I SAW THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY [525]

ITV News, with newscaster Lucrezia Millarini

When I previously discussed how BBC radio had no news to broadcast on Good Friday 1930, I clarified how specific the circumstances were: allowed only to report from newspapers and news agencies, the public holiday meant no newspapers were published that day, no wire services were running, and no other news was physically reported in time.

 

Today we, the audience, are like the BBC were then, primed to be on tenterhooks. The gap in time between the reception and dissemination of information has almost entirely been closed. Continuous, unedited live audio and video from anywhere can instigated at a moment’s notice by most people, ready to be picked up by anyone else. 

 

All technological and practical constraints that shaped TV and radio news have been removed. Instead of five-minute summaries or half-hour bulletins, the news is as long as you want it to be. Therefore, only you can shape what those limits are.

 

Because I will look at my phone an untold number of times per day – I don’t wish to know that number either – I can call myself up to date with the news, having looked at various reputable resources through the day, from the BBC, various UK newspapers including “The Guardian” and “The Times”, and American sites like CNN, “The New Yorker”, “The Atlantic”, “The New Yorker” and “The New York Times”. For this reason, once I arrive home from work, the last thing I want to watch is more news – a quick cursory glance through the evening will confirm if anything else has happened outside of business hours.

 

Our family, however, continues a tradition of watching the news from ITV in the evening. A half-hour regional news magazine has been anchored at 6pm longer than I have been alive, but the national ITV Evening News has become so long that, as a family, we consciously break away from it to watch something else. ITV’s evening news originally preceded the original news for fifteen minutes until 1998, when it was decided to make it ITV’s main news of the day, doubling the length to give more time to each story. From March 2022, it doubled again to an hour, adding the occasional longer investigation, but having more stories overall. The consequence, for us at least, is fatigue – there are only so many ways you can hear how human beings can be killed. Fortunately, we are relieved when “The One Show” begins.

 

Replicating daytime radio, hourly daytime news and weather summaries began appearing in 1986 on BBC One, with ITV following two years later. Largely made redundant by TV news channels and the internet, mornings on UK television are filled with people talking about the news: BBC One has “Breakfast”, “Morning Live” and an hour-long lunchtime news; ITV has topical shows “Good Morning Britain”, “Lorraine”, “This Morning” and “Loose Women”; BBC Two rebroadcasts the corporation’s global news channel, plus “Politics Live”; and Channel 5 has a succession of discussion shows from 9.15am to 3pm. Everything is up for discussion from various commentators, some appearing multiple times across these shows, some becoming identified with certain shows, like Sonia Sodha and Nick Ferrari on “This Morning”, or Kevin Maguire and Andrew Pierce on “Good Morning Britain” – all of these people also have regular newspaper columns. If you think one show is going on about the same subject for too long, or you want to hear what someone else thinks about the same subject, you have a choice of viewing. Only “Breakfast” and “Good Morning Britain” maintain news bulletins separated from commentators. Meanwhile, Channel 4 broadcasts American sitcom repeats in the morning.

 

This cacophony of news commentary is what led me to cancel my subscription to “The New York Times” once I realised I was only reading its comment section, and to complete the word puzzles. In truth, I cannot work out which of these was driving me most to the paper, but even if I agreed with what I was reading, too much of a good thing is still too much, and I haven’t played Wordle since.

 

I was planning this article just as the United States announced tariffs on countries that did not support its intention to take over the Danish territory of Greenland. Such a discombobulating story led me to constantly check my phone for updates, whether they would come or not, until I had enough of a context and grasp on the story. But “flooding the zone” of public discourse with announcements and edicts to keep politicians and countries on edge, dutifully repeated by news channels to keep us informed, only puts everyone on edge – it is an inevitably parasitic capture of the news cycle.

 

I think the only answer is to create your own bulletin – create times when you can update yourself, leave time to think, and see if there are any updates later. It may sound odd to compare it to the Muzak Corporation’s system of background music, known as “Stimulus Progression”, but it worked on the basis that motivational music be followed by periods of silence to limit fatigue.

 

I can only say this has worked for me – I have cut my phone usage by over an hour a day since 2026 began, but again, word puzzles form part of that time.

