One month as it happened…
MONDAY 1 Earthquakes probably happen somewhere on every day of the year, but New Year’s Day always seems especially popular.
📌 I know some people get a big, buoyant sense of renewal on NYD but I always find it one of the most miserable days of the year. I go to bed relieved that it is over and tomorrow will soon be here. Also, my reading glasses broke, which is a real bummer.
TUESDAY 2 And right on cue, to blow away the New Year funk comes a new rant on Substack from the New European‘s Mr Knocky Jonty Bloom. Did I use the word “new” enough in that last sentence?
📌 Speculation continues on the likelihood of a Middle East war breaking out in the Red Sea.
📌 The New Statesman has a valedictory piece on East Timor from 1990 by John Pilger, who has died age 84. I’d forgotten what an elegant writer Pilger could be, probably because years ago when I edited his copy for the Guardian’s Weekend magazine I found it badly overwritten and had several tortured telephone conversations with him, one in which he demanded with menaces to know how his 5,000-word masterpiece became 4,000. He ended up thanking me for my efforts.
📌 Darren’s New Year LondonArtRoundup is from Florida and features an awesome Day-glow sculpture called Miami Mountain.
📌 The Knowledge predicts that Keir Starmer will not win a landslide general-election victory. Starmer is, it says, “a man with the blank, startled gaze of a badger in the headlights”, a look, it says, not unlike previous Labour underperformers Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband. Did they mean rabbit?
WEDNESDAY 3 The whole day has seemed like one long build-up to the Luke The Nuke appearance in the world darts final, with a brief pause to listen to Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart interview Angela Rayner on their The Rest Is Politics podcast and a couple of dopey Charles Paris radio dramas starring Bill Nighy. The Rayner interview was especially impactful, for Tory Rory also.
📌 My wife thinks my new holiday sunglasses (+3.50 magnification) make me look like a drugs smuggler.
📌 Sam’s drawing of two pork chops look strangely like two angry people shouting at one another.
THURSDAY 4 Jonty Bloom’s early-morning rant includes the miserable thought that for the next 40 years Liz Truss will annually turn up at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Because as a former prime minister she is entitled to. And she has no shame.
📌 The game of Spot The Celebrity Lookalike we always play on holiday day has so far only yielded two contenders: “Mick Hucknall” in a music bar called The Vault, and “Amy Winehouse” on a zebra crossing.
📌 The Knowledge reports on something called The Trilemma Of The Modern World, which states that…
Governments cannot have all three of democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration. The more you integrate your economy into the world, the less sovereignty your citizens will enjoy; the less you integrate, the poorer your citizens will be.
It then points out that Brexit has defined where Britain sits in that uncomfortable triangle.
📌 The 18.22 sunsets rarely fail to delight.
FRIDAY 5 As we boarded the Fred Olsen Express to the nearby island of La Palma I noticed that a large portion of the lower vehicle deck of the vessel is effectively a staff car park. Fifteen minutes into our journey, on the upper passenger deck one man was being violently and very noisily sick all over the ship’s carpet. Passengers (including us) scattered to seats closer to the toilets.
📌 In today’s tapas bar my wife swears our waiter was “Pedro Almodóvar” moonlighting from his day job.
📌 The big festival here in the Canaries is the Three Kings, or Los Tres Reyes Magos. It’s always a fabulous celebration of community and togetherness. From the rooftop of our hotel we got a special window on the street parade in La Palma.
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.
SATURDAY 13 Jonathan Freedland finally names and shames Benjamin Netanyahu as “leader of the worst, most extreme government in Israel’s history.”
📌 At the Barbican for a second look at the Re/Sisters exhibition before it closes I was again most impressed by the film art, and most particularly the one featuring hot lava flows, which I think we’re meant to be symbolic of something else.
SUNDAY 14 At our allotment group meeting I cheerfully urged Anna to become next year’s Chair, only to be stumped two minutes later by Anna suggesting me as Co-Chair. Now I need to learn all about plants and planting, in which I have very little interest. My role in the group until now has been sweeping, tidying, mending and digging, with occasional input on the destination of the annual group outing. Last year my greatest contribution was to fix the tap on the water butt. Executive jobs I have always managed to avoid. Until now.
📌 At a Zoom meeting to discuss my contribution to the Nomas Projects exhibition Cosmic Madonna in Dundee I got to talk through the process of creating the Fallopian Jesus painting and cheekily use the words “playing with a vagina”.
One of the viewers said she never thought of the vagina as a super colourful place. She said she thought of her vagina as a dark place, which seemed quite psychological to me. Owen, one of the organisers, said my image was “bang on theologically”. It was made in response to the prompt of “Incarnation”, a subject Nomas explores every year around Christmas time. I wasn’t sure exactly what Incarnation meant in terms of Christian doctrine, so I looked it up, and that was where the painting began.
