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.
SATURDAY 3 An air of gloom hangs over both of us. Yesterday in the Hermitage, while enjoying a tuna sandwich with capers and a glass of rosé, we got a call to say the sale of our Brighton apartment has fallen through. It’s hard to work out who is to blame. Our “cash” buyer had claimed to have sold a property but he hadn’t. The estate agents did not verify his claims, so the lie was not detected. Either way we now have an empty apartment we must treat as little more than a settled spot on a campsite (two chairs and an inflatable bed). A new sale will happen when it happens.
📌 To the quaint Catholic almshouse enclave at Begijnhoff to see if they keep their lawns as trim as those at our London neighbours in Charterhouse Square. They do. Then to breakfast on the canal and a chance to see some pavement clog dancers doing their stuff. Then it was on to the flower market followed by an experimental tram ride way out east hoping to glimpse the lapping shores of the Zeider Zee but thwarted by Tram 26 disappearing into a tunnel beneath the waterway. We thought it might be like travelling down the Florida Keys. It wasn’t. It was a dreary ride through somewhere that looked not unlike downtown Milton Keynes.
📌 The gloom lifted with the arrival of our crab cakes at the Seafood Bar.
SUNDAY 4 An idyllic stroll around the Nine Streets and the central canal area led us to the wonderful Huis Marseille photography gallery and a superb exhibition of work by the Spanish neorealist Carlos Pérez Siquier, dominated by a collection dating from the 1950s depicting La Chanca, the working-class area of his native Almería.
MONDAY 5 Duolingo has got me confused on the difference between pièce and salle. And where does that leave the poor chambre?
📌 Yesterday for a writing project I penned a 100-word imaginary suicide note full of despair. Today a bright light on the horizon comes with the news that Universal Basic Income, a subject I have droned on about for years, is to be trialled in two areas of England. Can’t wait to say I told you so.
📌 Today’s Sensemaker from Tortoise Media rips through the naked cronyism of the lists of friends and colleagues Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have submitted for honours.
📌 On the treadmill video screen in the gym I visited the Devil’s Punchbowl trail for the last 5k. Wow!
TUESDAY 6 The Guardian has put together a fabulous photo collection dating from the 1950s of Sicily under the mafia.
📌 At a City of London gala reception for volunteers at the Guildhall last night we met sheriffs (who are permitted on occasions to carry swords), several aldermen and one alderwoman (who have large pockets in their red, ermine-trimmed gowns), and common councillors (who if they’re lucky have small pockets in their blue gowns). The Harry Potter references flowed freely. I got bored eating micro tapas and swigging wine, so I took some pictures, mainly of the different shoes worn for the occasion but also, prompted by Natasha, of William Beckford, a literary dilettante, sadist and slave trader whose statue stands in the Guildhall.
📌 One thing I never knew about my wife of 35 years until she retired is that she holds running conversations with herself. I used to think she was talking to me but soon I realised she was just telling her IPad off for not having those shoes in her size. Now I simply ignore what she says until I’m spoken to directly. This annoys her.
WEDNESDAY 7 In our youth one of the biggest social fears was something called VD. It’s not called that anymore. Venereal Disease came in two forms. The scariest was Syphilis, which could result in death (our school music teacher had a list of famous victims that included Schubert, Smetana and Delius). The bad but still shameful Gonorrhoea was difficult to spell but could be dealt with medically at a place called the “clap clinic”. The Guardian tells us today that both syphilis and gonorrhoea are running rampage in the UK. They are referred to in modern times as STDs (Sexually Transmitted Disease) and the clap clinic is now called a Sexual Health Centre.
📌 The ball games area beneath our bedroom window has found a new use…
📌 A crazy thought arrived in the middle of the night. Putin will continue to destroy Ukraine then exit abruptly, leaving behind a devastated nation for the EU and US to clear up, a burdensome and fraught task that will bog down both power blocs for decades. Then Russia will rise, pick off a few compliant eastern-European countries and become an overweight poodle to China’s obese rottweiler.
📌 In Art Class our theme for 2 weeks is Repetition. I am trying to make a crazy 3d rotating picture, which is half completed. In the meantime I played around with repetition and pattern using some cheap postcards I got in an Amsterdam photo gallery last weekend. I got 10 identical postcards of a sultry young woman staring defiantly at the viewer (€2.50 for 10). I will experiment more with this image, but made some roughs to be going on with.
And just in case the teacher thought I was slacking I dug out an old image of a cellist that uses a repetition of coloured layers in different transparencies.
📌 Congratulations West Ham United. You didn’t play that well, but you bagged the prize.
