MONDAY 5 There’s a story in the Hackney Citizen about a new film called Rocks, and a quote from one of its writers.
# Stuart writes to say “you have a way of extracting the most personal info out of me without even trying”. I took this as a compliment. He went on to confess that… “At birth, I was expected to be a girl. So for the first few years I slept in a bedroom surrounded by dolls, cuddly toys and female clobber.”
# Do parents who get fed up playing with their only child solve the problem by having another one?
# A review of two Brexit books puts some real context to what is often seen as a one-off political flashpoint in 2016, but was actually a national Euro-skeptic condition that had been festering for decades. And that when the 2016 referendum took place, different circumstances could easily have led to a very different outcome.
# In line with yesterday’s accidental spillage of grated parmesan cheese all over the kitchen floor, I opened the door of the too-small fridge and an egg crashed onto my shoe.
# The new stitchwork project is an image of Alex’s dog Nova, on a blank cotton tote bag.
TUESDAY 6 My wife swears that the government’s new oven-ready Covid app sucks the life out of your phone’s battery. In my case it also repeatedly plays an annoying pop-up ad telling me to download the app I already have installed.
# The pharmacist who gave me my flu jab asked if I was allergic to eggs. Apparently, the vaccine is made from something eggy.
# The City of London really is a creepy secretive place. It has the feel of a seedy enclave where dirty-money wrongdoing is unfolding behind every door.
# Stuart’s latest fascination is for Soviet and East European cars from the past. It started with the Trabant and a musical diversion into U2’s 1991 album Achtung Baby. Then he cruised on to the Russian Moskovitch, which was really quite a stylish vehicle IMO.
# A professor at Lancaster University has coined the term “Prozac Leaders” to describe excessively upbeat, self-trumpeting characters such as Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.
WEDNESDAY 7 The 9.15 video call with my renal consultant was not greatly different from the real thing in that I sat in a waiting room waiting for someone to call my name.
# Quora does it again…
# Said hello to Bridget in Cafe Passione, but she didn’t know who I was.
# There are some neat planters alongside Speed House managed by the Barbican Horticultural Society.
# Global Citizen has a story with the headline “The NHS Just Became the World’s First Health System to Commit to Net Zero Emissions by 2040”. I wonder in Boris knows about that? Or whether he has read the academic report in The Conversation that says he is incapable of taking tough decisions because people might hate him for it.
# This story reads like one of those gripping TV docu-dramas with classy actors getting all the emotional and psychological nuances spot-on.
# Newsbiscuit returns to form.
THURSDAY 8 The boss of the Geffreye Museum says they kept the statue of slaver Robert Geffreye because the government told them to. Sorry, the minister “reminded” them where their funding came from.
# She sends them so regularly, I’m not sure why the arrival of a new picture from Sam surprises me. Perhaps the surprise is actually in the image and not in the receipt of the email.
# Iceland’s Grímsvötn volcano is getting ready to erupt. The big question is whether the eruption will be a small one with wet, sticky ash that doesn’t travel far, or a big eruption with masses of dense soft ash that drifts globally and shuts down air traffic.
# Cristina sent over the feedback from the Barbican workshop last week and it was all positive. It made me want to check out the Basquiat-style work of John, the old Irish fella who attended.
# My wife and I refer to the BBC TV programme Repair Shop as “the crying show” because lots of tears are shed when people see their treasured belongings restored. But it really is one of those special inventions that distinguishes the BBC as a world-beating broadcaster.
# Our pandemic TV diet is a rich one: Giri/Haji is superb both from a close-up British/Japanese angle and from a wider viewpoint looking at Japan from a distance and at Britain (London) from an equal distance. And Pamela Adlon’s Better Things takes the TV short story into places it never even knew existed.
# In the first Cormoran Strike book, the author describes security cameras as “malevolent shoeboxes”.
FRIDAY 9 There’s a plan unfolding in America to have President Trump removed from office for being unhinged, detached from reality, bonkers, etc. It sort of adds up…
# Today’s Open Studio was hosted by abstract artist Katrina Russell-Adams, who talked to us about deconstructing what you see and looking at it differently. I did a digital painting of the view from our living-room window of the Barbican towers. I found the whole experience totally liberating.
# Concrete is one of the biggest sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Making the cement that goes into concrete creates so much that if the cement industry were a country, only China and the US would emit more carbon dioxide.
# If it wasn’t so serious, the Johnny Bananas story would be hilarious.
# Once again I didn’t appear in The Queen’s birthday honours list. Marcus Rashford got an MBE.
BillyScraps 
What a full diary today
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