WE ARE HERE TO GO [524]

Have you set any New Year’s resolutions for 2026?

Have any goals been set for the year ahead?

What rewards have you planned for when you achieve your Key Performance Indicators?

I have too often set myself up for failure by imposing targets on the organic flow of time, and too often have been disappointed when events didn’t work out as I hoped.

I have therefore been hesitant to risk further failure, but also unable to resist the post-Christmas, pre-New Year opportunity to, for once, switch off my attention.

The hopes of a single year can also be rendered trivial by considering in what “era” you may be residing. I have recently listened to a 2024 BBC radio essay series by Naomi Alderman, titled “The Third Information Crisis”, which led to her 2025 book “Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today”. Alderman posits that, following the advent of writing and printing, the internet has placed us into a tumult that “we will be in for the rest of our lives, changing us psychologically, socially and emotionally in ways that cannot be reversed.” With individuals no longer seeing eye to eye, Alderman implores us to step back from confrontation, but not to retreat from it, and “try not to burn anyone at the stake today.”

Always hoping for a clear horizon, being told instead how to deal with an unending choppy sea is not what I would rather be doing – I would rather move than acclimatise. Forming a New Year’s resolution then became a distraction from action. All I could think of was “break programming”, whether that be my own, or expectations or edicts imposed from outside, and to make sure the new plan sticks, to “get going”.

I then realised that “break programming, get going” was all I truly needed. Every resolution is a potential action that is given purposeful direction. I need not boil it down further, or add further ingredients, for breakfast is already served.

My use of “programming” is literal. Have you fallen into a routine either of someone’s or your own making, at work or elsewhere? Once you break the programme, and are you prepared for the time it will take to implement a new one? Do you have the knowledge to rewrite the code, or do you know how or where to find it?

“Get going” sounds chiding, especially if you decide to add an exclamation mark, but it is positively emphatic: make plans, but more importantly make a start and, most of all, keep going, regardless of any stumble. I also happen to prefer “get going” to “you got this”, something I hear in the instant I’m sure I haven’t got “this”.

Most importantly, whatever you want to do, no-one will tell you how to do that. Ease in, get started, and if it doesn’t work, make changes. If that works, make sure it doesn’t become too much of a routine, one you resolve to change at the next New Year. Onwards, and so on.

I'M TRYING TO TELL YOU NOW, IT'S SABOTAGE [523]

NOTE: I wrote the following in 2023 – my work-life balance has since improved.

“I have only formed one idea for my next article, and I have realised I don’t have enough of an idea to last five hundred words, so I’ll have to leave it for something else. What I was trying to form was ‘the call centre as Hitchcock film’. Just as Alfred Hitchcock talked about inserting the idea that a bomb could go off into a scene, in order to build suspense, could be translated as the tension of the phone waiting to ring, from when you have to put your handset on your head at the beginning of the day... in fact, the phone doesn’t ring, the call just comes through without prior warning, like something hitting you in the face. I still think an article exists here, I just need to think more about it first.”

 

Well, the inverted commas containing spare moments from my diary mean I didn’t get too far. 

 

I am a writer, and I sometimes make videos. I work as an administrator, where my strengths are in “back office” processing, and after a particularly bad week in more of a front-facing customer services role than was really comfortable, my mind wandered back to Alfred Hitchcock, who once forgot his own edict that, after winding up tension in the audience, the bomb should not go off – there has to be relief. Hitchcock had a boy unwittingly take a bomb onto a bus in his 1936 film “Sabotage”, and he was castigated in reviews for letting the bomb go off, which he accepted was his error.

 

I would be much happier having this to think about during my work week – administration is my job, but writing is my vocation, and being creative is what I do.

 

“I don’t want the last week to force a decision to take a break, a thought I am wrestling with - it is like having a chance to salvage the last week, but not having the week to do anything about it... I still need to find a way to write these articles during the week. What I do need to do is make plans for future articles, instead of coming up with them almost at the last moment. I need to have another book where I can write ideas, adding notes and plans as I go - saying it is one thing, doing it is another.”