Owen’s remark took me back to one of my primary school reports, age 7, when in a closing note to my parents my teacher wrote, “I am thrilled to see his interest in art and the Bible”.
MONDAY 15 An email tells me that in February the auction house Christie’s in New York will host Goodbye Peachtree Road, selling artefacts from the collection of Elton John. Browsing the catalogue is like a study in modern art, with pieces by some of the 20th Century’s most iconic art-world figures (Herb Ritts, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, William Klein, Banksy).
📌 In the Zoom discussion yesterday for the Cosmic Madonna exhibition one viewer remarked on the lightness of my Fallopian Jesus image and it did make me wish it could be made into a stained-glass window. Michelle wants me to remake it in stitch.
📌 Took a walk around the Barbican trying to imagine the best place for a dead body to be discovered in a Vera-style TV cop show.
📌 In the New European, Jonty Bloom announces the death of the City of London as a financial powerhouse.
Once famous as a towering force, it is now little more than a quaint, regional has-been with a very dusty trophy cabinet.
TUESDAY 16 Just after the Shipping Forecast early this morning the BBC World Service revealed that Camilla’s nickname is Lorraine. which they said is a play on the French words La Reine.
📌 Even earlier, at 04.32, was a fascinating interview on In the Studio with the film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, wife of Michael Powell and longtime collaborator with Martin Scorsese, who told of her time as an apprentice in which she was tutored in cutting huge chunks from masterpieces by François Truffaut and Bernardo Bertolucci. She also said Scorsese himself is a master editor, which made her job a real treat.
📌 Hooked on a website that scoots around Google Earth showing obscure islands and revealing fun facts about their weirdness. There’s one jointly owned by France and Spain that switches its nationality every six months.
📌 At a screening of Priscilla, the Sofia Coppola biopic of Priscilla Presley, we learned that Elvis posed for their wedding photos with a cigarette in his mouth. That was probably the most interesting thing about this deeply shallow film. The hairstyles tried hard to say something, but not very much.
WEDNESDAY 17 The Guardian only rarely throws up a properly intelligent insight into how we live today. Most of its content is following and not leading a progressive forward march. Today, however, a sociologist has a warning for those who think they know the British voting public.
Broadly speaking, they [British voters] are tolerant and open-minded when it comes to race, gender and sexuality. They also support redistributive economic policies such as public ownership and higher taxes on the rich. The fact these progressive instincts have not, historically, been harnessed by the Labour party says more about the Labour party than the electorate.
📌 Vera’s grandkids put her on TikTok over Christmas proclaiming that “Santa Claus does not f****** exist.” She was an instant hit. All the TikTok people wanted a grandma like Vera.
THURSDAY 18 In David Aaronovitch’s Notes From The Underground substack, he claims to have spotted a key flaw in the TV drama Mr Bates Versus The Post Office. After a fascinating introduction aligning the Bates drama with other classic British dramas in which the little people take on the might of state bureaucracy (Passport To Pimlico, Whisky Galore, The Titfield Thunderbolt), Aaronovitch then asks us to go inside the head not of Mr Bates the hero but of Paula Vennells, the head of the Post Office, who was not responsible for the mess of wrongdoing and injustice but nevertheless chose to sweep it under the carpet. This, he says, is where a true reflection of British society lies.
📌 An email from Chris at Full Fact offers a clue to how hard the fight against fake news is becoming.
📌 At an evaluation workshop with the Barbican for last year’s differently various exhibition and the Headway collaboration with Barbican Communities we were asked what impact the partnership had made on us personally. I said the main one was “celebrity” because my neighbours seem to think differently various was Billy’s exhibition, despite my insistence that dozens of other people made equal contributions.
FRIDAY 19 Not in a long time has a film impressed so much in its totality as Poor Things did last night at the Barbican. Normally you find parts of films you like and other parts you are happy to forget. Emma Stone carries this compelling Alasdair Gray story about brain transplantation from start to finish. Her assistants on this journey, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo manage to look like naturals to the cause of weird medicine without even trying too much. The film also brought back memories of a 2019 pre-pandemic visit to Glasgow and a night in the Alasdair Gray-muralled brasserie Ubiquitous Chip, where a drunken Scotsman told us he thought we were “theatre types” (says my 2019 scrapbook). And it prompted me to start re-reading Alasdair Gray’s A Life In Pictures, from which I intend to steal some stitchwork patterns.
📌 Our Brighton friend Rupert is a local hero, for rescuing a missing parrot called Susan.
