July 15-21, 2023
SATURDAY 15 It’s Nice That features a character called Henry Miller, who during isolation in Lockdown took to painting his favourite album covers. The gaudy paintings fall comfortably into the “so bad it’s good” league. I find them quite creepy.
📌 Andy Beckett reckons Keir Starmer’s flip-flopping and dithering could be his (and Labour’s) undoing in office when faced with the devastation left behind by Rishi’s mob.
📌 Off to the Barbican again on what my wife calls a “toofer” (two for the price of one) to see the South-African jazz god Abdullah Ibrahim, who was escorted onstage Nelson Mandela-style by a charming young woman and carried off at the end by his partners (bass/flute) in the famous Abdullah Ibrahim Trio. What went on in between was “eclectic”. My wife thought it was downright miserable and for me it hung on the word “melancholy”, which I decided to look up once we got home…
Middle English: from Old French melancolie, via late Latin from Greek melankholia, from melas, melan- ‘black’ + kholē ‘bile’, an excess of which was formerly believed to cause depression.
SUNDAY 16 The weather outside and Facebook jointly reminded me that eight years ago I made an illustration for a T-shirt…
📌 Frankie Boyle seems to have the meaning of life worked out.
📌 Paul, our friend in Brighton reacted quicky to the news that the Royal Albion Hotel on the seafront was on fire.
📌 So pleased that the Dr Evil of tennis got whacked by a cheery 20-year-old Spaniard.
MONDAY 17 I learned this morning that nieces and nephews are now called “niblings”. I quite like it.
📌 My wife, who used to work on statistics at the DWP, says she thinks the argument over the two-child benefit cap is a distraction. She says it saves negligible amounts of money, does not act as a deterrent to people deciding to breed bigger families and is actually making some children poorer.
📌 Sam’s picture of a Walking Kettle is mind-bogglingly surreal.
📌 We finished Series 1 of World On Fire in preparation for Series 2, which actually started yesterday. All the characters are poised to resume the second year of World War 2 in Europe. Harry and Kasia are on a hill being shot at by Nazis. New mother Lois has agreed to marry the dopey English pilot, Lesley Manville is being a superb snooty old racist bag and Sean Bean is trying his best to stay with his working-class pacifist roots. My money is on Bean and Manville having a grandparent romance.
TUESDAY 18 The government’s Illegal Migration Bill has been passed, despite fierce opposition in both houses. It is a vanity project that the government may soon wish they hadn’t been so stubborn about. Enacting and enforcing the bill is virtually impossible, so maybe this is the Conservatives’ final move – to be seen to go down fighting for the right to be cruel.
📌 Polly Toynbee defends Keir Starmer’s pathological caution and flip-flopping as necessary to ensure a general-election victory. Only once in power will he very slowly let his radical hair down, she says.
📌 Finally got to photograph the finished stitchwork of Marge’s self-portrait.
WEDNESDAY 19 This morning I learned that the French call pins and needles ants.
📌 The installation of the Headway exhibition in the Barbican’s Curve gallery has started.
📌 In Art Class, for the last day of term I worked on using watercolours with a PVA finish on different cotton fabrics.
THURSDAY 20 The stitchwork of Hawaii, based on a contour map, is finished. It is one of those patterns that can be re-used on different fabrics with different threads. Simplifying the pattern is always the hardest part of the process when using maps as a starting point. What looks good on screen is not always easy to convert into something that looks good, or even works at all, in stitch.
📌 As if the authorities don’t have anything better to do as the country falls apart…
📌 Lunch at Burgh House in leafy Hampstead, where me and Cecil will be sharing an exhibition in a few weeks. We posed for some pictures and charmed the nice but very dim “Hampstead Ladies”, to whom we must have looked like strange zoological specimens as we dined in the garden on our self-made cheese and pickle sandwiches. Sophie, the exhibition’s curator, bought us a cup of tea and a Burgh House Scone with clotted cream and pulped raspberries. It was awesome. On the way back to the station me and Ambar were held captive in Flask Walk by a jolly plasterer who told us how he uses stencils to decorate plane walls with hanging fruit and assorted foliage.
📌 An email from the City of London tells us that we now live in a designated Neighbourhood Area, whatever that means.
📌 The Conservatives must not just be deeply unpopular but deeply wrong if The Economist, bible of free-market individualism, consistently and persistently says so, reckons Andy Beckett.
FRIDAY 21 Labour failed to take Boris’s old seat from the Conservatives. They’re blaming London Mayor Sadiq Khan and his clean-air zealotry.
📌 I keep getting messages from Duolingo saying I have dropped into the demotion zone of my current league. I have actually lost track of which league I’m in, but every time a new message pointing to my imminent decline arrives I suspect more and more that the Duolingo leagues have nothing whatever to do with your learning progress and all to do with how often you use Duolingo. I use it once a day and that’s it.
📌 My predictions on Monday as to what happens in Series 2 of World On Fire couldn’t have been wronger.
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Billy's Scrapbook 