Scrapbook: Week 14

March 30-April 5,  2024

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 automated 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.

MONDAY 1 Didn’t spot a single April Fool. That could be a sign of the AI times we live in. BBC Radio 4 reported that a good number of British people still believe that spaghetti grows on trees, as revealed in a classic TV April Fool from 1957 that is repeated every year.

TUESDAY 2 Our cleaner Delia is away for a month, which means we are forced to do it ourselves, like most other people. I have been assigned kitchen and bathroom, but the degree of autonomy I have is very limited. I cannot, for example, rationalise the cupboard spaces and their exorbitant contents in any meaningful way. Clean the cooker, wash the floor, that’s all I’m allowed to do. Maybe I’m being too ambitious. After all, I did need a tutorial in how to use the mop.

📌 Buffy agreed to put together a collection of the rare weed pressings she did with the Natural History Museum for our Open Gardens event in June. Me and Bev will coordinate.

WEDNESDAY 3 In my online art course I learned that Picasso’s baptismal name was “Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso”. It also says he was a bit of a Mummy’s boy. The same course has a fab picture of Frida Kahlo aged 11.

📌 Kitchen and bathroom cleaned. I will, I’m sure, find scope for organisational improvements along the way. Then our cleaner will return and revert to doing things her way.

📌 Biggest ever win on the Premium Bonds arrived.

📌 In my dreams I’ve been getting people’s names wrong. I called Lisa Nina and Steve Stuart. In each case I tried to move the conversation on quickly, but I think they both noticed my lapse.

THURSDAY 4 A woman on the 243 bus to Wood Green complained loudly to the driver about the poor quality of the card reader at the entrance door of his bus. It was cheap, she said, and always failing to read her card on first swipe. She went on to open an argument about Covid with a passenger who coughed.

📌 If, as Jonty Bloom suggests, Rishi takes Britain out of the UNHRC, Keir Starmer should state immediately and loudly that when he becomes PM Britain will rejoin.

📌 One report says the Israeli bombs that killed the aid workers in Gaza were delivered by AI.

📌 The sight of five playing cards placed carefully next to a collection of plants is guaranteed to trigger your inner Sherlock Holmes.

📌 Natalie noticed that the very fine, very cheap viscose machine thread I sometimes use has a lustre that creates its own shadows.

📌 The studio’s ceramics table is an endless source of fascination and wonder.

📌 RIP Hella Pick, 96. She used to sweep imperiously through the Guardian office “like an ocean liner”.

📌 The big surprise on visiting the newly refurbished Museum of the Home is not the post-Geffrye inclusion of non-white faces in the cosy narrative history of cosy middle-class domestic life but that the excellent cafe has gone and a children’s playhouse installed.

FRIDAY 5 My wife has a new colleague in the carer’s forum she attends. Her name is Angela and she is transsexual.

📌 We cruised around the bourgeois galleries of Bloomsbury and St James’s before hitting the Royal Academy to see Chris giving a talk about his paintings.

📌 I’m half way through a Daphne du Maurier audiobook featuring a rich woman tired of her life of drudgery in upper-class London who decamps solo to Cornwall and is about to get frisky with a French pirate she found in a hidden cove at the bottom of the garden.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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