 

There should come a metaphor at this point linking Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense narratives to my dealing with work-life balance – something about stopping bombs from going off. I tend to take stressful work days home with me, and stress takes time from everyone. Until that resolves itself, this metaphor is To Be Concluded.

 

“I am doing my best at improving the quality of my writing, which usually results in finding ways to say the same things with fewer words, but it shows that I am not done with the form of the five-hundred-plus-word article after nearly seven years. Will that come after ten years, or will it come once I can make video production easier, or at all?”

 

“Never” was my answer, closing my diary for the day.

 

WORDS TO MAKE THE FIGHTING CEASE [522]

I still think that knowing how to write a letter is a very useful life skill, even when most letters are now e-mails. Writing well makes you taken more seriously, no matter how the recipient’s e-mail reader presents it to them.

However, form continues to matter more than content for some letter writers, beyond even whether you indent paragraphs, double-space at the end of sentences, or use “Yours faithfully” if the addressee’s name is not known. 

To that end, the US Secretary of State has mandated that diplomats use the Times New Roman font over Calibri in both internal and external correspondence, reversing a change made in 2023. The bulletin said this was “to restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful [diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility] program[me]”. The story reminded me of a 2019 story about former MP Jacob Rees-Mogg’s staff issuing a style guide for his letters, including banned words and rules on spacing, although no requirements for font usage was reported. One person’s decorum is another’s pretension.

In branding my website, YouTube videos and social media, I have seen my name in Futura Extra Bold for so long that I cannot imagine changing it. I had considered changing to Albertus, the woodcut-like font used throughout the TV series “The Prisoner”, but I like Futura’s presence as a clear, unambiguous typeface, regardless of how thick or wide you make it, coming from a Modernist, European tradition. It also happens to predate Times New Roman by five years, having first appeared in 1927.

The rounded ends of Calibri, contrasting with the ornate serifs of Times New Roman, were easier for people with certain sight conditions, and easier to read on a computer screen. I know the latter is correct, because regardless of how I start writing, my finished articles are saved on Microsoft Word in Calibri, a much easier choice for me to scan when typing and editing. Even after Microsoft replaced it, as the default font in Word, with the Helvetica-like Aptos in 2024, every new document I open in Word starts with changing the font back to Calibri. I use Arial when posting written articles online because, again, it is the clearest font available on the hosting software I use. I do not understand the use of Times New Roman on a computer screen except in large sizes, styling details becoming lost when made smaller.

Times New Roman, as the name suggests, had the very specific use case of being read on a printed page. When “The Times” introduced the font for the first time on 3rd October 1932, it acknowledged the reasons for the change to thicker lines and tighter spacing: “When it was founded, The Times was read in coffee-houses; in the nineteenth century, it came to be read in trains; to-day it is largely read in cars and airliners. Reading habits, dependent on social habits, will not remain constant. Neither must newspaper typography remain constant.”

Indeed, “The Times” only used Times New Roman until 1972, with each of the subsequent five “Times” fonts addressing changes in printing method, the paper used, and legibility concerns. The irony may well be that, for the perennially stuffy “newspaper of record” tradition in which “The Times” trades, the font in which it is read is the most progressive thing about it.

Meanwhile, If I know I am printing a letter, the font I use is Courier New, like I have used a typewriter. If in doubt, use a font that can be read from outer space. 

LISTEN TO THE MUSIC ALL THE TIME [521]

Sony Walkman NW-A45

With my sister deciding to ditch paying Spotify to stop interrupting her music playlists with advertisements, in favour of using an MP3 player to listen in comfort, we were surprised to find that a moderately-priced MP3 player, one that supports high-definition audio, no longer appears to exist, and there is no easy way to fill the gap created by this situation.

When I say “MP3” payer, it may be more accurate to say “personal media player” or, in my case, “Sony Walkman”, having owned an NW-A45 model since 2018 that plays my CD collection in a lossless format that streaming services would require me to pay a premium to access, providing they licenced the songs to begin with.

However, searching Sony’s website reveals that, if the bottom has not fallen out of their MP3 player range, the middle has: apart from low-end, low-storage devices that can only play lossy MP3 and WMA formats, and Android-based wi-fi-compatible models made with premium components that cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds, no mid-range device like my NW-A45 is available, with “Out of Stock” messages  for these being repeated on other online stores to the point where I believe production may have ended. Perhaps Sony are concentrating on publishing and owning the music instead.

