Museum Hours

So,  The Miniaturist  (warning - spoilers abound).  It looked amazing and all. It really, really did. Those interiors were straight out of a Dutch still life. The framing and perspectives were painterly.  Someone spent a lot  of money on the costumes; the silks looked as though they cost more than the entire budget for many programmes. The casting was pretty fabulous even if Anya Taylor-Joy is more familiar playing a witch/alien/robot  of an evil cast of mind and one rather expected her at some point to transmigrate into a rabid monster doll, crawl unbidden from the depths of the dolls house (on which more below) in the manner of Ringu  and consume half the population of Amsterdam (in 1686) before flooding the dykes and sinking the city beneath the waves. That might actually have made more sense. I may still have been dazed from LFC just buying the most expensive defender in the history of the world. I may not have drunk enough to be in the perfect state of comato

The thesis is simple. Forget the purported four  grand challenges  in the Industrial Strategy.  If the major economic issue of our times is increasing productivity then the single greatest contribution to success would be the development of a widely recognised emoji to express the feelings associated with having ones head in ones hands.   This after all is the position adopted by employees most frequently in workplaces up and down the land. Mountains of written communication, avalanches of emails and texts, are expended as a result. There may even be the odd phone call. If there were instead a single character that could sum up all these feelings which could be sent directly on a one to one or one to many basis it would save so much time and energy. It would cover all those many moments when almost involuntarily one sighs deeply, mouths 'not again' or 'really?', breathes even more deeply, stares at the desk or the ceiling, stretches a lit