February 17-23, 2024
SATURDAY 17 Whenever a conversation about Shakespeare starts, everyone tries to sound like a theatre critic. I try to avoid that by just saying what I liked about the play, or what I didn’t like. Being disabled means I often get to see plays free, or at very low cost, so this may cloud my judgement. In last night’s performance of Much Ado About Nothing by students of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama I especially liked the minimal set, the inclusion of tribal dancing and the playfulness in dealing with some of the play’s misogyny. I also especially liked the parts of Beatrice and Benedick, a relationship in which the actors (Anabella O’Gorman and Matthew Forrest) relaxed into as the play went on. Earlier in the play many of the actors rushed their lines and the story got lost in the mêlée.
📌 According to my online art course Monet’s full name was Oscar-Claude Monet, and from an early age he was said to be an expert caricaturist, earning money with humorous depictions of his school teachers.
📌 US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has a great reflection on global geopolitics after the controversial death of Putin’s arch enemy Alexei Navalny…
If you’re not at the table in the international system, you’re going to be on the menu.
📌 Back to the Barbican for a relatively more sedate viewing of the new Unravel exhibition. It made me want to try some portraits in appliqué. The big discovery on this visit was the purple reverse side of a big, weirdly joyous narrative tapestry, which revealed a whole new piece of work and a more sombre story. One of the gallery guides, Daniel, came to say hello. He remembered me from our differently various exhibition in The Curve last year.
SUNDAY 18 Popular perception is starting to make the death of Alexei Navalny look like a final act of sacrifice, but some commentators have dared already to point out that despite being a fierce opponent of Putin, Navalny’s politics were nevertheless still deeply rightwing, nationalist and intolerant.
Navalny was never the liberal white knight that some in the West may have hoped he would be.
Ian Garner, Unherd
MONDAY 19 Getting a bit bored by commentators attacking Keir Starmer for refusing to use the word “ceasefire” in relation to the conflict in Palestine. He’d made his views very clear…
The question is what we can do practically to deliver what we all want to see – a return of all the hostages taken on October 7, an end to the killing of innocent Palestinians, a huge scaling up of humanitarian relief and an end to the fighting.
His stubbornness in refusing to use a word that means different things and has different connotations and nuances in various international languages is obviously a sore point. The word STOP is obviously better, but not for Starmer’s critics.
📌 Gotta recommend watching a snuff movie at 11am. This was the offering today at Barbican Cinema 2 where a “senior screening” of Peeping Tom, the Michael Powell masterpiece on voyeurism, was showing. Quite why this was limited to people over 60 I’m not sure. I am sure it is relevant to the TikTok generation, if only to horrify them into seeking help for their debilitating condition.
TUESDAY 20 I’ve long subscribed to the view that politically the NHS is the thing British people trust and care most about. That thought came to me first as I laid in hospital for 4 months, unable to do anything other than think, that its conception, creation and execution are, despite its obvious faults, a thing of wonder. It also mirrors the magic of Britain. Nurses and doctors stand outside hospitals smoking together, ward staff share dirty jokes with patients. The food is horrible and screw-ups happen daily. Its flawed brilliance is that it is kept working by the people for the people. In the New Statesman Freddie Hayward senses that the penny has finally dropped in the Labour Party and that the NHS outstrips all its other policies (net zero, economic growth, education, childcare, cheap electricity) with voters.
📌 Keir Starmer has caved in and started using the word ceasefire. It looks like all he was ever doing was parroting what the Americans were saying.
📌 Darren’s weekly art roundup still makes for essential reading, the surprise in this week’s being his “it all went downhill when she met John” take on the early work of Yoko Ono at Tate Modern.
📌 The Knowledge reports that German linguists have calculated that the British have 546 words for being drunk…
the high tally is because virtually any noun in the English language can be transformed into a “drunkonym” by adding an “ed” at the end. Examples include: “trolleyed”, “wellied”, “cabbaged”, “gazeboed” and “carparked”.
📌 It is reported on a number of sites (most of them quoting an FT story) that two hardliners in the Israeli coalition government are holding Benjamin Netanyahu’s feet over the fire. They are named as finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. If Netanyahu softens his stance on Gaza they will collapse the government, ending Netanyahu’s premiership and open him up to a bunch of corruption charges he has been able to dodge while still in office.
📌 Season 2 of Kin is turning out to be even more exciting than Season 1. With three episodes remaining, you already sense the build-up to a massacre of Godfather dimensions. Hope it gets a third series, which I suspect will be a Mafia Women extravaganza.
WEDNESDAY 21 Hitler is under the cosh today not for anything to do with the Holocaust but because he was bad at art. The Telegraph deplores the booming market in his “atrocious” paintings. Can’t help thinking no one at the Telegraph bothered to look up the word atrocity.
THURSDAY 22 Last night on stage at the Barbican, Rhiannon Giddens told of the time she met Aretha Franklin at an Obama White House reception and nervously babbled nonsense in front of greatness. We’d never heard of Rhiannon Giddens and only came to see her tonight on a tip-off from our friend Dave. I didn’t even know what kind of music she performed so I did a web search. Wiki was helpful…
📌 MPs are still babbling a lot of nonsense about who got to vote first in the House of Commons on calling for a stop to the violence in Gaza. I can’t work out who won.
📌 We were joined in the Headway writing group by CEO Anna, who wanted to know about language use around brain injury and how we prefer to be described. We churned over the pros and cons of words such as “disabled” and “survivor”. We also learned the difference between “equality” and “equity” by use of an illustration.
Then we all wished Cecil a happy 86th birthday. He has been coming to Headway for 22 years and really does enjoy making a speech.
FRIDAY 23 Gender is not my only weak point in studying French. I’ve just about got the hang of the tip that if a word ends with an e it’s probably feminine. Now it’s singular and plural that is undoing me. Annoyingly, trousers in French is le pantalon and not les pantalons. Ce and ca and cette and ces also cause me no end of bad marks from my Duolingo tutors Lili and Zari, whose faces turn red with anger whenever I get it wrong.
📌 We have an actor staying with us and the more he tells us about his day-to-day life the more I’m growing to like the theory that seasoned actors are so conditioned to being other people that outside of the acting world they come to resemble the person they are totally not. Our actor has been suspected of being a thief in a supermarket and of being a sex pest by a woman he offered to help as she struggled to inflate her bicycle tyres.
📌 Got a message from Leggy, an old colleague at the Guardian. My phone did not recognise the number so I replied with a lot of aggressively interrogating remarks. Turns out Leggy is leaving the Guardian and is next week having a party at The Parcel Yard in King’s Cross, to which we are invited.
📌 We arrived in Winchester just before the heavens opened.
📌 The Dull Men’s Club has a very useful map explaining the great sociological territories of England.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 