The Reinvigorated Programmer

Second Year at Malory Towers — Enid Blyton

I made it some way into this sequel [see review of the original] before starting to enjoy it: I feel that the innocent charm of the original is either absent this time around, or has lost some of its impact through familiarity. But as I read on, I found that I was interested in how boring it was. What I mean is, until very near the end, almost nothing actually happens. One girl becomes ill and recovers, and that’s about it. So all the bulk of the story is about who is best friends with who, and who doesn’t like who, all of it rather catty and unappealing.

I found myself reflecting on the difference between the Malory Towers books (written for girls aged around eleven) and the Jennings books (written for boys about the same age). I’m not claiming that either series is a literary masterpiece, but what’s noticeable about the Jennings books is that stuff is always happening. The boys of Linbury Court are always building little huts, or starting detective agencies, or writing school magazines, or playing football matches, or catching burglars, or climbing on roofs. By contrast the girls of Malory Towers seem very passive. They mostly just go to lessons and talk to each other about who they do and don’t like.

I wonder what this means? The fact that both series have been wildly popular seems to show that they appeal to their target audiences. But to what extent does this reflect the real concerns of pre-teens in the 1950s, and to what extent does it just reflect the authors’ assumptions about their concerns? Again, the commercial success suggests the former, but then to what extent are the different concerns of 1950s pre-teens reflections of their culture, and to what extent were they intrinsic differences that shaped that culture? And how strongly are the same gender differences reflected today? Are the books still popular, and if so, with the same clear gender divide as in the past?

I don’t have answers to any of those questions — at least, none that I am strongly attached to. But I do wonder whether, as society has rightly shifted towards the idea that girls should be allowed to do everything boys can do and vice versa, we can slip easily from this moral imperative into the much less obviously correct assumption that boys and girls should like the same things. Gender differences are real — they can hardly help being, given the important role of sex-dependent hormones — and I’m not sure that trying to erase those differences is altogether helpful.

And that’s what I got from Second Year at Malory Towers.

Deja Dead (Temperance Brennan #1) — Kathy Reichs

We’ve been watching the TV series Bones, which was spun off from the Temperance Brennan novels. So I was interested to see how this, the first in that series, compares with the TV show. The answer is that it is different in almost every way: the TV show really used only the name of the lead character and her role as a forensic pathologist. TV Temperance is young, pretty and single, and leads a team at the prestigious (fictional) Jeffersonian Institute in Washington DC, collaborating with a handsome FBI agent played by Angel from Buffy. Book Temperance is middle-age, divorced with a collage-age daughter, a recovering alcoholic, and works as a relatively low-level technician in one of several police departments in Quebec.

The story itself is gritty and at times harrowing, fairly slow and carefully procedural — again, all in stark contrast to the zippy, fun TV series. I found it compelling enough, but ultimately rather unpleasant, and I’m not in a special hurry to read the next in the series.

I shall wear Midnight — Terry Pratchett

The fourth of the five books that make up the Tiffany Aching subseries of the Discworld novels. Tiffany herself is a distinctive character who is easy to like, and this is an enjoyable read. But like most late-stage Terry Pratchett, some of the lucidity has gone, and there is in places a rambling quality that was not present in the earlier books in the series. I’ve read this more than once, and no doubt will return to it again one day, but it’s not one of the greats.

Remarkably Bright Creatures — Shelby Van Pelt

A new colleague joined us at Index Data. We both went to a conference in London, and his wife came with him. She is an English teacher, and we quickly fell into conversation about books. She recommended this to me, and it was a fine choice. At bottom it’s a relatively straightforward story about an aging woman living on the coast in Washington state, still haunted by the death many years ago of her son, and of how she forges a connection with a young loser from California. The idiosyncratic twist is that alternate chapters are narrated by an octopus at the aquarium where the woman works as a cleaner, and that the octopus’s perspective on events helps us to see some aspects of them more clearly. All of this is a written with clarity and care, and it lands beautifully.

The Poet, the Tourist and the Waterfall — Andrew Rilstone

My favourite critic takes on C. S. Lewis’s famously difficult The Abolition of Man — one of the very few Lewises that I’ve read only once. The result is probably Rilstone’s most difficult book. I think that’s unavoidable: the book is Rilstone’s thoughts about what Lewis thought about what King and Ketley thought about what Dorothy Wordsworth reported that Coleridge thought about remarks made by tourists about a waterfall. Keeping all those levels straight is not always easy.

I’ve never not enjoyed a Rilstone book, but I don’t think this one would be a good starting point for anyone not already familiar with his work, or for anyone who’s not read The Abolition of Man.

The Light in the Hallway — Amanda Prowse

I found myself in the mood for some chick-lit, and it happened that an Amanda Prowse book (All Good Things) was in my daily BookBub email. When I followed this link I found it was not one of her better reviewed books, and more or less randomly chose The Light in the Hallway from the ones discounted to 99p that had 4.8-star reviews.

It wasn’t at all what I expected. It’s the story of a 35-year-old northern man coping with the early death of his wife from cancer, his son’s departure for university and his employer shutting down, all under the microscope of his family’s opinions. The actual writing is not very good at all — there are frequent jarring notes, especially in the dialogue — but the story was legitimately moving. I might come back for more.

