One month as it happened…
FRIDAY 1 George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election standing for the Workers Party of Britain, whose website takes so long to load you can click on it, go away and make a cup of tea then return to find multiple pictures of George in assorted brimmed hats. Get used to those hats. Galloway is back and you have to admire his determination to be a thorn in the side of politicians from every party other than his own. I’m not sure his party has any politicians other than him, but George is acting as if it does. George is acting as if British politics changed overnight and it was all his doing. I like the idea of George as Disruptor in Chief and I like the idea of all mainstream politicians feeling permanently disrupted. I don’t imagine the people of Rochdale will benefit very much from this state of affairs.
📌 Facebook reminds me that five years ago I made a self-portrait.
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 Rishi’s 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.
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.
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.
SATURDAY 23 Just caught up with a fabulous long-read, Putin and Beyond, that at first makes you think Russia will once again seek to do business with Europe (as Vlad once did) when Putin is finally gone but then turns into an explanation of how that would take decades as the nation withers under the attrition of war, and may never even happen at all. Putin’s regime is still powerful but vulnerable, ageing and, ultimately, mortal. Little is known about the generation of autocrats that will contest for power in 10 years’ time, but autocrats they will be, the piece’s author predicts, and not the stern uncle of democracy Putin pretended to be all those years ago.
📌 The Guild Hall School performance of Comedy of Errors was not impressive. I flippantly remarked that it was a jumped-up school play. Marge said that if she’d been on her own she’d have walked out. These actors simply had very little stage presence and poor projection, but maybe the stage is not a chosen route into acting jobs these days. The set was too simple, though I liked the use of a four-seat roundabout as a prop. It ended with a line-dance routine. Only then did the actors look like they knew what they were doing. The one to watch: Maximus Evans.
SUNDAY 24 One year after our near-death experience in Liverpool we met Rachel at The Grove pub in Ealing to reflect on the trauma. My wife says the Vegetarian Wellington had the texture of dense meat. The waitress warned us off the vegan tiramisu with the reminder that “it IS vegan”, the implication being that it was slop. The Teenager was still at home when we got back and not, as planned, out searching for a cheap ticket for Mahler’s 5th at the Barbican.
MONDAY 25 My wife spoke to Katie our financial adviser and tomorrow afternoon we are viewing an eyewateringly expensive Type 39 apartment in the Barbican. Those two facts might not be related.
📌 The Barbican seems to stagger from one PR disaster to the next. I’ve been invited to a meeting to hear what the Barbican has to say about the media controversy surrounding the cancellation of a lecture on Gaza.
📌 My wife’s actor cousin, who claims to have an ailment called “Actor’s Knee”, tells us that Indira Varma is a good laugh and plays Scrabble with other cast members backstage on Macbeth The Show.
📌 We sighed with relief when Ralph Little finally left Saint-Marie in TV’s Death In Paradise. Little ranks as both the worst of Saint-Marie’s resident chief inspectors and as the worst actor in the world.
TUESDAY 26 Jonty Bloom offers a taste of the ugly tactics we can expect from the Conservatives in the run-up to the general election.
The Tories will launch attack after attack on Sir Kier Starmer, accusing him of being a secret Corbynista and a friend if not ally of terrorists, rapists and child murderers.
📌 On Substack Tom Cox shared a review of Pride & Prejudice he found.
📌 I’ve never been entirely happy with the results from transfer pens and pencils when getting patterns outlined on to fabric in preparation for stitching. Now I’m trying sublimation ink in my Lamy fountain pen and the results so far are an improvement on what I was doing before. I probably need to spend a whole week testing different colours on different fabric shades. The heat of the iron to get the sublimation just right is another consideration. So far, half way between Cotton and Wool seems optimum.
📌 Marge has made my stitchwork of her grandson Max her screensaver.
WEDNESDAY 27 From what Jess tells us, the controversy at the Barbican over a lecture on Gaza was clearly a bit of mischief-making by the London Review of Books, who are obviously in desperate need of subscriptions. We cancelled ours a month ago.
📌 At a screening at the Barbican Hall of The Death of Stalin with live score by the BBC Symphony Orchestra it was hard not to imagine Vladimir Putin in the role of Stalin, other than that the chances of his death being a slapstick event seem so remote. The panel discussion afterwards, featuring director Armando Iannucci and actor Michael Palin (Molotov) seemed staged in such a way as to avoid talking about Putin, who thus became the elephant in the very big room.
THURSDAY 28 A morning in the studio went from bad to worse very quickly, upon which I asked anyone in earshot to shoot me if I ever try to use paint again. I was trying to finish the stitch+paint version of Max and his incontinent dog. Someone crept up behind me and I freaked, jerked and splodged paint on both myself and parts of the artwork that do not need paint. Then I tried to clean it up, which made things worse, so I gave up and walked away.
📌 The budget orthotic insoles that arrived yesterday are already a big hit with my feet.
FRIDAY 29 Jonty Bloom goes off on a fantastic class-war rant about the Boat Race being a closed shop competition for poshos.
📌 As Headway’s collaboration with the Barbican draws to a close Claire asked me what were my top 3 institutions to partner with next. I struggled to answer, partly because I’m so involved with the art studio, there must be other chances I will never spot. After some thought I named 1. The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, 2. The Office of the London Mayor and 3. The Royal Academy.
📌 The images we got from Sam’s Queen of Wonky workshops at differently various are a dream to make stitchworks of. Once you’ve got the legs cracked, everything else is a wild party of stitches and threads.
📌 I’ve always thought orzo would make a good replacement for rice in a risotto. Now I learn that “orzotto” is a thing. We are having a leek-and-cheese version for our Good Friday evening meal. With champagne.
📌 My wife’s actor cousin Mike wangled a sicknote off a physio for his “Actor’s Knee”, which means he no longer has to carry a tree up some steps in the closing scences of Macbeth The Show.
📌 My wife did something magical with our dessert. She mixed Strawberry Bailey’s into crème fraîche and poured it onto fresh strawberries.
SATURDAY 30 My wife claims I am addicted to what she terms “food porn”. These are social-media video postings in which various recipes appear in demonstration. My favourites, and the ones I study most, are the clips featuring eggs and bread-making. It would be disturbing if I were, as my wife says, addicted, but that is an exaggeration. What IS disturbing is that non-food reels have started to appear in this automatic feed, interspersed with the eggs and the bread. These rogue inclusions feature buxom women casually flashing their genitals.
📌 The hypocrisy of western views on the Israel-Palestine conflict always at some point boils down to arms sales to Israel. The American and British positions on this are daily looking more shaky. You can’t call for a ceasefire when you’re selling weapons to the aggressor.
SUNDAY 31 Liverpool beat Brighton, Arsenal and Man City drew. The day’s football results could not have been better. Or could they? “Pity Liverpool didn’t win 7-0,” my wife said, which was a good point. She bought me a peanut butter Easter Egg from Lidl. I bought her some compostable seedling pots. Marge came round for roast dinner with the usual stash of good wine and told us that one of the women in Derek’s nursing home is the spurned lover of a high-profile QC. The Evening Standard made quite a splash of exposing the upper-class love rat.
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