MONDAY 1 The Guardian has a cheeky list of 71 things you never knew about King Charles III. A student who once threw eggs at him was banned from carrying eggs. And in one of the pestering letters he used to send to government ministers he wrote “Illegal fishing of the Patagonian toothfish will be high up on your list of priorities because until that trade is stopped, there is little hope for the poor old albatross”.
📌 Chris and Sue have bought a massive new house. Jaq and Lynne have bought a Bongo (the Mazda motorhome, not the antelope or the drum).
TUESDAY 2 As the local elections get closer (two days to go), speculation as to how badly voters will punish the ruling Conservative Party gets louder. How well the Liberal Democrats perform is also a discussion point. If Labour manages to win the next general election, to govern without the collaboration of the Liberal Democrats would look like a wasted opportunity to keep the Conservatives out of office for a generation. Yet factions within both Labour and the Liberal Democrats would baulk at such an “arrangement”: the Liberal Democrats because of the nasty taste left after their attempt at coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, Labour because to some fanatics in the party, collaboration with other political parties amounts to heresy.
📌 I think I’ve got dandruff in my eyebrows. Then I discovered that Eyebrow Dandruff is a thing.
📌 Princess Anne, 72, doesn’t think much of Charlie’s plan to slim down the royal family.
WEDNESDAY 3 In Art Class we were treated to a presentation from Museum of London staff and shown some artefacts from their collection, which is soon to move from the Barbican to a new home in the old Poultry Market in Smithfield. Some were from the recent past, others were from ancient history. The leather goods (boot and water carrier) were especially fascinating, but since the project required us to work up sketches prior to making linocuts of our drawings, I simplified one of the items (a telephone) to make the lino-cutting easier
📌 Having watched the Coronation Special of Channel 4’s The Windsors we decided to keep the royal satire machine humming by catching up with previous series, which we had for some reason overlooked. With good planning, all the previous episodes will keep us going right past the real Coronation.
📌 Brighton are 7 points behind Liverpool with 3 games in hand. Tomorrow they play Manchester Utd, who are 4 points ahead of Liverpool with two games in hand.
THURSDAY 4 Last night I had a dream in which I attended an event in the US, met Barack Obama and found him to be the most boring person in the world. All he did was talk about himself, how great he was and why America and all Americans ought to be grateful to him. At one point I went to the toilet and on my way back overheard Michelle Obama complaining to a group of women about how Barack “drones on” incessantly.
📌 The next “emotion” detail in stitchwork from Tirzah’s big brain painting is meant to depict Disgust. Think I need to work a bit harder on the eyes.
FRIDAY 5 King Charles’s friend Jonathan has said he does not want any of his subjects to swear the Oath of Allegiance we’ve been asked to make during his Coronation tomorrow. Apparently he finds the idea abhorrent.
📌 Yesterday at Headway for lunch we had something called Coronation Quiche, which featured beans, peas and spinach and is said to be a personal favourite of Charles III and his wife Cammy.
📌 The Guardian uses the eve of the Coronation to urge for a better national conversation on the relevance of a monarchy so deeply wedded to the pageantry of the ancients past. It stops short of any real solutions such as a modern, historically self-aware monarchy as part of a democratic institution (Department of Heritage?).
📌 Our friend Paula treated us to a day out, first to the Design Museum in Kensington for the superb Ai Weiwei exhibition Making Sense, then on to a number of bars. The day was punctuated by strange happenings, which made it all the more memorable.
SATURDAY 6 King Charles might have plans to “modernise” the monarchy, but over at the Socialist Worker, very little changes…
📌 I’m sure Keir Starmer is a decent man, but he does present as having no personality whatsoever. Saying the next James Bond should be a woman just doesn’t cut it.
📌 Peter Kellner in the Guardian warns that the devastating losses for the Conservatives in the local elections might be down to abstaining Conservative voters writing off the local elections as a lost cause. But they could return at a general election and swing the outcome.
📌 Coronation update: I’ve heard of the expression “riding shotgun”, but never “riding javelin”.
📌 Coronation update: Felt sorry for Harry, left to walk alone behind everyone else.
📌 Coronation update: Princess Anne is wearing another one of her ridiculous ceremonial pointy hats.
📌 Coronation update: Was that Penny Mordaunt in a Maid Marion costume who handed the big sword to Charles? Yes, it was.
