Scrapbook: Week 17

April 20-26, 2024

SATURDAY 20 Matt Forde is back on the British Scandal podcast. I hadn’t known his absence was due to him having surgery for cancer of the spine. He can’t walk yet, but is nevertheless able to crack jokes about being a stand-up comedian who can’t stand up.

📌 We’ve set ourselves the challenge of naming our 3 chosen ways to spend Christmas this year. Only one of mine was to stay in London, but as I wrote it down, the prospect became more and more attractive.

SUNDAY 21 Rishi has gone way off the rails. A new survey says the culture wars are a real voter turn-off, he’s failed miserably in his mission to stop the boats and start shipping asylum seekers to Rwanda, the number of his MPs has shrunk from 365 to 346 because of sleaze, fraud and other misdeeds in office, and now he’s persecuting disabled people. An early election would be a merciful release for everyone.

📌 I bumped into Richard, who I haven’t seen in ages, and he told me ominously that his doctor had found “shadows in my back”. He looked well enough but seemed to struggle keeping his train of thought. He was on his way to Waitrose for one of their ready-cooked chickens (£6.95).

📌 We started watching Baby Reindeer on Netflix as a half-hour filler but were soon hooked on the tale of a no-hope stand-up comedian who falls prey to a crazy stalker called Martha. This is another curious hybrid where aching plot-drama flirts with dark comedy and horror. For me the loose strings are held together by Martha, played by Jessica Gunning, who also shone as the over-enthusiastic PCSO in the Stephen Merchant comedy The Outlaws.

MONDAY 22 In the wake of the Cass Review, the trans debate looks like it’s taking a turn. On last week’s Have I Got News for You the host, Alexander Armstrong, made a scripted sarcastic quip about a group of health workers who made the news by declaring their recognition of 21 different genders and sexualities, and on a New European podcast two metropolitan media men, Matt D’Ancona and Matt Kelly, felt emboldened enough to argue on behalf of honest reasoned debate over the cultish bullying of the social-media gender zealots.

📌 In the first episode of Red Eye, intrigue and death stalk a long-haul flight from London to Beijing. In an onboard orgy of suspicious glances and incriminating looks, a British-Chinese cop is trying to repatriate a suspected killer back to Beijing after he did a runner following a bad night out. Meanwhile, back in Britain, MI5, in the shape of Lesley Sharp, are up to something that can only be spoken about in coded utterances that imply something to do with national security. Stupidly gripping. Can’t wait for Ep2.

📌 Wilna at the Barbican’s Imagine Fund desk promised to deliver this year’s submissions to be graded (I’m on the awards panel), but nothing turned up.

TUESDAY 23 Someone on Substack got jumped on for starting his review of the new Taylor Swift album, Tortured Poets Department, with the words, “Sylvia Plath did not put her head in an oven for this.”

📌 While my wife was upstairs on a long phone call I got all the old veg out of the fridge, peeled it, chopped it and put it on to roast for a soup we (I?) shall eat (drink?) on our return from Winchester on Sunday.

📌 If I hadn’t read the caption I’d have shot right past the picture of the inside of a cello.

*Spacious loft apartment for sale, with stunning light and sound…*

WEDNESDAY 24 The whole vibe of Nye, a play starring Michael Sheen about the life and work of Aneurin Bevan, was quite loud, hectoring and depressingly binary. Moments I liked included a memory scene down a mine with his father in which Nye is urged to find and feel “the seem”. Other parts (the play is too long and too dense) seemed designed as an over-simplified explainer on the political birth of the NHS and a rallying cry to save the child from the filicidal desires of the market, both then and now.

📌 Red Eye update. The suspicious Chinese woman at the doctor’s conference in Beijing is thought to have secretly planted some vital evidence on one of the doctors, all bar one of whom have now been bumped off during a long-haul flight. The secret service agencies in London are involved and the mystery is said to be linked to an Anglo-China nuclear deal. On the plane a lone British-Chinese police officer is searching for the killer but only seems able to find more bodies, and her renegade journalist sister is back in London poking her nose in all the wrong places.

THURSDAY 25 At Headway Fiona told me that her ageing mother finds stitchwork quite difficult these days. Nevertheless she has completed three “Personality Quilts”, one for each of her daughters, made from Liberty fabric. They each in their design reflect the individual nature of their owner. For example Fiona’s quilt has structure, whereas her youngest sister’s is more wild and freeform.

📌 Also at Headway we learned that lunches are now free, for a year, rather than £3.50. This is thanks to Simon The Fireman, a one-time volunteer who made an early killing in bitcoin and now lives in luxury in Thailand.

📌 I’ve started to look at the Barbican’s Imagine Fund applications and did a quick Zoom with Georgia, Divya and Raluca to iron out any queries. They are all in their 20s and I really felt like a thought criminal when none of them deemed it inappropriate, as I did, with one of the fund applicants describing their project as a jewellery-making workshop for “menopausal ladies over the age of 45”. My wife agreed with them.

📌 In Winchester Dave told how long ago he used to hide spare cash in an old shell-suit that was gathering dust in the wardrobe. It contained £1,000 by the time his wife Sue threw it in the bin: “It was black, with green flashes. It was disgusting.” Dave also showed us the vintage Fiorucci advertising posters they found while clearing out their house in Spain. Sue thought they’d uncovered a stash of their son’s porn.

FRIDAY 26 The Watercress Line is a Hampshire tourist attraction for steam railway nerds. Seven of us spent the day trundling up and down, back and forth in throwback railway carriages in the company of chronic British nostalgists. My wife took lots of pictures of train nerds (white men) taking pictures of vintage steam trains.