument for those things, but I certainly feel there's a cultural and emotional one. There's a human one. A love of currency diversity, and the heart-racing, wide-eyed excitement it can bring. A differencing that's somewhere short of Othering.
So I suspect in 18th-Century France, I'd be one of the extremely stroppy farmers, complaining bitterly that this new "decimal" system was incredibly boring and unnatural and the whole world is going to the dogs...
The Lobster is one of the best movies I never want to see again 😅 The final scene still haunts me.