📌 Coronation update: At St Giles‘ Father Jack laid on a spread of drinks, cucumber sandwiches and cake, lots of cake. Oh, and a live streaming of the Coronation. The promised RAF ceremonial flypast was underwhelming in the extreme, but the atmosphere in the church was warm.
SUNDAY 7 Waved Kate & Pete off on their walking holiday of Croatia then wandered over to Tudor Rose Court for their Coronation tea party. Pleasantly surprised to see some old faces we haven’t seen in a while and glad to hear they can all still gossip and bitch for England. And nice to take a turn around their garden.
📌 Our friend Amanda reckons I will soon be able to play 1980s synthesiser hooks on my Casio keyboard. She cited Enola Gay by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and confessed to believing at the time that the song was titled Alone Again.
📌 We finished off the first series of The Curse, an absurd mock gold-heist caper story set in 1980s London, which ends up being hilarious in its own very stupid way.
MONDAY 8 Every so often our kitchen sink gets blocked, and it’s always a major ordeal to locate the unblocking gel that generally solves the problem. The cupboard under the sink is a vast, ridiculously inaccessible cavern that harbours a number of long-forgotten products that must all be removed before the unblocking can begin. Today I found two, yes, two bottles of white vinegar (“for cleaning”, my wife says), numerous limescale removers, two cans of WD40 and a can of fly/wasp spray that looked like it was excavated from Sutton Hoo.
📌 Pharmacists unhappy with the meagre amounts they are paid by the government are unlikely to go on strike. An awful lot of them are simply closing their businesses for good.
📌 Everton whacked Brighton 5-1, giving Liverpool a helping hand in their quest for European football next season.
TUESDAY 9 In a fight between Boris and Charles III I’m not sure whose side I’d be on.
📌 Penny Mordaunt’s attention-grabbing, sword moment at the coronation of Charles III has made her the bookies favourite to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
📌 Apparently our blocked sink isn’t a blocked sink, it is a blocked something else far bigger and buried deep inside the fabric of the building.
📌 Our neighbour Bev told my wife that recently she had a dream in which she had been invited to the Coronation in Westminster Abbey, picked a suitably impressive outfit to wear and arrived to discover that it was me and my wife who were being coronated. Bev said we both wore the most exquisite outfits.
📌 Lakshmi, one of the bloggers I follow, writes in a recent post about the philosopher Swami Brahmananda and his belief in “good ventilation”. This refers, Lakshmi says, to both our homes and our minds.
WEDNESDAY 10 I think I’m becoming a fan of Prayer For The Day on the radio, maybe because its emphasis is on reflection rather than church sanctimony. This morning (5.43am) someone rambled on for two minutes about the beauty of a friendship started in childhood that has endured into old age. The prayer ended simply by saying something like, “We are thankful for lasting friendships, Amen.”
📌 In Art Class we began a two-week exploration of “The Crown”, inspired by last weekend’s coronation of Charles III but open to any interpretation. I chose to paint a Crown edifice/temple, which I will place on the crown of a rolling hill, at which observers from below stare in stupefaction. The interior walls of the Crown edifice/temple are lined with scientific depictions of the Coronavirus that brought the nation to a standstill two years ago.
📌 After a suitably toned email to Liam, our area housing manager, the kitchen-sink blockage has been unblocked and normal domestic cleanliness has been resumed.
📌 Harshita says she once got a birthday card with the words “Have a drink on me” on the front. Inside was a tea bag.
THURSDAY 11 Hands Of Time, a fascinating history of watches and watchmaking by expert horologist Rebecca Struthers, is this week’s talking book on the radio for those who wake up in the middle of the night and need to get back to sleep quickly.
📌 The Tory government just nationalised another railway line.
📌 Nick Cave was pictured at the coronation of Charles III. On Facebook Roy Wilkinson claimed it was all his doing and related to some dealings he once had with John Betjeman’s daughter Candida.
📌 Bumped into Mo, who told me at length that his doctors had found cysts on one of his three kidneys.
📌 At the Barbican’s Alice Neel exhibition there is a fake living room in which you can sit and read what I suppose to be some of Alice’s favourite books. Reading Andy Warhol’s Diaries I can’t help but notice how he prices everything: “Made phone calls ($2)”… then “cabbed to Park and 18th ($5.50)”.