SATURDAY 20 Britain will soon lose the ability to make steel, says Jonty Bloom. That’s because the government has worked out that it is cheaper to buy it from a country that does produce it than to make it itself. But steel is symbolic, says Bloom, of a nation that has an industrial strategy, since steel is an essential element of everything from ships and cars to scientific and medical equipment. Having your nation’s day-to-day fortunes reliant on the steel price of other nations is no strategy at all…
SUNDAY 21 I began last week’s scrapbook by noting that Jonathan Freedland described Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s worst ever leader. One week later the Observer goes one step further saying the only solution for the peaceful future of the region is his removal from office.
📌 There’s a big storm called Isha out there. One of our neighbours, Miguel, asked in the WhatsApp group if our windows are strong enough to withstand it.
📌 In Junior Bake Off nine-year-old Esme’s “Florence And The Machine” tart collapsed into a pile of rubble before she could get it to the gingham altar.
MONDAY 22 The cheerful news this morning from Jonty Bloom is that Jeremy Hunt is planning a new Loadsamoney boom in an attempt to give Rishi a chance of winning this year’s election. He knows fully well that the boom will go bust in about five years, by which time poverty and desperation among the little people will have soared out of control.
📌 The Knowledge quotes the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz in trying to work out what Benjamin Netanyahu is playing at with his Rambo politics in Gaza. It says he’s being bundled by a group of ultras in his government who want to turn Israel into a supremacist regime and rid the world of all Palestinians. The irony of course is that this is the type of politics that led to the creation of Israel in the first place. And it won’t work for Israel because it effectively means it will become a theocratic dictatorship rather than the democracy it still proudly claims to be…
Israel will be viewed as a rogue and racist state and shunned by the world. It will become an economic backwater; its brightest talent will leave and its military capacity will dwindle. Without democracy, Israel will not survive.
📌 The new Tenerife stitchwork is finished. I started it while we were there over Christmas but never finished it before we returned. I guess I was too distracted by wine and volcanoes. Alex says it looks like an avocado.
I think I might need to add some light blue into the purple Atlantic Ocean. In the meantime, there are hours of endless fun to be had putting it through AI to see what happens.
📌 We’re now at the end of Season 2 of Top Boy, which if you include the original two seasons of Top Boy Summerhouse from 2011-13, makes four seasons completed. Only one final season remains and Sully has just sensed a weakness in Dushane and done something very dramatic. The latest inner-city gangsta jargon expressions we’ve adopted include “pre”, meaning take a look or to preview something, and “inabit”, which works on the lines of “see you later”. Still find it hard to believe that words such as “fam”, “cuz” and “blud” are still in use, but I do like “yoot” and “bredren”.
TUESDAY 23 I’ve decided that if I am to exhibit my attempts at art I should learn something about it, so I signed up to a course that takes you through all the primary-school stuff in 10-minute chunks, asking you questions along the way such as “is this white piece of paper on a white piece of canvas art?” The course didn’t cost very much.
That reminded me of my own white-on-white project, from 2022, in which I remade The Pyramids and assorted bits of Egypt with cotton buds, lots of talcum powder and tiny marshmallows for coffee.
📌 On the floor, right below the underside of the dome in St Paul’s Cathedral they’ve installed a meditative Labyrinth. The idea is that you walk it slowly in your stocking feet and some kind of spiritual enlightenment overtakes you on your journey. The inward path to the centre of the labyrinth is associated with release, the centre with receiving, and the outward path with return. The experience was not unlike snaking through the queue at an airport check-in, but it was a group invitation and I was glad to say yes to because it meant I could snoop around the Cathedral free of charge (normal price £25) and revisit Henry Moore’s Mother & Child, alongside which I had my first ever painting exhibited in 2016.
WEDNESDAY 24 We’ve slipped into the habit of pledging to do that thing that really needs doing “at the weekend” instead of today.
📌 You’d think Donald Trump was well on his way to becoming America’s next president by the way his victory in a poll of New Hampshire Republicans is being reported.
📌 Got a great tip-off from It’s Nice That about The Therapist, a short film that details the role of barbershops as a safe space for black British men to talk with their barber (their Therapist) in ways not available elsewhere.
📌 Vera said Iris knocked on her door in the middle of the night asking if Vera was ready for their two o’clock lunch date.
THURSDAY 25 At Headway James told us his dad had an obituary in the Guardian. He also showed us the small scar above his left eye he got while playing under a table with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ children Frieda and Nick.
