In Amongst It

 For any rugby fans in the Northern Hemisphere, the images are iconic: The 'H' goalposts on jerseys and balls, Miles Harrison's iconic voice calling the games for Sky Sports, the dramatic updates of the quarter-final qualifiers as bonus points and points differences shifted which teams had an easy route to the finals. The old format for the tournament was imperfect, sure, but it still became the best tournament professional rugby has had. The World Cup is brilliant and will hopefully become better and more intriguing with its expansion for the next iteration, but it lacks the Heineken Cup's never-ending competitive streak. Super Rugby is mostly a fait accompli with scant exceptions. The Six Nations and the Rugby Championship suffer from their exclusivity. The Heineken Cup had it all. But then it lost it. It rebranded in 2014 as the 'European Rugby Champions Cup' and immediately lost some of its most iconic imagery and associations. The money that has plagued mos...

I remember going to see a well-cast sci-fi linguistics film in 2017 prepared to nerd out and bask in talk of clauses, semiotics and word order. What followed was anything but, though all such topics of conversation were sprinkled throughout the film like flecks of past-its-sell-by pre-grated Parmesan. A shy-of-2-hours deep meditation on the nature of time, language, and memory, Arrival felt important. It deeply moved me in a way that was at the time explicable. The friend with whom I saw the film laughed at me, but I know what I felt. I was only marginally interested in linguistics at the time - forgive me, I was seventeen years old - but I knew this film had explored something more profound than mere ink blots on a page or larynx-based phonetics. All the Hollywood tropes of villainry are intelligently semi-subverted, though Russia and China still appear to be the bad guys when dealing with the heptapods compared to our heroes, the American military. Louise Banks, played fantastically...

Once seen, you can't unsee these beautiful golden flowers, blooming amidst a dark February in the northern hemisphere. I have taken to foraging more and more recently. It's allowed me to remain creative in the kitchen while giving me access to ingredients that cannot be bought, no matter how desperately I may at times search. I have also found such peace and solace in nature whilst going out foraging. It forces one to notice what is going on around you, what exists around you. It's important to understand the environment in which you live, to see the power and beauty of the natural world. In a world that is feeling more and more dissociative and placeless, to go out into the wild and find nature's produce is simply enriching. I have also, over the past few years, jumped aboard the fermentation train. The gut health and all that. I've been jumping into science-based books that would shock the chemistry teacher from whose class I quit just before our final school leav...

 I'd anticipated some lighter subjects for this blog before I woke yesterday morning and read the news about Alexei Navalny's death. When I first read it, I doubted it, dismissing it as Twitter doggerel and nothing more. That is, until respected historians like Simon Sebag Montefiore and Peter Frankopan started sharing it and commenting on it. Then people like Clarissa Ward and Anne Applebaum chimed in as well. It was in disbelief I read the varying attempts at hagiography, watched the prison video taken, apparently, only the previous day. This was a day I always knew was coming, and knew that it would come sooner rather than later. I just didn't think it would be today. I won't pretend that my freedom is under attack or that the situations that Alexei Navalny protested in any way resemble anything that I have gone through. I'm writing this in front of a TV in Dublin, Ireland. I'm not knee-deep in repression in Vladivostok or anything like that. The work of Alex...

I still remember vividly watching my first Chelsea match, as they romped to the tital in the 2005-06 season, defeating my father's beloved Manchester United 3-0 at home on the second last gameweek of the season. I was hooked, addicted, in love with the royal blue club and the barnstorming players and the funny, stylish, foreign manager. I tried countless times to recreate Joe Cole's skillful finish from that match when I played for Cabinteely F.C., but never to any avail. The club has given me such joyous times and such heartbreaking ones as well. From crying when my dad and his team got revenge way past my bedtime in Moscow in 2008, to rejoicing alone as I isolated from COVID when we won the Champions League in 2021 against Man City. There was always something poetically and beautifully unpredictable about the club, bordering on the illogical. We would sack a successful manager, bring in a new one and win all the same. It defied all that I thought I knew about sports managemen...

Everything about this film's opening scene oozes intelligence. A cracking cast - Michaels Fassbender and Stuhlbarg and Kate Winslet - reads an exceptional, mile-a-minute script - Aaron Sorkin - under masterful direction - Danny Boyle - with an exceptional musical score underneath - Daniel Pemberton . If you asked a generative AI bot how to make a film about a revolutionary genius, it wouldn't be able to come up with something so accomplished. The film has a very difficult job: make the audience relate to Steve Jobs, a messianic figure who, I suppose, bears striking resemblances to Elon Musk, though that is a rabbit-hole down which I do not want to go.  The film portrays Jobs as a genius and, I suppose, I am here to judge the film and not the man himself. The film has been hit by claims it is inaccurate, but I can't speak and won't speak to those. What the film does exceptionally, if not a little painstakingly, is show the viewer that Jobs is a genius. Nothing reflect...