March 16-22, 2024
SATURDAY 16 Pete told us last night that his one-time Spanish teacher, a Uruguayan, was the daughter of the first man to be eaten when in 1972 survivors of a plane crash in the Andes resorted to cannibalism to stay alive.
📌 My wife got a message on WhatsApp saying that back in London, a doll had come flying out of the primary school next to our block and landed outside our neighbour’s front door.
📌 A glut of street artists have started littering the walls of Paris with bad imitations of Invader’s legendary mosaics.
📌 A walk around the Marais ended with a stroll through its private gallery district. In one we saw gleaming black-and-white portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe, so studied they would be better described as, er, studies. In a second gallery we saw quietly brilliant finger paintings by the Swiss artist Louis Soutter, and in a third we saw a compendium of highly technical works that told you more about what the monied galleries of the Marais think good art looks like.
📌 Inevitably our afternoon travel plans were interrupted by a street demonstration, which forced us to walk all the way back from Marais to our apartment near Gare de l’Est. It turned out to be a most pleasant languid ramble, mainly along the Canal Saint-Martin, a hang-out for young dope, smokers, oyster guzzlers and bric-à-brac browsers.
SUNDAY 17 At a bus stop we saw some graffiti on the shelter’s seat. We had to check the translation.
📌 Dodging rain is the mother of discovery, which is how we ended up in the Musée des Artes et Métiers, on our way to a very dense and very busy photography exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. The views from the roof of the Pompidou more than made up for the pretensions of the exhibition.
📌 Station Rambuteau, the bar across the street from Centre Pompidou has champagne for €8 a glass and a fabulous collection of Jacques Tati posters.
MONDAY 18 The relaxing glass of champagne we had in the sublime La Samaritaine before entering the maelstrom of the Louvre was a distant memory by the time we staggered out, exhausted, stressed and in no way inspired. It seems the whole of Paris is paralysed by regeneration projects for the Olympic Games and once again we were forced to walk, walk, walk, walk, in traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic.
TUESDAY 19 The Guardian reckons it has caught Damien Hurst fiddling the dates of some of his “formaldehyde” artworks. I reckon the Guardian are using the facts to spin a story (reminder: Truth = fact + human intelligence).
📌 With my wife out shopping in the Marais, I strolled the Canal Saint-Martin in the company of bright sunshine, a light breeze and a graffiti character that plays a variety of musical instruments.
📌 An article on Unheard argues that Penny Mordaunt is the perfect leader for the party of headless chickens the Tories have become.
She has the kind of robust Anglo-Saxon bearing once associated with gymkhanas and provincial church fêtes that might inspire those superannuated Shire Tories whose constituencies remain, through economic luck or Nimbyism, relatively untouched by Britain’s headlong Tory-managed decline.
WEDNESDAY 20 I noticed at my sister’s birthday meal last night that my French nephew quite enjoys swearing in English.
📌 On a wall near our apartment the class war rages.
📌 The soupe de poisson at Terminus Nord is a dreamy, dense concoction that never fails to hit the spot.
THURSDAY 21 More and more often Jonty Bloom seems to end his daily rants on Substack with the same words: “Things will get worse before they get better.” Today’s is all about the UK’s chronic shortage of housing and how the government has schemed to keep it that way.
📌 At Headway the internal conversation continues about the appointment of a new CEO. A letter is being prepared to be sent to the headhunters tasked with finding someone to replace Anna. To many of us the best person is standing in plain sight (Sarah), but the board obviously prefers to operate in a more corporate way, which in my view is antithetical to the nature of Headway as an organisation. To me it started and should always remain a family business, if not in fact at least in spirit.
📌 I was dreading my part in the lecture to the Art Workers’ Guild. As the day wore on my nerves jangled louder. But in the end it was OK and for a whole year I am now a guest “brother” of this polite venerable but slightly olde-worlde institution where everyone behaves like a die-hard disciple of William Morris. Even the women are titled “brothers”. We got to see some fabulous arts and crafts, sit in fine oak chairs, were lavished with admiration and fed plentifully with wine and sandwiches. I was quite proud of our inclusion in their lecture programme because to me our studio really is the modern face of the Arts & Crafts movement.
FRIDAY 22 The cattlemarket chaos of the annual Stitch festival at the Business Design Centre in Islington threw up a welcome surprise in the shape of Naushin Kaipally and her “smash the patriarchy” feminist figures.
📌 The Princess of Wales has ended speculation on her health by telling the world she has cancer.
📌 Simon Jenkins has a timely piece in the Guardian saying the West is missing the point in its demonisation of the dictator Putin. Russian citizens are OK living within an authoritarian regime so long as it offers order, security and prosperity.
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