February 3-9, 2024
SATURDAY 3 I joined a Facebook group that hosts photographs from Crosby Beach, which is just north of my hometown Liverpool, the site of a famous collection of Antony Gormley sculptures, Another Place, and a regular giver of stunning vistas.
📌 Ashamed to admit that I did not know that “See you next Tuesday” is a coded insult.
📌 To the Barbican Kitchen to meet a woman called Sophie, who wants me to stitch the names of 24 people who signed a linen napkin at a family wedding. Turns out it was the wedding of a “famous writer”, Amy, and her partner Jake, who before getting wed to Amy suffered a brain seizure, was in a coma and emerged with something called Capgras Syndrome. This meant that Jake knew that Amy was Amy, but she wasn’t the real Amy. He thought she was an imposter, a fake double. Writer Amy has apparently penned a book about this fascinating story, and the screen rights have been sold. The eventual marriage of Jake and Amy thus became symbolic of some kind of new start, so Amy’s sister-in-law, Sophie, is understandably protective of this momentous family-napkin stitchwork project, so much so that she brought to our meeting a very professional example of what she wants. I told her I am a bodging stitch monkey and I don’t know one stitch from another, hoping she would tactfully back out. But she still wants me to do it, and I will give it a go, just so I can say I played a part in Jake and Amy’s dramatic story. She’s also pledged to make a “substantial” donation to Headway as payment. That donation might not be so substantial when she sees what I do with the precious napkin.
📌 American Fiction is a film that very cleverly lives up to its title in lots of different ways. At the top level there are stories of racial identity. Beneath that there are questions about how we write and edit our own lives, how we aspire to be parts of stories that we don’t really fit into, and ultimately about how honest we are with ourselves and others about who we really are. It’s a charming, funny and sensitive film that moves with ease around its subjects (race, class, sexuality, ageing, sibling rivalry and the hypocrisies of the book world). Top marks go to Tracee Ellis Ross, as the main character Monk’s sister Lisa.
SUNDAY 4 As I entered the room for our allotment group AGM at the punishing hour of 10am my spirit jumped. Around 20 people were singing happy birthday to Geke, one of their fellow growers. Tea was being poured, cakes and biscuits consumed. There was a projected photograph on the wall of the Butterfly & Moth Society giving us a talk one day last year. The good mood fizzled out when the election of a Chair for this year’s committee came up on the agenda. Silence. No one wants to do it, so for the next 12 months we are Chairless.
📌 Zone Of Interest is an oblique but scarily intelligent view of the Holocaust, from the lush garden of an Auschwitz commandant’s family home, where an awkward idyll sits right next door to the smoking chimneys of the death camp’s human incinerators. With heavy symbolism and masterful sound design the film places a culture of mass murder at the heart of everyday life, where it insinuates and settles. My favourite scene is near the end, of the commandant trying to be sick. But nothing comes out, because there is nothing there. He is dead inside.
📌 Yippee!!! My premium bonds paid up this month.
MONDAY 5 I’m still trying to work out whether the DUP’s decision to return to power-sharing in Northern Ireland under the leadership of Sinn Féin is a success. According to Freddie Hayward in the New Statesman Rishi is claiming it as a win, for now. Things might not look so rosy once the demands roll in for more and more ££billions to ensure the proper restoration of a devolved government his party helped destroy in the first place.
📌 My wife accused me of being an exhibitionist sneezer. She says my loud sneezes are unnecessary and imply a deep need to seek attention. My reply was to remind her of the words pot and kettle since every time she sneezes it carries on for at least 50 successive sneezes and half way through starts to include a kind of loud sigh-cum-grunt, not unlike that of some prominent tennis players.
📌 Like most people, I am deeply suspicious of algorithms, except when they get it right and identify the exact pair of shoes or the whizzy kitchen knife you had in mind all along. When that happens I secretly give thanks to the algorithmists.
TUESDAY 6 The New Statesman detects cracks in the Labour command. Starmer and would-be chancellor Rachel Reeves have different ideas on how to grow the UK economy, and have been heard singing from very separate song sheets. One of them has a chorus that includes a £28bn investment in green energy; the other overuses the word “aspiration” and sounds like it was written by Ebenezer Scrooge.
WEDNESDAY 7 Canadian photographer Edward Byrtynsky has been documenting the effects of human activity on the planet for 40 years. But ironically, sometimes the environmental damage (receding glaciers, oil spills, dried-out lakes). throws up an image of beauty. His picture gallery in the Guardian inspired me to dig out a painting I did a few years ago of a rain stain on concrete.
📌 Ed Davey was on the radio squirming over his role in the Post Office scandal. Can’t help but think all it accomplished was to leave his fingerprints all over the corruption that led to the conviction and bankruptcy of so many people, when in fact he probably acted in good faith on the assurances of others (the Post Office, the courts, the unions).
📌 Also on the radio a German theatre director working in London for the first time said he was shocked that ticket prices here are five times those of his own country.
📌 I managed to repair my wife’s novelty fascinator, which got damaged on a lively night out.
THURSDAY 8 My submission to the Headway writing group this week had the title A Romantic Fool.
Death was something Heidi and Martin could both joke about quite easily. Scarcely a week went by without one of them announcing they’d changed their funeral music. Martin once even jumped from ‘Crazy’ by Seal to Radiohead’s ‘Let Down’ in one day (Heidi keeps going back to ‘Disco Inferno’). Likewise they regularly dreamt up new gravestone epitaphs for themselves and each other. But one day, for some reason Heidi insisted that Martin stuck with his very first choice, A Romantic Fool. He did quite like it, in a Byronesque way, but something wasn’t quite right. He wandered around lonely as a cloud for a bit, wondering what could be wrong with A Romantic Fool. Then he realized what it was. It was that A, the indefinite article. Take that away and a job title was born, Romantic Fool. Hell, it was even something to live up to. Heidi disagreed and said that if he died first she’d put the A back in. Then they laughed about it. Sometimes Martin slipped back to that day he had with the clouds and remembered that what he really liked most about clipping the indefinite article was that when A Romantic Fool became simply Romantic Fool it became both a state of being, and of not being.
📌 The general feeling is that by putting a £28bn price tag on his green investment plan Starmer dug himself into a hole.
FRIDAY 9 Not sure Rishi will be overwhelmed with joy to learn that the Conservatives are winners when it comes to putting children into care.
📌 Joe Biden is facing criticism for being 81 and occasionally forgetful. The New Statesman defends him by detailing the economic success he’s brought to the US…
Real-terms GDP growth in the US has been more than three times that of the UK, employment has been robust, and inflation has been addressed faster and more conclusively than in any other advanced economy. While Europe stagnates and China experiences rapid deflation, Bidenomics has been a roaring success.
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