Sunday, London Annie Nightingale was on the radio news saying that she knew about John & Yoko’s relationship before the rest of the Beatles.
📌 Nick Cohen in the Observer is talking about how nasty Boris can get if you piss him off. “Conservative politicians talk about Johnson with a venom few socialists can match. It’s not that he’s a criminal like Putin, they say. He doesn’t have the balls to be truly evil. Rather, he is a pathetically insecure narcissist who turns on you if you don’t feed his craving for applause.”
📌 To Parsons Green where, depressingly, we found a majority with the view that the government has done OK with the pandemic. In the White Horse (aka, the Sloaney Pony) we ate lunch in a deserted interior. And later we heard two sisters compare the number of marriage proposals they’d each had.
📌 Stuart and I have been sharing a great enthusiasm for Lulu’s To Sir With Love. A fascinating fact is that the song was also the name of the 1967 film, starring Sidney Poiter. But the titles differ. The film is To Sir, With Love, the song title loses the comma.
Monday, London Protest outside offices on Bunhill Row opposite the Wetherspoons. BA recently announced it was to retire its entire fleet of 747 Jumbo Jets.
📌 As I’d agreed last week, I sent a shot of an article I wrote (and did the picture) for NME decades ago to James Brown.
📌 My wife is refusing to help me. Her birthday is in the first week of August and she says she cannot give me any ideas for a gift. I will feel like a total failure and a bad husband if I don’t come up with a solution soon, even though she insists she wants nothing. I sent her two links for possible gifts. One was for a vintage Biba scarf, the other was an online art appreciation course with CityLit. So far, she has made no reply.
Tuesday, London I didn’t write much here yesterday because I was feeling queasy. I went for a morning walk up to the canal basin, but that didn’t help. In fact, later, while we were down in the basement sorting stuff in the storage rooms, I was forced to quickly locate a plastic bag and throw up. The sick bag contained a disgusting cocktail of half-digested cold garlic bread and a banana.
📌 There is an article in the latest issue of Positive News pointing to post-Covid bright spots, one of which is the Wellbeing And Future Generations bill currently before parliament. It’s the work of Caroline Lucas and Bug Issue founder John Bird.
📌 My wife swears there are pigeons nesting somewhere on our roof. She bases this on the sqwalking we hear from our bedroom first thing in the morning.
📌 I got an official letter saying our lovely financial adviser Katie has moved on to “a different opportunity”. This was distressing because it was Katie rather than the firm she worked for that inspired us with confidence and assurance about our money matters. So I decided to find Katie, but by the time I did (she’s on Instagram as @the_money_mum) my wife had already contacted her by text.
📌 Sam sent me her latest picture, a finished version of the Toyin Ojih Odutola image from a recent Open Studio session.
📌 I gave up on David Copperfield at 70%. I want to move onto the Bob Paisley biography I got off Carol. I’d read Copperfield before anyway. My wife said watch the film instead. I wasn’t sure there was one, then I found reference to an ancient one from 1935 starring Freddie Batholomew and WC Fields.
📌 Agreed with Stuart that the best Spanish translation of Headway is “El Método de la Cabeza”.
BillyScraps 