Diary: Week 10

March 7-13 

SUNDAY The TV psycho-drama Behind Her Eyes, starring Bono’s daughter Eve Hewson, ended in one of the most baffling twists I’ve ever seen (SPOILER ALERT), with the murderer and the murderee being one in the same person. And it seems we weren’t alone in being baffled. Marie Claire helpfully published an entire article explaining what happened, though the phenomenon of Astral Projection is still way over my head.

📌 One blogger I follow lives in Hampshire’s New Forest and often posts pictures of the beautiful wild horses that roam there. Today the horses were joined by the slim figure of a woman in pink practising her qigong moves.

📌 The song Murder Most Foul on the Bob Dylan album Rough And Rowdy Ways made a fool of me…

📌 On her podcast Breakdown, the actor Mayim Bialik interviewed Big Bang Theory co-creator Bill Prady, whose character resemblance to the show’s chief oddball Sheldon Copper is unreal.

MONDAY The continued bitching between the UK and the EU makes it look more and more like Northern Ireland is being abandoned as a lost cause. That might not be the intention, but it’s not hard to imagine a united Ireland by accident as becoming the only possible outcome.

📌 Getting pictures from Sam every week has really helped keep me sane during lockdown. Having someone else’s life to think about is a great tonic.

And her picture of Dolly has been made into a Women’s Aid T-shirt.

📌 The Banksy image ‘Game Changer’, which depicts a child opting for a superhero nurse over Batman and Spiderman in the box of dolls, is expected to raise £3m at auction for “NHS charities”. I do hope that charitable status means no grubby government minister can get their hands on the cash and give it to their mates in the form of spurious contracts.

TUESDAY It’s probably a dark omen, but last night I had a dream that at a gala dinner I was asked out of the blue to give a speech in tribute to Paul Elliott.

I was forced to improvise in a most embarrassing way, recalling his love of Arsenal FC and his distinction of being the cleanest looking heavy-metal writer in the world.

I spoke of his implausible youth and his natural ease with the written word. I mentioned that he “had a job in a garden centre”, which I attempted to spin into a joke about euphemisms.

I thanked him, did a quick hip-hip-hooray and staggered back to my seat. It worked. I got away with it, which just about sums up MY life.

📌 From what I can see in Derrick’s photographs, the New Forest must have some special protected zoological status. Because not only do wild horses roam free there but big horny bulls too. With the biggest horns you’ve ever seen, like there should be a Spanish bullfighter attached, a pained look on his contorted face. The cutest one was called Blackie.

📌 You can always rely on the Morning Star to speak its mind…

And the New Statesman…

📌 Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty (aka, Dr Death) has grabbed the moment to assert his authority over a patently dim government.

📌 Zoe Williams has long since stopped being a yappy irritant and now has a fantastic way of telling it like it is…

📌 Does chuckling with glee when algorithms get it wrong make you a bad person? There is also the weird possibility that those fingered by the QCovid algorithm as “obese” respond with, “Me? Yes, that sounds about right.”

📌 The new stitchwork project is a purple tote bag with stitching in red, green and pink based on a SatNav map of Didcot in Oxfordshire.

📌 The news value of this story in The Mirror is marginal, but the “human interest” is immense. It recalls that unforgettable scene in John Irving’s ‘The World According To Garp’.

WEDNESDAY Someone on Quora wants to know why the British use the term “loo” for a toilet rather than “bathroom”. The answer is characteristically snotty.

“In Britain we don’t use prudish euphemisms for the function of the rooms. Toilet is were we go to urinate or defecate. Terms like bathroom are misleading, unless it is a room with a bath in it.”

That still begs the question as to what a “loo” is. At least we know it’s not a prudish euphemism.

📌 There’s a minor controversy kicking off in the world of statistics. The UK Census has traditionally been a snapshot of Britain’s population on one day, March 21, every 10 years.

For this year’s Census, however, it seems the singular March 21 date has been scrapped in favour of a casual online participation, which makes the census more of an audit rather than an accurate snapshot.

📌 The Morning Star has a story claiming that angelic Rishi Sunak persuaded Boris to keep Britain open and let people die rather than go into Lockdown 2, as the scientists were urging him to.

📌 We never saw Star Wars, and we haven’t seen H&M on the Oprah show. But on it rolls…

📌 Today’s deliveries brought a new kitchen sink. Chaos begins on 22 March.

📌 A long article in the London Review of Books reveals Patricia Highsmith to have been catastrophically destructive and exceptionally bitter.

THURSDAY “The discovery of human remains” is an expression that never fails to send a shiver. And later in The Mirror the grim reality arrived.

📌 A Morning Star columnist speculates on whether Joe Biden’s Presidency has run out of gas already, before it even reached the freeway: “Will Biden follow Obama, Clinton, and Carter — 20 of the last 46 years of presidential administrations — down the rat hole of unfulfilled promises?”

It’s a message that chimes with others guessing when the great reform promised will actually start. It concludes: “Trump is gone, but Trumpism will return if we fail to overcome the inertia of a lifetime of Democratic Party betrayal of meaningful reform.“

📌 Someone asked Jim’ll Paint It to do Prince fighting Prince Harry with the Queen fighting Queen in the background.

FRIDAY In one of her daily Slice if Life blog posts, Lakshmi referenced a short quotation… “For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it. —Jacques-Yves Cousteau”

… and when I read it in my head I changed the word “protect” to “dominate”. Only now, after a century of trying to dominate nature, man has discovered the need to protect it.

📌 Have I discovered drawing as a neurotic itch, a fevered scratching that can only ever end in a ragged mutant human figure?

📌 If a bandwagon accusing government ministers of handing billions in taxpayers money to their rich friends is passing, I will jump on it. But Full Fact argues that recent accusations about the government’s useless and wasteful Test & Trace scheme miss a point or two.

📌 And on the subject of governments squandering taxpayers’ money…

📌 As a “jumper” I was happy to read that my actions were ethically sound, as pompous and smug as it sounds to say so.

📌 A soft awakening on BBC4 led me to the shame of forgetting all about the work of Pete Frame.

SATURDAY The Queen probably thought she’d put a lid on the Harry/Meghan fiasco.

📌 Had totally forgotten how achingly funny Dylan Moran is.

Read all of my Diaries.