One Day — David Nicholls

This is the novel on which the recentish excellent Netflix series was based (as well as a less well regarded earlier film). There is a high concept: we follow Emma and Dexter, who met just before graduating from Edinburgh University, through 20 years of their lives, but only seeing a single day of each year (15 July, St. Swithin’s day). Their friendship is charming if sometimes strained, and always has a frisson of something more.

I came to the book because I’d enjoyed the TV series so much, and it turns out to have been a very faithful adaptation. But the book is even better than the TV series, because it’s so well written, and so effortlessly full of throwaway insights into the two main characters’ state of mind that ring absolutely true. This, for example, very early in the book:

Even [Emma’s] beloved Edinburgh had started to bore and depress her. Living in her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left, and so in October she had given up the flat in Rankeillor Street and moved back to her parents for a long, fraught, wet winter of recriminations and slammed doors and afternoon TV in a house that now seemed impossibly small.

Nicholls is an excellent writer, whose other books I will certainly seek out.

Colonel Sun — Kingsley Amis (writing as Robert Markham)

This is the first James Bond book written by someone other than Ian Fleming. The idea had been to get a series of celebrity writers to contribute books, all under the pseudonym Robert Markham, but in the event Amis’s book was the only one that went out under this name.

I’ve read all the original Bonds a couple of times each, and to my ear Amis pretty much exactly captures the tone of those books (which is very different to that of the films, in case you didn’t know). His Bond is world-weary, self-questioning, fallible, but dedicated and highly capable. He is not an easy man to like.

The plot begins with M’s abduction from his country residence by, it turns out, agents of the Chinese government. This is part of a plot to destroy an international conference, taking place on the Greek island, and pin the blame on Britain. Bond recruits two Greeks — the requisite beautiful young woman and a war-veteran mariner — and together they … Well, I don’t want to spoil the story. It’s well worth reading for yourself.

The eponymous Colonel Sun is a sadistic Chinese army official, who has made a study of torture — a truly loathsome creation. The most compelling parts of the book (and also its most unpleasant) are those concerned with his and Bond’s confrontations.

 

A quick update on my interrupted trawl through Flux. I watched episode 5 some weeks ago. I did intend to write about it, but I got distracted — and in the intervening time the episode has almost completely slipped away from me. I remember the Doctor on a sort of space-station affair between two universes where her adoptive mother had some important exposition, the content of which escapes me. Something to do with the eponymous Flux. I think I remember her dying for some reason? Not sure. Oh, and there was an Ood. Yeah. That was it.

I will watch the sixth and final episode. I will. And, so help me, I will write about it. And then it will finally be on to the blessed relief of the Specials, and then at last onto the New Guy.

Having watched the first four episodes of Flux, I did watch the fifth episode and intended to write about it. But somehow I got distracted and didn’t get around to it. I probably will, but not today.

But in the mean time, for reasons I can’t really explain even to myself, I’ve started watching the not-very-good old-Who season 11 — Third Doctor, 1974. So far I’ve watched all of The Time Warrior (four episodes, first appearance of a Sontaran) and Invasion of the Dinosaurs (six heavily padded episodes) and I’m two episodes into Death to the Daleks.

The cliffhanger at the end of Invasion of the Dinosaurs episode 1 is the appearance of this Tyrannosaurus rex.

As noted, these are not very good episodes. They are incredibly slow moving — one often finds scenes of two people just standing quietly together, perhaps guarding an entrance — and as the screenshot above shows, the effects and not merely bad but at times risible. The acting is often perfunctory. The script is frequently inane.

And yet, and yet …

Something about these ancient serials — now more than half a century old — keeps me coming back, whereas I have no inclination to return to Flux beyond my promise to myself that I’d finish watching it before moving on to other newer episodes.

I think it comes down to Old Who’s respect for causality. You couldn’t say the episodes are coherent, exactly, but they’re not nonsensical. If the Doctor is captured by the bad guys, then the result is that he becomes their captive. If he’s able to reason with a captor, he regains his freedom. A happens, then B, then C, and the logical consequence is X. In short, causes have effects, and the result is that a story is told.

But in Flux, it frequently feels like there is no cause-and-effect going on at all. A happens, then X, then delta and zeta at the same time, but not for any comprehensible reason. Then A again for some reason, again not apparent, then Q, 23 and XXIV all at once. Not because the story (what story?) demands that they happen but because … well, I can only assume because Chris Chibnall thinks they look cool. But even when they do look cool, they don’t mean anything. How can he not understand this?

Structure, Chris. Sequence. Meaning. Narrative. Causality. Look them up.

Over the last few weeks I have noticed a behaviour in myself.

If I follow a link — say from a Mostodon post — and I get one of those “We care about your privacy” popups, I click the “Reject all” button and read the article. As I assume we all do.,

But if there is no “Reject all” button, just a link to a complicated set of preferences, I simply close the window and never see what the article had to say.

I wonder how many others do this. (When I mentioned this on Mastodon, a lot of people said they do the same — see all the replies there.)

And I wonder how many web-sites are losing a lot of their traffic for this reason.

There’s a good Doctor Who episode somewhere inside Village of the Angels. I’d call it the best episode of the season so far, which I admit is faint praise, but it scored highly in two important respects. First, it had fewer plot threads, which meant it was possible to keep some sense of what was going on. And secondly, it had some genuinely interesting ideas.

