FRIDAY 1 An article in the New Statesman brings an air of sanity to the raging debate about London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s expansion of ULEZ (Ultra Low Emissions Zone) across all of London. The best bit for me was the image of Labour (Khan) stealing and taking ownership of a Conservative (Boris) idea.
📌 On the 21 bus to New Cross Gate my wife pointed out the store on the Old Kent Road where we “bought our first Dyson”.
📌 Will Dunn has a sharp analysis of the political chicanery the government has adopted to make the next government sweat for a least five years. It is the political equivalent of football’s “parking the bus”, with the exception that real life chances and opportunities for success are the losers.
📌 At lunch in Croydon for Margaret’s 93rd birthday Lil claimed that “curry is good for the bones”.
📌 There’s a fast-food outlet in New Cross Gate called Gateway Chicken. My wife says that’s where you go before you get a taste for turkey or partridge.
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.
SATURDAY 9 Jonathan Freedland’s lengthy praise of Joe Biden has a valedictory tone verging on obituary.
📌 The escaped Wandsworth jailbird, 21, has been recaptured. He was nabbed while cycling along a canal towpath in West London and did not resist arrest. Whether he was actually a dangerous criminal threat we will likely never know. His four days of freedom, however, have thrown the justice system into an ever deepening swamp of awkward questions.
SUNDAY 10 In a very convoluted way a big story in the Observer “reveals” that Rishi has sneakily slashed by 20% the budget for special educational needs.
📌 At a meeting of our allotments committee it was agreed that we stop trying to make our own compost and buy it instead.
📌 At an Unthanks all-day takeover of the Barbican the afternoon set threw up something new to me. The pianist both played chords and melodies to accompany the singing but also at times reached deep inside the grand piano and plucked the strings.
📌 Andrew Rawnsley reckons it would be a big mistake for the Conservatives to campaign next year’s general election on the issue of immigration. They’ve broken too many promises and failed badly at the ones they tried to keep (small boats, Rwanda), he says. It would be worrying if they took Rawnsley’s advice because the only other issue they might major on is one of the many culture wars they’ve already tried to start, and that could get very ugly indeed.
MONDAY 11 Reflecting on the Unthanks evening performance last night, what seemed obvious is that sisters Rachel and Becky are now at the centre of a mammoth production enterprise. On stage were 11 musicians, four men and seven women. The production values were beyond comprehension for a simple folk outfit. The lighting was theatrical, the compositions heavily orchestrated. At times the clog-dancing sisters looked quite lost in it all.
📌 My wife is constantly disgusted at my attempts to create the perfect savoury porridge. Today I made one with red onions, chorizo and leftover pork sausage. Yum.
📌 Fascinating exposure in the New Statesman of the crookedness of the British tax system, the bottom line being that most of Britain’s working population is taxed at a higher rate than Rishi Sunak.
TUESDAY 12 Rooting through my Google files I found some junk from decades ago. A lot of it went straight in the bin but a mountain of memos still stands before me. I’m thinking of making the clearance a one-year project, a bit like learning French on Duolingo.
📌 Among the junk found in the long-forgotten cloud storage I have have been rooting through was my first ever blog post, which was an instructional piece on building a small arts & crafts table from wood found discarded on the street. The table I made referenced the work of one of my favourite American furniture makers, Gustav Stickley. And the photograph I found buried deep in the folds of the cloud was shot on a background of William Morris wallpaper, which was a nice touch.
WEDNESDAY 13 Sadiq Khan’s future as Mayor of London is in doubt. He’s in disagreement with his party over his stance on emissions and clean air. And he faces competition from Jeremy Corbyn, who is threatening to stand against him at the next mayoral election, which will be decided using the discredited FPTP (First Past The Post) voting system.
📌 Fascinating podcast from Tortoise about the mysterious Charlotte Owen, a 30-year-old Westminster hangabout who Boris made a Baroness. The Tortoise journalist states early on in the podcast that her interest in Owen was not about what she did to get a seat in the House of Lords but what she didn’t do.
📌 The New Statesman is running a poll on the question, “Can Labour be radical without spending more money?” This follows Angela Rayner’s speech about workers’ rights and levelling up. As I write, the totals are NO=67%, YES=33%.
📌 Quite excited to be starting a stitchwork interpretation of Marge’s collage of her grandson Max dressed a gangster for his school play. Might watch Bugsy Malone for inspiration.
THURSDAY 14 For Headway’s Babyshoes writing group I penned a 100-word story with the title Northern Soul.
When they first met Martin couldn’t take his eyes off Heidi’s left breast. Right there, on her T-shirt was a logo, a clenched black fist in a circle ringed with the words NORTHERN SOUL KEEPING THE FAITH. Heidi said she was a fan. Wigan Casino, etc. Martin tried to look interested. No way could he tell her the last album he bought was Frampton Comes Alive. He noticed the clenched fist was a right hand. Martin was left-handed. He’d played violin at school. His fingers were nimble. That’s how a few hours later he found out Heidi was a 34b.
📌 James told us that as a child his sister had a spinally deformed chicken called Hairgrip.
📌 To the Barbican for Angelheaded Hipster, a documentary about Marc Bolan featuring celebrity acts performing Bolan songs or, in the case of David Bowie, doing a hilarious Bolan impression. Outstanding moment was Nick Cave singing Cosmic Dancer. My wife told me later that this coming Saturday is Bolan’s “deathiversary”. My sister will probably be one of the lunatic celebrants as she once dragged the entire family to London from Liverpool to momentarily look at the alleged home of Marc Bolan in Maida Vale.
FRIDAY 15 We wanted to take the 55 bus all the way to its destination in Walthamstow, have a look around the market and try to remember some of the places we knew when we first got together 35 years ago. It was heartening to see that the old places have been rejuvenated. The high streets of Hackney and Waltham Forest are vibrant and busy, Walthamstow market likewise. My wife says it has the reputation for being the longest street market in Europe. The far end is a paradise of fabric shops and haberdashers, all with very good prices.
📌 Started a new map stitchwork, a miniature of London’s hidden rivers.
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.
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.
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.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 