📌 More grisly food descriptions appear on p125 of my Inspector Chen Cao story, A Case Of Two Cities by Qiu Xiaolong. Chen is having a working “breakfast” with his trusty colleague Sgt Yu: “It was not exactly soup… but hot, savory liquid with a rich flavor made of crab ovary and digestive glands.”
THURSDAY 8 In Duolingo (French) I have been promoted to the Emerald League but continue to linger in the bottom three, perpetually at risk of dropping back into the Ruby League. This must be what it’s like to be Norwich.
📌 The Conversation really does have some of the finest stories of our time. This one dovetails beautifully with yesterday’s ramble around VD.
FRIDAY 9 I’m starting to think I’m maybe overworking the Repetition idea.
📌 I’ve got the horrible feeling that George Osborne is trying to make a comeback. Watch out for upcoming “reflections” that ooze contrition.
📌 The Labour Party is coming under fire in the media for “rowing back” on the idea that they are the party that plays fast and loose with the taxpayers’ money.
📌 To an awesome exhibition of American Folk Art at the Royal Academy called Souls Grown Deep Like The Rivers. In the bookshop I asked a strange woman what she thought of the exhibition. She said she thought it was strange, but seemed incapable of expanding on that.
📌 Boris has finally thrown in the towel and blames everyone else for his monumental defeat.
SATURDAY 10 “Scissoring”. Great Noun x Verb transition .
📌 The closing paragraph in a Tortoise article on Ukraine after the dam-busting appears conclusive. But it also hints at other possible outcomes.
Ukraine is in a Catch-22. Something has to give. If it isn’t the Russian army it may have to be Nato’s refusal to countenance Ukrainian membership while the conflict is ongoing. The alternative is a war that could go on for decades, and a revival of Russian dreams of empire from Moldova to the Stans.Tortoise Sensemaker
Might Nato’s “refusal” also cause the EU to get serious about its own security alliance, one that might have been more successful in deterring Putin in the first place. Sure, he hates democracy full stop. But he hates the US more. This is another good argument for a properly United Europe.
📌 An article in the New Statesman predicts a win for the Greens in Brighton at the next general election without the pulling power of Caroline Lucas. Most of my green-leaning friends in Brighton would just like their bins emptied and the streets cleaned, a rabbit Lucas was unable to pull out of her hat.
📌 We finished the gripping Irish-Belgian detective drama Hidden Assets and I wasn’t entirely sure why I found it so intense and compelling until the penny dropped and I realised it was the spooky music supplied by composer Michel Corriveau.
SUNDAY 11 The most tantalising bit of speculation on the future of a humiliated Boris is that he will front a consortium in buying the Telegraph newspaper group, which has recently been put up for sale. The sitcom is already playing in my head.
📌 The council’s gardeners are not bothering with our lawn so it has turned into a meadow. My wife believes this deters people from using it to sunbathe and have picnics, play games etc. She is probably right, but when I told her I quite like it she said “lawns are meant to be used, not just looked at”.
📌 The gates to our allotments are flung open every year for the annual Open Gardens weekend. Hundreds of visitors arrive from all corners of the country to check out the crops we grow in our little corner of reclaimed space. My “experimental beans” (ie, I can’t remember what I planted) and my juvenile heritage tomatoes were a big hit.
MONDAY 12 The Conversation explains why we should all be bothered if China invades Taiwan. The export of microchips would grind to a halt and debilitate much of the modern technology we rely on – “cars, phones and healthcare equipment such as ultrasounds and vital sign monitors”.
📌 There is an eagerness in all of us to hear what we want to hear rather than listen to what was actually said. Boris’s resignation declaration that “it is very sad to be leaving parliament – at least for now…” has been widely interpreted as the threat of a return. And that fits with the idea of Boris as a political troublemaker. But was it the leaving or the sadness at leaving parliament that Boris claims is temporary? Cunning ambiguity is another Boris hallmark.
📌 My wife disagrees with my theory that once the Boris Show has left town Rishi will call an early general election.
📌 The BBC reports a chronic disintegration at the heart of the Russian military in Ukraine. Their mercenary partners, the Wagner Group, will not do as they’re told.
📌 Just imagine the cheers that went up at Labour HQ when Nicola Sturgeon got arrested.
📌 Silvio Berlusconi is dead at 86. His Life In Pictures really does show what a squalid individual he became.
📌 The art project on repetition I started at last week’s class is nearing completion…
📌 Found a short yarn about Franz Kafka and a child searching for a lost doll. No idea if it’s true, but I’d like to think it was.
📌 Andrew Marr’s take on Boris’s bitter departure reads like an obituary.
TUESDAY 13 When 25% of the population thinks COVID was a hoax, there has to be something very wrong with your country.
📌 RIP Cormac McCarthy, 89.