But because this is Chris Chibnall, it was hard to make out that good episode under the dense fatty layer of irrelevances. Every time we start to be interested in Professor Jericho and Claire, we cut to Yaz and Dan, or the great-uncle and great-aunt, or even — heaven help us — Bel or Vinder. (Their thread is really nothing to do with the episode at all, and should have been ruthlessly cut out.) As a result, we never really get a chance to invest our emotional energy in any one of the scenarios before we get yanked away.

And please, please. Just stop with the Angels. We get it. They move when you can’t see them. You mustn’t blink. At times, Village feels like one three-minute scene from the original Blink stretched out to an hour by sheer repetition. Over and over and over again we see indistinguishable bad cover versions of the sequence where they close in on the protagonist. The same Angel jump-scare, over and over. As though doing it more times will make it scarier.

I found myself considering how Jaws — 50 years old this year — would have worked out in Chibnall’s hands. We’d see the shark in the first minute, and it would be on screen more often than not. About 20 minutes in, it would turn up on land. Chief Brody would be cooking breakfast, and turn round to see that — JUMP SCARE! — it’s in his kitchen. This would happen six or seven or eight times. Before long, the shark would start to communicate telepathically with Hooper, but all it would say is a sequence of vague but ominous-sounding prophecies that turn out not to signify anything. Then at the end, Brody would say some fast words and the shark would dissolve into particles of light. While all this is happening, we would get periodic scenes of Quint lost in a desert and having hallucinations where he revisits his childhood.

And the reason I hate this so much, the reason I still care enough to hate it, is that there’s actually good stuff in there. Spoilers follow. Dum dum de-dum, spoiler space spoiler space spoiler space. Do not read on if you don’t want the spoilers. Still here? OK, here we go. It was intriguing that the Angels seemed to be pursuing Claire in particular. It was properly surprising when we found out that it’s because an Angel is hiding inside her and the other Angels are actually chasing it, not her. It was genuinely shocking to realise that the other Angels are acting for The Division, which the Doctor had previously worked for. And not exactly surprising, but narratively coherent and satisfying that it turned out that their real quarry had actually been the Doctor all along. And it was profoundly disturbing to watch the Doctor turning into an Angel, in the best cliffhanger for some time.

These are the elements of a story that I want to hear. And I think it’s possible that Chibnall could tell it. If only he wasn’t so busy making lights flash and machines go ping and music swell and special effects light up in shiny colours and a hundred other things.

Just tell us the damned story, Chris!

Do that right, and I’m prepared to overlook a lot. I’m prepared to overlook John Bishop’s utter inability to act. (He makes poor Mandip Gill look like Judi Dench.) I’m prepared to overlook the clunkiness of much of the in-the-small writing. I’m prepared to overlook the weightlessness of much of the effects.

There are so many other criticism I could make — dreadfully misjudged lines like “Surrender to the Angels, Jericho. You know you want to”, the total absence of jeopardy as our heroes are repeatedly killed and just turn up magically somewhere else, the failure to evoke different places and times, or even really to attempt it. But I don’t want to keep kicking this puppy. I want Flux to work. I really do. I’m going to hang in there.

“What if we have Daleks and Cyberman and Weeping Angels? That would be an amazing episode!”

Nope, that’s not how it works.

“What if we bring the Fugutive Doctor back? That would make it great, right?”

Nuh-uh.

“What if we use Yaz and Dan and Vinder, but have them all turn up in three or four unrelated segments each? That would be awesome, wouldn’t it?”

No, at it turns out.

I don’t think I have ever seen an episode that so perfectly evokes a kid getting all his Doctor Who toys out of the toybox and smashing them all together. Once, Upon Time is a five-year-old’s idea of what makes a good episode.

Poor Chris Chibnall just doesn’t get it at all. He’s watched the kinds of things Russell T. Davies and Stephen Moffat do, and he thinks that if he does similar things but more and louder then he’ll be even better than them. But at no point has he understood what any of RTD’s or Moffat’s work means. He’s seen ideas smashed together, and enjoyed the collision, but never understood the ideas. So he thinks smashing anything together will do, and that the sheer number of smashed-together things is what counts.

It’s not.

I don’t think there was any point in that episode where I fully understood what was happening. I don’t think that’s because I’m unusually stupid, though. I think it’s because there was no point in that episode where Chris Chibnall understood what was happening.

Here we are in episode 2 of Flux, the six-episode mini-season with the alleged overarching plot line. We’ll see about that. I will say, though, that this was at least an improvement over the first episode.

I’m using this image because it’s resonant, and a Sontaran in the episode does say “I wanted to ride a horse”. But I don’t remember seeing anything like in the actual episode. Seems like a missed open goal.

Most fundamentally, there are fewer things going on this time, which means we have a bit of time to relax into them and start to care. There are three plot threads: the Doctor in the Crimean War, which is against Sontarans rather than Russians; Yaz on the Planet Time confronted by the Big Bad; and Dan (John Bishop’s character) back in Liverpool, trying to stop a Sontaran invasion of present-day Earth. None of them necessarily make a ton of sense, but there’s enough weight to them that we are perhaps prepared to overlook that.