Searching elsewhere produced similar results: Amazon either had a number of cheap MP3 players, from unknown brands that give no indication of their quality, or expensive devices by Astell & Kern or Fiio, while UK store chains Currys and Argos had either a cheap in-house brand MP3-only player, or CD players that can play MP3-encoded discs.

Streaming has not killed off the demand for devices that plays the music people own, although I do wonder if some people who junked their records and cassettes in previous years have since deleted their MP3s in favour of streaming. Pretty much everyone has a device that fulfils the job of playing music files stored to it: their smartphone. Apple guaranteed this by adding lossless FLAC playback to iPhones in 2017; discontinuing their final iPod, the iPod Touch, in 2022; and consistently increasing the available internal storage of iPhones into terabyte range. The next question is how to play the files: do you want the Apple Music app to access and subsume them, or play them from “Files”, which lacks the functionality of the dedicated app, or download a third app to keep things separate? 

This circles back to the desire for a dedicated device, and why I have not downloaded my FLAC files to my phone yet. For all that a phone can do in software, and most can do most things well enough, having a dedicated device geared to produce an optimum experience for a specific task is still appreciated where they can be found. The hardware in my Sony Walkman was made like you expect a decent hi-fi system to be made, instead of like a computer that can impersonate one. 

But I know I have not been using my Walkman full-time. I have referenced here a few times that I have used YouTube to listen to music, trading the quality of the audio for convenience, listening to music ad-free there being a by-product of paying to remove ads from videos. In some cases, those songs have been uploaded unofficially by any old person that had their own copy, so I have now found myself recently tracking down and buying CDs of those songs, so I no longer miss out on the quality I am currently sacrificing. Do I save those to my phone or Walkman, and will do so push me to use one or the other in future?

I am prepared to admit that this may all be just me, that I want something that doesn’t exist. But it used to exist.

DON’T GO FOR SECOND BEST [520]

David Fincher’s video for Madonna’s song “Express Yourself” (1989) ends with an epigraph: “Without the Heart, there can be no understanding between the hand and the mind." Inspired by the futuristic, utopian and dystopian of imagery Fritz Lang’s science-fiction magnum opus “Metropolis” (1927) – perhaps even down to Madonna’s monocle, although Lang never wore his on a chain – a similar epigram is displayed in capitals at the beginning, middle and end of that film: “THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN THE HEAD AND THE HANDS MUST BE THE HEART!”

The plot of “Metropolis” has become secondary to the visuals, not surviving the film’s being scattered to the wind following its premiere in Berlin. Its plot, a modified retelling of the Tower of Babel story, lost sub-plots and characters when it was re-ordered for Paramount’s US release by Channing Pollock, a playwright and sometime writer of the Ziegfeld Follies. Half an hour shorter than the original 153-minute length, this wider release was also seen across Germany, cut shorter still by Nazi Party censorship in the 1930s – this 93-minute version, archived by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was pirated for low-quality public domain releases that blew out both greyscales and actors’ faces.

But the imagery shone through. Influenced by the Manhattan skyline, Art Deco and Modernism, the city of Metropolis can be found in “Blade Runner”, “Akira”, Superman and Batman comics, and Osamu Tezuka’s manga also titled “Metropolis”, itself later a film. The “Maschinenmensch” robot, designed by Walter Schulze-Mittendorf, is deliberately more human-looking for reasons explained later, and the underground workers’ city is stark in its comparative lack of detail, simple edifices below a concrete sky, the real sky only visible through grates.

The story is simple. Joh Fredersen, architect of the city of Metropolis, installed at the top of the New Tower of Babel, sees the underground workers that toil to keep the lights on above ground as “off where they belong”. His son Freder, entranced by the appearance of Maria, who came from the depths to show the underground children their “brothers and sisters” in the restricted Eternal Gardens, descends to witness the horror of the M-Machine, the “Moloch” devouring its workers, and works to bring hope. Maria, preaching from the catacombs, retells the allegory of the Tower of Babel, altered from its use as an allegory for why different languages and cultures exist: “But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of which the head that had conceived it had been fantasising… The hymns of praise of one man had become the curses of others… The same language was spoken, but these men did not understand one another.” Freder knows he is the mediator from the start, and will link the hands of his father with the workers’ foreman at the film’s end.

