Scrapbook: Week 43

October 21-27, 2023

SATURDAY 21 I began last week’s scrapbook with some good stories from Positive News to offset the horrors of events in the Holy Land. This week Positive News has uplifting stories right from the heart of that conflict.

📌 The swollen left ankle is stubbornly refusing to mend itself.

📌 Never was a great fan of Bobby Charlton as a player, though I did like the dignified way he conducted himself in public as he got older.

📌 Michelle got quite excited by a picture I sent her of the reverse side of the first in a series of stitchworks I’m doing as a support act to a future exhibition of Sam’s drawings and the drawings that have been made in her mark-making workshops.

📌 We finished TV’s The Reckoning, a fact-based serial drama about the evil paedophile entertainer Jimmy Savile, or “Sav” to the people he liked to call his friends. Savile is played by the comedian Steve Coogan, who skilfully never allows comedy to creep into his performance. He is convincing in his portrayal because he mixes his great talent as an impressionist with a desire to interrogate the psychology of the character seriously, with growing menace throughout. The ending is especially powerful.

SUNDAY 22 Last night I woke up from a dream in which I was trapped in a dull grey police interview room where a friend was having a horribly personal row with her adult son. I woke up when the son stormed out in anger and his mother sat quietly for 30 seconds then left the room gracefully, without expression. Before that I was aware that the atmosphere in the room, and possibly the entire room itself, had become electrically charged. After waking from the dream I listened to Poetry Extra on the radio and it was about using your dreams to write poetry. The trick, said the dream-poet featured, was to not try to interpret the dream but to re-enter it in your imagination and just let it be, describe it and feel your way around it (“let the purple horse eat the cloud”). I found that impossible, largely because for me my dream was in no way surreal and just a plain old metaphor for the Israel/Palestine conflict.

📌 As we sat in the cinema watching Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon I wondered whether every single Scorsese film has a good/evil/confession/redemption theme running through it. Or was it just that we saw it so soon after the 50th anniversary screening last week of Mean Streets. The theme is much better developed and much more sophisticated in the current film than it was 50 years ago, but it was still the same theme.

MONDAY 23 I’m reading another hilarious Oscar Wilde story. In this one a wealthy American family move into an old English stately home despite knowing it to be occupied by a 300-year-old ghost. When on first encounter the new owner arrogantly insults the ghost a farcical power struggle begins.

📌 RIP John Vidal, 74. He was strangely witty for such a serious man.

📌 It’s worth seeing documentaries on the big screen and the film on spy writer John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel, was special for its artistic photography and music but dull as ditchwater for learning anything interesting about its subject other than his lifelong commitment to the construction of mystery and enigma, in this case about himself. It was intriguing to note the number of executives attached to the project with the surname Cornwell. John le Carré’s real name was David Cornwell.

TUESDAY 24 If Labour is still looking for a “quick win” to cement a healthy majority it might (or might not) win at next year’s general election, EV charging could be it. If Labour were to instal Ministry of Transport rapid vehicle chargers in all motorway service stations, it would 1 Put state-owned, revenue-fertile businesses back on the political agenda; 2 Score massively with the green lobby; 3 Put a big smile on the face of the Electric Vehicle manufacturing industry; 4 Create jobs.

📌 I sometimes like to frame an essay question in my head and then attempt to answer it (in my head. I’m too lazy to write it down). Today the question was…

Has the past 13 years of Tory rule in Britain made its voters think more seriously about politics?

The answer I came up with (in my head) boiled down to…

I hope so.

📌 Nicola Sturgeon is up and running on life outside the fast lane of Scottish politics. She’s passed her driving test and got a job at the New Statesman as a book reviewer.

📌 My wife’s actor cousin Mike tells us his job tomorrow is to visit a butcher’s shop in Marylebone to stab a dead pig’s head with a sharp knife. He is rehearsing the part of a killer in the William Shakespeare play Macbeth and it is important, says the play’s director, for Mike to feel the steel puncturing the flesh.

📌 Marge sent over her finished Art Class project drawing. The theme was the NHS and she said some of her fellow classmates did not quite get the politics of a quarter-brain Boris holding a bedpan begging bowl with not very much in it.

WEDNESDAY 25 The TV journalist Gavin Esler is fed up with hearing stories about the deterioration of life in Britain, so he’s written a book about it. And in the Guardian he tells us that it’s not Boris, or Liz, or Rishi who’s to blame for the great nosedive in our quality of life. It’s OUR OWN fault for putting up with a system that allows it to happen. At one point reading the article I expected him to recommend a full-blown people’s revolution. But no, he chickens out and whispers something has to change, being ever so careful not to wake anyone up.

📌 Absolutely fabulous summary of Rishi Sunak’s predicament by Will Lloyd in the New Statesman.

Sunak is a studious mute in an era defined by splenetic, work-shy demagogues. 

THURSDAY 26 A rare full day out on a group visit (9 old friends) first to the David Hockney exhibition/production at Lightroom in King’s Cross, then on to the Welcome Collection for a new exhibition titled The Cult of Beauty.

FRIDAY 27 We’re on the fourth episode (of 6) in the “true” crime drama Love & Death and we’re still waiting to see if anyone’s dead, though the title suggests someone is.

📌 Mashing up news stories in snide ways is often what NewsThump does best.

📌 The New European has a very cutting but funny list of 50 people Britain could do without. Laurence Fox (number 35) is described as “the cretin’s cretin”. Nigel Farage is at number 18, Jacob Rees-Mogg at 12 and, it says, “younger than Kylie Minogue”. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters is at number 9 and the top spot goes to, mmm, Suella.

📌 My wife has a unique way of filing her boots. It’s a top-down bottom-up formulation that goes UGG/Chelsea/Chelsea/Ugg, which sounds like a tribal chant.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

---