I like that we were invited to wonder what the connection was between the Lupari’s Earth shield and the arrival of the Sontarans; I like that we were given an answer that kind of  made sense: “seconds prior to the Lupari shielding Earth from the Flux in the previous episode, the Sontarans took advantage of the Flux and rewrote human history.” I mean, I’m not saying it makes a lot of sense, but it’s something.

And one piece of dialogue, I really liked. “I don’t think we’ve met before”, Yaz tells Swarm. A pause. “Such linear creatures”, he dismissively replies. That’s the stuff. In that moment, we really feel the sense that we are dealing with a creature far greater and more alien than most of those we encounter.

And yet and yet and yet. There is so much that does not make sense. Why don’t the Doctor and her companions die when the Flux hits? No reason. Why do they turn up in Sevastopol in the middle of the Crimean War? No reason, except Chibnall thought it would be cool. Why do Yaz and Dan dissolve into nothingness shortly thereafter but the Doctor does not? No reason. Why does dissolved Dan turn up back in his hometown but dissolved Yaz arrives on the Planet Time? No reason. No reason at all. And why, having arrived back in Liverpool, is Dan suddenly heroic? Again: no reason.

And so much of the dialogue simply clunks dutifully into place. We have moments like this: Dan, having been inside the TARDIS, which is bigger on the inside, sees outer space from inside it, then is destroyed by the Flux, then turns up in the Crimean war. Then he observes some very mildly eccentric behaviour from the Doctor and asks Yaz “Is she always like this?” Seriously? That‘s the thing you’re freaked out about?

Plus the delivery of the line is just dreadful. John Bishop is classic stunt casting: in the show because he’s a celebrity and for no other reason. He really can’t act at all. Over and over again, he’s in shocking situations — in the TARDIS for the first time, starting to physically dissolve, ambushed by a troop of Sontarans — and never once does he look or sound terrified or shocked or surprised, or even interested. It hurts to watch.

And here’s what hurts most. These are not the reviews I want to be writing. When I was reviewing Matt Smith’s tenure during Steven Moffat’s tenure as showrunner, I had my complaints, sure, but fundamentally I found myself writing about ideas. Not plot-holes. Not total failures of acting. Not incoherence. For me, the glory of Doctor Who was always that it was about ideas. And I’m struggling to see any in the season. I will say it feels like it has some potential. But I want to start seeing that potential manifest pretty darned quick.

Faithful readers will remember that I found Season 12 a step up from the deeply disappointing Season 11. Not great, but with some good parts. After that I am pretty sure (based on the Wikipedia synopsis seeming sort of familiar) that I watched Revolution of the Daleks, and I definitely made a start on Season 13 (Flux), watching two episodes before I drifted away.

After that, half a dozen specials were broadcast (I missed them all) and then The New Guy debuted. I was slightly excited about this, but having a completionist streak, I wouldn’t let myself watch Ncuti Gatwa’s episodes until I’d caught up with the end of Jodie Whittaker. And that is why, dear reader, I sat down this evening to have another stab at Flux, the six-episode story that encompasses all six episodes of Season 13. I know, I know.

Did I like it? Reader, I did not.

First, the opening. The Doctor and Yaz in an inescapable trap, about to be killed in three different ways for some reason. When the hazards are piled up like this (dropped into acid lava, shot by robot drones, the planet’s about to explode), it doesn’t make things more exciting — it just takes away any sense of credibility; and with it, any real sense of jeopardy. How can Chris Chibnall (for it is he) not understand this?

Anyway, with one bound, the Doctor and Yaz are free, and we’re free to get started on the actual episode (pausing only for the curiously bloodless current version of the once-iconic theme music). And that main story, when we get to it, is all about … well, I couldn’t tell you.

What I can tell you is the ingredients of the main story. In roughly the order they appear, they are:

• A dog-like alien called Carvinista
• Victorian industrialists supervising a mine that is digging for something we’re not told about
• John Bishop’s character and his not-girlfriend Di
• An imprisoned alien (who Wikipedia tells me is called Swarm) and his captors
• A couple living in an isolated house in the Arctic Circle
• A woman called Claire from the Doctor’s future
• New doors spontaneously appearing in the TARDIS
• A Weeping Angel for some reason
• Observation Post Rose and its inhabitant, whose name escapes me for the moment
• Something called The Division, which I still have no idea about
• The eponymous Flux, which Carvinista tells us about
• Sontarans for some reason
• The Doctor’s alleged history with the Big Bad, which she doesn’t remember
• The Big Bad’s sister who summons Di into a deserted house for some reason

I make that fourteen plot points and thirteen new characters (not counting the Sontarans), besides the Doctor and Yaz. That’s an awful lot to squeeze into one episode. To cover all that ground, and to hit each plot point and character with enough clarity to make us care about them, takes some great writing.

Chris Chibnall is not a great writer.

As a result, every single one of these elements falls flat — briefly examined, then dropped on the floor just as we start to think it might be interesting. At the end of the episode I was left with nothing more concrete that that the Flux is destroying the universe, and that the no-longer-imprisoned alien … exists. I guess they may be connected somehow. Then again maybe not. And what the Sontarans and Weeping Angels have to do with anything, I can’t begin to imagine. I just don’t care about any of this. There are no stakes. It’s only the end of the universe. Again. yawn.

