July 8-14, 2023
SATURDAY 8 I’m not sure I can tell whether Jonathan Freedland’s article in the Guardian about ageing rockers (Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Elton John) is a reasonable assessment of the passing of rock-n-roll as a form of music and youth culture or a pathetic dive into rose-tinted nostalgia.
📌 Our friend Amanda declared that she could “manage half an hour every few years”. She was talking about watching the Winter Olympics on the TV.
📌 My wife tells me that for the new Indiana Jones film they used digital technology to “iron out” Harrison Ford’s skin. The film then instantly became known in our house as Indiana Jones And The Iron-Out Skin.
SUNDAY 9 Managed to get signed on to Threads. Twitter is now ditched for good and it was a relief. Mastodon was confusing. I never knew what multiverse I was in. I only ever used Twitter for a dose of gossip and satire. Threads is virtually identical, but it’s linked to Instagram, which I only ever used for art projects, so the whole experience is far gentler than Twitter and the humour is just as good.
📌 A galaxy of BBC presenters are lining up to deny being the anonymous public figure who is said to have bought sexually explicit photos from a troubled teenager.
📌 My wife can’t see what all the fuss is about England’s revival in the cricket (they won the third Test against Australia). “Who wants that piddling little perfume bottle!?” she said referring to the diminutive Ashes urn.
My presumption all along has been that England will lose, because that’s what the English do best. But it was pointed out to me earlier in the week that England’s two previous Test defeats against Australia were close, so a victory was always possible.
📌 One of the advantages about being a disabled person in Britain is that arts and culture centres offer discount, or better in some cases – two for the price of one. Otherwise I might never have seen the Wynton Marsalis jazz orchestra. To be honest, jazz is something I’d probably have steered clear of. But tonight at the Barbican Centre was a delight. Each of the 15 musicians onstage was a virtuoso, a technical master of their instrument(s). The stand-out for me was the one woman in the band, Alexa Tarantino, who played flute, saxophone and at the end put in a sublime clarinet solo. Marsalis finished with a small bar-room quartet (trumpet, bass, piano, drums) that held us all in a state of rapture. I intended to finish this paragraph with a comment about the beauty of instruments that get their sound from human breath, but sleep got in the way.
MONDAY 10 Once again Simon Tisdall has worked himself up into a frenzy of indignation over Ukraine’s continued exclusion from NATO. That might change this week at a big summit in Lithuania, and if what just happened in Turkey is any clue, (Erdoğan released captured Ukrainian generals, much to the annoyance of Vlad) a real turning point could be on the cards.
📌 Erdoğan is definitely shape-shifting. He just lifted his veto on Sweden joining NATO. He’s playing for power in the new anti-Putin European order.
TUESDAY 11 Looks like the case of the BBC presenter, the 17-year-old and a collection of explicit images was a stunt by the 17-year-old’s parents, maybe born of greed, maybe born of desperation for the wellbeing of their troubled son. Or maybe they were betrayed and exploited by the Sun newspaper. The mysterious events seem to change by the hour.
📌 Series 2 of Before We Die is becoming tiresome. Lesley Sharp’s character is scaling new heights of hysteria in every episode.
📌 The new stitchwork is a relief map of Hawaii that looks strangely like an oyster shell with an animal’s face etched into it.
WEDNESDAY 12 It has to be a telling moment in any government’s demise when one of its so-called flagship departments – in this case Michael Gove’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) – simply gives up trying to do anything.
📌 Yesterday Chancellor Jeremy Hunt stamped his feet shouting “no more pay for public-sector workers” (ie, doctors, nurses, teachers). Now he’s been gifted £1.9bn by Michael Gove, I wonder what he’ll do with it.
📌 My dislike of musicals took another knock tonight from Guys & Dolls at the Bridge Theatre. Best performance prize goes to Marisha Wallace as Miss Adelaide and it was nice to see serious actor Daniel Mays letting his comedy alter-ego work its way out in the character of Nathan Detroit. Not since Anything Goes has my anti-musical posture been uprooted, so I guess it’s my love of a silly story well played by good actors that allows me to tolerate bad songs as a dramatic vehicle.
📌 Huw Edwards has been outed as the BBC presenter who allegedly bought explicit images from a teenager.
THURSDAY 13 Today at Headway was rather like having a cushy job. I agreed to work on finishing a big stitchwork, a portrait of Yoki, then after a leisurely lunch I helped Michelle and Eliza compose a big banner of Tony Brooks artworks that will appear at the upcoming Differently Various exhibition. On discovering that Eliza was from Birmingham, Michelle told a joke about two ancient Brummie elephants who moved into Birmingham’s famous old-elephants home. One said to the other “Did you come here today?” The other replied, “Yes, but hopefully not for a few years.”
📌 Rishi is playing hardball on public-sector pay. It will drive the nation deep into a mire of strikes, poverty, chronic ill health and early death. It signals the moment when he finally accepted there is no possibility of electoral survival and is now determined to leave behind scorched earth for the next government to deal with in the hope that some of his failure rubs off.
FRIDAY 14 Crazed equalities minister Kemi Badenoch sent a team of inspectors to investigate a Sussex school after she saw a video of teenagers debating gender and identity. In it one of the students allegedly “identified” as a cat, or at least put forward the proposition that humans can identify as other animals. A teacher even got stuck into the vigorous debate. The media reports make the event sound very like a Monty Python sketch, but obviously not for Kemi Badenoch. Now school inspectors have said there was nothing to worry about and the pupils were just doing what teenagers do these days.
📌 Thanks to George Osborne in 2015 Britain has effectively become a client state of China, says Tortoise Media’s Sensemaker.
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