Scrapbook: Week 32

August 5-11, 2023

SATURDAY 5 We will be in Paris this time next week and won’t hear Dermot O’Leary’s radio show in which he asks listeners to name a “mystery voice”. My wife reckons she knows the mystery voice that listeners have failed to name correctly for about 2 months. She thinks it’s the actor Phil Davis but refuses to phone the radio show with her theory.

📌 At the Barbican Jess told us that Will Gompertz has quit as artistic director and is moving to the John Soane museum. Unshackled from diplomacy Barbican staff remarked on what a small contribution Gompertz actually made in the organisation. I pointed out that at least Headway got its differently various exhibition out of him. And the exhibition did fulfil Gompertz’s stated vision that exhibitions in the future should focus on storytelling.

📌 A line in the latest Inspector Singh story I’m reading jumped out as being especially relevant.

The continuation of a conversation that had been going on for several days was a key feature of their marriage.
From Inspector Singh Investigates: The Singapore School Of Villainy, by Shamini Flint

📌 At Piano Smithfield with a mob of friends for my wife’s birthday it was interesting to note how the pianist turned every request into a jazz song. You might imagine that the gentle piano introduction to Bohemian Rhapsody is a case study in “don’t mess with perfection” but no, our host felt compelled to make it his own impenetrable ramble that nobody could recognise as the pop classic that Bohemian Rhapsody is.

SUNDAY 6 For the last time I occupied my paint-spattered wicker seat in the Barbican’s Curve gallery to suck up the final hours of Headway’s differently various exhibition. I have become over the 9-day run what one Barbican staff member called a living installation. There was a steady but very healthy flow of visitors, many keen to stop and chat. That’s something you don’t see much in mainstream art galleries. Rachel, Melissa, Rosie and Thomas came to visit. Angelina, too. Several people stopped to talk whom I’d obviously met before but could not remember. It’s embarrassing when that happens. Then at around 4pm, those closely involved in making the exhibition happen gathered in the Barbican’s Fountain Room for drinks and pizza followed by a final group walk through the exhibition and speeches in which we all congratulated and thanked one another. Exhibition visitors caught in the moment all broke into applause, then it was back to the Fountain Room to finish the booze and eat cake. Over and out, differently various, it was a blast.

MONDAY 7 I wrote last week about women footballers in the World Cup adopting the manners and behaviour of male professionals. Today, one of England’s players, Lauren James, stamped on one of her Nigerian opponents in an act reminiscent of David Beckham’s foul on an Argentina player in the 1998 World Cup. But very unlike their male equivalents, the England women’s team later scored a win on penalties.

📌 Today’s Tortoise Sensemaker focuses on the declining vote share in South Africa for the ANC and the rise of a charismatic Marxist leader, Julius Malema, who has a growing number of disaffected young followers. Skeptics describe Malema as “part Mussolini, part Madonna”.

📌 My wife was mesmerised in horror by the preposterous fake pregnancy bump given to DI Helen Weeks in Series 2 of the TV crime series In The Dark. She snorted with derision every time the ballooning detective squeezed herself into the driving seat of her red hatchback. Then came a moment of confusion when Weeks was pictured having a bath, her baby bump resembling a small, beautifully round island in the Pacific Ocean. Was the DI pregnancy real after all, and would the Manchester police officer be able to get herself and her unborn child out of the bath before the killer lurking in the hallway outside finds out where she’s been hiding?

TUESDAY 8 Heston Blumenthal is widely credited with being the crackpot inventor of weird food. But the Victorians were at it too, says an article in the Conversation, and especially with ice-cream. Heston may have his notorious bacon-and-egg ice-cream as one of his flagship “molecular gastronomy” dishes, but in 1885 Mr Whippy was churning out concoctions such as brown-bread ice-cream and a speciality scoop made from chicken paté, curry powder, Worcestershire sauce, egg yolks and anchovies.

📌 The Guardian’s First Edition newsletter has a timely look at the UK housing rental market and compares its meagre regulation with that of comparable European countries. And it’s not something Labour is keen to tackle.

📌 A Guardian editorial makes an interesting point about the Bibby Stockholm barge and the government’s failure to devise a humane way to process asylum claims.

The priority is getting them out of hotels, which are not necessarily more costly than other forms of accommodation but are politically awkward because the word implies comfort.

So it shouldn’t be long before the residents of the Bibby Stockholm are characterised as holidaymakers on a cruise ship.

📌 The final stitchwork of one of Cecil’s drawings for the upcoming exhibition at Burgh House is nearly finished. As usual, the reverse side (back) looks better to me than the finished side (front).

WEDNESDAY 9 I caught the end of BBC Radio 4’s Thought For The Day. A rabbi appeared to be making a nationwide plea for more public toilets.

📌 For my contribution to this week’s Babyshoes writing group at Headway I combined two of the recently suggested titles for a story called Is It AI Or Is That A Picture In The Attic?

Stuart never needed AI to write his blockbuster crime stories, but he thought he’d try it: “Write a 100-word crime story titled Picture In The Loft.” He also mentioned his favourite artist was Andy Warhol. ChatGPT came back with a formula yarn about a crook who breaks into the attic of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, finds the “missing” Warhol screenprint of Marilyn Monroe then hears the wail of the police siren. It was utter rubbish. But one line in the swamp of nonsense stuck with him: “Marilyn’s eyes gazed back and he was gripped by a terrifying sense of guilt.”

📌 Ukraine has around 140 replica Eiffel Towers, says an article on the Hyperallergic site, and one photographer, Oleksandr Popenko, is trying to capture their images, presumably before any of them are hit by Russian drones and the tally starts dropping.

*The Eiffel Tower, as seen on an Odessa ostrich farm*

📌 Today’s Tortoise Sensemaker exposes UK sanctions of Russian businesses and individuals to be not only meagre but full of enforcement loopholes. In short, useless.

THURSDAY 10 On Threads the Welcome Collection has a story that makes it look like Vincent van Gogh and Dr Gachet (the medic who attempted to repair Van Gogh’s severed ear) were in a serious bromance.

📌 News from Ecuador made me think I might be drifting into a lazy mindset that sees two of the planet’s biggest continent’s, Africa and South America, as the lands of the lawless. Is this a form of imperialism?

📌 A man with a dog got on the 55 bus at Old Street Roundabout and paid with his wristwatch.

📌 RIP Wilko.

📌 RIP Mrs Warboys.

📌 At Headway Stuart told us about his dad, returning to his home turf in Greasby, Wirral, after a stint in Egypt during the second world to find the local newspaper had not only reported him dead but had published an obituary.

📌 Intriguing sentence in the Inspector Singh book I’m reading: “He was finding that, as he grew older, the thought was not so much the father of the deed as in lieu of it.” Not entirely sure I know what that means.

FRIDAY 11 Noise from the building site outside our apartment room in Paris did not start at 8am as anticipated last night.