February 10-16, 2024
SATURDAY 10 Nickie Aitken, our MP, will not stand at the next general election. She is the latest in a long list of Conservatives who have decided to get out of politics before they are pushed out by voters. When she visited our stitching group last year she told us then that she was expecting to lose her job. She is moving to the UAE in support of her husband, who has been asked to work there. The Westminster Accounts database says that Aiken’s biggest “gift” since getting elected in 2019 was £7,250 from Qatar.
📌 At the Barbican Conservatory with Marge to see works by the Indian sculptor Ranjani Shettar we actually spent half the time drinking wine at the pop-up bar.
📌 The judges on the Masked Singer were convinced that the costume character Bigfoot was the comedian Alex Brooker, and the strongest evidence I could find for that being true was the costume’s uncanny resemblance to Brooker himself.
SUNDAY 11 If Keir Starmer is down in the dumps today after reading in great detail how he embarrassingly binned Labour’s green economic recovery plan, he could do worse than turn to the New European, in which there’s a six-point plan for “winning from the centre”. And the shocker is that the first of those six points is to bring back National Service.
It would help to create a shared consensus on the state, and teach valuable skills directly linked to the services we all rely upon. It would help people to realise how much we have in common.
📌 I’m thinking of starting a proper photographic collection of the reverse side of my stitchwork projects. Or maybe just a portrait collection.
MONDAY 12 To Barbican Art Gallery for what’s called a private view, but which is in fact a crowded house of pretentious art-world hangers-on who all congregate in cliquey little groups right in front of the art works and talk endless nonsense about nothing. The exhibition, Unravel, The Power And Politics Of Textiles In Art, is fabulous and totally wasted on the creeps that get invited to these increasingly tedious events. Can’t wait to return to view it again, alongside normal people, but I was on this visit pleased to find I’m not the only one who enjoys the reverse side of stitchworks as much as the show sides.
TUESDAY 13 Labour’s popularity balloon has been punctured twice in the last few days (green energy, antisemitism). Will it slowly deflate over the coming months, or is the hot air just the sign of an overheated media? There are several by-elections soon, so I guess we’ll find out for sure then. Meanwhile, “Disgraced MP” seems to have become an unassuming job title.
📌 The New European gossip column has it that Rishi is in the final stages of cooking up a comeback for Boris, who is unhappy that his old rival David Cameron is back in government. Boris of course has a price, and it’s a life peerage.
WEDNESDAY 14 I’ve secretly given our neighbour Sue the nickname The Quiet Feminist, which sounds like the title of a book.
📌 In his latest Goads & Prompts substack Slavoj Žižek offers a hilarious compendium of philosophy based on the psychoanalytical theory that sex is the driver of human existence.
Descartes: “I fuck, therefore I am” ie, only in intense sexual activity do I experience the fullness of my being (Lacan’s “decentering” answer to it would have been: “I fuck where I am not, and I am not where I fuck” ie, it is not me who is fucking, but “it fucks” in me).
📌 I’ve been really quite successful with my Duolingo French lesson recently, scoring several PERFECT ratings. I’m beginning to think I’ve accidentally changed the settings to a super-easy program. Or maybe I’m finally getting the hang of this infuriating language.
THURSDAY 15 David Aaronovitch reckons Azhar Ali deserved to be cut off by the Labour Party not for the views he shared but for the fact that he was stupid enough to believe them in the first place.
📌 The title I picked for today’s writing group at Headway was Fainting Goats. Where this bizarre title came from I’m not sure. But it was an opportunity to add a bit of memoir to my Him & Her series featuring Heidi and Martin.
Do all couples in long-term relationships take part in silly contests with each other? He and Heidi did, thought Martin, just after Heidi had won their latest tussle. The game was called Daft Punk and the object was to name the daftest punk or post-punk band names. Heidi won with Fainting Goats in a close encounter with Martin’s offering, Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel. Both names scored highly on imagery, but Heidi edged it with her story about seeing Fainting Goats one night in 1983 at Liverpool’s Everyman Bistro with her uni pal Sally. As Heidi tells it, on this memorable night Goats singer Sam jumped off stage, walked out of the building and down Hope Street towards the proddy cathedral, still singing into the band’s newly acquired, new-fangled wireless radio microphone. It was a total blindsider. Sam returned five minutes later just as the rest of the Goats finished the bit in the middle where they show off their virtuosity. And that’s how Fainting Goats won Daft Punk, not really for their daft name but for the daft antics they brought with it.
FRIDAY 16 This morning I should be adding photos to the blog entry for last night’s performance of Macbeth The Show at the Dock X arena in Canada Wharf. The images would have shown stars Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma in full flight as Mr & Mrs Monomania (Varma was especially good), but alas I don’t have any photos because shortly before we left for the show my phone fell in the toilet, so it spent all yesterday evening in a bowl of rice. It is still there now.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
I think the phone in a bowl of rice trick is an urban myth 🙁
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It certainly didn’t work.
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