Scrapbook: Week 26

June 24-29, 2023

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 got to 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.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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