November 11-17, 2023
SATURDAY 11 It’s going to be the weekend we remember what Suella did.
Braverman has announced that Saturday’s march will “give offence to millions of decent British people”. In which case, Suella and the march aren’t so different after all.
Marina Hyde, the Guardian
📌 After a day’s team building at the Barbican I must now wait a week to find out if I have been selected to join the panel for the Imagine Fund, a grant-making body that funds creative community projects. My wife thinks I’m a shoo-in because I tick boxes for old-age, disability and local residence.
SUNDAY 12 When we learned that Suella Braverman’s real first name is Sue Ellen (a character in the TV series Dallas) my wife reminded me that Sue Ellen’s descent into alcoholism and madness was the result of being bullied by her horrible oil-magnate husband JR Ewing and his psychopathic family. So what if Suella’s political posturings and staged cruelties are a psychological outcry, a case of the abused becoming the abuser. Has she been bullied so badly sometime in the past that she has inherited bullying as a character trait?
📌 To Barbican Cinena 2 for the 11am screening of Anatomy of a Fall, a gripping and deeply intelligent courtroom drama that questions the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves versus the stories others tell about us. It’s all down to how you see things is the message, and it was a fascinating spectacle to watch in this film a blind child emerge as the one who sees most clearly.
📌 The philosophy writer in the New European reckons Albert Camus was more successful for his good looks than his stunning thoughts.
MONDAY 13 The BBC’s flagship Today programme is doing itself no favours when mild-mannered listeners start shouting at the radio. This morning presenter Amol Rajan interviewed shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting about a report claiming that despite increased funding the NHS has been unable to treat more patients. Streeting started his answer by saying that throwing more and more taxpayers money at a chronically broken system was no answer and that structural reform is what’s needed. Rajan responded not by asking what that change in structure might look like but by quizzing Streeting about non-dom tax income. Streeting answered gamely. Then Rajan moved on to a question about Gaza, at which point I gave up any hope of finding out WHAT REFORMS STREETING HAS IN STORE FOR THE NHS.
📌 Rishi has surrendered and sacked Suella. He is now rearranging the deckchairs on his sinking ship. He’s appointed David Cameron Foreign Secretary.
📌 At Piano Smithfield to see the jazz artist Alan Barnes I worked out that the only form of this music I can tolerate is the soft, gently swaying melancholy variety. Screechy, parpy, show-off solos drive me mad. At one point I swore I saw the trumpet player take a puff on his inhaler at the end of one song, but my wife swears equally that I was wrong. However, she did come on board with my calculation that the sleazy basement room contained only three non-white people, and two of them were table waiters.
At the end of the night, our friend Marge reminded Alan Barnes that she’d seen him perform many years ago, hideously drunk (him not her), in a pub owned and run by Coronation Street‘s Elsie Tanner (Pat Phoenix). Barnes said sorry.
TUESDAY 14 No one seems to be able to make up their mind about Rishi’s appointment of David Cameron as Foreign Secretary. Was it a masterstroke to rob Suella of the headlines, or a desperate attempt to look like he’s back in charge? The biggest shock was the ease with which the unelected Cameron was slipped back greasily into government via a gifted membership to the House of Lords.
📌 Chris says that my Fallopian Jesus painting will now go up at an exhibition in Dundee and feature on street posters. I may have to go into hiding.
📌 Grace Sagar Shotbolt, Resident Campaigns and Communications Manager at the City of London Corporation, invited us to the Old Bailey to cross-examine council officers on local issues, plus festive drinks afterwards.
📌 On the recommendation of my wife’s actor cousin Mike we started watching Top Boy, but I can’t tell if I like it yet. I really didn’t like it at first (a copycat of The Wire set in Hackney), but then I started rooting for two of the characters.
WEDNESDAY 15 Turns out that there are two TV versions of Top Boy and we were watching the wrong one. The crime drama originally aired on Channel 4 in 2011 but was dropped after two series. In 2017 it was revived by Netflix, with the backing of a Canadian rapper called Drake. Netflix relaunched it, starting at Series 1 and renamed the two original Channel 4 series as Top Boy: Summerhouse. It is the post-2017 Netflix revival of Top Boy I’m not sure I like. Top Boy: Summerhouse is a riveting piece of British drama with all the hallmarks of the quality gangster genre in an inner London setting – strong characters, powerful themes and a vivid sense of place with an absorbing soundtrack.
📌 The New European has a columnist that sounds just like Radio 4’s Ed Reardon.
📌 Veteran punk rocker John Robb of The Membranes has started whingeing on Facebook about the state of the trains.
📌 Even the philosopher Nigel Warburton has something to say about Suella and her weird leanings towards cruelty – specifically her attempts to rob the street-sleepers of their tents.
📌 A note in today’s Tortoise Sensemaker got me rushing to Google…
New Zealand crowned the puteketeke as its bird of the century…
…Upon which the story got even better with the fact that the puteketeke is “a bird that pukes, grunts, growls and has bizarre mating rituals.” It also has a crazy hairstyle.
📌 To smug Kensington for Jen and Lisa’s discussion around the art they (as Art et al.) are exhibiting at the Royal Society of Sculptors. The presentations on how to work with neurodivergent artists leaned slightly too far into academic theory for my liking. I wanted to know more about the self-help tricks artists invent for themselves than power structures and the need to watch your language when it comes to using “neurodivergent” instead of “neurodiverse”, etc. But needless to say the exhibits were exquisite.
THURSDAY 16 At Headway James told us that his four-year-old sister had an imaginary friend called Toffin Pan. He also told us that the same sister is now his brother.
FRIDAY 17 While waiting for sausage and mash at the Garden Gate in Hampstead I demonstrated painting on your phone to Al.
📌 The pub conversation was at first centred on planning our upcoming seasonal holiday in Tenerife but ended up in Gaza/Israel.
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Billy's Scrapbook 
You may have to go into hiding 🙂 Thank you.
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