November 25-December 1, 2023
SATURDAY 25 At Winchester Library an exhibition about our enduring fascination with shoes featured some very attractive X-ray photographs.
Next to one of the exhibits, a Lotus Shoe from the 19th Century, was a description of a barbaric form of coercive control called foot-binding, which involved “breaking a girl’s foot bones when she is four or five years old and binding the mutilated foot to prevent natural repair. The result is that the foot remains small and malformed and the grown woman’s mobility is compromised.”
SUNDAY 26 RIP Terry Venables, you were an early advocate of statistical analysis in football, as I remember.
📌 Duolingo isn’t prudish about including same-sex relationships in its French and Spanish dialogue stories. They feature regularly. I wonder if this is the case across all its language lessons.
📌 Asylum seekers in Britain waiting for their applications to be processed by a monstrously incompetent system should be allowed to work, writes Patience Wheatcroft in the New European. Stopping them from doing so is not only inhumane it is bad for business.
MONDAY 27 a summary in today’s Sensemaker from Tortoise casts Keir Starmer as spineless in his slippery refusal to agree to a full return of the stolen Parthenon/Elgin Marbles to their rightful home in Greece.
📌 The cupboard search for Beechams Powder capsules ended in failure. Lemsip it is, then.
📌 To Cinema 1 for Maestro, in which Bradley Cooper becomes a chain-smoking Leonard Bernstein. The news that Cooper had been given a prosthetic nose had me focused on the search for evidence of comedic slippage rather than on the complex and tortured relationship between Bernstein and his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan), whose performance outstrips Cooper’s despite some very convincing turns by the Hollywood Maestro at the conductor’s podium. The whole film is underscored by the idea that Bernstein may have been a great orchestral conductor, but the way he conducted himself was flawed.
TUESDAY 28 Rishi has insulted the people of Greece by refusing to talk about the rightful ownership of the Elgin Marbles with Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. For some time in UK the marbles have been renamed as the Parthenon Marbles (or “sculptures”). I prefer to continue with the term Elgin because it points a finger straight at the man who stole them from Athens in the first place.
📌 The next installment in the series of stitchworks from Sam’s Legs drawing workshops is coming along nicely. The big experiment with this one will be the flesh tones of the topless stilt-walker.
WEDNESDAY 29 My wife makes no secret of the fact that she thinks I exaggerate my ailments, but I think on this occasion she is at least glad I never described my cold as flu. I thought the deep, raspy voice I’ve been using over the past two days was prima facie evidence that I was genuinely unwell. But yesterday she arrived home with a bottle of liquid treatment from Boots designed to stop it, so maybe she just finds Mr Raspy a bit irritating.
📌 A New Statesman long read on the state of British policing offers a lot of clues as to the political crimes inflicted on the force, but the closest it gets to a solution is to suggest some kind of alignment with the NHS “multi-disciplinary” structure in which specialists and non-specialists are all part of the same thing.
📷 Street decorations in the City of London before December 1.
📌 The Knowledge reports that Keir Starmer is secretly just as hardcore cruel on petty criminals as Suella or Priti.
THURSDAY 30 At the Headway writing group, aka Babyshoes, we were asked to come up with stories and poems that might fit into a Burns Night supper event in January next year. With the help of ChatGPT I wrote a him-and-her sketch featuring the irritating Martin and Heidi. Only later did I remember that a very similar scene appears in the film When Harry Met Sally, but without the dark ending.
New Year’s Eve probably wasn’t the best time to lecture Heidi on the meaning of Auld Lang Syne, but Martin was in too deep already and she was starting to annoy him. He tried to tell her it was about friendship and brotherhood, but she wouldn’t let go of the idea that it’s about forgetting. “It’s in the first line, you Muppet,” she said with a bit too much venom. Then he tried to move on to talking about “fond memories”, but that didn’t work. She just wanted to score points. As the clock counted down to midnight a moment of truth approached. Who’d buckle first? That’s when he did that thing they’ve never spoken about since.
During the session we also, for some reason, tried to concoct a gangster story about an international gambling syndicate based on the performance ratings of the Archerfish, a creature that stuns its prey by spitting water at it.
📌 RIP Shane McGowan, 65. I saw a picture of you recently and wasn’t sure you had very much left in the tank.
FRIDAY 1 The Knowledge identifies a new type of class elite – the Bopea – who are described as bohemian peasants, which sounds quaint.
Among their approved hobbies are rewilding, keeping chickens and cold-water swimming; no-nos include processed food, supercars and “bread that isn’t sourdough”. They don’t make honking jokes about sex; they do chat about gut health. And obviously, they are still rich.
Our present King, Charles III, is said to be the original Bopea.
📌 A Spanish modelling agency has a pneumatic AI model on their books called Aitana, who is said to earn more than €10,000 a month.
📌 Viewed from a different angle, the Tenerife map stitchwork in progress looks like a frightened ghost, which begs the question, What do ghosts fear?
📌 At a day-long training session to prepare us for membership of the Barbican’s Imagine Fund panel we learned all about values mapping. As the group of strangers had already been introduced to one another and gelled quite well it came as no surprise that we shared many values both generally and individually. From a list of about 60 personal values I named my top three as LOVE, LAUGHTER and PURPOSE.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 