Scrapbook: Week 2

January 6-12, 2024

SATURDAY 6 A peaceful silence has descended on La Palma. The streets are empty, the beach sparsely populated.

📌 They do like their Juliet balconies round here.

📌 Facebook reminds me that eight years ago I was quite the climate-change activist.

📌 I’ve only just remembered that last night, on the eve of Epiphany, my wife and her friend sat huddled in the corner of a bar debating the issue of assisted dying.

SUNDAY 7 Today we are off on an expedition into the dark interior of a hostile volcanic island. That’s a lie, we are on a bus tour around the sunshine Canary island of La Palma, aka La Isla Bonita, though from the way my wife prepares for these outings (food, drink, extra clothing) it could be true. Our guide is called Norbert.

📌 Tajogaite is one of La Palma’s newest volcanoes, says Norbert, and it very helpfully sent up a smoke signal on our arrival.

📌 Lunch in Puntagorda was empanadas y dos vinos Vega Norte, then back on the bus up to the “top of the island”, Caldera de Taburiente, and a huge international scientific colony of astrophysics observatories.

MONDAY 8 Our last day in La Palma inevitably included a stroll around town and time-honoured visits to the local church and market.

📌 RIP Franz Beckenbauer, age 78.

TUESDAY 9 Some years ago I made a pompous statement about the things the UK was good at. One of them was comedy and I ended my righteous rant by saying that Britain’s actors were its great truth tellers. Today I’m feeling especially smug because the excellent TV drama Mr Bates versus the Post Office looks as if it might have forced the British state to own up to bullying, extorting and criminalising its own citizens. 

📌 Jonty Bloom’s daily rant on Substack has a pop at the idea that public-spending cuts are what the country needs by listing where all tax revenue actually gets spent. The big hit is that targeting “sick-note scroungers” saves paltry amounts of money.

🎨 The sun is out (22⁰C), I’m 73% into the Ed McBain 87th Precinct story Fiddlers and an album by Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds is playing gently in my ears. I must do something about the knub of hard skin on the first joint of my right big toe.

📌 An email from Shroders Personal Wealth tells me that an investment outfit called BlackRock is pumping big money into something called ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds), which hints at something going on…

We believe this reflects greater investor willingness to hold riskier investments due to an improved economic outlook and the increased prospects for lower interest rates. Bond prices often rise when interest rates are expected to fall.

📌 A re-elected Donald Trump might not be a bad thing for Britain and Europe, says History professor Richard Vinen. It would force the European nations to stop sucking up to America and instead build a coherent alliance powerful enough to defend itself from neighbouring aggressors such as Putin’s Russia.

📷 The sunset tonight threw up a spooky sky.

WEDNESDAY 10 Just finished Fiddlers, the last book in Ed McBain 87th Precinct series, written in 2005. The first was Cop Hater in 1956 and the series numbers more than 50.

📷 The tiniest ladybird settled on our table outside Bar Gavota. It flew away once I started talking to it as if it were a new pet.

📌 Facebook reminds me that eight years ago I made a portrait for my sister to mark the death of the songwriter Peter Sarstedt. She was a fan.

THURSDAY 11 In one of his recent Substack newsletters Ian Dunt applauds Keir Starmer’s promise of a government that stays out of voters faces and “treads lightly” on their lives.

The health of a society is roughly inverse to how gripping its political coverage is. In a perfect world, it would be mind-numbingly boring. 

Yet he admits that Starmer’s new political “establishment” will be bad for the commentariat, himself included, who have been gifted over the past 14 years with the opportunity to make stuff like interest rates sound like the most exciting sport that was ever contested.

📌 Intrigued by the reading matter of the passenger sat next to my wife on the flight back to the UK. The crying baby across the aisle offered a possible answer to the book’s title.

FRIDAY 12 The switch back to the daily routine on returning from holiday is normally a tortured transition. This one has been calm and serene, chilled even. We’d already lined up some activities and appointments, so slipping back into stride has been easy. The only difficulty has been settling on the order in which we catch up on all the TV programmes we missed while we were away.

📌 On Radio 4 Jeremy Bowen said the best way to stop the Houthis causing trouble to shipping in the Red Sea is to get Israel to stop killing Palestinians.

📌 At Milton Court we saw a violinist, a pianist and a flame-haired Welsh soprano perform a set they’ll soon take to Carnegie Hall in New York. This is tuneless classical music so far up the Scale of Snoot that I struggled to stay with it. Fortunately they finished with some Welsh folk songs and my interest perked up.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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