My blog. Carpe diem No 26 - a weekly miscellany.

Last Saturday, I read the FTWeekend almost cover to cover on a flight from Stansted to Dublin. I had gone off the FT, having read it every day, five days a week, for most of my working life. I went off it in hospital during chemotherapy. Indeed, I went off all newspapers and radio news. I couldn't cope with the news.

But I had started to go off the FT anyway. I felt it had lost its way editorially. Or perhaps it was I who had lost their way. I don't know. But I do know that the FT failed to match its initial enthusiasm for the relaunch of capitalism and its support of ESG with an effort to do something about the scoreboard on its back pages.

Either I have changed, the FT has changed, or both, but last weekend's FTWeekend blew me away, page after page. Enuma Okoro wrote an excellent short piece on Blue Monday: "..the third Monday of January...supposed to be the most depressing of the year". The point of her piece was, "It's OK not always to be OK."

There was a thoughtful Opinion piece by Daniel Susskind on Growth, the title of his latest book and a talk he gave last week in Davos, the heart of which is that he believes more growth comes from more progress in technology, which comes from more ideas.

Lunch with the FT, one of my favourites, was Edward Luce with Doris Kearns Goodwin, "the grand dame of American history - author of Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln. She revealed that Barack Obama asked her "where she thought Lincoln found the emotional intelligence to forgive his enemies and appoint them to his cabinet" and that Hilary Clinton joked that she had Goodwin to thank for President Obama appointing her secretary of state.

There was a great piece by Robert Armstrong on the value of finding your signature style, for example, Springsteen's jeans and T-shirts. Since my illness, I have been wearing red socks. It feels like the rebellion I failed to mount in my teens. A piece by Ludovic Hinter-Tilney on Ed Sheeran's foundation for music education and a full-page piece by Raphael Abraham on Brady Corbet, the maker of The Brutalist, I have marked for later reading. Camilla Cavendish wrote about the need for a clear governing philosophy for Labour. I agree. I'm not clear on its purpose.

The review of A Complete Unknown, the film about Bob Dylan, was absorbing most of all because of the last line: "He is whoever he says he is - unknown indeed, on principle". I saw the film and was fascinated and disappointed in equal measure. I am intrigued because Dylan is fascinating, and I love Chalamet. Disappointed because it was, as some have said, a bit "vanilla". A Real Pain, written, directed and starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, was a better film. I was moved more by it than by the Dylan film.

And so, while I'm ready to make up with the FT, I've never lost my admiration for The New York Times, which always stirs me every time I read it. Elizabeth Dias' piece on Bishop Budde's courage in confronting President Trump about mercy was an excellent example:

"..At a moment when conservative Christians are poised to gain even more power through Mr Trump's second term, Bishop Budde tried something different at the interfaith service...Mr. Trump was unmoved. When the sermon ended, he exchanged a look with Vice President JD Vance...who shook his head in apparent disapproval..."She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way," Mr Trump declared on Wednesday. "She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart."

In my work with senior leadership teams and boards, I have witnessed similar scenes, if not on the same scale but on the same emotional level, when someone tries to call someone else out. I found Bishop Budde compelling and smart. Like all rejections, President Trump's rejection of her was a statement about him, not her.

Thank you to those who read my blogs for Meal of the Week and absolutely nothing else. 'Twas last night. I nailed spaghetti carbonara after many disastrous attempts and was so overjoyed that I wrote a separate mini-blog about it: https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7288266438413361152/

Carpe diem,

Ciarán