June 8-14, 2024
SATURDAY 8 There is fevered speculation on the theory that Rishi is now such a turkey that the Lib-Dems will become the official party of Opposition if Labour wins with a landslide.
đź“Ś My wife has been ill all day with a digestive disorder so I didn’t get to spend much time at the allotments for Open Gardens weekend. News came through later that attendance was high and the Community Cafe made nearly ÂŁ400 off homemade cakes. Sue said my wife’s fruitcake was the first to go.
đź“Ś I’ve finally finished A Gentleman In Moscow and will not re-read it immediately as I thought I might. I decided instead to re-read George Orwell’s 1984.
SUNDAY 9 On Substack Notes the writer Natasha Poliszczuk pays tribute to her grandfather Albert, a mild-mannered and dignified veteran of the Normandy Landings. It made me wish I had my own grandfather story to tell. I know very little about any of my grandparents, and what I do know has been handed down through generations and mangled no doubt in the re-telling. And I never go in search of more information because I’m always wary that the cold facts might get in the way of a good story. I like the story about my maternal grandparents stowing away from Liverpool to Canada and slipping secretly across the border into the US, where they settled in The Bronx and ran something our ancient aunts called a “theatrical boarding house”. I love these stories so much that the truth might break my heart, so I steer clear of the of it (ie, “theatrical boarding house” probably meant brothel) and allow the stories to grow and take on new flavours with every passing. The only war story we were ever told as children was when Grandpa Willie got shot in the head during the Great War. He was saved, it was said, by a folded-up copy of the Daily Mail he’d stored in his helmet, and was later presented to a member of the royal family as a fighting hero.
đź“Ś It’s always nice to see and hear the police horses trotting around outside.
MONDAY 10 I’d long suspected as much, but a visit to UCLH A&E confirmed that the term Accident & Emergency is now truly meaningless. One guy here had cut his finger and wrapped toilet paper around his wound. A triage nurse, who is meant to be processing accidents and emergencies, politely dressed the damaged finger and dispensed a pain-killing tablet. I tried very hard to read her thoughts but was distracted by the sight of her smiling genially all the way through this moment of absurdity.
đź“Ś Elon Musk is annoyed because Apple are putting AI into all their devices. On the radio a series called Orwell vs Kafka observed that Big Brother doesn’t need to follow us everywhere because we have all quite happily invited Big Brother to sit in our pockets.
TUESDAY 11 Substack Notes is a very polite and gentile version of Twitter, for refined folk, people of letters and a belief in their own good taste. It goes (whimsically) without saying, then, that it can sometimes start to look like a sounding board for The Fast Show.
đź“Ś AI Steve, a non-human candidate in Brighton at the forthcoming general election, turns out to be a guy in Rochdale who owns an AI development company.
WEDNESDAY 12 In the New European Matthew D’Ancona has a chilling profile of Nigel Farage and his real political intentions, which are not as a naughty agitator-in-chief but as a British fĂĽhrer for the future.
He grins, quips and chuckles; but what underpins his politics is venom, resentment and antagonism. The trademark smile is really a rictus of mean-spirited determination.
đź“Ś I’m really enjoying Sophie’s napkin project. Signatures are such a personal form of expression that we experiment with when young but settle into later in life. The napkin everyone signed at a special lunch is soft white linen and the threads Sophie supplied are gloriously smooth.
đź“Ś My wife says she prefers it when really old or really young couples make it to the final of Pointless.
THURSDAY 13 The Headway writing group meeting took place in Shoreditch Library, where a potted version of last year’s differently various exhibition is on display. One of the story prompts for the assembled gathering of Headway members, volunteers and staff alongside members of the public was “Heidi and Martin: The Origins”, which refers to the soap-opera characters I have been building over the past months. Other people’s ideas on how Martin and Heidi came to be a couple were far better than my own…
It all depends on who’s telling the story. The way Heidi tells it Martin was never even on the agenda; it was his friend Ben she was after. She describes Martin as “offering himself up” like some kind of consolation prize when dreamboat Ben casually sloped off with Sasha. Martin claims he planned it that way, using Ben as bait, knowing full well he was already stuck on Sasha. So the “How did you two get together?” question left them both stumped as to which version of events to tell of what they’d come to call, “That night in the Casablanca Club”. They needed an agreed statement.
Heidi: “What about A Happy Accident?”
Martin: “I suppose that will do, for now.”
đź“Ś Keir Starmer is getting kicked for telling us all repeatedly that his father was a humble toolmaker. If he had an ounce of wit he’d turn the joke around and explain like a nerd what exactly a toolmaker does, and indeed if real people actually still do such a job as toolmaking. I’d be surprised if all toolmakers hadn’t by now been made redundant by computers. Starmer could use this fact to talk about a whole range of issues relating to work and the workplace, but he just keeps parroting the toolmaker line, so much so that some wag has edited the Wikipedia entry for toolmaking to include the line: “Tool and die makers are highly skilled crafters working in the manufacturing industries and create future barristers who will undermine their own Country.”
FRIDAY 14 Today’s Sensemaker from Tortoise has a curious graphic showing the policy content, page by page, of the manifestos delivered so far by the main political parties. Each page of the manifestos is represented by a glass (or test tube) full or half full of policy content. Labour has the greatest volume of emptiness.
đź“Ś The pink rose stitchwork is outlined and ready to be filled in. My preference is to blend the greens and pinks of the leaves and petals using the seed stitch as used by textile artist Richard McVetis, who we met not long ago at an Art Workers’ Guild event.
đź“Ś I’ve run out of suitable bedtime audiobooks on BBC Sounds and Librivox has too many American readers for my taste. So I checked our local library’s audiobooks for loan and have become mildly fascinated by a character called Alex Rider in a series of books by Anthony Horowitz, who is the spy world’s answer to Harry Potter. Alex is only 14 but he has MI6 DNA coursing through his young body, inherited from his father and uncle, both of whom, disturbingly, groomed Alex in spycraft from a very young age to become a proper junior James Bond.
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Billy's Scrapbook 