July 1-7, 2023
SATURDAY 1 Yesterday’s Daily Sensemaker from Tortoise gives Rishi’s migration plans a proper slapping.
đź“Ś Sam sent a picture with the title Elephant.
I replied “Wow!” and she came back to me saying “the red thing in the middle is a plunger”.
đź“Ś A very corny line just appeared in the latest Inspector Chen book I’m reading, A Case of Two Cities. Chen is closing in on the “pennydrop moment” and the author signals it in a way that made me laugh out loud…
A possibility he had so far refused to acknowledge scuttled across the floors of his subconscious.
đź“Ś Rishi is failing badly in the promises he made in the “Five Pledges” he punted to the nation back in January, writes Marina Hyde.
He increasingly resembles not so much a prime minister as a collection of blandishments that fall on the wrong side of the fine line between platitude and twatitude.
Marina Hyde
đź“Ś The Art Newspaper reckons a 2,000-year-old Pompeii fresco depicts the first ever pizza, an invention thought previously to have originated in 19th-Century Naples.
đź“Ś At the British Museum we waited patiently for an after-hours free glimpse of the small Persia exhibition. If the exhibition had a story, my version would describe the invention of decadence and how the rich and powerful get addicted to obscene wealth. The British Museum’s version of the story amounts to “no comment”.
SUNDAY 2 Still struggling with French pronouns. My wife says I lack concentration and casually answer ton frère when it should be son frère. If I’m this bad in the Duolingo lesson imagine how bad I’ll be when we visit Paris in a month. Presume French trans people use ses.
đź“Ś The grand reckoning on Rishi six months after he made his Five (supposedly soft-goal) Pledges continues…
The only people the government has managed to put on a plane to Rwanda have been the home secretary and her bodyguards.
Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer
đź“Ś Glad to hear Madonna is recovering after her recent encounter with a “bacterial infection”. I’d been listening to her albums and thinking of her in the past tense.
đź“Ś There’s a good dose of generation-gap humour in the latest Marc Warren Van Der Valk series and some good character transitions, but the stories are desperately corny. Nothing noirish, no real complexity.
đź“Ś My wife confessed to a desire to try pistol shooting. I offered it as a birthday gift but she declined.
đź“Ś Fascinating story unfolding about the Orkneys wanting to leave Britain for Norway.
MONDAY 3 Anyone expecting a new, invigorated radical Britain to emerge if Keir Starmer becomes our next prime minister should snap out of it immediately. Labour, says the Guardian‘s daily newsletter, has backtracked on so many of its promises it’s now as hard as ever to know what it, or Starmer, stands for other than a middle-manager approach to running the country.
đź“Ś In preparation for this week’s Art Class I have been swotting up on the work of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi with some moody still-life sketches…
TUESDAY 4 Getting Alexa to talk to the ancient Sonos smart speaker is once again an uphill task. I can talk to Alexa through the Sonos, and Alexa replies, “Mmm, I don’t think I know that” whenever I make a simple request such as “Play Acoustic Chill”. I don’t think she knows where to find what I want to hear. Shall try again tomorrow, or maybe I won’t.
đź“Ś If Labour has any sense, when it gets into government it should say that if it can spend the next five years fixing one thing the present government has wrecked it must be the NHS. But does Keir Starmer have the personality to issue such a pledge and take the heart of the nation with him. No. Thankfully, shadow health minister Wes Streeting does (his grandfather was an armed robber). Whether Starmer will let him do it is another matter.
đź“Ś I’ve moved on to Inspector Singh of the Singapore Police. Shanghai’s Inspector Chen was getting on my nerves. His constant references to boring Tang Dynasty poetry wore me out. And he’s obviously repressed, especially about sex. Women practically throw themselves at him but he always makes his excuses and leaves, quoting Communist Party rules regarding behaviour in the company of randy women. Mr Gu’s K-girl assistant White Cloud even offered a side portion of steamed buns stuffed with pork, if ever there was a sexual metaphor waiting to be put into action. But still Chen went all coy and bottled it. Same deal with the US marshall Catherine Rohn. I sense even after one chapter that Inspector Singh, a fat slob, is from an entirely different school of male decorum.
WEDNESDAY 5 Caught a fascinating BBC World Service history programme in the middle of the night about West Bengal, which claims to have had the “longest-serving democratically elected communist government” (1977-2011). It all fell apart eventually in an orgy of bitching and recrimination. The Wikipedia entry makes it sound like a Monty Python sketch, with the Communist Party of India (Marxist), aka the CPI(M), and the plain old Communist Party of India (CPI) trying to be part of the same sprawling alliance of hard-headed left-wing factions.
đź“Ś In Art Class I attempted the ridiculous in making a still life that included the built environment. It all hinged on my belief that the still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi had an architectural quality, a stillness of composition in which the elements sit together in harmony. When the teacher gave me a look that said “bullshit” I tried a conventional still life, with Morandi-style tones and tints.
THURSDAY 6 Downloaded the Threads app to see what all the fuss was about but couldn’t sign in. Kept getting a message saying “unknown error”.
đź“Ś At Babyshoes, Headway’s weekly writing group, the title I chose to write a 100-word story was Camouflage and I was so late doing it I cheated and stole a story from Stan Ridgway.
Camouflage is the title of a ghost story set during the Vietnam War. In it a US soldier is ambushed by the enemy. Then from nowhere a big marine called Camouflage comes to his rescue. Camouflage has special skills. Bullets go straight through him, or he swats them from mid-air with his bare hands. When the soldier and Camouflage finally make it to safety Camouflage disappears. The soldier returns to his base and is told the big marine called Camouflage was killed a week ago. Before he died Camouflage said his one last wish was to save a fellow marine.
By Stan Ridgway
FRIDAY 7 Early-years education is the way out of the hopelessness and despair many Britons feel about the future, writes Andrew Marr in a rousing article in the New Statesman. It’s an obvious retread from the Tony Blair playbook, so can it work again for Starmer? Yes, is Marr’s answer.
đź“Ś Simon Jenkins is miffed by politicians who know all about problems but don’t know how to agree on a solution. They all know WHAT is wrong but none of them has a clue when it comes to HOW to fix it.
đź“Ś The New Statesman‘s daily newsletter has a very clear explanation of how Nigel Farage came to be booted out of Courts, the rich people’s bank (Farage didn’t have the required ÂŁ3m in his account). People in power, including politicians, face a higher level of financial snooping than the rest of us. Maybe that’s because history tells us that corrupt politicians often have a secret side hustle in money laundering.
đź“Ś A sharp essay in the London Review of Books shows how nation states are no longer at liberty to control their own economics. The deal already done with global capital has shackled governments and their banks to a fund-management system that can only be unpicked very slowly.
The gap between housing costs and wages has rendered the British economic model socially unsustainable, not just on the cultural or geographical margins, long brutalised by conservative politicians, but at its very core.
William Davies, London Review of Books
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