📌 The Alice Neel exhibition is a feast of creepy hands…
FRIDAY 12 A shouty email from Make Votes Matter reports the election of the Mayor of Bedford on a vote share of 33.1%. This is because last year the government extended the much-discredited First Past The Post (FTPT) voting system to include mayoral elections. The big parties love FTTP because it allows them to rule without consensus. Absolute power. Consensus equates with weakness in the UK, unlike in other European democracies, where coalitions and partnerships are common and the business of politics is how to make them work.
📌 Whenever I can’t quite work out the correct French verb ending, my wife tells me it is an “irregular verb” as if I’m meant to know what that is. My reply is that if I carry on learning the number of “irregular” verbs will soon be greater than the number of regular ones. Her reply is to stereotype the French as being difficult.
📌 Zelenskiy said on the radio that he didn’t want the Eurovision Song Contest to be held in Liverpool. He wanted it in one of the countries that shares a border with Ukraine. But not Russia, obvs.
SATURDAY 13 At the end they said “Liverpool, Ukraine, Europe and Australia, good night.”
📌 Back in the Coronavirus Era I signed up to a longitudinal health study by one of the big London hospitals. Now I get chapter and verse on their latest research…
SUNDAY 14 All the comment following last week’s local election results is asking how Labour and the Lib-Dems will conspire at the next general election to keep the Conservatives out of office. A formal coalition is said to be unlikely, but other forms of collaboration are consistently “not denied” by both sides. This hints at the start of a different kind of politics in Britain, one of tactical alliances. October 2024 is the likely date. It will be interesting to see how the Lib-Lab secret partnership progresses up to that moment. The more Labour and the Lib-Dems urge an “Anything But Tory” (ABT) popular vote, the more easily the Tories can depict Labour and the Lib-Dems as a political OCG and themselves as the victims.
📌 It happens every year: you pack away your Winter clothes and Summer decides to turn up late. Even our heritage tomato seedlings are unhappy about that.
📌 It sounds like a cliché, but at the British Museum’s newChina‘s Hidden Century exhibition you get a proper grip on why modern-day China is still so inscrutable.
📌 At Headway Penny has been drawing pictures of members and asking members to draw pictures of her… I tried to get her to say a smiley word and the more I asked the more she froze, with a slight look of contempt in her eyes.
MONDAY 15 Cinderella’s pink puffball sleeves seem to go on into infinity.
📌 If Nigel Farage can be credited with anything it is the ease with which he forced the lunatics in the Conservative Party to show their faces. Now the party is awash with crazies who think Boris Johnson was treated unfairly and Liz Truss had the right idea. They give themselves names such as the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) and National Conservatives and they’re giving Rishi a headache. Even his Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has started to coordinate group bitching sessions and make incendiary speeches in an effort to line herself up for the top job. Others simply say they are shoulder to shoulder with Rishi but every decision he’s made as PM has been an act of treachery (Hello JR-M!). All of this is routine Tory shenanigans except for the fact that “National Conservatism” sounds a lot like the mutant offspring of National Socialism.
TUESDAY 16 The BBC has caught the Conservative Party taking vast sums of freshly laundered money from an oligarch in Azerbaijan.
📌 Looks like Turkey no longer has an appetite for democracy. A new iron curtain appears to be under construction.
📌 The Portuguese heritage tomatoes are planted out. Fingers crossed. The seeds were a year too old, I think.
📌 After a meeting at Toynbee Hall to discuss community outreach for their advice service we got to nose around the Library, which is an archive of middle-class radical politics.
📌 Pip, one of our friends in Brighton, is irritated by a recipe asking for 10g of fresh bay leaves. “Not 2 or 3, but 10 BLEEDIN’ GRAMS!” he screams in frustration. Two things: 1 I wonder if fresh bay leaves weigh more than dried ones? Probably, yes. 2 I have the same problem with bread recipes that ask for 7g of yeast, which I have been forced to calculate as 2.25 teaspoons. Pip went for 2 bay leaves.
