SATURDAY 1 Yesterday’s Daily Sensemaker from Tortoise gives Rishi’s migration plans a proper slapping.
📌 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”.
📌 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.
📌 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
📌 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.
📌 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.
📌 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
📌 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.
📌 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.
📌 My wife confessed to a desire to try pistol shooting. I offered it as a birthday gift but she declined.
📌 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.
📌 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.
📌 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.
📌 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.
📌 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”.
📌 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.
📌 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.
📌 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 £3m 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.
📌 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
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.
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.
SATURDAY 22 Farming Today has recently featured three big stories about farmers joining cooperatives (beef, milk, fertiliser).
📌 My wife has been sacked as a spy for the Post Office. Her cover was blown when one of the “mystery” parcels she receives as part of her undercover mission to test the Post Office deliveries system had already been opened and its contents seen. This means that the postie who delivered it knew she was a spy. She was paid in stamps and has such a vast surplus that she’d taken to selling them to neighbours at a knockdown price. All that ends now she’s been compromised.
📌 To the BBC for a radio interview with Robert Elms about the upcoming Headway exhibition at the Barbican. All very relaxed and we got to say everything that needed saying.
SUNDAY 23 Glad to have caught the last half hour of Colm Tóibín reading extracts from his book Mad, Bad, Dangerous To Know, which was all about JB Yeats, WB’s dad. Tóibín reads beautifully, with a storyteller’s awareness of pace and drama.
📌 Simon Tisdall has made it his mission to find more and more extravagant ways to insult Vladimir Putin.
Putin embodies Russia’s international isolation and growing spiritual degradation. Like a daemon, hobgoblin or kraken of ancient folklore, he’s metamorphosed into global bogeyman or bugaboo – a monstrous, nightmarish figure personifying evil. Simon Tisdall, the Guardian
📌 Andrew Rawnsley knows why Labour failed to take Boris’s old seat from the Conservatives. They did not sell to the voters of Uxbridge and Ruislip the benefits of getting rid of high-polluting vehicles from the roads and they didn’t punch back when the Conservatives sold lies about the London Mayor’s clean-air drive to the same voters.
📌 My wife is out for lunch with friends and I was so proud of the lunch I cooked for myself that I sent her a picture.
MONDAY 24 I was asked to come up with some wall text to go with the upcoming exhibition at Burgh House in Hampstead, which features drawings by Cecil and a few stitchworks by me. I said in the text that I enjoyed making stitch versions of Cecil’s drawings because their depiction “opens up the imagined life stories” of the characters portrayed. I went on to say something about feeling like an actor while I’m doing it.
📌 And then came the awful discovery that there was a spelling mistake in my latest stitchwork, a short story about my childhood. Corrections in stitchwork are tedious and time-consuming.
TUESDAY 25 Doing faces in stitchwork is my new challenge. Stopping them from looking like cartoons is a big part of that challenge, but it’s one I’m enjoying so far. This one started as a very quick wax monoprint several years ago, from a picture in a newspaper. I can’t even remember who it’s meant to be.
📌 The River Seine has been cleaned up beyond recognition in preparation for the Paris 2024 Olympics. It was all made possible by building a massive underground reservoir to hold the storm water that follows heavy rain. Previously the filthy water simply gushed into the river.
📌 My favourite performance in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a cameo by Gary Oldman of Harry S Truman. Other standouts include a pudgy Matt Damon as a military big-mouth and Robert Downey JR as an evil Lewis Strauss. Emily Blunt’s Mrs Oppenheimer is the only meaty female role in this powerful, male-dominated film that will probably end up becoming the most remembered account of the Oppenheimer story. Marge says Karen won’t watch it because she thinks Nolan plays fast and loose with facts.
WEDNESDAY 26 Michelle read the biographical wall text I wrote for the upcoming exhibition with Cecil at Burgh House. She suggested one small change to remove a reference to Cecil’s unscrupulous boss back in 1950s British Guyana (as was), from where Cecil stowed away. Then she hinted that there was still time for me to do one more stitch version of a Cecil drawing. I’ve already done 6, so I wasn’t initially tempted. Then I recalled our visit to the Burgh House gallery last week and remembered what a fabulous space it is and how good Cecil’s drawings and my stitchworks will look when installed. This ended with me selecting yet another of Cecil’s drawings to stitch.
