Scrapbook: Week 40

September 30-October 6, 2023

SATURDAY 30 Finally managed to start and finish the radio adaptation of spy writer Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours. I started on several occasions at bedtime but fell asleep during the first episode and woke up hours later in the middle of the final episode. I will probably listen to it again mainly because it very typically twists and turns to baffle but is nevertheless dramatically gripping.

📌 The Socialist Worker has a revealing interview with a teacher who says the dramatic rise in school absences is because schools have become hostile rather than nurturing environments.

📌 Serbia is getting ready to invade Kosovo, says a report in the Guardian. Wonder what the EU will do about that.

SUNDAY 1 Shirley took us on a day out to Brighton in her new-fangled electric car so we could collect some belongings from the Brighton apartment to bring back to London. We lunched in The Regency after a seafront stroll and spotted the comedian Mark Steel doing likewise.

MONDAY 2 The stitchwork of London’s hidden rivers got slightly spoiled when I put it into my jacket pocket, not realising that still in the pocket was one of the leftover baby tomatoes I had harvested from our allotment earlier in the week. I will try to wash out the tomato stain but part of me thinks I should leave it there, especially as it is barely visible.

📌 From Friday’s Newscast podcast on the decrepitude of the British economy I learned that Milton Keynes is a ray of hope and has become a hub for high-performing robotics.

📌 At the Barbican Conservatory I joined a group meeting to devise self-guided tours, activities and workshops to make this botanical wonderland more accessible to everyday users. Then on my way home I spotted a dead magpie. Nature can be both beautiful and cruel.

📌 A political podcaster speculated that Rishi will make fools of us all by announcing in his big speech on Wednesday that the HS2 extension from Birmingham to Manchester will in fact go ahead after all and not be axed as has been leaked.

TUESDAY 3 On TV last night the impressionist Jan Ravens did a fabulous version of Liz Truss as a Daddy’s Girl. Ravens uses the stereotype to build a character for her impression, which ultimately casts impressionists as simply another type of actor. Or is this just what all actors do, pretend convincingly (dramatically or humourously) to be someone else?

📌 In the New Statesman Freddie Hayward neatly sums up Rishi’s predicament…

Rishi Sunak has become the absentee landlord of the Conservative Party.

📌 The short-short story in pink is very nearly nearly finished. You really have to be committed to the story to complete this amount of text in stitch, and I’m not sure I won’t just be glad to be rid of it.

📢 Liz Truss is the human equivalent of honking out a joke about a terrorist attack while they’re still pulling bodies out of the rubble.

Marina Hyde, the Guardian

WEDNESDAY 4 Rafael Behr paints a Hogarthian portrait of our ruling party at its Manchester “conference” as a lurid circus of performing animals, pseudo-magic and sideshows of freaks and dancers.

The spectacle that has unfolded in Manchester this week is not just the endgame of a tired government. It is the late stages of moral and intellectual putrefaction.

📌 Rishi got his wife to introduce him on stage for his big speech and he started it by saying she was a “long-term decision for a brighter future”. He went on to reminisce about delivering “prescriptions” for the family pharmacy business. I pictured young Rishi cruising around on his bike in a hoodie, dropping off brown packages to grim people with dark rings under their eyes.

📌 After a tip-off from Jennifer I am starting to like Darren’s London Art Round Up a lot (and not just because I’ve been in it). He always manages to find some exciting hidden exhibitions to visit. Soon we will go to see Paula Rego’s fun-time floor drawings in a gallery we can walk to from home.

📌 Vera told us Yvonne had suffered a broken heart. We all commiserated, but none of us actually knew Yvonne had a romance on the go. Then Vera clarified that Yvonne’s broken heart was a medical rather than a romantic condition. She said it was a failure of the muscles surrounding the heart.

THURSDAY 5 It’s widely reported that Rishi fluffed his last chance to behave like a prime minister. Speculation is rife as to who will be the next leader of the Conservatives. Penny Mordaunt is channelling her inner desire to look regal.

📌 I said I sort of felt sorry for Rishi and my wife looked at me with horror.

📷 A hidden church just off Shepherdess Walk.

📌 For the Babyshoes writing group at Headway (exactly 100 words) I selected the title “Cider Socialist” for a scene that continues the Heidi & Martin him-n-her thread.

When Martin told Heidi that Peggy Jay was “the doyen of champagne socialism”, she hadn’t a clue what he meant. They were in Burgh House, the historic manor and museum that screams the leafy lefty north-London politics that Peggy Jay was famous for. They’d heard the café was worth a visit. Martin tried to explain champagne socialism but got way out of his depth. “Are we champagne socialists?” Heidi asked. Martin said he’d like to think they were prosecco socialists, “but in truth we’re probably cider socialists”. Heidi nodded as if she understood and took another bite from her scone.

📌 The air-dry miniature prototype for a ceramic globe featuring the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea has survived intact despite some hairy moments when I was convinced it would shatter during construction.

📌 At Headway I learned that when he once visited the Timber Wharf HQ on an open day Russell Brand unsuccessfully “tried it on” with one of the staff.

FRIDAY 6 It feels like the day after a general election, like a new phase has just started. When Labour stops talking about its victory at the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election in Scotland as “seismic” maybe it can start to talk about the realities of rebuilding an exhausted and decrepit nation. Michael Shanks, the triumphant new MP in R&HW made a good point in his victory speech. He said his win was a rejection of two failed governments, the one in Scotland and the one in Westminster. Labour should try to remember that. The “not them” vote is the most powerful constituency, but it is also a shifty thing that needs to be reassured that another disaster is not in the nature of the political cycle, the merry-go-round of enchantment from one party to the other. If Labour doesn’t continually remind voters what an utter mess the Conservatives made of their time in power, and make a real difference to people’s lives, they will end up in the same place.

📌 Rishi is selling off all the land and properties he bought to build HS2 between Birmingham and Manchester.

📌 The Brighton apartment is sold and the money is banked. Might open a bottle of fizz and watch the new series of Ghosts.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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