There are few things more likely to make my eyes roll than the headline:

Wallace’s response to MasterChef claims was misogynistic, says No 10

The fact that a television presenter has made people feel uncomfortable by acting inappropriately is serious, and ought to be dealt with seriously by his employer and, perhaps, his employer’s commissioner. The fact that early complaints to the BBC appear not to have been adequately acted upon is worthy of investigation. The fact that people face inappropriate behaviour in workplaces across the country and feel powerless to report it is upsetting, and we can only hope that stories like this help to change that narrative.

However… it is slightly absurd that journalists asked for the Prime Minister’s take on an Instagram video made by the television presenter in response to those accusations, and it is truly absurd that the Government responded to them.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales suggests that around 3,000 people became victims of seuxal assualt on the same day that Greg Wallace recorded his unpleasant Instagram rant. Many thousands more will have put up with inappropriate behaviour that they’ve felt powerless to tackle—or, perhaps worse, that they’ve tried to tackle and yet been ignored.

The fact that the No 10 spokesperson didn’t use the opportunity of the question to pivot to talking about the wider issue is a failure of communication.

The fact that the Prime Minister’s attention is evidently distracted by an unpleasant issue outside of his control is a failure of Government.

But… the fact that BBC One has chosen, of all characters, Wallace and Grommit to feature in idents introducing news programmes where another Wallace features heavily is a divine comedic success.

Wendy and I were both struck by the measured tone of this week’s Parliamentary debate on assisted dying.

It’s a complicated topic. To me, the starting point is certainly that assisted death should be legal, but the practicalities are complicated. They are probably best left to people with more expertise than me.

It strikes me that the medicalisation of death complicates the picture. It is not obvious to me that it should be up to doctors to arbitrate on the processes surrounding the universal human experience of death.

It is, of course, appalling to contemplate that representatives of our state religion, in which only a minority of the population express a belief, will get a Parliamentary vote on the issue… but that’s hardly unique to this topic. It is absurd and unjust that bishops continue to sit in the House of Lords, and if this debate forces a re-examination of that issue, then that will be a welcome side effect.

I was particularly interested to read Richard Smith’s thoughts on this week’s debate, as a former editor of the BMJ who has spent much longer thinking about the topic than I have.

As you will no doubt be aware, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom is currently mulling over the exact definition of a ‘woman’. As The Economist drily noted this week,

Finally, an answer looms for those who wonder what those 34m people in Britain who are not men might be.

The debate about the exact definitions of gender terms is distressingly toxic, and rarely seems to contain much compassion. It also often feels very current, as though it is a debate which could only exist now—which is, of course, nonsense.

We all know this is nonsense, as we all know that the role of women in society has transformed over the last century, and we all know that change always leads to conflict. Of course, there have been repeated, endless debates about the topic.

I learned this week about the case of Gwyneth Bebb vs The Law Society, heard 111 years ago next month. The similarity between the debate then and the debate now is striking.

Bebb wished to become a solicitor, but found herself prevented from doing so by the tradition that only men entered the legal profession. The Solicitors Act of 1843 referred only to a ‘person’ acting as an attorney or solicitor, setting no specific gender boundaries.

And so Bebb asked the Courts to rule on whether a ‘woman’ was a ‘person’—a very similar question to that being considered by the Supreme Court today.

Bizarrely to modern eyes, the Courts ruled that a ‘woman’ was not a ‘person’—not least because married women were unable to enter legal contracts of their own accord.

In the short term, and to Bebb specifically, this was devastating. She died from complications of childbirth aged 31, just a few years after the ruling. Yet, within a decade of the ruling, women were practising law—just as they had a few hundred years before.

I’ve no idea what the Supreme Court will conclude this time around, but I suspect the impact is likely to rhyme with history: society’s views will continue to change at an unprecedented pace, for better and for worse, and people arguing about the exact definitions of words will have little long-term impact.

