September 16-22, 2023
SATURDAY 16 Artnet has a story saying a tourist at a Tate Modern exhibition noticed that one of the paintings had been hung upside down.
📌 The list of vehicles exempt from Sadiq Khan’s controversial ULEZ charge is pretty long and includes “showman’s vehicles”. That looks to me like a loophole for all manner of chancers, but it’s nice to know that the circus will still be coming to town
📌 Quora tells of the concerned schoolteacher who contacted a pupil’s parents when their child produced a disturbing image in art class.
The teacher relaxed when it was explained that this was a picture of the child’s family snorkelling in the Bahamas.
📌 It’s quite a cunning move by Starmer to say Labour will work with the EU on dealing with migration. It is a way for Britain to rebuild an awkward semi-detached relationship with Brussels and to start grown-up talks with France about small boats.
📌 My wife believes Premier League footballers should be fined £50,000 for every yellow card they get.
📌 We arrived at the Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield just as the trapeze artist (no net) was finishing.
SUNDAY 17 We were given an invitation to visit Horizon 22, the latest of the City of London’s new skyscrapers to allow ordinary mortals to see the city from a lofty viewpoint (free). The views are indeed spectacular and spotting the landmarks got quite competitive. I performed badly, at one point even confusing east with west.
📌 To the Barbican for a 25th Anniversary re-release of the Sofia Coppola film The Virgin Suicides, which turned out to be as enigmatic and mysterious as the Jeffrey Eugenides book from which it was made. We never bothered with it 25 years ago because we liked the book so much and Eugenides and Coppola had fallen out over its translation to film. Back then we sided with the book and dismissed the film as the product of a Hollywood Nepo Baby, even though the term had yet to be invented. This viewing caught the essence of the story, but that could just be a form of nostalgia playing havoc with good judgement. The look of the film had not dated, and it captured softly both the spirit of the times in which it is set (1970s America) and now (postmillennial seperatism).
📌 My wife said my stitchwork map of London’s hidden rivers looks like someone’s veins.
MONDAY 18 The New Statesman has a report on a counterfactual economic model called The Doppelgänger that imagines Britain did not vote to Leave the EU in 2016 but voted to Remain instead. Yes, it all adds up to a colossal “I told you so”, but it does have some contextual bells and whistles missing from recent analyses of “Broken Britain”.
Not quite “Project Fear” – the label applied to Remain voters who warned the UK would suffer an immediate recession. But nowhere near a nimble Singapore-on-Thames nor a buccaneering Global Britain either.
New Statesman
📌 Former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney weighed in later with a cheeky quote: “When Brexiteers tried to build Singapore-on-Thames, they delivered Argentina-on-the-Channel; a high-inflation, high volatility problem for the world economy.”
Meanwhile, in the Conversation some of the lesser-heard aspects of Brexit emerge in the stories of dual-nationality families that were torn apart in the fallout.
📌 Just read that before she became prime minister, Maggie Thatcher was know around Westminster as Atilla The Hen.
TUESDAY 19 John Crace calls Liz Truss Radon because she is an “inert gas”.
📌 RIP Roger Whittaker, 87. When you were a boy you sat on the banks of the River Tyne and watched the ships go down the line, whistling as you did so.
📌 The Guardian has finally admitted that it was one of the many media outlets to employ the now-toxic Russell Brand. I remember being charmed by his intelligent and funny columns on football and his childlike fanaticism for West Ham United. I asked the then Sports Editor Ben if Brand’s writing was really any good or whether it required some sprightly subediting. No, Ben said, Brand delivered good copy.
📌 It looks like Boris was so overwhelmed with the complexities of high office that he couldn’t tell the difference between The Munsters and The Addams Family.
WEDNESDAY 20 Rishi seems to have found the big issue on which he can fight next year’s general election. He is to scrap the UK’s commitment to carbon reduction in the hope that it will bring down the cost of household bills and make voters vote Conservative.
It’s a slap in the face for Conservative MPs who have been urging him to do the opposite, including Tory environmental poster-boy Alok Sharma who appeared on the radio this morning to say “the pulse is very weak” on Britain’s ambition for net-zero and that businesses planning for it have been thrown into disarray.
My wife tells me that all Rishi is actually doing is putting Britain’s advance to net-zero at the same speed as the EU. But that is unlikely to stop the cruel portrayals of him as a crackpot climate denier.
It’s quite a moment when a Green party MP finds herself on the same side of an argument as the chair of Ford UK – but here we are.
Caroline Lucas, the Guardian
📌 A new book is to claim that Rupert Murdoch is “a frothing-at-the-mouth” enemy of Donald Trump and has been heard praying in dark corners for his death.
📌 Finally, after what seems to have been years, we exchanged contracts on the sale of our apartment in Brighton. Phew! Completion is 6 October so now begins the scramble to empty it out and wave goodbye.
THURSDAY 21 Escape was the title of this week’s 100-word story for Headway’s Babyshoes writing group.
Martin and Heidi had a plan to escape talking to their respective parents. He’d lie for her and she’d lie for him. It usually worked.
One Sunday Martin took the call from Heidi’s mother and said she’d gone to the chemist for a pregnancy testing kit. Heidi heard him and started waving a Sabatier kitchen knife at his throat. Martin went on: “We were thinking Bruce for a boy and Sheila for a girl.” Heidi’s mother then remembered she’d left the oven on and cut the call.
It was six years before Martin and Heidi got back together after that.
📌 Once you enter Headway’s art studio store room you don’t want to leave. And when you do it is always with the feeling that something is still hidden in there waiting to be found.
📌 On Golden Lane a van driver has started a collection of parking tickets. The way they are displayed suggests some kind of delinquent pride.
📌 My wife got an email from our neighbour Yvonne saying she’d had a heart attack and was in hospital.
📌 We started watching the new series of Sex Education. The former classmates are now in different colleges of further education. The storylines are quite soapy, but we’re still keen to see what happens to them all.
FRIDAY 22 I’ve turned off Notifications for Duolingo so the messages telling me how bad my French is have stopped.
📌 Andrew Marr is putting his money on a Spring 2024 general election, with Rishi opting to do with small boats what Boris did with “Get Brexit Done”. Can’t imagine what the slogan will be.
📌 Camden traffic wardens have won an 18% pay rise, taking the hourly rate to £15.
📌 Michelle asked me to start working on a collection of stitchworks referencing Sam’s drawings, in much the same way as I did with Cecil for the Power of Transformation exhibition. It will keep me busy for the best part of a year and offer plenty of opportunity for having fun, even with some of Sam’s best-known images.
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Billy's Scrapbook 