But She's A Girl

I caught a bit of a conversation on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour the other day, which amazed me. Humans produce unusually sugary breast milk compared to other mammals, but many of the sugars in it cannot be digested by babies. Instead, these sugars are thought to feed the gut microbiome.

That’s pretty mind-blowing: evolution has tuned the composition of breast milk so that mothers feed not only their baby but the community of bacteria within him or her.

So much of the trouble that humans create between each other stems from making tiny distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. And yet we are incredibly similar to other apes, other primates and even other mammals. And each of us has at least as many bacterial cells within us as we have human cells (not to mention the viruses, fungi and so on). There are layers and layers of communities, and we should worry much less about which of those communities is ‘us’.

Beautiful and heartbreaking. I loved ‘The Secret of Kells’ and ‘Song of the Sea’. This film is every bit as beautifully animated as either of those, but tells a much darker story. Parvana and her family are struggling to survive in Afghanistan under the tyrannical rule of the Taliban. When Parvana’s father is arrested by the Taliban and thrown in jail, Parvana is forced to dress as a boy to try to make money and buy food for her mother, older sister and infant brother.

It doesn’t shrink away from the violence and harshness of the regime, but it also beautifully portrays the tenderness between members of the family. I have seen criticisms of the ‘story within a story’ which Parvana tells her siblings, but I think it is a key part of the way that the characters can approach and deal with emotionally difficult things.

All of the Cartoon Saloon films have a moment that comes out of nowhere and grabs you right by the feels. This one is no exception, and it was heart-rending and stunningly beautiful at the same time. The film even managed to make me (eventually) pity the over-zealous young Taliban follower who harasses Parvana and her family. There’s a very subtle moment when you see that he is just a young lad who can’t even grow a proper moustache yet, and he’s scared when the reality of the situation dawns on him.

This is an amazing piece of work.

I’m a huge fan of C.J. Sansom’s ‘Shardlake’ books, and have read all the previous books in the series. His writing seems to get better with each book, and the Tudor world in which you are immersed gets richer. His characters have deepened and matured too. I’m glad Jack Barak is back, as I love his tough chippiness. It’s such a good foil for Shardlake’s quiet seriousness.

This book is set in 1549 and tells the story of the peasants’ rebellion in Norwich, lead by Robert Kett. My knowledge of history is not great, admittedly, but I had never heard of this rebellion before. The detail was fascinating, and the way that the plot strands of the crime that Shardlake has to solve weaves in with the historical events is superb. As ever, the plots are gripping, even over such a long book. It is also very moving in places, because we get so fond of many of the characters. I had a particular fascination with this book, because part of it is set in Wymondham and Hethersett, where I spent quite a bit of time as a child, visiting friends and relatives.

By the way, don’t skip the Historical Note at the end. It is fascinating to see how much of the action (and some of the characters) was based on historical facts. It is an incredible piece of work.

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Growing up in Suffolk, Nathaniel Mann, heard stories passed down by his grandma about a tradition of the village Rough Band, made up of pots and pans, iron and metal implements, including meat cleavers - delivering a sort of sonic warning to anyone stepping out of line, committing adultery or behaving in way considered unacceptable.

As part of the Avant-Folk trio ‘Dead Rat Orchestra’, Mann, a singer and composer, has long been playing music with strange percussive instruments. Coming across an old meat cleaver in his dad’s garage he was inspired to make a set of cleavers to play music on - so turned to a bronze bladesmith to help turn meat cleavers into musical gold.

I listened to this yesterday and found it fascinating. The sound that comes out of the bronze cleaver when struck is eerie and beautiful, and I love the poetic terms used in smithing like ‘The Cry of the Tin’. There are so many interesting layers here, including the social standing of blacksmiths (respected, but feared and mistrusted), the soundscape of traditional crafts, old traditions of social justice through ‘Rough Music’, and work songs from around the world. If you can access BBC radio, I definitely recommend giving this a listen.

BBC Radio 4: Dead Rats and Meat Cleavers →

Mr. Bsag is a printmaker, and often submits his work to open exhibitions. The requirements for this process are many and varied, but these days the initial round of selection usually involves submitting a digital image of your work. He now has a copy stand, and so he takes a photo of his prints. This is a tricky process in itself, because his engravings are often small in size, so difficult to capture in a photograph at an appropriate level of detail.

But then the fun starts. Every submission seems to require a different combination of DPI, maximum or minimum image dimensions, maximum file size and so on. Over the years we’ve tried a range of image editing applications to process the images for submission. It seems as if it would be an easy task, but (for example) the ones that allow you to set a specific DPI don’t give you a live estimate of file size, so you have to use trial and error to optimise the pixel dimensions and quality while remaining within the file size limits.

What I really want is an editor that would allow me to enter filter-like constraints (less than 3 MB, longest edge more than 1920 px, 96 DPI) and it would then pick the combination of variables that maximised image size and quality while satisfying all the other constraints. If anyone knows of anything like that, do let me know!