March 2-9, 2024
SATURDAY 2 Got a news notification on my phone yesterday just before the end of Pointless saying Rishi was about to make a statement to the nation. I nudged my wife and suggested he was about to announce an early general election. No further notifications arrived and further investigation now reveals that Rishi brought out his wooden lecturn and stood in the rain whingeing something about the rise of extremism in the country. Was this prompted by the victory the previous day of George Galloway and his pro-Palestine rabble-rousing-in-fedora routine? Maybe, but given that most of the said extremism has been deliberately hatched by members of his own party, probably not, although Rishi is so dim he probably can’t spot the difference. We stayed with Pointless.
📌 Claire Balding went night walking for her latest Ramblings podcast for BBC Radio. She roamed the South Downs around Seaford and Cuckmere Haven, picking her way gingerly along paths and trails lit only by the magic of moonlight on flint and chalk. I didn’t even know night walking was a thing.
📌 To the Dorfman theatre at the National to see Till The Stars Come Down, which starred several actors seasoned in domestic British TV drama (Lisa McGrillis, Derek Riddell, Lorraine Ashbourne) in a play about a family wedding, which is always the natural home of heightened tensions. There are so many internal conflicts here born of external events (from immigration and the Miners’ Strike to botched flings and badly fitting wedding dresses) that to count them is both an exercise in futility and a worthwhile endeavour. If I had to pick one it would be Death (of people, community, family, friendship, love). Hilarious in the first half, tragic in the second was my wife’s verdict.
SUNDAY 3 Some people on Threads think the obviously fake Laura Kuenssberg is the real one.
📌 We finished The Way tonight. We watched it on the recommendation of my wife’s actor cousin, who is currently in a London play with the Welsh actor Steffan Rhodri, who plays the lead part in The Way. A revolution breaks out in Wales and a troubled steeltown family go on the run to escape a crazed regime of military dictators who are chasing them as the instigators of the unrest. It’s a riveting, poetic mix of conventional hyper drama (male rivalry, young love, torn conscience) and soundbite reportage that walks a tightrope between realism and dystopian fantasy. Unswitchoffable.
MONDAY 4 The new Billy Joel record is playing everywhere. Pity, that. Turn The Lights Back on is an embarrassing confessional in which a pathetic wrongdoing man asks for forgiveness in song. It is excruciating, and a lesson to all has-been singer-songwriters to stay that way and learn to live with it. Paul Simon made the same mistake with Wristband.
📌 The Knowledge recommends a feelgood website in which couples in New York City tell of the day they met and the circumstances under which they were brought together. In one of them a railway controller confessed to fixing the train arrivals on his station so that he could catch sight of Bonnie every day.
TUESDAY 5 Don’t get too excited about Jeremy Hunt’s budget tomorrow, says Jonty Bloom. There is no money left, so if he pretends to give you some he is lying.
📌 In her latest blog post Lakshmi wrote about seeing a documentary about the Devadasi, which in India are God’s sex slaves. This is, I learned, a form of misogynistic exploitation so evil that it recalls the fictional handmaids of Margaret Atwood.
📌 The consultation meeting on the City of London’s pets policy almost but not quite boiled down to one man and his dog. It was actually four women, two men and a 10-year-old child, who was very much in favour of housing estate residents being allowed to keep dogs.
WEDNESDAY 6 Far from being the safe pair of hands he’d like us to believe he is, Rishi has made another media blunder by doing an interview in a glossy lifestyle magazine alongside his wife in which Rishi boasts how good he is at getting up early and loading the dishwasher, things that Akshata is apparently not very good at.
📌 Good news for Joe Biden comes with the announcement that Donald Trump’s rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Nikki Haley, has pulled out of the contest. That means the presidential election will be a straight fight between the two very old white/orange men. Voters can be in no doubt what they’re voting for. The Knowledge reports that Trump’s support even among republicans is softening, which raises the prospect of many of them staying at home on election day. The known unknown in this year’s presidential elections will no doubt be the influence of the singer Taylor Swift on the outcome. My money says Biden will breeze it.
📌 In his song Perfect Day I wonder if Lou Reed was poking fun at twee romantic couples and not romanticising twee romance, or his addiction to heroin, or anything else for that matter. Think of the song as a satirical sketch featuring a pair of nauseating characters and it becomes a very different kind of masterpiece.
THURSDAY 7 At Headway me, Michelle and Sam ran through our upcoming presentation for the Art Workers’ Guild. I need to concentrate and work a bit harder on my preparation.
📌 It was such a delight to get an invitation to see the RSC stage play of the Japanese fantasy story My Neighbour Totoro. It was truly magical and performed with what my friend Shirley said is an unusually heavy dose of ironic humour for Japanese theatre. Exciting to see how “the spirits” invisibly or disguisedly place themselves in every scene, which I took to mean every aspect of Japanese life.
📌 I saw a caption on a TV documentary about Boris Johnson that suggested I’d been spelling Keir Starmer wrong all the time. I hadn’t.
FRIDAY 8 I’m quite enjoying the pot of flowers in my latest stitchwork, which is a kind of 17th-Century rural scene featuring a sweaty agricultural male and a daisy-chain-making maiden.
📌 In today’s Wordle contest, my wife and I both scored 3, but my journey to the solution had by far the best narrative construction.
📌 At the cinema there was a moment in Kevin Macdonald’s John Galliano documentary High & Low when the enfant terrible of couture fashion appears to have made fools of us all. After his anti-Semitic outburst in a Paris bar he is rejected by the fashion world as damaged goods. When a rabbi who specialises in Holocaust education offers Galliano the chance to learn about the Holocaust, he agrees, studies, and appears to show contrition for his evil deeds. As soon as he is cautiously accepted back into the fashion world Galliano blows his chance immediately by garbing himself up in Hasidic chic. As one commentator remarks, “he obviously didn’t learn very much” from his Holocaust education classes.
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