This was the first of Anne Tyler’s many novels that I’ve picked up, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. As it turned out, I found it to be a gentle, closely observed, and quietly moving book. Tyler takes the narrow frame of a wedding weekend and uses it to reflect on far broader themes: the weight of societal expectations, the different ways people respond to past traumas, and the messy complexity of family dynamics.

The story unfolds over three days: the day before, the day of, and the day after a wedding. It is really a character study rather than a plot-driven tale. Gail, her ex-husband Max, their daughter Debbie and her fiancé, and the various in-laws and hangers-on are all rendered with enough detail to feel convincingly real. I warmed to them, flaws and all. There was a real sense of a lived-in family world: the tensions and misunderstandings were familiar, but so too were the flashes of tenderness and humour.

Reading this just after Nella Larsen’s Passing and Andrew Sean Greer’s The Story of a Marriage gave it an added dimension. Each of those novels, in their different ways, looks at the interplay between love, loyalty, and social constraints. Taken together, they feel like a thematic triptych across time: Larsen’s 1920s Harlem, Greer’s 1950s San Francisco, and Tyler’s present-day Baltimore. Each reveals something of how individuals navigate the gap between private feeling and public expectation, and how private trauma can shape a lifetime.

Stylistically, Tyler’s prose reminded me of Fannie Flagg—light on its feet, yet full of warmth and detail—though this is firmly grounded in the contemporary world. She has that knack of making small domestic moments feel significant, without tipping into sentimentality.

At heart, Three Days in June is a short, understated novel, but one that lingers in the mind. I enjoyed spending time in its world, and I came away feeling I’d met a cast of characters whose lives, while fictional, seemed to illuminate something very real. I thoroughly recommend it.

This is Hexham Bridge, which has been crossing the Tyne for 232 years: longer even than it takes to cross the Tyne Bridge at rush hour with the current ongoing restoration work.

Hexham Old Bridge, this bridge’s predecessor-but-one, lasted only a year, swept away in the Great Tyne Flood of 1771.

Its replacement last only a couple of years, swept away by a ‘hurricane’ in 1782.

So when the third Hexham Bridge eventually opened in 1793, even its architect Robert Mylne surely couldn’t have dared to hope that it would still be standing two centuries later… unlike his bridge at Blackfriars in London, for which he’s rather better known, which lasted only a century.

This is Molly: unveiled on the banks of the Wear earlier this year, the statue commemorates the women who kept Sunderland’s shipyards running during the World Wars. She was sculpted by Ron Lawson.

Shipbuilding was a continuous occupation on Wearside for about seven centuries, until the last shipyard closed in 1988. It perhaps lends an extra air of poignancy to the statue to realise that it’s commemorating an important contribution to an industry that no longer exists, and shows a woman at work in an occupation that’s now lost to Wearside history.

The same artist is responsible for this nearby sculpture showing two shipbuilders eating their lunch towards amid a dying industry, perhaps contemplating their employment fate:

In my day job, I am the successor to the District Medical Officer referred to in this notice pinned to a wall in an early 1900s school at Beamish.

The list has expanded, though everything on the Beamish list is more or less still on the list today, though not always in quite the same way.

Consumption is, of course, better known now as TB, as notifiable now as it ever was.

Croup can be caused by many things, and isn’t notifiable in itself, but can be a symptom of diphtheria, which is certainly notifiable.

The dodgiest one is erysipelas, a skin infection. This can be caused by a Group A Streptococcus infection, and can be invasive, in which case it would be notifiable.

The first order for the national collation of notifiable disease data in England and Wales was made by the Local Government Board in 1910. The first statistics followed in 1911, though were pretty incomplete, so most data sets only report from 1912 onwards.

A list of notifiable diseases from the early 1900s might therefore seem a bit anachronistic for Beamish’s school—but local systems of notification like this vastly pre-date efforts to collate data on a national footprint. Notification of certain diseases to local medical officers became legally mandated in 1889, and existed in other forms for many years before that.

In the world of twenty-first century public health, my predecessors would be shocked to learn that it’s sometimes forgotten that notification enables (first and foremost) timely action in response to individual cases to protect the population. Compilation of those reports into statistics is an important secondary use—but not the primary aim.

With Air, John Boyne brings his quartet of elemental novellas to a close, and it feels like a strong, fitting conclusion—though I was a little sad to finish the series. Like the others, Air is an easy book to read in terms of pace and prose, yet it has serious things to say about how trauma and guilt echo through a lifetime and even across generations. Trauma, and especially sexual trauma, has been the theme running through the quartet. Each novel has approached it from a different perspective and in a different register, and Air feels like both a continuation and a resolution.

This time the focus is on Aaron, an Australian psychologist, and his teenage son Emmet, travelling together on a long-haul flight. The story is simple on the surface, yet through their conversations, silences, and the memories that intrude, Boyne unpacks complex legacies of abuse and loss. Both Aaron and Emmet are characters who feel fully human: flawed, searching, recognisable. I thought the dialogue in particular was strikingly lifelike: it was clipped, awkward, occasionally funny, often freighted with things unsaid.

As with the earlier volumes, what struck me was the quality of the storytelling. Boyne has a knack for stitching together past and present, personal memory and wider history, without the seams showing. It is years since I read Water, yet the connections in Air to earlier characters and settings came immediately to mind. I never felt lost or in need of a refresher, but nor did I feel weighed down by slabs of exposition. That balancing act must have been fiendishly difficult to pull off in practice, but it reads as effortless.

Air may not be as dramatic or heightened as Fire, nor as claustrophobic as Earth, but it closes the cycle with grace and clarity. The quartet as a whole is a study in how people carry damage, sometimes with resilience, sometimes with bitterness, sometimes unknowingly passing it on. To have sustained that theme across four compact novels without repetition, and with each volume offering genuinely different insights, is a real achievement.

Boyne has long been a master of drawing us into characters who are scarred, contradictory and complete. Air is no exception. As a conclusion to the Elements series, it left me satisfied, moved, and ready to recommend all four books.

I recently walked past Leith Library which is almost a century old. I did not expect to later discover that, in 1976, an elephant popped in:

This photo is courtesy of The Scotsman, 15 January 1976, where it is reported that:

Indras, a five-year old female elephant now appearing in a circus at Leith Theatre, is helping Edinburgh Library Service in their campaign to remind people to return their books on time. She carried a load of books yesterday to Leith Library, where Mr Peter Allan (70), of Portland Street, Leith (left), questions whether the table will stand her weight.

The past truly is a different universe.

On 9 March, Wendy and I found ourselves on a flight from Belfast to Newcastle. As we approached our destination, the captain came over the tannoy.

Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies, but we’re currently unable to land at Newcastle. Work on the runway means that the lights are currently inoperable, and the current fog means that we cannot land without runway lights. We will circle for a while to see if the fog clears, but otherwise, we may need to divert.

Disappointment turned to dismay as the fog only thickened, and the captain eventually confirmed that we would be diverted… back to Belfast.

A few months later, dismay turned to disbelief as we stared at this chunk of runway tarmac in Newcastle Airport’s 90th anniversary exhibition:

It claimed, in black and white, that the runway resurfacing in March 2025 had been successfully completed ‘without disrupting the flight schedule’.

I beg to differ.