Scrapbook: Week 31

July 29-August 4, 2023

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print run of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep has a publisher’s note included saying it contains what might be seen as “outdated language and cultural representations”.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 the exhibition 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. And we got a 5-star review in the Guardian.

📌 Elisa reminded me that the exhibition story on Channel 4 News that went out on Saturday 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.

📌 Chris had been to see Oppenheimer and said the way the film explained the difference between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission was accurate. Then he tried to explain it to me and I tried to look interested. All I got was that one results in the A-Bomb and the other in the H-Bomb.

📌 England pulled off a dramatic win in the final Test at The Oval, bringing the series to a respectable 2-2 draw.

TUESDAY 1 We started Wolf last night and by the end of Episode 1 my immediate dismissal of it as cartoon horror blended with hardboiled detective fiction had given way to a disturbing fascination as to what happens next and when I’ll get my next fix of rotting corpses and disembowelled animals.

📌 Just when you thought they’d decided to say nothing for once, the Socialist Worker pipes up with its reviews of Barbie and Oppenheimer

📌 It just started raining space debris.

📌 We’ve been given reserved tables in the Barbican Kitchen for the duration of the exhibition, plus 20% discount, which just about brings the price of your comestibles down to “very expensive”.

WEDNESDAY 2 Labour’s enemies are probably still looking for sticks to hit it with following the beating they inflicted on it in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election recently. The extension of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) was the weapon in that war. Now Labour-run Birmingham City Council has shot the party in the foot by being ordered to pay £760m in equal-pay compensation. This is on top of the £1.1bn in pay-outs it had made earlier following a Supreme Court judgement. It will be fascinating to see how Keir Starmer reacts. Labour has held a healthy majority on Birmingham City Council since 2012.

📌 My wife was dismissive when I remarked that on the pitch women footballers have started to act in the same manner as men. Then I saw one of Argentina’s players spitting and became more convinced that my observation was valid. But maybe it’s nothing to do with gender and all to do the way football has been professionalised and commercialised. It is the behaviour of a stereotypical star sportsperson on their own turf.

📌 To the Barbican to give a visitors’ exhibition tour for differently various alongside Lisa, who had bought a new pair of trainers recently but then broke her left foot tripping over her baggy trousers and can now only wear one of them. In two weeks’ time she will be able to wear both of them, but one might look slightly more pre-worn than the other one.

📌 To Barbican Cinema 3 for more exhibition plugging… and another chance to see Posy’s Chaos/Quest, which features Headway members (including me and Chris gassing over cold coffee), and Zara’s Portrait of Tony. Both films were made as Artist in Residence projects at the studio. The panel discussion afterwards went quite smoothly, but two things stood out as special for me. First how in Zara’s film the trains passing overhead in the background while she filmed in the studio sounded like heartbeats as heard through a stethoscope. And second how deliriously happy Tony Brooks looked when being interviewed by Michelle. He was loving every minute of the attention. Posy also confessed fully that she stole her Chaos/Quest shots straight from My Own Private Idaho.

THURSDAY 3 The First Edition newsletter in the Guardian looks at the fiasco of the Bibby Stockholm housing barge in Dorset, whose 222 small cabins are soon to be stuffed with more than 500 male asylum seekers who are waiting for their applications to be processed. Soon because no one can decide whether the vessel is safe to house so many people, and also whether its legal status lies on land or at sea.

📌 Headway has been temporarily relocated from Timber Wharf to the Barbican, so the Babyshoes writing group has been suspended for a week. Last week I was so lazy and preoccupied with the differently various exhibition that I simply got ChatGPT to write my 100-word story. This week I have resorted to dragging an old story from the archives. It is called Mortality Tale…

Martin thought a Toddler Zombie Walk would be a fun introduction to the complexities of death. He got all the costumes from one shop, the one opposite Poundland.

The kids went along with it to please him – looked deadly, walked slowly, whatever. Ten laps around Bunhill graveyard with Blake, Bunyan and Defoe. Plus jelly and chocolate. But it all felt a bit flat, as death is always likely to.

Then, out of the blue, a line of grown-ups filed in, headed by community police officers Christine and James. Only up close did anyone notice they were crying tears of blood.

📌 Another very busy day at the differently various exhibition at the Barbican. The stitching workshop was rammed and the group singing was noisy. It was like a typical day at Headway.

FRIDAY 4 It’s like nothing else has happened in the world except the Headway exhibition at the Barbican. Protesters have colonised the roof of Rishi’s house; Navalny has been sentenced to another 19 years in a Russian prison. But my world has been confined to a dodgy old paint-spattered wicker chair inside the Barbican’s Curve gallery, where I sit, a human specimen, stitching a piece for the exhibition that comes next.

Glad to see that again the exhibition is packed out, but it does mean that chatting to visitors takes up an awful lot of your time, especially as most of them want to know why on earth you are stiching a weird punky woman into drab cotton fabric.

📌 The vast amounts of taxpayers’ money that is daily being flushed down the toilet by the HS2 rail fiasco is outlined clear for all to see and swallow hard at in today’s Tortoise Sensemaker.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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