📌 There was no writing group today, but I’d already done a story with the title The Haggis Hunt…
Martin was more than surprised when Heidi dragged him out shopping for Haggis. She was a lifelong militant vegetarian and everything about Haggis should have been a red-flag issue. But here they were, traipsing around Hackney in search of that mysterious lump of unwanted animal body parts, pulped and compressed into a plastic ball. And it was only now, after four hours studying the spice list in each of these competing globs of viscera, that was he starting to understand why. Her new boss Mark and partner Jenni were coming round for a Burns-night supper and Heidi wanted to impress. She’d already prepped the neeps and tatties, insisting on turnip and not swede. Her vegetarian militancy had melted in a flush of suckuppery, and Martin had already agreed reluctantly not to mention that haggis is banned in the US, as is any food product containing sheep’s lung. But what was really bothering him was her insistence that only red wine can be served with haggis. This just seemed plain bonkers.
📌 In the stage play Dear England Joseph Fiennes looks like a natural playing England football boss Gareth Southgate as he drags a deeply entrenched collection of primitive soccer talent into new sophisticated “touchy-feely” ways of thinking. He has sports psychologist Geena McKee at his side in the colossal task of slaying collective fear. The message is that losing is OK, but the type of loser you choose to be impacts on others and can even mutate into a destructive cultural virus, a malaise. Fiennes puts in a classy performance, playing Southgate partly in caricature and partly as an internally conflicted hero on a quest amid an energetic cast of comedy banterists and boys trying desperately to be men. My wife thought the play was a game of two halves, the first half being better than the second. The reviewer in the Guardian thought the reverse. That’s football for you.
FRIDAY 26 And then came that horrible moment when the 10 screws you counted out carefully became nine…
📌 The media is reporting that Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp will “leave the club” at the end of this season. This isn’t a real shock as he telegraphed his intention in the media sometime last year. It is poignant on the back of seeing the play Dear England last night and one of Klopp’s quotes in his resignation press conference will no doubt resonate with Gareth Southgate, who in Dear England talks a lot with his players about love.
I love absolutely everything about this club, I love everything about the city, I love everything about our supporters, I love the team, I love the staff. I love everything. But that I still take this decision shows you that I am convinced it is the one I have to take.
Jürgen Klopp
SATURDAY 27 At the Courtyard Theatre, a small venue in a large building in Hoxton, we saw Ross become Lew Grade in Who Is No 1? a stage play about the business wrangling behind the making of the cult TV series The Prisoner. It centred on the tragic personality of Patrick McGoohan, the self-inflicted torture he suffered for his art and his ultimate undoing. My guess is that he probably deserved it. Ross had a great line when, as Grade, cigar in one hand, whisky in the other, he warns McGoohan not to make himself “a second Orson Welles”.
SUNDAY 28 My wife asked me over lunch if I could spare “79 minutes” afterwards for a “surprise”. I closed my eyes, opened them when told to and started watching the film This Is Spinal Tap.
📌 One of the secret new-year resolutions I made with myself was to cook food from recipes instead of freestyling. Today I am tackling chicken and peppers with red onion, garlic and rosemary. It’s a single tray-bake so I can’t see what can go wrong. As a nod to my old freestyling days I added some old leftover chorizo.
MONDAY 29 Kinlochewe, a place right at the top of Scotland, has been named as having the highest ever recorded January temperature for the UK. It clocked up 19.6⁰C last Sunday, which made it hotter than Rome.
📌 Stitching straight lines is not easy, as my latest attempt at a Barbican tower proves. Or maybe I just can’t see straight.
📌 In preparing to sit on an interview panel described as a “fireside chat” with candidates for the job of artistic director at the Barbican, I realised I used to work with one of the candidates. I wonder if they will remember me?
TUESDAY 30 Jonty Bloom is not convinced the newly minted “deal” with the DUP to restore power sharing in Northern Ireland holds water unless the government has done a secret back-door deal with Brussels.
📌 The Barbican job candidate I knew from the past giggled then remarked, “Oh my god, it’s Billeee!”
📌 Managed to catch up with a fantastic picture gallery in the Guardian from Cuba by a welder turned photographer.
WEDNESDAY 31 Surprised to learn that one of the people on the interview panel I did yesterday, Mikey J, co-wrote the music for the Netflix series Top Boy with Brian Eno. During our online chat Mikey’s cat walked nonchalantly back and forth behind him on the sofa.
📌 Freddie Hayward makes an interesting observation about how foreign secretary David Cameron, free from the need to answer to constituents (he is not an MP) or the internal bitching within his own parliamentary party (he sits in the comfort of the House of Lords) is sneakily steering British foreign policy in new, uncharted directions. Directions that might even appeal to an incoming Labour government.
📌 The Knowledge has a tantalising story about Vladimir Putin that automatically conjures images of a Bond Baddy in his secret lair.
The palatial pad includes three properties, kitted out with £8,000 bidets, £3,500 shower heads, and £300,000 worth of Austrian beer brewing kit capable of producing 82 pints a day.
📌 Bill Clinton (US President 1993-2001) is younger than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
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Billy's Scrapbook 