The Zuyder Zee Sized Hole At The Heart Of The Miniaturist

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 comatose acquiescence lying prone on the couch.

I have no problem whatsoever with the ending of a journey of self-discovery and development, personal growth and taking responsibility for dealing with circumstance. None.

What I do have a problem with is that the central plot device - a weird dolls house which is gradually populated by articles which seems to presage events - whilst clearly not a complete macguffin, made no sense whatsoever in terms of the central dynamic. 

In particular:

(a) why does the husband decide that a dolls house is just what his new wife needs to distract her from the fact that he is not going to be the husband that she thought she was marrying? 

(b) he gives no sense of actually knowing or having any connection with the elfin character actually making and delivering the miniatures - so ....

(c) there is no explanation of why said elfin character other than clearly being several degrees brighter than most of the population of Amsterdam (in 1686) would pay particular attention to observing in minute detail the goings on in this particular house

(d) how said elfin character is able to capture parakeets - which when last seen seemed destined for a long and doubtless ultimately fruitless flight back towards the Tropics - when it looks as though reaching up to close the shutters might prove fatal to her. 

I may be doing this production and possibly the book (which I haven't read) a disservice but this looked like a classic case of, so to speak, a (dolls) house which the author thought was in need of a home. 

Then it's a case of don't think too hard about the detail because, well, this is a pretty amazing idea with just the right combination of spookiness and mystery so people will just kinda switch off and go with the flow and be pretty fascinated by all that period detail. 

And wondering how to capture an escaped parakeet.

And whether the main character will turn into a rabid monster doll.

And whether LFC have bought the best defender in the world or just been duped by a feint from a competitor. Rather like this production.

Meeting the Productivity Challenge: A 'Head In Hands' Emoji

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 little and then succumbs to a modest bout of chronic rather than acute despair at the world in general.  

It would meet the need when HR send out, yet again, a contract that has the wrong job title, an incorrect salary and the wrong number of hours to be worked (but is, of course, in all other respects absolutely fine).

When you explain something for the fourth meeting in succession and it's still palpably obvious that 'don't get it' remains the dominant reaction. Moreover, many of the attendees have actually forgotten that there even were three previous discussions.

When someone actually reads out in public the phrase 'not for disclosure' and continues to make the associated disclosure whilst maintaining the sense of beatific calm bestowed on those for whom the connection between eyes, brain and mouth is at best fleeting.

The selection of available emojis simply doesn't quite cut it. For example:

🤨   Raised Eyebrow - good for denoting scepticism, disbelief, or disapproval but is rather too simply quizzical rather than capturing the full ennui associated with dealing with repeated nonsense 

🙄   Rolling Eyes - splendid for disdain but the boredom is too straightforwardly contemptuous rather than having more of a sense of despair 

😣   Persevering Face - does provide some of the 'how many times' emphasis and can also suggest being on the verge of tears but also suggests some hope of actual agency to make things different

😕   Confused face - very good for puzzlement but often there's really no puzzle just incompetence and a failure to think things through. 

I think we are coming closer with something like this: 

🤦   Facepalming - to display frustration or embarrassment at the ineptitude of a person or situation, but that has more of a sense of one off immediacy rather than connoting in the fully Nietzschean sense eternal recurrence. 

So the search goes on. The emoji would convey a sense of frustration coupled with a degree of genuine puzzlement; it would add in a touch of disbelief but in a resigned rather than indignant mode; there would be an element of despair and a bit of desperation. Above all there would be a sense that this is just how the world is and always has been and that expecting anything better is tantamount to a fool's errand. So there is an underlying fatalism. 

It would indeed be the perfect symbol for our confusing and troubled times when so little seems to be achieved by so many and indeed most effort is directed at something that is actually counter our best interests. And even then we cock it up.  

Maybe it has an element of this:

This one is probably going a bit far but could work if suffering also from a migraine:

This one would be good for rather more eirenic states of resignation:

So come on all those great minds, the untapped potential about to be unleashed across the UK in response to committing wilful economic suicide by severing ourselves from our main trading partners, lets put together a national competition to design the emoji that best meets the needs of the time. 

Let's work really hard on putting our heads in our hands.

Let's show that you really couldn't make it up.