The robot is the most startling image of “Metropolis”, and its reason for looking so close to human was lost among the cuts, along with scenes of the “Thin Man” enforcer trailing Freder, and scenes of the man who swapped places with Freder being tempted to join the hedonistic nightlife he previously could only imagine. The scientist that built the robot, Rotwang, is not the archetypal wild-haired, one-handed mad scientist that James Whale’s “Frankenstein” cemented, for his work to bring the robot to life was to resurrect the memory of a lost love, named Hel, who would eventually marry Joh Fredersen, dying after giving birth to Freder. Joh’s demand to turn the robot into a clone of Maria, to sew discord among the workers, is used by Rotwang as an opportunity to avenge Hel’s death by killing Freder, and to take the real Maria as a substitute. Just as Joh told Rotwang, “Let the dead lie, Rotwang… She’s dead for you as she is for me,” Rotwang’s reply is, “For me, she isn’t dead, for me she lives! Do you think the loss of a hand is too high a price for recreating Hel?”

I have previously mentioned watching four versions of “Metropolis” over the years. One was a 139-minute version on VHS, rented from a library, that undercranked the film to the extent I had to watch it on Fast Forward – that all silent films were made at sixteen frames per second is a misnomer. Giorgio Moroder’s pop music-laden version was comparatively quick, barely over eighty minutes, achieved mostly by replacing intertitles with subtitles, but the reincorporation of Gottfried Huppertz’s original hand-written score from the premiere, the original titles from German censor cards discovered in a film archive in Sweden, and many scenes from multiple sources, most importantly the rediscovery of a near-complete copy of the film in Buenos Aires in 2008, has allowed me to watch the film as near as possible to what was originally intended at its premiere.In terms of what I think about "Metropolis", I appreciate the visuals more now the full story is back in place.

I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY [519]

My umpteenth "Myra Breckinridge" reference

With the leaking to “The Times” newspaper of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) update of the 2010 Equality Act Regulations, instigated by the Supreme Court judgement in April 2025 that transgender women with a Gender Recognition Certificate are not women under the terms of the Act, it has been confirmed that requests for paperwork for some people to enter single-sex spaces that correspond with their gender, found in interim changes to these regulations that have since been withdrawn, have been replaced with perception-based assessments on appearance and behaviour. 

This attempt to avoid the policing of these spaces inadvertently creates what sounds like, to me, a beauty contest, because what a joy it is going to be having to pass the test to appear in the correct space at the right time. 

This remains theory for now, as the knowledge of what could become law stems from a leak of something the Government is assessing, but considering how often “The Times” reports on this issue, and with the EHRC imploring the Government to implement these new regulations as soon as possible, this new report raises questions for me about motivations I won’t get answers for, as I will only be affected by what the final decisions will be.

Years of experience as a human being, let alone as a trans woman, show that “passing” as the correct gender in any situation, for anyone and everyone, is as much in the eye of the beholder as bias and prejudice will be in other situations. In using a public toilet or a changing room, the regulations make clear that there will be circumstances where you present so well in your gender that you can reasonably be excluded from the space that corresponds to your sex, but it is made clear I cannot be left without any facility.

I hope people don’t talk about me like they would the cross-dresser from across the road, if they have one, or any person they see more than once without ever needing to talk to them. I am not “committing to the bit”, I am being myself, but if you don’t know me, you don’t know that, and your confidence in bridging the gap should not then leave me at your mercy.

The knowledge that months of waiting for clarification of the law is effectively to continue the status quo that existed for decades, after what has felt like a protracted abjectification of trans people in the media since the Supreme Court judgement, is a profound waste of my time and energy. By necessity, “gender critical” belief is included in the regulations, but also crucial wording about distinguishing the objectionable expression of beliefs.

If implemented as reported, the new Equality Act regulations codify a loss of trust, regulating what could no longer be left to people to decide. Good luck, everyone.