WEDNESDAY 1 An article in the New European uses the disgraceful behaviour inside government as revealed in Baroness Hallett’s Covid-19 Inquiry to list a number of prominent people who hold power but have no shame (hello, Boris). It made me think a bit harder about the nature of shame. I also asked the worldwide web for its view.
Shame has various root causes. Sometimes shame is instilled in early childhood by the harsh words or actions of parents or other authority figures, or from bullying by peers. Shame can stem from a person’s own poor choices or harmful behaviour.
Maybe I should have asked for the root causes of shameless instead, but that would only have yielded reviews of the TV series Shameless, which has nothing to do with the amoral behaviour of renegade government officials.
📌 Our MP Nickie Aitken visited our community stitching group, The Golden Lane Stitchers, and got stuck in, stopping only to spread enough charm to prop up the meagre majority she holds, to offer her views on the Israel/Hamas conflict and to predict that she will lose her job sometime next year. Her parliamentary assistant Lucy had very cold hands but nevertheless bravely made several repeated attempts to thread a needle.
📌 At the wardmote for tomorrow’s election of a new member for common council I noticed that Natasha, who we haven’t seen for a while, is very pregnant. The overall flavour of the wardmote was as ever adherence to historical tradition, signalled right at the start of the meeting by the Ward Beadle, who in tricorn hat and elaborate robes begins with a short introductory speech.
Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All manner of persons having to do at this Court of Wardmote for the Ward of Cripplegate holden here this day before the Worshipful Alderwoman Susan Pearson of this Ward, draw near and give your attendance. God Save The King.
THURSDAY 2 The all-day Open Space event at the Barbican posed the question “How can we use co-creation and evaluation to bring about institutional change?” We then all split into small groups to interrogate the idea. It was a nice chemistry of people and it was easy to have fun playing with the theme. My main contribution was a soundbite that stated, “All organisations need a heart attack every now and then to keep them alive.”
📌 Facebook reminds me that seven years ago I painted a picture of a World War I rifle lingering over a poppy field.
FRIDAY 3 Against all expectations our friend June’s daughter won the local election and a seat on the Council. Interesting to note that she stood as a Labour Party candidate against three others (all men) who described themselves as “Independent”.
📌 The best long read on Gaza I’ve come across is from Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books. And long it is. His conclusion – that Israel and Palestine are stuck with each other – shuffles in almost apologetically, with the only addition being a repetition of the view that politics has the answer, somewhere yet to be found, and that violence never works.
📌 I have a 1pm haircut appointment tomorrow with my wife.
📌 At Barbican Cinema 3 we saw a tantalising switch in motive during The Killer as assassin Michael Fassbender first kills for money, in a weirdly religious way, then starts killing for love, breaking all his previous commandments. SPOILER ALERT: he then tries killing for revenge but ends up deciding that killing is a bad idea. Wow! What a revelation! The saving grace in this Netflix dud is a mesmerising casual cameo performance by Tilda Swinton.
SATURDAY 4 I tripped up last week, accidentally referring to someone as “she” rather than their preferred pronoun “they”. The gender debate is a minefield. In my Duolingo language studies I get very steamed up on the seeming absurdity of gendered nouns in both French and Spanish, and as a copy editor I grew to despise gendered pronouns full stop. Frustrating as all this is, it’s nice to learn that other countries are grappling with the same issue and in characteristically different ways.
📌 Facebook reminds me that eight years ago I was making Christmas cards in readiness.
📌 My wife’s actor cousin Mike came home today in pain. The overweight youth-theatre actors from Liverpool (“the twin tubs”) he was rehearsing with had duffed him up badly in a fight scene in Macbeth.
SUNDAY 5 A neighbour’s young children were excited to find me on the Archive Jukebox in Barbican library babbling about the history of the Golden Lane Estate.
📌 Interesting to note from a Guardian Opinion piece about class and political allegiance that social scientists have yet to find a useful definition of class that stretches beyond classification by occupation and education. The article briefly cites the case of Angela Rayner, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, but goes no further than to label Rayner (working-class in power) as some kind of outlier. I once told a friend asking about class that I am economically middle class but historically and culturally working class. She told me she was the reverse. Her job is psychology counselling.
📌 Liverpool desperately scraped a 1-1 draw against Luton Town with a late goal from Luis Díaz, whose father is still being held captive by kidnappers somewhere in Colombia.
📌 When we were younger my wife never seemed that keen on dancing in hold, so over the years I got used to watching her dance by herself, lost in music. Now I get the same remote pleasure watching her sing in her community choir. And it’s more thrilling for her to perform songs she really likes in big-choir performances at big-time venues such as the Barbican, as she did tonight (alongside 250 others), conducted by the King of Gospel André J Thomas.
MONDAY 6 That awful moment when I need to accept I may be out of your depth is getting closer.
📌 Every stitchwork rendition of Sam’s famous Legs drawing is different but still in essence the same. The current one has many faults but still easily identified in the mind as being what it’s meant to be.