WEDNESDAY 14 In Art Class we finished our 2-week study of repetition. It’s been an enjoyable excursion and I am beginning to sense that I have a tendency to always see my subjects as characters. Every version of the Moody Girl From Amsterdam becomes a new character as the image is being made. My workbook now has a complete cast of different portrayals.
📌 After publicly stating her determination to resign as an MP, Nadine Dorries has not yet done so. This is being interpreted as her way of sticking the knife deeper into Rishi.
📌 If Boris does ever become PM again (as is his desire) it won’t be as leader of the Conservative Party.
THURSDAY 15 Just finished a strong radio re-imagination from the BBC archives of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In The Chatterleys a soldier, Cliff, returns from Afghanistan with disabilities that render him sexually useless. His partner Connie struggles to cope with his disabilities but eventually finds comfort in a fella called Olly (Mellors), who likes to wild swim in the cold North Sea. Cliff learns to savour the human touch of Ivy, who keeps the books at the caravan park Cliff inherited from his dead dad. The drama simmers with unstated needs and desires, as you might expect given the original source.
📌 We finished Mystery Road Origin, the first prequel to the already successful Australian TV mystery series Mystery Road. As a standalone six-part series it was a superb evocation of outback Australia and Australian life hosted by an ensemble of characters you never stopped rooting for. It was billed as Series 3 of Mystery Road and has a different set of younger actors. Confusingly, Series 4 is tipped to be a second prequel. This is like running Endeavour at the same time as Morse or Young Sheldon alongside Big Bang Theory. It’s obviously a trend.
📌 RIP Glenda Jackson, 87.
📌 At Headway I found my favourite tea cup, which I thought had disappeared forever, or to eBay.
FRIDAY 16 Now I’ve been demoted from the Emerald League back to the Ruby League in my Duolingo French studies, the taunting messages telling me how bad I was doing have stopped. I wonder if this is a new policy on bullying. Last week I messaged one of my fellow Duolingo students, SLBubbles, asking them to slow down because Duo, who is an owl, kept reminding me that Bubbles had overtaken me AGAIN!
📌 Yesterday morning our neighbour’s teenage daughter Molly came walking towards me. She wore old combat trousers and no make-up. She smiled. “She was a picture of natural, youthful beauty,” I told my wife later. In the evening we bumped into Molly’s mum. I told her I saw Molly today, etc, etc. You didn’t, Mum said, Molly is on a girlie holiday in Malta, let me show you the pictures.
📌 The Tortoise Sensemaker has a cracking summary of Silvio Berlusconi’s legacy.
📌 The fifth in a series of six stitchwork patches depicting human emotions is bouncing along towards its end. Then comes the arguments I have with myself as to what colours are appropriate for the final patch (Happiness). This is when I study the collection so far and dither.
📌 Andy Beckett has some chilling news for anyone who thought Bories was simply a bad apple…
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”.
SATURDAY 24 Last night we saw a fascinating stage performance by one of our neighbours. The title was Benched and it centres on the observation that we often have better quality conversations with strangers than we do with those closest to us. In it our neighbour Tink describes carrying a small wooden bench to various random locations around London and the UK, sitting on it and chatting to the people who come to sit beside her thinking it was public seating. They tell Tink all about their lives and about the events that brought them to Tink’s bench. If that wasn’t a smart enough idea in itself, some of the seats on which the audience sat last night were shared by a random item that triggered a memory from Tink’s own backstory or from her bench encounters. On my seat was an Iceland carrier bag, which sparked a story about a woman who sat on Tink’s bench with an Iceland bag full of firelighters and kindling. To save money the woman had started to use her open fireplace instead of electric or gas heating. Tink asked the woman what fuel she used on her open fire and the woman replied that she burned her own incontinence pads. Tender, intelligent and very funny.
📌 It sounds like Russia is on the precipice of Civil War.
📌 At the Headway 25th anniversary party I got quite excited about the upcoming exhibition at the Barbican. I remembered the evening back in 2021 when the idea was hatched, or maybe bullied into existence by my mate Chris, who challenged Will Gompertz, the Barbican’s artistic director, to walk the walk and give Headway exhibition space. I made a sketch in my notebook straight after his answer.
📌 At the Golden Lane Summer Global picnic I looked at feet. It is starting to look like a trend.
Then our neighbour Lena, previously known as YouTube Euro-disco queen Elly Space, picked up an accordion and played some of the most sublime classic European folk tunes. I sensed a transformation was underway. The contrast between the two styles was bold.
📌 Andy posted a nice picture that sums up a lot of things about modern life, and uses the apostrophe correctly.