WEDNESDAY 17 Once again I’ve failed to come up with a 100-word story for the Headway Babyshoes writing group. I wasn’t very inspired by the titles offered (‘Concrete Tube’, ‘Eye Level’, ‘Flibbertigibbet’, ‘Spanner In The Works’). ‘Eye Level’ is the title of the theme music to the 1970s TV detective series Van Der Valk, which is set in Amsterdam. That should have been inspiration enough because we are to visit Amsterdam in two weeks for an exhibition of work by the artist Johannes Vermeer (Girl With A Pearl Earring, etc). But I couldn’t muster any ideas. Van Der Valk has recently been remade starring the excellent Marc Warren in the title role. And the words Eye Level hint at something to do with convergence and the vanishing point in art, but still nothing came to me. I’m probably not trying hard enough. Maybe if I rework the above and play with the tenses, a story will emerge. Something like…
Once again he’d failed. He said he wasn’t inspired by the titles offered. One of them, ‘Eye Level’, was the title of the theme music to a 1970s TV detective series Van Der Valk, which was set in Amsterdam. That should have been inspiration enough because he was planning to visit Amsterdam in two weeks for an exhibition of work by the artist Vermeer. And Van Der Valk had recently been remade starring the excellent Marc Warren. The words Eye Level do hint at the convergence device in art, but still no ideas came. Maybe he wasn’t trying hard enough.
📌 In Art Class I placed the Coronavirus Crown I made last week on the crown of a rolling hill and stood a hapless individual below, staring up in awe at the monument to monarchy. Most people preferred Version 1; I prefer Version 2.
📌 To west London (Latimer Road) for the 20th Anniversary party of Into University, an education charity my wife’s cousin Rachel started, er, 20 years ago to help disadvantaged young learners get places in university. Inspirational speeches from pupils past and present centered on the yearn to learn given opportunity and hope.
THURSDAY 18 Water, another example of a once-public utility privatised and now failing totally. Public industries were never designed to operate as private businesses.
📌 In a fight between Boris and Macron I’m not sure whose side I’d be on.
📌 The sale of our apartment in Brighton should have finished weeks ago, but useless solicitors, estate agents and managing agents seem to think the world moves at a speed so slow it cannot be detected by intelligent life.
📌 James said he did Wordle in 2. I told him it wasn’t skill but luck.
📌 To Barbican Cinema 1 for a National Theatre screening of Best Of Enemies, a dramatic reconstruction of a TV wrestling match between two political adversaries (conservative William F Buckley Jr and liberal Gore Vidal) during the 1968 US party conventions. Seeing David Harewood command the role of a rabid right-winger was a proper revelation.
FRIDAY 19 Was woken up in the middle of the night by a scary BBC World Service documentary about online Muslim masculinity, aka The Manosphere.
📌 I’m still learning the ropes around gender issues, personal pronouns, etc. And it isn’t helped by the tedious coincidental business of learning the gender of French nouns on my Duolingo course. But that is a side issue. Yesterday while talking to a colleague I referred to their “fella” but noticed thereafter that they used the word “partner” instead. My mistake, but no offence intended. I’m just old and a slow learner.
📌 Tortoise’s Daily Sensemaker has an intriguing report on South Africa, its failing economy and a falling-out with the US over the Russia-Ukraine war
📌 HuffPost UK has started using the alliterative handle “Robotic Rishi’.
📌 Overheard on bus in Brighton: “My pituitary gland is not talking to my thyroid.”
SATURDAY 20 An item on Quora asked for recollections of incidents when hotel staff entered a room unexpectedly to find, for example, someone ironing their clothes, totally naked. It reminded me of the time our friends Liz and Spud were selling a house and an estate agent (with keys) brought customers to view the property while they were still in bed. They faked being asleep, overheard everything and waited for the incident to pass. Then they ate toast.
📌 The play we saw on Thursday evening,Best Of Enemies, features a head-to-head debate between two political rivals. I am trying to imagine other head-to-head encounters that might have the same dramatic impact. Police interviews with criminals are a staple of TV drama, but might imaginary interviews made fictional be just as compelling?
📌 One last look at the view from our Brighton apartment. Time to say goodbye, old friend.
📌 To Percival Mansions on Kemptown seafront to visit our friend Paul, who was exhibiting his photographs as part of the Brighton Festival Open House weekend. On the way we spotted Humphrey Bogart enjoying some sunshine.
📌 RIP Martin Amis, 73. Never liked your writing to begin with, then somehow came around to it. Sharp, it was.