I said a few years ago that I think Paris is at its best on crisp, sun-drenched winter days. I reflected this week that Newcastle is pretty good under those same conditions… and unlike during that trip to Paris, the ice on Newcastle’s pavements hasn’t swiped my feet from under me (yet).

In 2012, I visited the Tyne Pedestrian and Cyclist tunnels, about a year before they closed for refurbishment. The refurbishment did not go to plan, and the tunnels were closed for six years. I re-visited in 2020 to see how the almost-finished product looked.

I reflected on that visit that the fancy new lifts were not yet up and running. But this week, the better part of five years on, the lifts have finally opened to the public. The tunnels, which are free to access, have also returned to 24/7 opening.

The Tyne and Wear Metro used to have 90 Metrocars formed into 45 trains. The fleet is now well beyond its intended lifespan, and some of the trains have been harvested for parts to keep it running. A while ago, the service frequency was reduced so that only 28 trains are required at peak times.

Yesterday morning, a quarter of the 28 running trains broke down in service. A few weeks ago, there was an afternoon when only twenty trains were available.

Somehow, none of this feels surprising—it feels like yet another example of a public service that no longer works properly, another asset which once evoked civic pride but now feels like a bit of an embarrassment.

There are plans in place to fix things—new trains are coming, for one thing—but reputations lost are hard to regain. Regardless of how quickly it might happen on paper, I wonder how long it will be until the system feels reliable again?

This is a short French film by Coralie Fargeat, first released in 2014. I streamed it elsewhere, but it turns out that you can also now watch it on YouTube:

It is set in present-day Paris. Residents can choose to have a ‘chip’ implanted which allows users to see themselves and their fellow users with their ‘dream’ bodies, for twelve hours per day. It’s a commentary on how parts of our society are obsessed with physical appearance.

It won lots of awards, but I thought that didn’t say much beyond the obvious, that a person’s qualities are more than skin-deep. I saw Jennifer Haley’s one-act play The Nether at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London around the same time as this film was released. The play has a similar conceit, but leaned into exploring ethics in a much more interesting and memorable way: instead of focusing merely on romance, it used the theme of child abuse to raise deeply uncomfortable questions—though I suppose it was three times the length.

I’m not sure the film did much for me.

In his Dividing Lines newsletter last week, Tom Hamilton wrote about the absurd and offensive use of war metaphors in political debate.

Here’s Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, perorating.

“This is a Budget of broken promises, and when the dust has finally settled and this lot have gone, as we step over the fallen—the former farmers, the pensioners, the one-time businesspeople, the poor and the vulnerable—there we will find the shattered remains of the working people of this country, betrayed by a party that lied to them, and they will never forget it.”

Believe it or not – your mileage may vary on this, but I found this astonishing – Stride was actually wearing a poppy as he used this metaphor. Paying tribute to our war dead while saying that pensioners losing their winter fuel allowance are basically in the same category as the boys who got machine-gunned at the Somme. I realise that while it is crass it is not intentionally crass, but it is not obvious to me that this is less disrespectful than defacing a war memorial.

As Tom says, ‘it shouldn’t be too much to ask people who use words for a living to think about the meaning of words.’

But politicians aren’t alone in this. If there’s one word that’s likely to elicit an eye-roll in my office at the moment it’s ‘frontline’, which has not only lost it’s war-based metaphorical meaning, but has seemingly lost all meaning altogether.

I’ve never previously considered that for people who are into the Christian traditions of Christmas, there’s a conflict at this time of year. You neither approve of decorations before the start of Advent nor approve of representations of the birth of Jesus being omitted.

So when retailers stick up their decorations early, which principle do you sacrifice first? The Metrocentre chose the former (along with a very feminine representation of Gabriel and a Mary who looks older than you’d imagine). I’d probably have made the same decision.

I find it difficult to look at a nativity scene these days without thinking ‘where was the poor kid’s mother?’