Scrapbook: Week 36

September 2-8, 2023

SATURDAY 2 Some schoolchildren will not return to the classroom as planned next week because their schools were built with a type of cheap concrete that disintegrates when wet. Hospitals and other public buildings were likewise built with this killer concrete (it has a lifespan of 30 years), which governments have known about for several years and ignored.

📌 Broken Britain is likely to be a theme for some time as the government runs down its term in office to cause maximum destruction in the hope that it will soon all be forgotten.

If there were such a condition as long short-termism, the UK could now consider itself an advanced sufferer.

Marina Hyde, the Guardian

SUNDAY 3 We missed the Barbican Summer garden party because of a prior appointment in Hampstead for a friend’s birthday, at which we learned that Jenny is descended from Lithuanian Jews. All the youngsters there seemed to have jobs that never existed when we were getting our first jobs.

📌 Andy Beckett reckons it’s not only Britain’s economy that is failing, but our society too.

MONDAY 4 Gender is my big downfall in French. I just don’t know if a pizza is a le or a la. My other big crime on Duolingo is accents. Who’d have guessed that aprés is actually après.

📌 My wife still talks to Alexa as if she is a real person and not a device. She says thank you when Alexa successfully plays Radio 2.

📌 Jennifer messaged to say that the Cecil exhibition at Burgh House in Hampstead, for which I did seven stitchworks, got mentioned in a cult art newsletter.

📌 The City of London has long been famous for its secrecy. Even today the exteriors of some commercial buildings do not declare the name or nature of the business that goes on inside. Now, post pandemic, there is another twist. Empty offices are attempting to disguise their emptiness by sticking printed plastic sheets with uninspiring design patterns on the ground-floor windows.

TUESDAY 5 Germany is refusing to extradite a wanted drug trafficker to Britain because our prisons do not meet European human-rights standards.

📌 Labour shadow health secretary Wes Streeting made a good point on the radio about Martha’s Rule, a campaign launched by Merope and Paul following the tragic death of their 13-year-old daughter. He said Merope and Paul are both media professionals whose job is to communicate. If they couldn’t penetrate the arrogance and complacency of expertise in the healthcare system what chance does anyone else have.

📌 The apostrophe is dead. Long live the apostrophe. I intend from now on to irritate those who conspired to let it slip away.

WEDNESDAY 6 The people of Britain are not suspicious of a large state, says Rafael Behr in the Guardian. In fact they crave it. They have, he says, a “historical attachment to functional public services and a social safety net.” What they don’t like is a corrupt, inefficient or incompetent state machine, which is why the present government should prepare for opposition and reflect on that.

📌 It’s not hard to avoid the perception that Rishi’s move to ease up on planning laws for onshore wind power is less to do with being green and more an acknowledgment that Britain has been left behind on the development of a renewables industry.

📌 We’re watching Painkiller, a fictionalised account of the Sackler development and promotion of OxyContin, an opioid that was oversold and massively oversubscribed in the US with devastating consequences. If you knew about the scandal already, there doesn’t seem to be anything new, and the storytelling devices feel trite. But it does lay bare the perils of placing health provision in a shark-infested marketplace.

THURSDAY 7 A terrorist prisoner on remand in Wandsworth Prison has escaped by clinging to the bottom of a food van, which seemingly sailed through several security gates unchecked. This is a caper movie made real and each day more and more detail emerges as to what actually happened, giving the story  compelling added drama with a touch of comedy. Already we are speculating on whether the security checkpoints were compromised by mass bribery from an OCG (organised crime gang) working for the Iranian state, or something.

📌 Bit by bit Britain is rejoining the EU. Rishi’s deal on Northern Ireland back in March was step one. Now the UK is back on board the Horizon science programme. Will this be Rishi’s 2024 general-election bid, to say he brought Britain home to the ambient interior of the EU?

📌 Britain as a nation has very few revenue schemes outside of taxation. Profit-seeking state industries are seen generally as non-starters. So the burden falls on tax. Who or what to tax and how heavily? Which leaves little scope for big infrastructural reforms for an incoming Labour government. Or is there a taxation trick they’ve missed? Yes, says Larry Elliott. There’s a way to tax the wealthy that doesn’t look like a revenge strike on the rich, he says.

📌 I started to draft a letter to our council, the City of London Corporation, to say why I will not be rejoining their community education Art Class next week. It starts… “I cannot in all conscience have any dealings other than those required by law with a local authority that has no regard for its residents’ personal data.” This is after the council sent out voter registration documents to the wrong addresses and an earlier GDPR infringement in which email addresses were randomly shared. The draft concluded “… there is no room for casual mistakes. Such protections should be baked into the protocols of any large, obscenely wealthy organisation.”

📌 The Garden of Eden Reimagined stitchwork is finished and I quite like the crumpled gold satin. Adam & Eve are clothed, obviously, and the apples on the Tree of Life are now edible flowers. I tried to get the tree to double up as a snake, but I’m not sure that’s entirely successful.

📌 For Headway’s Babyshoes writing group I opted to write 100 words exactly with the title ‘Loud Americans’…

When Martin woke the next day in Heidi’s bed he thought, “Last night, what was THAT?” They were in The Grapes and Heidi, in one of her show-off moments, said, “You know Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’… it was originally called ‘Loud Americans’ but the record company said change it.” Martin bristled but kept a straight face. Heidi’s story that the song was about a girl with an abusive father and not a romantic exploration of youthful discovery seemed daft even for Heidi. But he didn’t want to sound challenging so he disguised his skepticism as a query: “What was the chorus?”

📌 Past Lives is a film that will stick in my mind for a long time. My initial favoured keyword was “separation”, then it became “pause” because the film is punctuated by short, tentative breaths of feeling and glance.

📌 It might work out that the escaped prisoner Daniel Khalife, 21, was driven to mount his audacious exit from Wandsworth Prison not by a desire to enact terror offences but by the “crumbling, overcrowded and vermin-infested” conditions under which he was being held on what, as reported, sound like pretty speculative charges.

📌 RIP Marion. You left too soon.

FRIDAY 8 From somewhere in Canada my cousin Helen sent a picture of a museum exhibit featuring a collection of ceramic mushrooms.

📌 The Socialist Worker reckons a deal to avoid bankruptcy at Birmingham City Council was sabotaged by the government just so it could then say, “Birmingham is what you get if you vote Starmer”.

📌 To Oxford for Great Nephew Ozzie’s second birthday, on which Thomas The Tank Engine and Spike Milligan’s Silly Verse were big hits.

📌 RIP Mike Yarwood, 82.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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