Why does Doctor Who have to be like this? Are the people running it now really so unimaginative that they think all it takes to make an exciting story is the multiplication of entities with necessity? Where is the craftsmanship? One feels that if Chibnall had been directing Jaws, we would have found out part way through that the shark is a shape-shifting alien and that Roy Scheider had been tracking it through time and space, and Richard Dreyfuss was dyslexic but it had absolutely no effect on the story, and Robert Shaw had been a ghost all along.

I’ve been re-watching Lego Masters Australia, which can tell you is much more entertaining than The Halloween Apocalypse. Eight teams of two people compete to build the best Lego models, judged by Ryan “Brickman” McNaught. And one thing that Brickman tells the teams over and over is that he wants to see “one good idea, well executed”.

Can someone please tell Chris Chibnall that?

(Note added in proof. I see that this post contains the phrase “for some reason” in four different places. I think that fact tells its own story.)

Here is a YouTube playlist of my now-traditional top-ten list of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the previous calendar year. (See this list of previous entries.)

I listen much more to whole albums than to individual tracks, so each year I pick the ten albums that I listened to the most (not counting compilations), as recorded on the laptop where I listen to most of my music. (So these counts don’t include listening in the car or the kitchen, or on my phone.) I limit the selection to no more than one album per artist, and skip albums that have featured in previous years. Then from each of those ten objectively selected albums, I subjectively pick one song that I feel is representative, or that I just love.

10. Billy Joel — 1978 — 52nd Street (3 listens)

Over the years Billy Joel has become inexplicably untrendy. I can’t make sense of it: he’s always been a fine songwriter whose songs explore a huge range of styles. The album of his that happened to creep into the Top Ten this year is 52nd Street — but had the dice fallen differently, it could easily have been Piano Man, Turnstiles, The Stranger or The Nylon Curtain — all brilliant albums, and all very different. This year’s album offers the searing scorn of “Big Shot”, the heart-on-sleeve balladry of “Honesty”, the defiant pop of “My Life”, the Latin exuberance of “Zanzibar” and plenty more. It was hard choosing a single song, but in the end I went for the portentous love-against-the-odds theatrics of “Until the Night” (above). So underrated.

9. Black Sabbath — 1980 — Heaven and Hell (4 listens)

A proper slice of heavy metal from one of the old gods during the time of the NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal). By this time, Ozzy Osbourne had been booted out of Sabbath and formed his own band, to be replaced by Ronnie James Dio, late of Rainbow. He was an inspired choice: a totally different singer from Ozzy, and that was exactly what Sabbath needed at that point. Not a tribute act, but someone with his own approach, who would take the band in a different, though recognizable direction. Instead of Ozzy’s affectless nasal drone, we got Dio’s unearthly howl.

Truthfully, the reason I listened to this album so much in 2025 is because I recovered the game of the same name that I wrote on my VIC-20 around 1983. It felt like the perfect soundtrack as I played through the game (referring frequently to the source code for solutions to the more obscure puzzles). Playing it was delightful exercise in nostalgia, and so was listening to the album, which I loved back then — loved enough to name my game after it. The thing is, Heaven and Hell actually holds up really well. Its brooding, malignant atmosphere is undimmed by the passage of 46 years — as you can tell from the title track (above), with its killer guitar riff, shifts in texture, and (most of all) the blistering vocals.

8. Beardfish — 2024 — Songs For Beating Hearts (5 listens)

On my eldest son’s recommendation, I started listening to this one on Bandcamp, and I liked it enough that I ordered the CD as a Christmas present. [Side-note: make your music available, bands! It works!] I would classify as mellow, approachable prog with a folky tinge. Less demanding than some of what comes later on this list, but easy to sink into, and to allow the complexity to gradually reveal itself. Much of the album’s running time is spent on three long compositions of 20, 11 and 8 minutes. The opener (“Ecotone”, above) is a bit more digestible.

7. It Bites — 2008 — The Tall Ships (6 listens)

It Bites were an experiment that should have worked, but never quite landed solidly enough to be commercially successful. Their three late-eighties albums (and the minor hit single “Calling All The Heroes” that was drawn from the first of them) aimed to meld the richness of prog with a catchy pop sensibility. They were amazing albums then, and still sound great today, but the broader world just wasn’t interested enough to make them the Big Deal they deserved to be. They broke up in 1990, with guitarist/vocalist Francis Dunnery going on to a low-key successful solo career.

So it came as a bit of a shock when, 18 years later, they returned with this album, fronted now by John Mitchell but with the rest of the original quartet intact. As I recall, there was some reasonable scepticism at the time from old-time It Bites fans — could it really be the same band without Dunnery? But whether or not it should be credited to It Bites, The Tall Ships is a storming album. Mitchell is an excellent singer and guitarist, and the band’s musical ambition was as strong as ever. Along with sharp, hooky (but sophisticated) pop/rock numbers like “Ghosts” and “Great Disasters”, we get some more complex songs including “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” (above) and “This is England”. There really isn’t a weak track on the album.

