December 2-8, 2023
SATURDAY 2 Today’s training session to prepare us for our role on the Barbican’s Imagine Fund panel was interrupted by the arrival of my wife who had locked herself out. We were bang in the middle of a session on systems of oppression, positionality and intersectionality. It was a chance to leave the room for five minutes to hand over my door keys. I returned to the session to learn a new word, “misogynoir”, which is discrimination against black women.
SUNDAY 3 My wife and I enjoy using jargon from TV crime shows ironically by inserting them into dull domestic settings. On various occasions in the past we have adopted “OCG” (Organised Crime Gang, from Line of Duty), “Wagwan” (What’s going on? from Top Boy), and most recently the act of “clipping” someone (killing an enemy, from Kin) in relation to kitchen activities and politics. Nigel Farage is top of the shopping list of people we want clipped.
📌 The Euro 2024 draw was interrupted during transmission, reports the Guardian…
The interruption, which sounded like sexual moaning, was initially heard after Switzerland were drawn in the same group as Scotland, Hungary and hosts Germany.
📌 My wife gave me an early Christmas present because giving it to me on Christmas Day would rob me of the chance to show off my Screwfix jumper at all the parties building up to the big day.
📌 The reverse side of my stitchwork projects continue to fascinate. I sometimes wonder if subconsciously I’m thinking about the underside while stitching the show side. I know I check regularly for knots and loose threads, so maybe these subliminal “accidents” are not so accidental after all.
MONDAY 4 Of all the Shane MacGowan obituaries and tributes that have appeared over the past few days, the one that did the best job for me was in the Socialist Worker.
📌 Absorbing insight in today’s Sensemaker from Tortoise as to who is actually in charge of the Israeli side of its horrific assault on Gaza, the bottom line being that once America runs out of patience with Israel it will be on its own.
📌 Keir Starmer stupidly stated the fact that Margaret Thatcher was a truly transformative prime minister. Now he’s getting slapped up for being a Thatcherist.
The distinction between praising someone’s power to affect change and the change itself is easily lost.
New Statesman
📌 The local transvestite, Patrica, turned up to my wife’s Age UK Christmas party (the first of several) and played the piano.
📌 RIP Glenys Kinnock, 79. I remember you telling a reporter how you met your husband Neil at Cardiff university by asking, “are you the man from the socialist society?”
📌 To La Petite Auberge in Islington for a pre-Christmas catch-up with Shirley, Sandra and Gill, where we leaned that Gill has a thing about spinach and its impact on her kidney function and that Sandra once broke both arms at the same time.
TUESDAY 5 Good luck to anyone who ever tries to persuade Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott that Brexit was a disaster. His stubbornly reasonable analytical approach to the subject is a constant cold shower to all rose-tinted Remainers.
📌 Beyond all expectations the Fallopian Jesus painting is being splashed on posters around Dundee to promote the Nomas Projects window exhibition Chris got for us.
📌 A High Court judge has ruled against an attempt by Tortoise to get information about how Conservative Party leadership elections are run – specifically the ones that delivered prime ministers the public had no say in choosing.
WEDNESDAY 6 Intriguing investigation in today’s Sensemaker on the very determined and scrupulously planned rise of Keir Starmer to become leader of the Labour Party and the nation’s most likely next prime minister. It includes secret meetings and shadowy fixers.
📌 On our way to East Croydon station after a Christmas lunch with Sue, Margaret and Lil, I accidentally kicked over a beggar’s (empty) paper cup. By the time I realised what I’d done I’d lost the will to go back and say sorry. I think my guilt probably caught up with me later on the train home because I used the time to write a long email to Anna at 38 Degrees saying keep up the good work.
📌 Rishi’s government is starting to crumble right in front of his eyes.
THURSDAY 7 I was disappointed last week to miss the Artbox London exhibition Identity, which clashed with our own Open Studio. Artbox is a project I have long admired so it was a treat to get an email this morning saying Identity is available to view online.
📌 Freddie Hayward in the New Statesman says the resignation of immigration minister Robert Jenrick is “the latest sign that a death drive has gripped the Conservative Party.”
📌 David Gauke revels in the irony that it is Rwanda, a country deemed unsafe by the UK’s Supreme Court, that could end up burying Rishi’s desire to dump asylum seekers there.
📌 The second of the stitchworks to come out of Sam’s Queen of Wonky drawing workshops is finished. The race is on to find a fresh supply of the silky brocade fabric for when I finish the next one. Sarah’s son Caspar is on the case.
📌 To Guildhall School with Marge, Christine and Alison for a free concert from the Guildhall Big Band jazz combo, which featured music arranged by Allan Ganley and vocals from Elaine Delmar, 84, a veteran jazzer who mentors the school’s students.
FRIDAY 8 Benjamin Zephaniah died yesterday aged 65, which is no age these days, says the guy who is 64. Zephaniah was the subject of one of my earliest reviews for NME in the 1980s, when he was known as a “dub-ranting poet”. I think my NME review highlighted the ranting aspect of his work, which to me sounded very angry.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
Thanks for pointing to the Shane McGowan obituary, I’m going to search for Whisky in the Jar. You might like to look at the Benjamin Zephania poem to the Christmas Turkey, that would make No 1 if there was a Christmas Poem Top 20 chart.
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