📌 On Radio 4’s Battle Grounds the rural journalist Anna Jones met a militant vegan who became a dairy farmer.
TUESDAY 7 In the King’s Speech Rishi laid out his big plan to win next year’s election. It’s a phased total ban on smoking.
📌 Maybe I should forget about the show side of my stitchworks because the reverse side is always the best thing about them.
📌 Destination City, a sales pitch at St Giles Church to flog the idea of the City of London as a place of leisure, included a collection of corporates with limited presentation skills and a PowerPoint projection made for a different audience. They hadn’t bargained for a bunch of difficult residents demanding to know dull things like why there were so few public toilets in the Square Mile. As I watched the hapless sales people walk away with fleas in their ears an apt look could be seen in the face of one of Father Jack’s new modern sculptures.
WEDNESDAY 8 At the state opening of Parliament and the King’s Speech yesterday, Rishi and Keir Starmer marched in side by side laughing together. It’s hard to imagine what they were laughing at given the plight of both leaders with unruly members of their own parties. Starmer is losing support over his “diplomatic” stance on the Israel/Hamas conflict and his muddled view of the difference between a ceasefire and a humanitarian pause; Rishi has Suella openly plotting to grab his job asap with speeches designed to excite the looniest parts of the Loony Party (she wants police officers to confiscate tents from homeless people sleeping rough). The commentariat agrees that Suella is angling to be sacked, but Rishi seems reluctant to do that for reasons that everyone says are complex.
📌 I wasn’t expecting to be impressed by a film called How To Have Sex about three randy young women on a clubbing holiday in Crete. But as a coming-of-age story with hidden depths you only glimpse when least expecting to, it is hard to beat. Mia McKenna-Bruce as Tara is the stand-out performer in a debut role that proves she has a long career ahead of her. Her predicament in the film expands the issue of consent to include the agreements we make with ourselves about our own behaviour, and their consequences. Tara is the embodiment of this hard and painful struggle.
THURSDAY 9 Once again I hadn’t written a story for Headway’s Babyshoes writing group, so I asked Chat GPT to do it for me. My chosen title was My Imaginary Friend and I requested a Whodunnit.
In the quaint town of Willowbrook, the mysterious death of renowned artist Victoria Harper sent shockwaves through the community. The peculiar twist? Victoria’s closest confidante was her imaginary friend, Emily. Struggling to believe the unbelievable, detective Alex Reynolds delved into the artist’s enigmatic world. As secrets unravelled, it became apparent that Emily wasn’t imaginary at all. She was a long-lost twin, seeking revenge for a stolen life. With chilling precision, she orchestrated Victoria’s demise, leaving behind a masterpiece of deception. The canvas cleared, the town breathed a sigh of relief, unaware of the dark tale hidden behind the facade of an imaginary friend.
📌 Liverpool slipped up against Toulouse in the Europa League, losing 3-2. In a weird way I was happy for the Toulouse fans. They were beaten horribly at Anfield in October but came back with strength in tonight’s home leg.
FRIDAY 10 Suella is deviously sucking out any last vestiges of credibility Rishi might have had, says Simon Jenkins.
She is acting as Fool to Sunak’s increasingly tragic Lear.
📌 I’m starting to like the idea that Rishi is playing a canny game with Suella. The current government probably still has a year’s life left in it, so Suella has started her sprint for the finish line very early. She wants to be the next leader of the party and is laying out her politics for all to see. The Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has today refused to back her position in her fight with the Metropolitan Police. If more Conservatives start to distance themselves from her provocations and incendiary remarks, she could end up looking like a spent force very quickly. If enough of them publicly suggest she resigns if she is so unhappy with Rishi’s regime, maybe she will and Rishi will regain some authority. Having said all that, I’m not sure Rishi has the political intelligence or skill to make it happen. The New Statesman thinks he’s in a very bad place.
There’s a situation in chess known as a “zugzwang”: when one player finds themselves facing a state of play where every possible move will weaken their position.
📌 Finally got my copies of the latest Art et al project book, which collected all of the work Jen and Lisa did with the Indonesia-based art collective Ketemu. Aside from the fab visuals featured, the book is notable for being two translations (Indonesian/English) in an upside-down back-to-front format, which we had discussed beforehand but knew was risky, not least in the cost of printing. But it all worked well in the end, I think. And it looks great.
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.
SATURDAY 18 At Luke’s 50th birthday celebration in London Bridge, his partner Aron described Austin, Texas, their home city, as “the blueberries in the tomato soup”. This was a reference to the Democrat/Republican mix and much as I like the imagery, the probable taste of this exotic combo sounds disgusting.
📌 A bar worker in a London Bridge pub stood stock still, seemingly tranquilized by indifference.
📌 The young contestants on Strictly Come Dancing adopt a fake upbeat wide-eyed persona like they’re being interviewed for a place at an elite university. Which in essence they probably are.