6. Frost* — 2024 — Life in the Wires (7 listens)

I’ve been listening to this on and off since May, and while I admire it I’m still waiting for the moment to come when I love it. The premise is very Radio K.A.O.S.: it’s a concept album about Naio, a kid in the modern world, who discovers the voice of an old DJ on his mother’s ancient AM radio. But that summary is derived from Wikipedia — I’ve honestly not really picked up on the story as I’ve listened to the album.

Still, “Evaporator” (above) is a strong advert for the album as a whole: “You’re a plastic god / With a torn paper crown / I am done with this town”. The driving backdrop falls away completely for the gentle, harmonized bridge — then erupts back in. This one is in my “albums to listen to more in 2026” list.

5. Flower Kings — 2025 — Love (8 listens)

Prog veterans The Flower Kings (they’ve been going since 1994) are fronted by prog super-veteran Roine Stolt, who’s been recording since 1974. More than half a century after his work as lead guitarist on Kaipa’s debut album, it’s understandable that Stolt is slowing down a little: my sense is that it’s largely because he’s pulled out of touring with Transatlantic that The Absolute Universe is their final album.

Love is their most recent album, which I bought and listened to as preparation for seeing them as the support act to The Resonance (see below) in June. What I love about the Flower Kings is how, sixty years on from the peak of psychedelia (Revolver and all), they continue to go hard on psychedelic sounds because, hey, that’s just how they like it. As a result, “How Can You Leave Us Now” (above) has a delicious, inviting quality to it. A chilly piano-only intro quickly warms up with the addition of fretless bass, and by the time the vocal enters with jangly guitar arpeggios, everything feels like its ready to drift off into the ionosphere.

4. Sky — 1982 — 4 (Forthcoming) (12 listens)

When I was in my early teens, someone gave me pirated tapes of the first three Sky albums. (I can’t remember who it was, but I seem to recall it might have been the father of a friend, rather than the friend himself.) I loved their playful blend of classical and rock music, even while suspecting that it wasn’t very cool.

In the last year, I have listened a lot to those three albums while I’ve been working, because (and I know this doesn’t sound like high praise) they are great background music that doesn’t distract me while I’m trying to hold a lot of complex ideas in my head at once. And this is the year when I finally got around to their fourth album, punningly subtitled Forthcoming. The opener, “Masquerade” (above) is a decent representative of what they do. Based on Khachaturian’s waltz of the same name, it opens delicately as a classical guitar solo, before gradually gaining momentum and finishing up with a howling electric lead.

3. Steven Wilson — 2025 — The Overview (28 listens)

The not-very-coveted Mike’s Favourite Album Of 2025 Award is really a three-way tie: the top trio of albums each have many more listens than those lower on the list, and are very close together. If I’d added in listens in the kitchen and the car, I’m not not at all sure that the order of the top three wouldn’t have come out differently.

In previous WIBLTIs I’ve been … I was going to say harsh on Wilson, but I think it would be truer to say I’ve been sad about him. Since 2015’s stellar Hand Cannot Erase, I’ve found each of his subsequent albums — 2017’s To The Bone, 2021’s The Future Bites, 2023’s The Harmony Codex — beautiful but disappointing.

Well, I’m delighted to say that The Overview is utterly beautiful and deeply satisfying — my favourite Wilson album at least since Hand Cannot Erase, and maybe ever. Here, he takes the bold step of giving us just two songs, each of them taking up a “side” of the album (23 and 18 minutes respectively). Both of them have multiple sections of course, and the long running times really allows each section to breathe. The theme of the album is space — the title refers to the Overview Effect, in which astronauts seeing the Earth from the outside feel a profound and transformative sense of its beauty and value. And the whole album sounds, well, spacious It’s overflowing with ideas, and each of them has scope to grow and change in a way that draws the listener gently in but never becomes boring. And as always with Wilson, the actual sound is lovely throughout.

In May, my eldest and I went to a fascinating gig at the London Palladium: Wilson touring this album with Stewart Lee as the one-night-only support act. It’s a strikingly appropriate pairing. Both do things very much the way that satisfies them and hope that other people will like it, too — and they do. As a result, both have a smaller audience than they could have if they were prepared to compromise more, but a much more dedicated audience. I hope they’re both happy with that trade-off. I certainly am.

Anyway, above we have “Objects Outlive Us”, the first song on The Overview; if you can call a 23-minute suite a song. Just drift away into it. You’ll love it.

2. Cosmic Cathedral — 2025 — Deep Water (32 listens)

Neal Morse likes to start a new band most years — I’m not even exaggerating much — and 2025’s was interesting in being made up of veterans. The cringily named Cosmic Cathedral comprise CCM guitar hero Phil Keaggy (age 74), ex-Weather Report and Genesis drummer Chester Thompson (77), bassist Bryron House (66) and Morse himself (the baby of the group at 65), for an average age of about 70.

You would be forgiven for expecting a gentle, relaxed album from these gentlemen. You’d be very wrong. Instead, it’s exuberant, driving, energetic, and very joyful. (Exception: the short song “I Won’t Make It”, which feels out of place on this album and would have been omitted.) It feels as though these musicians have been given permission to cut loose, and are enjoying every moment. That’s especially true of Keaggy, who is an outstanding guitarist but who usually keeps his chops under wraps.

