One month as it happened…
THURSDAY 1 Jonty Bloom’s early-morning rant about the “deal” to get the protestant Democratic Unionists back into power sharing in Northern Ireland ends with an epic quote…
As Samuel Beckett apparently said of the protestant grammar school boys he once taught, “They are like Irish cream, rich but thick”.
📌 Another quote from another writer (this time Ernest Hemingway) opens a superb comment piece by Aditya Chakraborty on the symbolism of the downfall of the Royal Mail, ushered by governments of all colour (but not, surprisingly, by Maggie Thatcher’s), into near extinction.
📌 On the radio a pub quiz host posed a question: “Which football ground is closest to the River Mersey?” Answer below…
ʎʇunoƆ ʇɹodʞɔoʇS
📌 Just before attending a meeting at the Barbican Centre to discuss how to improve its use of space, I took a picture to submit as evidence of something gone wrong.
FRIDAY 2 And today’s quiz question comes from Andy, our friend in Brighton, who asks us to name this actor (answer below).
uʎɥʇǝʅꓭ ɐpuǝɹꓭ
📌 The sick state of British civic society is exposed today in a Guardian report on how the present government’s determination to debase and corrupt every aspect of British life has slid effortlessly into local councils.
📌 Vera told us that when she wakes up in the morning she opens her bedroom curtains and goes back to bed. This is to reassure all the neighbours who notice her curtains still closed at 10am and bang on the door to make sure she is OK.
📌 I always put my feet up after lunch and read, which then segues into a snooze. Today I have lined up an article in Vice.
📌 We started watching Series 3 of Slow Horses (which is filmedon our estate) and were surprised to find it starting bang in the middle of a dramatic siege and gunfight. We were so transfixed by the action that we didn’t notice that we’d accidentally started at the end of the series. We watched episodes 5 and 6 before we twigged, so now we are watching episodes 1-4 in the vain hope that we will forget the climax and denouement. And in one episode our apartment appears in the background as Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) takes a slovenly stroll to the kebab shop round the corner on Old Street.
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.
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.
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.
SATURDAY 24 Today’s Substack from Jonty Bloom poses an interesting question for national economies globally…
Where does a Brit with an Irish passport, living in Portugal, working on a computer server in Norway owned by a German company, making a website in America for a Canadian games maker and paid by the company’s Luxembourg office, actually need to pay their taxes?
The answer is that no one knows. He goes on to say that rich people are accomplished game-players in the tax jurisdiction racket, but anyone doing it accidentally or purely by circumstance will eventually be traced and forced to pay up.
📌 My wife “lost” me twice today in Winchester. Once in TK Maxx and again in the Oxfam book shop. It’s always my fault. She eventually found me in TK Maxx studying luggage; in the Oxfam bookshop I was mulling over a vintage Dorothy L Sayers, which originally cost 5 shillings new but now costs £3.99.
SUNDAY 25 in the New Statesman Andrew Marr describes Keir Starmer’s hair as “stiffly disciplined”.
📌 Linda McCartney’s vegetarian meatballs in an Ottolenghi ragu are more than nice. And our enjoyment of them gave my wife the chance to once again complain noisily that restaurants generally have defaulted on the “vegan option” as their non-meat choice. My wife loves a vegetarian cheeseburger, but not a vegan one with fake cheese.
MONDAY 26 A Liverpool team of youngsters beat Chelsea in the Carabao Cup final yesterday with a single goal in the last minute of extra time.
TUESDAY 27 On a free trip to the Tower of London (normal price £37) we were staggered at the size of the ravens. The legend is that if the ravens fly away, the Tower will crumble and fall. There is no chance of that because not only do the King’s workers clip their wings to inhibit flying but feed them enough to inflate them to the size of a dog. The twice-a-day Raven Diet includes “chicks, rats and mice. Once a week they enjoy a boiled egg, plus the occasional rabbit, which is given to them whole because the fur and bones are good for them.”
📌 Jonty Bloom says young people have no interest in joining the armed forces not because they are spineless snowflakes but because the pay and conditions are rubbish.
WEDNESDAY 28 Full Fact says every time they find a bare-faced lie uttered by a politician they write to them asking them to correct the statement immediately. So far this year none of the 15 people they have caught at it have done so. Every day Full Fact adds to its compendium of lies. One recently told of a circulating image of Keir Starmer’s sat next to serial sex offender Jimmy Savile. The picture, says Full Fact, is a fake, in which Savile’s head has been grafted onto the body of someone else. That somebody, they say, is Gordon Brown.
📌 I have this image of Jonty Bloom waking up early every morning in a state of agitation. Before he can even wash and eat breakfast he has already spat out the bile that is bothering him. Today it is privatisation and the example of Thames Water, which has been ripping off the British taxpayer for far too long.
📌 Got a message from the Barbican CEO Claire to say they’ve appointed a new artistic director, and not surprisingly it isn’t either of the two wildly creative balls of creative energy I favoured after interviewing them a month ago. I think the Barbican still likes to think of itself as a prestigious international arts institution whereas I see it as a national cultural heritage site that includes the arts.
📌 At tonight’s resident’s meeting a stooge reporting to the Council faced questions about their intentions to replace the City footfall that disappeared with the Pandemic. The project has a name, “Destination City”, and the intention is to make the City an exciting “offer” for visitors. But the packed room believed that the best way to increase footfall and business opportunities in the City of London is for more people to live there. The half-million people who work in the City leave it every night and spend their money elsewhere. Those left behind (ie, residents) are a marginalised community in a weird commercial compromise with a medieval oligarchy (the City of London Corporation) and get no great “offer” at all. We’re lucky if the pubs are still open after 10pm.
THURSDAY 29 A message from our GP surgery says they are branching out into community work, which seems sensible given the number of people who book to see a doctor when all they want to do is talk to someone. So from now on, the “Together Better” project will organise walks, arts & crafts sessions and coffee mornings.
📌 I think Michelle got quite excited when we spoke to Paula, who runs the Old Street Digital Canvas. They’ve asked if I’d like to join the panel for that selects the artworks that go on display. I think I will say yes. And I think Michelle would secretly like to take over the site for Submit to Love artists.
📌 It was a day of team photos. At Headway I posed with Sam and Michelle for a publicity shot to go with our upcoming presentation at the Art Workers’ Guild. Then in the evening at Leggy’s leaving drink I gathered with some old colleagues. I was surprised so many of them remembered me.
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Billy's Scrapbook 