May 27-June 2, 2023
SATURDAY 27 Quora algorithmically sifts its millions of stories and feeds you only the ones it thinks you have a taste for…
📌 Better late than never… An article in the Conversation reveals that in California (where else?) they have been testing the powers of COVID sniffer dogs, and a fun fact has emerged. Dogs instinctively do a preparatory first-phase detector sniff with the left nostril, then switch to the right nostril for the full-monty sniff.
📌 I think a lot of the paintings at Terrible Art In Charity Shops are actually quite good, brilliant even.
SUNDAY 28 Desperately trying not to look at any stories about Philip Schofield, but transfixed by the contortions of ITV in its attempt to cover its back in the matter of the high-profile celebrity talking head and the junior employee.
📌 A short biographical tribute to Tina Turner on Democratic Underground is about the best I’ve seen.
📌 Rishi’s appetite for helicopter rides is raising eyebrows. Maybe they make him feel like he’s on a mission.
📌 Everton squeezed through their final game to beat Bournemouth 1-0 and avoid relegation.
MONDAY 29 Victory in the Turkish presidential election runoff for Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a vote against a shambolic opposition rather than a vote of support for a hard-line tough-guy dictator, claims the Socialist Worker.
📌 As we prepare to visit Amsterdam this week to see an exhibition of paintings by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer I have been swotting up. It has proved embarrassing because 40 years ago the first published writing I did was a review in the New Musical Express of a collection of Linda McCartney’s photographic portraits. McCartney clearly adopted the domestic interior styling of Vermeer for her portraits, but at the time I hadn’t even heard of Vermeer and didn’t spot the homage. I dismissed McCartney’s portraits in the most rude terms as a display of superiority and condescension. My flesh crawls thinking about it now. The headline was “Linda McCartney’s Shots In The Eye” and I think NME paid me £15 for the review.
📌 HuffpostUK uses a telling graphic to illustrate the state of the nation according to a recent survey.
TUESDAY 30 Duolingo is not teaching French gender very well. How am I meant to know if words such as l’école (the school) and l’université (the university) are masculine or feminine? It wouldn’t matter much to me, but when you attach an adjective to a noun, the adjective and noun should have the same gender, eg, l’école est grande (the school is big). The word école is feminine; if it were masculine the adjective would be grand. Only by using French for a very long time will you learn these intricacies. In the meantime your Duolingo French teacher marks you as a failure and issues punishment. Let’s hope that in an age of gender fluidity it won’t be long before French students start marching on the streets demanding the ridiculous noun-gender convention be guillotined.
WEDNESDAY 31 The voice on the radio told us that today is “World Parrot Day” so it wasn’t entirely surprising to hear Ritchie phoning in from Harlow in Essex to tell listeners that his full name is Ritchie Parrott.
📌 At the Eurostar waiting area we learn that one of the heirs to the House of Mouse (Disney) is sitting among us.
📌 Welcome back, Amsterdam! It’s such a joy to see you again.
📌 The Daily Sensemaker has a cold analysis on the likelihood of Vladimir Putin pressing the nuclear button. It is, says the piece, the real reason the US has been cautious in its willingness to arm Ukraine. If Putin senses Ukraine is getting the upper hand, he will go nuclear. Problem is that US citizens are equally up for a radioactive fight and would relish a preemptive strike on Moscow by the US military.
THURSDAY 1 There’s an inevitable period of readjustment on arriving in Amsterdam to work out which way to look to avoid being mown down by cyclists.
📌 On our way to the Rijksmuseum for the Vermeer exhibition we visited an antiques emporium and something Vermeerish obviously drove me to photograph the faces of dolls and figurines.
📌 The petulant jostling at the Vermeer exhibition ranked as accomplished as at any big exhibition in the UK. What we’d not seen before were people taking selfies with artworks. There was a lot of that, and sharp elbows. Even people in wheelchairs had a fight on to see a painting.
📌 Things I learned about Vermeer and his paintings… 1 He fathered “14 or 15” children. Imagine if you were the one they weren’t sure about? Or would you even know you were the one who was later gifted the name “or”? 2 There is always a window on the painting’s left, through which the very best photo-quality light is streaming. 3 A woman bathes in the brilliant light and does something ordinary (read a letter, darn a sock, pour milk from a jug) 4 Very few of these women are named and the words “model unknown” are common in the description of the images.
📌 In Leidseplein there was an anti-war protest in progress.
📌 When we got back to the hotel there was a hard-hitting interview on BBC News24 with a notorious internet misogynist.
📌 Other memorable images from today include a Van Gogh mobile toy for sale in the museum shops and my wife trying to embrace the Dutch love of chips. A chip-shop in the 9 Streets district near our hotel had a queue stretching back across the canal. It’s window display was a wall of unpeeled potatoes.
FRIDAY 2 The new Iron Curtain is going up fast. The EU wants to sanitise Hungary’s upcoming presidency of the EU council.
📌 A hearty breakfast then over to Waterlooplein via a flea market, a photo-op stop at what is claimed to be Rembrandt’s house and an encounter with a heron attentively listening to street music. Then into the Hermitage for some epic outsider art, some boring Rembrandts and a look at the Amsterdam Museum courtesy of two redundant €18 tickets left behind by previous visitors. As we moved through the museum my wife asked questions about Amsterdam’s historic involvement in slavery. Upstairs we found the explanation in an amazing exhibition of dolls and dioramas by Rita Maasdamme, which tells the story of Dutch colonialism they’re too frightened to tell in schools. And it gave me a chance to revive my sordid interest in doll’s faces.
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