Above, we have the album opener, “The Heart of Life”, which just bursts with life right from the start, and goes through a ton of changes before reaching its peaceful conclusion. I don’t want to be morbid, but it’s not impossible that this will be the last album some of these guys ever make. If that’s how it turns out, it will have been a great way to sign off.

1. Neal Morse and the Resonance — 2024 — No Hill for a Climber (33 listens)

And finally, beating out Deep Water by a single listen, we have its opposite. This is from the year before, but I was slow getting to it. This is Neal Morse with a new band again, but this time with a band of much younger musicians. (My suspicion is that he plans to spin this band off into its own thing — just The Resonance, not Neal Morse And — maybe after one more album together. I think he wants to leave a heritage when he retires … if he ever does, which doesn’t seem like a given, in light of how very much he’s doing right now.)

This is a superb debut: confident, stylish, muscular, inventive, ambitious. It has all the epic qualities you’d expect from a Morse project, but also some surprises. Among them is “Thief” (above), which doesn’t really sound like anything else I know. I guess it’s … a comedy-horror song? I think this kind of experimental piece is really important. If “progressive” is going to really mean anything, it mustn’t ossify into a particular set of musical conventions, however much I happen to like those conventions. To stay fully alive, it has to keep twisting and turning, trying new things. “Thief” is certainly that.

Next month, at Morsefest UK, I’m going to see Cosmic Cathedral, The Resonance and the Neal Morse Band (performing the classic One album), plus several other bands. It’s so exciting!

Also ran

Three albums that have featured in previous WIBLTIs were, for that reason, ineligible this time around. There were last year’s winner The Unforgivable by Anubis (9 listens) and two Transatlantic albums with three listens each: The Absolute Universe: Forevermore and The Whirlwind.

Three albums were ineligible because the same artist had a higher placed album: Sky’s imaginatively named 1 (10 listens), 2 (5 listens) and 3 (3 listens).

Finally, six albums were tied for tenth place on three listens. Of these, I picked Billy Joel’s 52nd Street because I listened to a lot of Billy Joel this year — every album but Storm Front and The Bridge, totalling 16 listens across all his albums. The other five unlucky candidates were The Waterboys’ A Pagan Place, The Rutles’ Archaeology, Karmakanic’s In a Perfect World, Deep Purple’s Machine Head and Dave Gilmour’s On An Island.

Thoughts

It turns out that 2025 was hugely prog-dominated. Billy Joel is something different (though I wouldn’t want to try to narrow down what), Black Sabbath are metal, and I suppose Sky are sort-of-classical. But all the other seven entries on this year’s top ten — including all the top three and seven of the top eight — are unambiguously prog of various flavours. Funny how that works out.

I don’t think I have ever hated being a professional programmer like I have in the last few months. In the very early days of this blog, I wrote Whatever happened to programming?, lamenting:

When I was fourteen, I wrote space-invader games in BASIC on a VIC-20. When I was 18, I wrote multi-user dungeons in C on serial terminals attached to a Sun 3. Today, I mostly paste libraries together.

And now, in 2026, the era of pasting libraries together feels like a lost golden age.

What I mostly do now is maintenance of programs that I’ve already written, that worked fine, and that now suddenly don’t work any more because of something someone else has done. Usually, it’s new major releases of a dependency, or more often, of a transitive dependency. Sometimes it’s because the actual language changes under my feet. Java, which is supposed to be the language for grown-ups, has made eleven major releases since in just over five years since September 2021. Node has made nine in the same period. That is insane.

The combination of new backwards-incompatible releases of actual programming languages, plus the constant churn in libraries (usually with the abandonment of security patches for all but the most recent major version) means every non-trivial program written in either of the two dominant languages needs constant care and feeding — not to improve it, just to keep it standing still as its foundation leaps around in all directions, and sometimes just evaporates catastrophically.

If, like me, you’re the person primarily responsible for a dozen or so programs, just keeping them running is something close to a full time job. That’s before I try to spend any time actually, you know, adding functionality. I have to squeeze creative work into spare minutes stolen from a schedule mostly filled with repairing the constant vandalism.

An old hope

And the thing is: it doesn’t have to be this way. For a long time, it wasn’t this way. C programs written 30 years ago pretty much just work. (To prove the point, I just compiled and ran a game that I wrote in C in 1988, which, eek, is closer to forty years ago. It took about five minutes, mostly to determine what compiler flags to use for old-style C.)

Until a couple of weeks ago, I would have said that I’ve never known a Perl program, once working, stop working. Perl was one of the things I clung to, telling people was an example of how much better things can be that the treadmill we’ve all got used to.

Tragically, that record was ruined by an idiotic update to Perl that makes it fatal to use goto to jump into a clause governed by if, resulting in another of my old programs now failing. What were they thinking? As a result I spent much of last Saturday, a rare and precious free day, making a new release of a program that I’d not previously touched for two decades.

Why make this innocent construct illegal? Someone’s computer-sciencey desire for a certain kind of purity has been allowed to overide engineering considerations. This is now how grown-ups behave. (I meant to type “this is not how grown-ups behave”, but on re-reading, I see that the typo version is more accurate.)

Doing it right

In ye olden days, we learned a very simple dictum: do not make backwards-incompatible changes. Just don’t. That and that alone explains why so much 20 and 30 and 40 year old software still Just Works. “Do not make backwards-incompatible changes” is the absolute Rule Zero of software engineering. That statement is almost tautological, since the definition of software engineering is creating software that works, and that continues to work, with minimal or ideally no maintenance.

