August 26-September 1, 2023
SATURDAY 26 This weekend’s Tortoise Sensemaker has an article that identifies British stand-up comedy as the caretaker of the nation’s conscience. And it is proving to be a commercially viable conscience with the power to go global. It sounds like some kind of new moral empire.
📌 I wrote last week that I was glad Spain had reached the final of the Women’s World Cup because Spain needed a dose of gender equality. I never imagined the team’s success would trigger a full-scale gender war with Spain’s patriarchal soccer elite.
📌 To Tate Modern for a spurious exhibition that tried unsuccessfully to partner two artists – Hilma af Klimt and Piet Mondrian – in some bogus concept on the environment. “Piet seems to do most of the heavy lifting,” my wife observed, later adding that Klimt’s work resembles “Spirograph on acid.”
SUNDAY 27 Andrew Rawnsley reckons Rishi, like previous “tail-end” prime ministers, will hang in to the bitter end and not call a general election until all hope has finally dried up. That means January 2025.
📌 Liverpool grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat in a 2-1 win at Newcastle.
📌 Another visit to the Barbican’s outdoor cinema. This time the ticket price included a glass of Campari. We took a supply of Haribos and supplementary booze to keep us going through Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. I went also in search of a favourite line from the film we have seen so often, and on this occasion it was “How do you begin to cut up a human body?”
MONDAY 28 Tourists in the West Country have been driven from the beaches, and residents from their gardens, by the noxious “Weymouth Whiff”, a foul smell said to emerge from a badly supervised local sewage works. The smell has been persistent over a number of years but has intensified recently as Wessex Water struggles to snuff it out (ho ho) when changing weather conditions overload its treatment systems. They are failing so badly that they have now sunk to accusing old people of not being able to tell the difference between the smell of sewage and the smell of seaweed. Sewage Or Seaweed? sounds like a TV game show waiting to happen.
📌 There’s a cracking line in a New Statesman article about Nadine Dorries. The headline dubs Dorries the Miss Haversham of the Conservative party, claiming that despite her resignation she will linger until Rishi has been properly finished off.
Sunak now plays the role of funeral director, transferring Johnson’s 80-seat majority from the morgue to the grave.
📌 To Barbican Cinema for the delightful Scrapper, which starts off as a home alone story but soon changers into a father-daughter interrogation of grief and resilience. Beautiful depiction/observation of everyday colours.
TUESDAY 29 The top health news of the day is that the government has announced plans to put blood-pressure monitors in dominoes clubs.
📌 In an article superficially about the death of Yevgeny Prighozin and Putin’s role in it, the Socialist Worker spots an interesting geopolitical fact about the emerging global alliance between Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (Brics).
Whatever the wider significance of the recent Brics summit, it showed the failure of the United States and its allies to isolate China and Russia.
📌 The government has decided that it’s more important to hit its housebuilding targets than to stop poison being washed into rivers.
📌 I went to Smithfield to find out if the 46 bus still departs from outside Bart’s hospital. It is the bus we need to get to tonight’s exhibition at Burgh House in Hampstead. I took the opportunity to snoop around the area and found two gems: a very quiet chapel of St Bartholomew The Less – which has a fascinating history dating back 900 years when the area was a “hospital parish” and the vicar a medic – and Bart’s Hospital Museum, which has a grand staircase mural painted by William Hogarth and some quaint oral histories from nurses who knew Florence Nightingale.
📌 The private view of our exhibition at Burgh House went off without a hitch. Everyone I invited turned up, had a glass of fizz and enjoyed the art and the company. Cecil was a hoot when interviewed by Michelle and my wife said she was quite proud of me, which is a rarity.
WEDNESDAY 30 I’ve learned the hard way that using words in your art practice can cause trouble. The big scroll I stitched for the Barbican Curve exhibition Differently Various raised hackles for its use of the word “bonkers”. Now a Chinese art student who used graffiti on a Brick Lane wall to trigger a street-art debate about human rights in China has fallen foul of the mentality that words are to be read and understood and pictures are to be seen and wondered at.
📌 To Exmouth Market for lunch at the Coin Laundry with Janet, Rhona, Dave and Janet’s eccentric sister Ann, who seemed to be suffering from some kind of nervous trauma. After several glasses of soothing white wine she offered me from her recently inherited stash of family heirlooms a 100-year-old hand-embroidered tablecloth. I said yes, but would have preferred the ruby-encrusted gold jewellery Anne says she will bequeath to her niece Rhona.
📌 Marge has asked me to do a stitchwork of her grandson Max in the gangster gear he wore for his school play, so I’ve devised a pattern that I’m starting to quite like but will need some more work. Marge says she wants his suit to be sparkly, which is no worry. I’m more concerned that you can’t tell that the dog is having a much-needed wee.
THURSDAY 31 Another bumpy adventure on the 46 bus to Hampstead for a stitching workshop at our Power of Transformation exhibition at Burgh House, which wasn’t wildly attended. At least I got a chance to have a look at the experimental work of Lancelot Ribeiro in one of the other rooms and bumped into Reagan from the British Museum, visiting the exhibition with her daughter Annabelle. Michelle messaged later to say that Reagan had bought two pictures, one of Cecil’s drawing and the same drawing I had translated into stitch.
📌 The title I chose as an assignment for the Headway Babyshoes writing group was “Music Is My Chocolate”. I struggled to get even 100 words out of that…
When Heidi stated grandly that “music is my chocolate” Martin tittered audibly with derision. He regretted that as soon as he did it, and to disguise his momentary shame he suggested they play The Chocolate Scales, a stupid word game he invented on the spur of the moment, the idea being to name chocolate bars after each of the notes in the musical scale. Heidi agreed and started with A=Aero. Martin followed that with Bounty. By the time Heidi got stuck at E (via Curly Wurly and Double Decker) she’d forgotten Martin’s earlier scorn of her pretentious music-chocolate thing.
FRIDAY 1 An article in the New Statesman brings an air of sanity to the raging debate about London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s expansion of ULEZ (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) across all of London. The best bit for me was the image of Labour (Khan) stealing and taking ownership of a Conservative (Boris) idea.
📌 On the 21 bus to New Cross Gate my wife pointed out the store on the Old Kent Road where we “bought our first Dyson”.
📌 Will Dunn has a sharp analysis of the political chicanery the government has adopted to make the next government sweat for a least five years. It is the political equivalent of football’s “parking the bus”, with the exception that real life chances and opportunities for success are the losers.
📌 At lunch in Croydon for Margaret’s 93rd birthday Lil claimed that “curry is good for the bones”.
📌 There’s a fast-food outlet in New Cross Gate called Gateway Chicken. My wife says that’s where you go before you get a taste for turkey or partridge.
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