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.
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.
📌 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.
📌 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.
📌 My wife corrected me with a disapproving look. England coach Sarina Wiegman is not Swedish but Dutch, she said sternly.
📌 Gripping finish to the Japan-Sweden game.
📌 Rue Seveste, Montmartre, is a paradise for fabric shoppers.
📌 Terrible Maps really does come up with some gems…
📌 Never quite noticed before how much my sister and my wife enjoy talking to each other.
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.
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.
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 in 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 Anne, 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.
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Billy's Scrapbook 