SUNDAY 25 Andrew Rawnsley hopes Keir Starmer’s backtracking on Labour’s commitment to a green industrial revolution is a tactical policy readjustment rather than an exit strategy
If the Labour party cannot sell lower bills, more jobs, a healthier planet, energy self-sufficiency and screwing Vladimir Putin to the electorate it might as well get out of the business of politics altogether.
📌 The reverse side of a stitchwork project once again produces the most fascinating image.
📌 To the Barbican to see Steve Earle doing the acoustic set he presumably brought from his Friday appearance at Glastonbury. My first yawn came one hour into the performance. Many of Earle’s best songs were electric and made with his band The Dukes. I replayed the recorded versions in my head as he performed the ill-adapted songs. Later my wife remarked that she wasn’t surprised Earle had been married seven times. Upstaged for me by support act Roseanne Reid.
MONDAY 26 The aborted coup in Russia by Wagner supremo Yevgeny Prigozhin is a riddle wrapped up in an enigma says an article in the Conversation. Putin was rattled but not shattered. That, says the article, was a missed opportunity for Ukraine.
📌 On TV we finished The Change, a comedy drama by and starring Bridget Christie. It has some great moments and the drama is well paced. Supporting performances from guests such as Paul Whitehouse are hilarious, but Christie’s own comedy always walks by a fine line between rad-fem realism and rad-fem cliché.
📌 Really enjoying the wonderfully long and complex BBC radio drama Keeping The Wolf Out, an intense crime drama set in 1960s communist Hungary.
TUESDAY 27 The Socialist Worker has a short punchy analysis of what’s happening inside Russia with Putin and Prigozhin that portrays the Wagner group as a state owned, state sanctioned terror group.
📌 The so-called “human interest” story has never been my thing, but something about the Mirror story on adopted paralympian Ellie Simmonds reconnecting with her birth mother for me.
WEDNESDAY 28 It’s like being back at work today. Both of us were up at the crack of dawn (ok, 7.30pm). My wife is consulting via Zoom on a City of London Corporation strategy for carers proposal. I am helping to plug differently various Headway’s upcoming exhibition at the Barbican. Good job I shaved last night.
📌 At the Barbican presentation I told the head of the outdoor cinema programme to get some blow-up cushions because the seats they provide are so uncomfortable. And I had a moan to disability guru Emma about the Barbican’s endlessly disabled disabled toilets. Otherwise, our slot (me, Claire, Jess) went well and Barbican artistic director Will Gompertz was full of praise.
📌 I missed Art Class because I thought the Barbican presentation took priority, but nevertheless submitted another iteration of the Museum of London archive project using items from the museum’s collection. I picked an old ring-dial telephone as my subject and ended up with a depiction of a group of abandoned severed “receivers” (in old telephone colours) hurtling through space. It might look nice if it were bigger.
📌 If Thames Water is any example it’s starting to look like the final act of the once-public utilities that got swallowed in the rush towards privatisation is to hand back the keys to the government and run for cover. Or maybe that final act has been in progress for some time and the denouement is upon us. Either way, the taxpayer is the loser, again.
THURSDAY 29 It came to me in a flash, so I messaged my wife immediately.
I think I might have left a herbal teabag in the pocket of the trousers I put in the washing bag last night.
📌 At the Babyshoes writing group at Headway Eliza wrote a lovely poetic story about a Curve and Ade told us that the illegal trafficking of eels is more valuable than the illegal trafficking of drugs. It sounded too much like a joke to believe. Then we all did a web search.
📌 The heron’s back in the pond on our estate. The water level has been very low, so maybe an easy lunch was the reason.
📌 The Babyshoes story I wrote was titled When Women and Fish Ruled The World. It is the same title as one of Tirzah’s artworks in the upcoming Headway exhibition at the Barbican. I had intended to write a piece of atmospheric description but somehow ended up with 100 words of tortured mansplaining, which seemed kind of ironic.
Whenever anyone mentioned that time When Women And Fish Ruled The World I itched to correct them. Back then, women and fish were aquatic species so only ruled the two thirds of the world that’s water. What went on above the surface, on the hard ground of the floating continents, was bossed by the trees, who later teamed up with the men, and then the birds. When women left the sea, and the fish, to live on the land, that’s when the trouble started. That’s when men decided they ruled the world, and the women and the fish, and everything.
📌 Our local Wagamama has an automatic paying system using a QR code. My wife and I sat, after paying, speculating on how we might cheat the QR system and sneak out without paying.
FRIDAY 30 My wife was snooping around east London on Google Maps and stumbled on the fascinating fact that the Vagina Museum in Bethnal Green is temporarily closed.
📌 My sister’s local bus station in Paris has been burned down in the riots.
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