That dictum has, tragically, been replaced by a much weaker one: when you make backwards-incompatible changes, increment the major version number. Oh, and feel free to drop all ongoing support for all the old versions. I was at least half joking when I blamed Semantic Versioning for this, but I increasingly think I might have been right. Without ever intending to, SemVer has unwittingly given people permission to break their software without feeling the profound shame that should attend this terrible failure.

Never mind the hope, feel the despair

And so here we are.

We build Node projects with 3694 dependencies (99% of them transitive, of course). One of them is the reverse-text library, which is used by hardcore-fruitbat, which is used by gsx, which is used by @tehhaxor/c00llib, which is used by tensor-tensor, which is used by whatever HTTP server framework happened to be fashionable the week we started the project. The reverse-text library provides a single function, reverseText(text, mode), where mode is 0 to reverse the order of lines in the text or 1 to reverse the characters in each line.

One day the maintainer of the reverse-text library decides it would be nicer if the order of arguments to his function was reversed, so he releases v2.0 of reverse-text. Often (not always, but often), the major-version bump ripples up the dependency tree — especially when peer-dependencies are involved or the new version drops support for Node 14 or whatever. And so your project has to issue a new major version (and if it’s a library, quite likely the code that uses it has to do the same). And that’s how your own library ends up on major version 13 even when it’s made no backwards-incompatible changes of its own.

Needless to say, the constant churn becomes background noise. Upgrading dependencies becomes nothing more than a chore. So developers see that, for example React 17 (seventeen!) is deprecated and v19 is the new hotness; so they file a Jira, “upgrade React dependency to v19”, make the relevant change to the package file, and go home with a warm feeling of having done something productive — even though the blind upgrade may well have broken something because actual backwards-incompatible changes in v18 or v19.

Whatever. It’s all hours on the timesheet, right?

Remember when we used to build things?

More pointless whining

In discussion with my buddy Zak on this subject, he made the point:

I wonder what the architects and builders who constructed stone cathedrals in 12th century Europe would think of today’s architects and builders. Do the contemporary folks lack respect for proper engineering, or is it the nature of building itself that has changed? It’s tempting to think of JS and Ruby and Python in the same breath as Fortran and C, and thus to compare the engineers building Slack (or FOLIO!) to those who built the moon lander or designed UNIX.

He’s right. I very much want to see myself in the same lineage as the people who built cathedrals, and (more relevantly) those who designed C and Unix. And not too long ago, I sort of did, in my small way. Now I see myself as, I dunno, a hod-carrier or a key-punch operator.

It’s not that other people are doing the delightful, elegant, valuable high-level work and I’m left holding the short end of the stick. No-one is doing it. We’re all key-punch operators, just cranking through the CVE patches and weekly new major releases.

I hate it all.

A new hope

If there is one thing that gives me a glimmer of hope in among all this, it’s Go. Go is not a sexy language. It wasn’t intended to be. It’s boring, and programming languages — like constitutional law — should be boring. Go is a bit more low level than I like, and its approach to error-handling is tediously verbose. Writing a program in Go takes longer than writing the equivalent program in Node. But a program written in Go stays written, dammit.

The language itself is currently on version 1.25.1. The original Go 1 was unveiled on 28 March 2012, so we’re currently into year 14 of version 1, and there is no intention to make a version 2 in the foreseeable future. The distribution includes not only the compiler but the standard library, which is pretty comprehensive. That means, for example, if you wrote an HTTP service in Go in 2012, using the HTTP server library, you will not have had to make any changes ever since.

This is what I want from a programming environment.

Why is Go so much more stable than Java or Node? It doesn’t really have a big technical advantage that makes this possible (though the way the go.mod file works may be better than equivalents in other ecosystems). The real difference is cultural. Go programmers don’t make backwards-incompatible changes, not because they can’t but because they know better.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Go was largely the work of Unix old-timers Ken Thompson (69 years old when Go was released) and Rob Pike (56) — as well as Robert Griesemer (50). This is a language created by people who have been there, done that, and learned the lessons. More importantly, this is a language community whose tone was set by those people. It was created not by whiz-kids, not by ninja coding wizards, not by — heaven help us — disruptors. It was created by honest-to-god engineeers.

… And back to despair

It’s come too late for me, of course. I’m 57 years old, closing in on 58. Given the typical lifespan of programs, I’ll probably be maintaining all those JavaScript things for a decade or more, which will take me to 68 and closing in on (eek!) retirement age. (That said: I’ll retire when I’m dead. But you get my point.)

Biut what I can do is struggle hard not to get involved in any more land wars in Asia JavaScript projects, and ensure that new code I write is in Go. So that, as I go through the next decade and my older programs gradually become irrelevant, the newer ones — the ones that retain their relevance — will be programs that just keep working.

Still. The name I gave this blog back in 2010 feels like a sick joke now. Sixteen years ago, as I played with Ruby, I felt like a reinvigorated programmer, and named the blog accordingly. But Ruby has turned out to be unstable, too, and I have long ago abandoned it. Now if I was naming the blog, I would probably go with The Demotivated Programmer.