June 17-23, 2023
SATURDAY 17 Quite possibly I’ve gone mad, but the reverse side of my latest stitchwork project looks like Boris Johnson.
📌 The King’s birthday RAF flypast arrived bang on time and included, I’m told, a Tornado.
📌 I’ve turned into a horrible snob. Tonight I laughed when on TV’s Gogglebox Giles in Wiltshire told his long-suffering wife Mary about an incident at their local Waitrose checkout in which a woman asked him if he knew how to cook “these man-get-out peas”. It chimed because I also laughed recently when my wife reported a case in our local Aldi a young woman mulling over a tin of “mine-strone” soup.
SUNDAY 18 Don’t be distracted by the unfolding drama of Boris. In a News Agents podcast Lewis Goodall catalogues the catastrophically painful economic state Britain is in. Boris and his crazy fan club are the least of Rishi’s problems.
📌 One of my fellow bloggers once wrote to me saying how much they liked the mixture of art and politics I cover in my scrapbooks. It reminded me of a note my form teacher added to my school report when I was seven years old saying he was thrilled to see my “interest in art and The Bible“. Things change. The Bible became politics and art became football. Nevertheless, my mission for the next six months is to find an interesting way to combine art and politics. Here’s one of Rachel Reeves.
📌 Every day my wife and I compete at Wordle and compare answers at the end. Today, we both scored 5 in exactly the same sequence of words.
📌 To the Barbican on the spur of the moment to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a performance I found unimaginably boring. Half an hour would have been OK. Two hours, augmented by ridiculous acrobatic dancing, was numbing. Luckily, the evening was saved by their support act, black-British folk singer Angeline Morrison, whose sublime songs have a curiously Celtic twang.
MONDAY 19 I was briefly promoted back into the Emerald League from the Ruby League in Duolingo French but was demoted almost immediately because I screwed up my pronouns. Note to self: Ma mère, Mon père; ta mère, ton père; tes parents.
📌 When I discovered that the parliamentary punishment of Boris didn’t start until 4.30pm I stared out of the window to pass the time.
TUESDAY 20 The Boris debate yesterday in Parliament threw up some intriguing prospects. First up was the absence of Rishi and more than 200 other Conservative MPs, an act of cowardice that is unlikely to be ignored. Whether it will prompt unruly outbreaks of clucking whenever Rishi walks by remains to be seen. That would be childish, so watch the tabloid newspapers closely for pictures of Rishi “trussed up” like a chicken.
Second, Penny Mordaunt used the debate to go on manouvres. She still wants the top job. Cradling the King’s Sword is clearly not enough for her.
📌 Liz Truss did not vote in yesterday’s debate. Our Conservative MP Nickie Aitken, who is very visible locally, voted FOR.
📌 The missing submarine tourist vessel Titan (it snoops around the wreckage of the Titanic) is reported to have “only” 96 hours of oxygen left in its tank. If by some miracle the rich people on board emerge from the ordeal in good health, I hope they reimburse the US and Canadian search parties for all the trouble their morbid curiosity has caused. Of course, if they don’t, the previous sounds callous and heartless.
📌 Got cancelled by some evaluation geek at the Barbican dressed all in black. The crime was that I used the word Bonkers in one of my stitchworks for the Differently Various exhibition. I didn’t cry.
WEDNESDAY 21 Last week we took part in a quiz, won, and were awarded as a prize two good seats at the Barbican to see a classical music performance by the French orchestra La Siècles, fronted by their maestro François-Xavier Roth. This turned out to be the most unstuffy, unsnobby classical music performance imaginable, a dream for me whose classical music interest is comfortably satisfied by the film music of Hans Zimmer and Ennio Morricone. The performance of some very delicate French classics (Debussy, Ravel) had personality, shaped by Roth himself, and delivered by an orchestra (plus the London Symphony Chorus for Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé) that looked and sounded joyous. It was classical music having fun. The snobs would have been horrified, especially by the cheeky bop of the Austin Powers theme music (Soul Bossa Nova, by Quincy Jones) as an encore.
📌 The British media really does love a countdown-to-death story.
📌 At the crack of dawn our estate was overrun with a film crew setting up for a chase scene in Series 4 of Slow Horses, the spy drama in which failed MI5 spooks outperform the supposedly successful ones.
📌 In Art Class my debut attempt at linocut printing was not entirely successful, though I think I will persevere. The original image is from a drawing workshop we did with the Museum of London Archives.
📌 To a small upstairs gallery in Angel Islington for the launch of Jennifer’s new exhibition, Why We Linger, a compendium of all the artists she represents. The neuro intensity of the work on display was characteristically high and it made me want to know more about Jennifer’s own neuro story. The most impressive piece for me was a pair of sculpted paper figures that made overlaid sellotape look like a vitreous glaze.
THURSDAY 22 Last night at Jennifer’s exhibition she told us that the Resolve Collective has pulled out of the Curve gallery in the Barbican in a row about political censorship. This is the space in which the Headway exhibition is scheduled to appear for nine days opening on July 29. Sadly, my first instinct was not to sympathise with the radical artists at Resolve but to imagine the possibility of getting our exhibition into the gallery earlier than expected. I also wondered whether the Barbican’s management failure with Resolve will make them more determined to pull off a good-news story with us (ie, bump up the budget).
📌 I am readying myself to be accused of heartlessness. The underwater tourist vessel still hasn’t been located and the countdown-to-death story is now top of all the news agendas. In Art Class yesterday we casually speculated on the toilet facilities inside the tiny submarine.
FRIDAY 23 Don’t be fooled by the notion that war in Ukraine, the Pandemic and Brexit are to blame, because Britain’s economy has been slipping down the drain for a long time, says Aditya Chakrabotrtty in the Guardian. All the political classes since Margaret Thatcher have been pimping an illusion of imminent triumph.
From Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia through to George Osborne’s “march of the makers”, our rulers have trumpeted every false success, while ugly facts have been waved away as anomalies… What they really created was a low-wage workforce, in a low-growth country ruled by politicians with low ambitions for everyone bar themselves.
📌 The Lightning Seeds, performing at Glastonbury, did not alter the line in their song Marvellous that states “a submarine got stuck to the bottom”.
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