SUNDAY 21 On TV Ian Hislop abbreviated National Conservatism to Nat-C.
📌 One of our friends who ran the Brighton half marathon recently confessed to accidentally pooing their pants towards the end of the run and then unapologetically excused themself from the post-marathon revelries to go and get cleaned up.
📌 Maybe Boris’s “Get Brexit Done” fib was a fib too far. Rishi and Suella’s pledge to “Get migration down” looks very hollow indeed right now. Suella even plotted to dodge a crucial vote on it.
📌 Is the Conservative Party turning into some low-rent version of the nastiest wing of the US Republican Party? A lot of commentators seem to think so and are quite pessimistic about the drift. Not so the actor Rachel Weisz who appeared on an episode of the News Agents podcast about gobby Liz Truss. Weisz, a self-proclaimed “superfan” of the News Agents, says it is characteristic of British people to politely look the other way when in the presence of political lunacy, so no worries. Try telling anti-Brexiters that, Rachel.
MONDAY 22 Kevin Maguire in the New Statesman reckons Jeremy Corbyn, 73, is being strongarmed into not standing in the next general election to make way for Angela Rayner’s partner Sam Tarry, 40, who was ejected from Keir Starmer’s front bench for picketing with striking railway workers.
📌 We’ve persevered with three episodes of Ten Pound Poms and will probably see this super-mediocre drama through to the end, despite finding it more and more irritating with every dragged-out minute.
TUESDAY 23 One correspondent on Quora asks if female astronauts wear bras in space. The top answers stated that it was a matter of personal preference and none of anyone else’s business, but that in training for zero gravity, sports bras were commonly worn.
📌 Will Suella survive the rest of the week in her job as home secretary? One news organisation reported that on her first day as an MP she asked if speeding fines could be claimed on expenses. But now the finger is pointing at Rishi for being too cowardly to remove someone who is quite obviously incapable of doing the job.
📌 A forensic analysis in the Guardian shows that Rishi’s big fat lies are bigger and fatter even than Boris’s. And he’s just as shameless about them.
📌 We are still searching for a near-empty bottle of Cillit Bang. My wife used it to clean some kitchen cupboard shelves, put it down and now it has been missing for around 2 hours.
WEDNESDAY 24 Fun fact from medical historian Dr Lindsey Fitzharris: Marie Curie’s notebooks are radioactive and must be stored in lead-lined boxes. Curie’s body is also radioactive and lies in a coffin lined with one inch of lead.
📌 You do see some of the strangest things if you wander the backstreets of Brighton.
📌 Not being in Art Class this week, and next week being half term, gives me the opportunity to spend longer on the current project, which is to draw or paint a brown paper carrier bag. I will work harder on this over the next week but getting a first draft done is always a good way to start…
📌 RIP Tina Turner, 83. You were my Dad’s favourite.
📌 We finished Ten Pound Poms and it ended inevitably in a way that can allow for a second series. Trying to imagine what that might look like triggered the impression of a Little House on the Prairie in 1950s Australia.
THURSDAY 25 Common-sense conversations about immigration are rare. The Labour Party, despite Keir Starmer’s awkward, borderline aggressive posturing on the subject recently, appears keen to work it into the national conversation. Or so says the New Statesman‘s Freddie Hayward.
📌 As we prepare to leave Brighton, the number of “last” looks out of the window will multiply. Belchers Cafe has been there with us all along. I always wondered whether it was a meeting place for people who belch a lot or whether the owner had the surname Belcher and the apostrophe went missing at some point.
📌 The long-running BBC radio crime drama Annika has transferred to TV. And its star, Oslo murder detective Annika Strandhed (played on both radio and TV by Nicola Walker) has moved to Scotland. Glasgow, in fact, which makes a good home for her neurotic internal monologues and bad jokes. It is surprisingly enjoyable.
FRIDAY 26 Katie, our financial advisor, says our “wealth portal” is healthy and big enough to allow us in the future to transition to a suitable property without stairs.
📌 Celine Dion has a condition called Stiff Person Syndrome.
📌 The latest stitchwork emoji patch based on Tirzah’s paintings is finished. It’s meant to depict the emotion of disgust. Not sure it does.
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.
📌 There must be something wrong with me because I think a lot of the paintings in Terrible Art In Charity Shops are 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 the language 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 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.
📌 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.
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