Scrapbook: Week 39

September 23-29, 2023

SATURDAY 23 Our 35th wedding anniversary was notable for its medical theme – vaccinations in the morning, hospital appointment in the afternoon.

📷 10am, Shepherdess Walk, Hoxton. A billow of chimneys, or whatever the collective noun is.

📌 Rishi has decided to make climate part of the culture wars. Watch out for lots of attacks on Labour for having lunatic policies such as a low-carbon economy.

📌 At the October Gallery while my wife kept a hospital appointment I found a collection of images by South African artist Zana Masombuka titled A Portal For Black Joy. Mesmerising and baffling in equal measure, Masombuka’s work for this exhibition is said to “explore the intersection of culture and identity”. And she “weaves startlingly original visual narratives that confront issues impacting from the wider world with locally inherited creative strategies”. I was compelled to remove a number of superfluous commas from that last quotation. I don’t know why I bothered.

SUNDAY 24 In the early hours a raging thirst kept me awake long enough to catch the last installment of hydrophile Laura Barton’s radio series Down By The River, which included an essay from a wild swimmer, a riveting extract from Tarka The Otter and assorted poems.

📌 To Burgh House in Hampstead in search of inspiration for a short story to submit in the museum’s Tell Me A Story competition. All the pictures and objects have been stripped of written details, so all you have as stimuli is the bare item. I was tempted towards a study of class by a photograph of a smart elderly woman in a hat pulling tongues at a bedraggled street seller, but instead took my inspiration from Object 26, an ancient cine projector. I rewrote one of my old stories as an amateur film scene.

EXT. CEMETERY – DAY

Martin and Heidi agreed that a Toddler Zombie Walk would be a fun introduction to the complexities of death. Martin got all the costumes from one shop, the one opposite Poundland, and plenty of slime from the Monster Supply Emporium in Hoxton. 

The kids showed character and went along with it to please him. They put on their best deathly looks, walked slowly, gave it the glazed stare, made ghosty noises, whatever. Three turns around the graveyard with the bones of Blake, Bunyan and Defoe resting silently underground. Plus jelly and chocolate, and fizz. Too much chocolate, really.

But it all felt a bit flat, as death is always likely to. Then, out of the blue, a line of grown-ups filed through the gate, headed by community police officers Christine and James. Only up close did anyone notice that the grown-ups were all crying tears of blood.

MONDAY 25 If Rishi really wants to blindside everyone in the HS2 debate he could do worse than take up Andy Burnham’s suggestion of a conversation with the people of Manchester.

📌 I just heard my wife humming along to a Coldplay song on the radio.

📌 At the Barbican evaluation meeting for differently various Chris asked me if I’d be interested in contributing an image to an exhibition in Dundee he is working on. The theme is INCARNATION, in the religious sense. I had to do a web search to find out what it really meant…

Central Christian doctrine that God became flesh, that God assumed a human nature and became a man in the form of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity.

TUESDAY 26 A herd of sheep in Greece broke into a greenhouse and ate 100kg of medicinal cannabis. They’d gone in search of pastures new after floods invaded their regular grazing territory.

📌 Felicity’s memorial in the Battle started with solemnity and ended with a joyous walk down memory lane. It was amazing to see the natural shift from one to the other, and everyone agreed it’s what she would have wanted. Not sure she would have agreed with Jan’s view that gardening is “housework outdoors”.

WEDNESDAY 27 Under the heading “The Cost of Not Zero” today’s Tortoise Sensemaker rips through Rishi’s abandonment of green commitments in favour of short-term election point scoring. Meanwhile in the USA Suella Braverman is cutting her own path to No 10 with a speech arguing for a rewrite of the UN’s definition of what it means to be a refugee. The New Statesman reckons she is daring Rishi to sack her.

THURSDAY 28 Finished a first draft of the Incarnation image Chris pitched on Monday for an exhibition in Dundee. It might be a bit too risky.

📌 Young prison officers are quitting for cushier jobs because they don’t like being without their mobile phones all day.

📌 RIP Michael Gambon, 82.

📌 I felt myself glued to the sign-language interpretor during the Channel 4 documentary exposé of Russell Brand. He is quite obviously an angry, aggressive narcissistic deviant (he used his female conquests as his pimps), but to see how the very important testimonials featured in the exposé were translated by the signer amount to a separate, lonely testimony.

FRIDAY 29 In the Guardian the historian Timothy Garton Ash urges Joe Biden to step aside “before Thanksgiving” (November) and let a younger person lead the Democratic Party into next year’s presidential election. He says this is the only way to stop Donald Trump from winning. My own preferred scenario is for Donald Trump to be locked up in jail for plotting to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States, for Biden to win a narrow victory and then for him to step aside for a youngster.

📌 Sent Chris a new revision of the Incarnation painting, which features a simplified pair of ovaries and a human egg sitting in one of the fallopian tubes. I will be astonished if this daring idea is acceptable to Chris’s co-curator in Dundee so I do not intend to do any more work on it for now.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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