Scrapbook: Week 34

August 19-25, 2023

SATURDAY 19 Tortoise reports that most of the “illegal” migrants arriving in Britain on small boats are from Afghanistan and are now being treated as criminals by a government that abandoned them when Britain pulled out of its occupation of Afghanistan in 2021.

📌 The referee in the Portsmouth versus Cheltenham game left the pitch injured. A linesman took over but was himself replaced in the second half by a willing spectator. The game finished 0-0.

SUNDAY 20 With five minutes remaining in the Women’s World Cup final that sinking feeling of defeat entered the room. It wasn’t going to happen. And it didn’t. Ten minutes earlier we got a message saying a friend in a hospice in Brighton had quietly gone to sleep and hadn’t woken up. In all honesty, everything else seemed irrelevant then, especially football.

📌 Sam returns to form with a plain mono drawing with no background.

📌 Andrew Rawnsley reckons Keir Starmer is so terrified of tripping up at the final hurdle of the electoral race that all hope of a better future under a Labour government is being slowly suffocated at birth.

📌 Tonight I won again at Scattergories and was congratulated for naming a weapon of mass destruction beginning with E as “Exocet missile”.

MONDAY 21 Once again my curiosity was piqued by Farming Today on the radio, in which they spoke about something called “vertical farming“. It appears to be exactly what it says it is.

📌 Today’s Tortoise Sensemaker is a powerful reminder of the atrocities unleashed 10 years ago on the people of Syria by Bashir al Assad, aided by Russia. The message is that what happened in Damascus then could happen in Kyiv tomorrow.

Children in their pyjamas started to foam at the mouth, paralysed in agony. Then their lungs stopped working. More than 1,400 people died.

📌 And then, just as you are about to start a train journey, your reading glasses refuse to go with you…

📌 On page 52 of Inspector Singh Investigates The Singapore School Of Villainy we learn that the top graduates from the Singapore police academy are assigned not to difficult murder cases (Singh’s speciality) but to white-collar crimes such as securities fraud and criminal breach of trust “and other wrongdoings that made Inspector Singh sleepy just thinking about them”.

📌 Michelle posted on Instagram a few nice photos and a video of me and Cecil to promote the Power of Transformation exhibition, which starts at Burgh House next week.

Meanwhile I am racing to finish the final piece for the exhibition, often distracted by the beauty of the reverse side.

TUESDAY 22 Amazon Photos occasionally throws pictures at you from the folder it tags “memories”. Two of my creations from yesteryear arrived today, one a painting of Hammersmith Bridge, which has what looks like an enemy submarine patrolling its waters, and a small side table I made in an attempt to mix light and dark woods in exposed joints.

📌 Nadine Dorries is refusing to resign as an MP until she gets a seat in the House of Lords, as promised to her by Boris Johnson. Pressure is growing for her to be forcibly ejected and Parliament has the power to do it. It simply chooses not to.

📌 Keir Starmer must have got it into his head that people think he’s a spineless wimp because to juice up the fight against the SNP in the upcoming Rutherglen by-election he’s penned a personal essay in the Scotsman saying what an ordinary working-class fella he is and will fight to his last breath for workers’ rights.

📌 To Sadler’s Wells theatre for a ballet version of Romeo & Juliet. It was actually more dance-theatre than ballet, but awesome nevertheless. It is set in the “Verona Institute” (part mental, part correctional, part penal) and our star-crossed lovers are suffering from institutional oppression, their pure love forever in a desperate battle for survival. The sheer grace and physical energy of the stunning performances made me feel old and worn out.

WEDNESDAY 23 A new pair of reading glasses arrived in my stash of birthday presents, plus a sinister digital tracking device I can use to locate lost possessions, or people.

📌 To the Carrie Mae Weems exhibition at the Barbican where I found her use of colour, light and texture absorbing but her droning politics boring. Having said that I could have happily spent all day in the mock living room installation in which you could sit in an armchair and read vintage back issues of Life magazine. One of the articles was by staff writer Loudon Wainwright.

📌 My wife treated me to an expensive lunch with wine, then it was home in time for tea and macaroons with my visiting cousin Kate, who brought me a Banksy for my birthday.

📌 A Strange Loop will probably go down as a landmark musical, but I can’t say it did much for me. There was some good singing and a few clever songs, but the weight of race, gender and sexuality point-scoring got in the way of what might have been a fabulous, exuberant piece of theatre.

THURSDAY 24 There are lots of reports claiming that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary warlord who tried to oust Vlad, has been killed when his private jet fell from the sky in a ball of flames. Many of the reflections that followed said repeatedly that his death was Putin’s revenge.

Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback.

William Burns, CIA chief

Some commentators also repeatedly described Russia as a mafia state. Maybe what they were really describing is Putin as one mafia boss in a mafia world.

📌 The title I opted for at the Babyshoes writing group was Dust. I always limit the stories to 100 words exactly so that they qualify as drabbles. The 150-word version of this story was actually better.

Martin had knocked around academe long enough to know they don’t award Nobel prizes for stuff like his Unifying Theory Of Dust. He’d hooked it on what he saw as the original thought that dust wasn’t dust until it could be seen by the human eye. And Science couldn’t decide on the critical mass of microscopic residue that needed to accumulate on the top of picture frames before it could be called dust. But that year the Nobel Committee fretted about the number of moral degenerates they’d rewarded with a Prize in the past, so Martin’s crackpot idea sailed through.

📌 When I told the studio that Christmas dinner is available in a tin I was roundly ridiculed, until…

📌 My wife and I had an argument about broken crackers and she said I behaved like a teenager.

FRIDAY 25 No more free COVID boosters from next year, says the Conversation. Instead they’ll cost £100 a shot.

📌 Large numbers of Ukrainians who came to Britain after the Russian invasion on the Homes for Ukraine scheme are now registered as homeless. The cost-of-living crisis has driven many of the original hosts to pull out of the scheme because they can no longer afford it. Many also found the scheme to be badly funded and poorly supported.

📌 The New Statesman has a fascinating article about how political dissidence has been absorbed into the mainstream.

📌 The Economist reckons Xi Jinping is a spent force and China’s economy is down the toilet.

📌 My wife was the first to invoke the Elvis Theory (not dead) of the reported incineration of Yevgeny Prighozin, Vlad’s one-time bezzie turned arch enemy. Apparently he’s now been spotted in a Siberian gulag sporting one of his numerous wigs.

📌 Eddie Kidd is the same age as me and lives in Brighton. His exploits are buried in my memory. He was paralysed and suffered brain damage following an accident in 1996, yet in 2013 his then wife Samantha was convicted of assaulting him. “The court heard that she tried to throttle Kidd, slapped him on the face and chest and kicked him. She was sentenced to five months in prison and a restraining order was issued against her.”

📌 Another mass data breach by the City of London Corporation who have sent out our voter registration forms to the wrong addresses.

📌 The divine Lindsay Duncan and her husband Hilton McRae were in our local trattoria tonight.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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