9-15 March, 2024
SATURDAY 9 My wife still has a bee in her bonnet about the documentary we saw at the cinema last night. I’ll admit it bothered me slightly that we’d paid money to see this film. I could have excused its faults if I wasn’t out of pocket. But my wife is more irritated by the fact that High & Low, which purports to depict the rise and fall of the racist fashion designer John Galliano, was apparently funded by Condé Nast Ltd, the fashion world’s favourite publisher.
📌 Got some new clothes for our trip to Paris next week (capsuling on grey/black) followed by a nice lunch of Turkish Eggs in the Black Olive.
📌 24 hours after what is probably the worst film we’ll see this year comes what is likely to be the best. Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days is beautiful in so many ways I’ve stopped counting, the kind of film not to be viewed in any conventional way but something to be quietly sat with for two hours, smiling at its warmth. Outwardly it’s about the ascetic mundane life of a Tokyo toilet cleaner, Hirayama. There is not much in his life you could call drama and he says very little. His countenance reminded me of that saying Ben brought back from his visit to Japan: “We all have a little bit of sadness inside of us.” But inwardly there is drama hiding in the shadows (a big theme) and there’s obviously something in Hirayama’s backstory we itch to know more about? Perfect Days is a photographic meditation on Japan and its identity as a highly advanced nation that’s also, it seems, not so ahead of the game after all. And it is a study of Tokyo’s public toilets, things of beauty that must rank as among the best in the world. They certainly piss all over London’s.
SUNDAY 10 The film we saw last night has left a mark and my mood is quite monkish. My wife has clippered my hair to a Number 3 and we have brunched on simple stuff from the store cupboard. I even feel philosophical about Liverpool’s crunch encounter with Manchester City this afternoon.
📌 Got an email from Paula confirming me as a member of the curation committee for the Old Street Digital Canvas. I shall be shamelessly plugging all my favourite art from local and marginalised groups for display, including my own studio, Submit to Love.
📌 In his latest column for the New European, Will Self uses the contraction “to’ve” for “to have”.
MONDAY 11 Sweden and Norway are at the vanguard of a movement against “cashless”, forcing businesses to accept real money for goods and services.
📌 Catherine, the Princess of Wales has confessed to playing with Photoshop on a picture of herself and her three children. There’s a lot of fuss about some smudgy microscopic shadowing on the arm of Charlotte’s cardigan. I’m sure I’m not the only one of Catherine’s subjects who a, didn’t spot anything weird about the picture anyway, and b, doesn’t give a toss about it.
TUESDAY 12 Catherine, Princess of Wales was slow to confess to doctoring a pixel or two of a photograph, so instead of the internet vultures speculating on the condition of her body below the waist they have occupied their time wondering why she took so long to admit to the felony of digitally removing a ketchup stain from her daughter’s cardigan.
📌 It is raining dirty secrets. UK vets are charging 10 times what they do in France, because they can. Ditto private childcare firms, and moderate Conservatives are reeling from revelations that one of their mega-donors uttered hateful misogynist and racist remarks about Hackney MP Diane Abbott.
📌 The nice way of putting it is that Michelle got a bit muddled working on the shared presentation document for our lecture next week at the Art Workers’ Guild and managed to create duplicate documents that I had no access to. The bottom line being that the document I’d been working on is now in a long-forgotten area of her work computer. I tried to stay calm.
📌 Once I got past the clunky user interface I’m starting to really like the New European quick crossword. Unlike the irregular verbs thrown at me in my Duolingo French course.
📌 Our allotment group meetings always throw up some truly fascinating questions. Tonight’s was which one of us is best skilled to ask the guy who is masterminding the overhaul of our composting system where is the best place to dump our green waste. It was Bev.
WEDNESDAY 13 It’s always nice to check on what stupidly rich people are spending their money on. And if you thought it was all about space travel and holidays on Mars you’d be wrong. Thanks to The Knowledge I arrived at an article about the new developments in luxury yacht design. If only there was enough money out there, new homes could be floated on the high seas (or, as in one case, 250m beneath it). Oh, but there is enough money out there, but not for people who need homes.
📌 Rafael Behr doesn’t think Michael Gove can possibly succeed in his efforts to nail extremism in British society. That’s because it is a master of disguise and very hard to spot. In fact, some of your best friends could be proper baddies.
The search for a location where the “extremism” happens leads not to a line on the political spectrum but a threshold in the radical psyche. It is a critical mass of perceived victimisation that becomes an obligation to take revenge. It is the cognitive fuse that blows, turning activist into executioner.
Rafael Behr, the Guardian
THURSDAY 14 One of the threads on Threads features pictures of famous people when they were babies, the thesis being that some people just don’t change their essential features from birth to death.
📌 Two good quotes turned up on my Substack feed, the first from Philosophors, quoting Victor Hugo…
Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.
And the second from Poetic Outlaws, quoting Henry David Thoreau…
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
📌 At Headway, James told us he has started working on a pocket book of our writing-group efforts. He plans to call my chapter The Ballad of Heidi & Martin, which roughly chronicles the relationship of my fictional Hoxton couple. I duly supplied a new entry with the title TrueStory.
The holiday rep told them to be in reception at 7pm for a glass of fizz and the icebreakers. Martin wasn’t sure his “true story” icebreaker would break any ice in today’s gender-fluid non-binary world. Social etiquette had changed so much since he first used it, and although he and Heidi still laughed and jointly milked laughs enthusiastically from assembled friends, some of the weirdos out there today just wouldn’t get it. The problem was, until they tried telling it there was no way of knowing whether the true story was still funny. So they decided to flip a coin. Heidi: “Heads, yes. Tails, no.” And that was how the holiday group got to hear about the weekend Martin spent camping with 9 lesbians.
📌 The 15.31 Eurostar to Paris was remarkably stress free, the hotel check-in less so as my wife forgot the PIN to the account that holds all of our euros for travelling.
FRIDAY 15 In Paris near Gare de l’Est we passed a restaurant advertising itself as “95% Vegan/100% Vegetarien”. My wife remarked sarcastically: “That means it’s 5% cheese.”
📌 The storm clouds loomed over Boulevard de Magenta and by the time we got to Halle Saint-Pierre they were ready to dump their load. Only during a brief break in the downpour did we luxuriate in the fabric shops across the road.
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Billy's Scrapbook 