📌 Another very disappointing outcome from the City of London Corporation’s repairs team. We still have a leaky roof and crumbling brickwork. The attempted paint job was a horror.
📌 There’s a story in today’s news saying beware the phone call from your wayward child asking for money because it could be an AI scam. Maybe AI fakery will signal the resurrection of snail mail. Agree a secret code word with your wayward child by post and only send them money if they include it somewhere in their written request.
📌 To Barbican Cinema 1 for Barbie, a film that is hilarious and serious in equal measure, if occasionally a bit preachy. Best line goes to Ryan Gosling as Ken, who in a late moment of self-awareness utters to Barbie, “Once I realised The Patriarchy wasn’t about horses, I kinda lost interest.” I will enjoy listening to what viewers have to say about the transformation in the character of Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt).
📌 RIP Sinéad O’Connor, 56.
THURSDAY 27 I always look for a single sentence to sum up a situation. In the case of Nigel Farage’s bank account, the sentence in a Guardian editorial does the job…
Purging corporate bosses in the middle of the night to appease the fury of a maverick populist is not the behaviour of a mature government.Guardian editorial
📌 Michelle sent me a photo of my five Stroke paintings next to a big cut-out by Jason from the Curve gallery, where the installation of differently various is nearing completion. Later I was interviewed in the Curve by Jane from Channel 4 News but imagine my contribution for Saturday broadcast will end up on the cutting-room floor. The Guardian correspondent Cathy ignored me but was apparently horrified to learn that the ramp was a temporary addition to the Curve for this exhibition only. Visitors to the exhibition are in for a rich experience. The look of pride on Michelle’s face was a joy.
FRIDAY 28 The Socialist Worker is outraged by the hypocrisy of some of the glowing tributes to Sinéad O’Connor, who has sadly died aged 56. The Sun newspaper is one of the chief culprits.
📌 The England women’s football team should be the automatic owners of the World Cup of Cool Names. Special awards to Alessia Russo and Lucy Bronze.
📌 And finally… The differently various exhibition opened at the Barbican. My favourite exhibit is Terry’s Neural Reef ceramics. Saw lots of old faces with good memories, but was disappointed that Frankie was a no-show until we got home and saw her on Newsnight saying Starmer is a wimp, in a roundabout way, much to the irritation of Peter Hain.
SATURDAY 29 My wife has noticed that the Guardian is collecting writers with names extracted from the novels of PG Wodehouse. The latest addition is Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff.
📌 Nice to see a steady footfall through the differently various exhibition at the Barbican. Nice also to get so many lovely comments from Barbican staff.
📌 Chris Kemp messaged to say she saw me on CH4 News.
SUNDAY 30 The Telegraph reports that the latest print run of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep has a publisher’s note included saying it contains what might be seen as “outdated language and cultural representations”.
📌 At differently various we did Chris’s drawing workshop in which you try to access your inner child by drawing with your “wrong” hand. My left hand shakes because of my brain injury, so the effect was doubly fascinating. The woman sitting next to me scrawled a fabulous self-portrait in profile.
📌 We bumped into Bev at the exhibition, who put a positive spin on it being only for 9 days. She said it becomes a cult that people “missed out on” and it doesn’t fizzle out with longevity but is here and gone in a flash of glory.
MONDAY 31 The exhibition is jam packed, which is unusual for The Curve on a Monday. And we got a 5-star review in the Guardian.
📌 Elisa reminded me that the exhibition story on Channel 4 News includes cuts of The Headway Legends, a rap Sean and a bunch of the other younger members (inc Haroub, Cheryl, Jackie) made in about half an hour one day after lunch at Timber Wharf. I was pleased because I knew it would work well in broadcast from the first time I heard it.
📌 England pulled off a dramatic win in the final Test at The Oval, bringing the series to a respectable 2-2 draw.
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