Scrapbook: Week 33

August 12-18, 2023

SATURDAY 12 On the streets of Paris my wife spotted two pieces by the renowned street artist Invader.

And in a wine bar last night I spotted a waiter who looked like a bad Renaissance painting of Jesus.

📌 At the very creepy Fondation Louis Vuitton, which has a sinister Truman Show feel of fakery about it, we joined a human motorway snaking its way through a far-too-large collection of giant collaborative canvasses called Four Hands by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Les Deux were obviously just having a laugh at the art world and the gullible private collectors who presumably paid top dollar for these artistic playthings. We learned two useful things about the two artists. Warhol had the fantastic ability to look like he was dead when he was actually still breathing. And Basquiat had a neurotic obsession with teeth. We also learned that one of the security guards thought my wife’s husband was her father.

SUNDAY 13 In an article that details Britain’s economic woes at great length, Will Hutton manages to get to its end sounding almost gleeful. Things can only get better, he states with relish for the umpteenth time, if everybody does what he says.

📌 You can practically hear the laughter ringing around Peel Road, Brighton.

📌 At the UK Border Force desk at Paris Gard du Nord anyone who wasn’t an obvious UK holidaymaker got a really intense grilling, the kind of very detailed aggressive interrogation you see in countless TV police dramas.

📌 The Eurostar train back from Paris ran slowly because someone spotted that one of the windows was cracked. The setback did, however, give us a chance to witness the horrible concentration-camp fencing alongside the track at Calais as the train enters the Channel Tunnel.

MONDAY 14 A message from Eurostar says we’ve got a voucher for 30% of the price of our delayed return journey from Paris.

📌 Two of the most horrible home secretaries ever, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman are locked in an argument over how to house asylum applicants.

📌 38 Degrees is campaigning to get Nadine Dorries to resign, quoting a Sky News report that says some of her constituents haven’t seen her in years.

TUESDAY 15 It was only in the last minute of the Spain versus Sweden Women’s World Cup semi-final game that I decided who I wanted to win. For what are probably all the wrong reasons, I went for Spain, because I generalised that gender equality in Spain probably needs a victory more than in Sweden.

📌 Finally finished the weird stitchwork story about falling in love with my sister’s doll.

📌 One emerging point of view I spotted after a morning listening to political podcasts is that the Conservative government is becoming nastier and nastier by the day because that’s what appeals to its core voters. This view runs alongside the belief that the Conservatives have already accepted they will lose the next general election. How badly they lose is the only issue they can now control, and being super hard on migrants and ditching pledges on climate will keep the nastiest of their supporters from taking their votes elsewhere.

📌 In his satirical radio show examining the week’s news Dom Joly held a running conversation with Alexa, who berated him constantly for not being very funny. But whenever Jolly asked Alexa a question on the radio, the Alexa in our living room tried to answer it. That’s how I got to learn about the low life expectancy of gay people in Uganda.

WEDNESDAY 16 The new stitchwork project features a frisky young couple snogging in the shade of the Tree of Life.

📌 The Lionesses roared past the Matildas in a gripping 3-1 semi final victory in the Women’s World Cup. We are away from home staying with friends at the weekend and they don’t especially like football, so we might be forced to fake illness and watch Sunday’s final in secret.

THURSDAY 17 Another one of my pompous grand theories was proved to have legs this morning by an item on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme saying a university degree is no longer the glittering career passport it once was. It reported that big international businesses no longer expect a degree from their “graduate” employees. What they ask for are people with a wide range of skills, backstories and qualifications who can be shaped to fit their business vision and trained to take up the top jobs. Examples given were young people who had worked in bars and restaurants (=people skills), ones who could not afford university fees or had become carers (=empathy) and ones who studied independently (=motivated). It signals (as I predicted pompously some time ago) the redundancy of the commercialised university and its corrupt and sordid marketplace. It signals also, however, a new class system in employment, the long-term effects of which we can only guess at. And it suggests that universities need to learn a bit more about how to be successful businesses.

📌 Ten is the number of times Stuart has sent me the same joke about a furniture upholstery shop having the same name as a “classic” Hollywood movie (A=Hope Springs). All the reviews I read said it was rubbish.

📌 A snippet from Tortoise said that two US tourists were found asleep in the Eiffel Tower after getting stuck overnight while drunk.

📌 For the Babyshoes writing group at  Headway I took the “Christmas” prompt and tried to write a dark story about a sinister bunch of carol singers.

Would anyone notice if she knifed the bitch during In The Bleak Midwinter? Not if it was still snowing and the distraction was good enough. She sang so badly that, with good timing, a 10-inch blade rammed upwards, straight through the heart at the end of verse three as a motorbike backfired, or something, would pass unseen, the lame croak of death snuffed out by a trick of the mind. Then they’d all see the blood and stare at one another. Everyone would know Sally did it, you could rely on that. Because everyone knew Sally wanted to do it.

FRIDAY 18 Tortoise has a report on Italy’s exit from China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). The story explains what the BRI is exactly, but says Italy’s involvement so far has been meagre.

Nothing concrete has been agreed since 2019 apart from minor deals on the export of oranges and bovine semen to China.

This prompted me to Google bovine semen extraction methods.

Semen is most commonly collected from bulls in bull studs using an artificial vagina. Electroejaculation is an alternative method used with bulls that cannot mount or are too fractious for easy handling (eg range bulls).

📌 In Winchester for the weekend our host Liz told us about meeting David Hockney at Glynde recently. She said he was a lovely man with beautiful, pure fresh skin.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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