ineke.co.uk

This book was so much fun – I know you don’t get that from the title, in fact, it sounds *incredibly* dry, but I assure you, it’s a fun read! All sorts of cynical comments and random tangents make it a really easy read, all while being really interesting! There were jokes at the expense of Tottenham fans and the population of East Anglia, as well as random bits of trivia and at times, just following his train of thought wherever it went!

The book is split into 5 sections:

• The first three look at how things have changed over the last 200 years that regular censuses have been taken (Who we are, what we do, where we are)
• The fourth is a focus on the 1921 census, which was just after the Spanish Flu, and given this was written in 2020 in the depths of the pandemic, a lot of comparisons are drawn.
• And then finally an imaginative look ahead to what the 2121 census might look like, both in results, and how it’s achieved.

I really wanted to give this 5 stars, but there were just a few mistakes that meant I couldn’t do that: Categories mislabeled on a graph key, black and white diagrams with shades of grey too similar to decipher, and tables which didn’t show units, making them confusing to interpret. as well as one instance of talking about a value decreasing and then showing it increasing….. other than that, brilliant!

I’d be really interested in reading a re-issue of this now that we’re out of COVID (for the most part), with a bonus chapter or two looking at how it affected things as a lot was made of what effect it might have, but at the time of writing, it was too soon to tell.

As it is, it was bookended with this quote from Lord Kelvin: “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”