SUNDAY 19 An article in the New European reminded me why I still name Bologna as my favourite Italian city, despite having visited only once.
📌 On the Threads social media site (Facebook’s answer to Twitter) Bill Gates recommends a visit to Brussels’ Sewer Museum and the chance to “experience the authentic sewer”.
📌 I’m a big fan of the “Early Life” section of Wikipedia entries, even though they might not always be scrupulously accurate. Today I enjoyed the text on Rosalynn Carter, wife of former US president Jimmy Carter, who has died, age 96. Wiki also researches some very nice images, free to use under Creative Commons licence.
MONDAY 20 With the vague idea that I might one day put together an art collection inspired by our 1998 trip down the east coast of the USA (Title: Route 1), I have been re-reading the scrapbook we made during that journey. The gist of the project would be to create something with the same flavour as the Australian one I did with MUMA (Monash University Museum of Art) for Art et al. Browsing the US scrapbook, I’m impressed by the care we took in recording the obscene price of restaurant wine and the obesity (and bad manners) of American children.
📌 Noticed on Instagram that Michelle had posted a picture from South Africa of herself with her dad, who has died. I knew he wasn’t well and suspected the worst, but never asked for details.
📌 Finally getting to grips with Let it Be on the piano. Want to move on to the C-inversion version, but happy at the moment to master the “walk-down” from F at the end of the intro.
TUESDAY 21 A whole day (ok, five hours) making patterns and testing various methods of transferring prints and drawings to fabric for stitching. Transferring to light fabrics is mainly easy, just a simple trace. Transferring to dark fabrics is another matter and always prone to failure. Transfers are often a one-shot deal involving transfer pencils or ink and a hot iron, so if it goes wrong you either start again or attempt to salvage the project in some way later as stitching is in progress. Up until now, I’ve always opted to salvage the bodge, but today I decided that every project needs a whole day to nail the pattern and transfer to fabric ready for stitching. I need to learn to enjoy this process and not see it as an interruption to actually stitching.
📌 Half way through the film Saltburn you get the idea that the lead character Olly, a seemingly dopey first-year student at Oxford, is on a mission to destroy the aristocracy, or at least a tiny part of it. But his motivation is unclear. Is it just his own sexual repression, or is there something deeper going on? Is this really class war? We never find out, and the rest of the film spirals into a bundle of half-cocked sub-Brideshead sequences with a few colourful twists thrown in.
📌 The trailer for the BBC drama Boat Story had you thinking it was a crime caper in which two innocent unwitting strangers get caught up in a drug war. It is, sort of, but not very much. It’s a very clever and very, very funny COMEDY caper.
WEDNESDAY 22 The government is now so desperate that it has given up even trying to stem its loss of public support. It is now on a massive, ground-zero wrecking spree of public services, says Rafael Behr.
Labour will inherit a colossal mess and face vast pent-up demand for palpable improvement in the state of everything.
📌 Film director Ridley Scott is getting a slap for playing fast and loose with historical facts in his war drama Napoleon. One of his biggest crimes is said to be his depiction of Josephine (IRL older not younger than Nap) and her relationship with the crazed general. Cue the arrival of a university boffin at the Conversation to put the record straight and to tell a love story that is quite touching in its banality.
📌 Record numbers of people are being found dead at home long after their bodies have already started to rot, the Guardian reports.
Men are more than twice as likely as women to be discovered in a decomposed state.
📌 Dense, heavy and a little bit creepy was our verdict on the film May December. I drifted in and out of concentration a few times during this over-studied film but managed to stay awake for the big non-climax climax in which Julianne Moore finds herself during a staring match with a wild cat in the woods.
THURSDAY 23 Google Photos contains nearly all of my visual thinking over the past 10 years. Sometimes it’s worth browsing as a reminder of where your head was at a particular moment in the past. Or sometimes you look back and wonder WHAT WAS I THINKING OF?
📌 At Headway I agreed to put my leaf stitchworks and the big gold Adam & Eve one into Open Studio.
📌 Ade agreed to let me make a text stitchwork of his poem Otherwise Engaged.
📌 Our journey to Winchester was interrupted by an “intruder” on the railway track.
📌 Winchester is so dark I got lost on my way to the ceremonial lighting of the Christmas tree at Kingsgate and missed it entirely. I ended up taking refuge in the Wykeham Arms.
FRIDAY 24 Another very strong analysis from Andy Beckett, who reckons Rishi’s dubious lurches towards authoritarianism are not seen by voters as a sign of strength but as laughable.
📌 In 1817 Jane Austen became ill and moved to a house in College Street, Winchester, to be closer to her doctor. She later died here and is buried in Winchester Cathedral. Winchester’s book shops make the most of this connection.
📌 My wife thinks there should be a law against any kind of Christmas frivolity starting before December 1. Winchester does not concur.
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.
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Billy's Scrapbook 