April 6-12, 2024
SATURDAY 6 I’m starting to think I really might have magical powers. I could even be a new Messiah, but my wife says I’m just a very naughty boy. Several years ago a wheelchair user was so inspired by the story of my stroke recovery she stood up and walked to the toilet. More recently an academic described my Fallopian Jesus painting as “theologically spot-on”. And yesterday I got a video message from Claire featuring Yanis, who likened the Bonkers stitchwork I did for the differently various exhibition to “a scripture”.
📌 They’re filming Slow Horses outside on our estate again. They keep having to stop shooting when ordinary people leave their homes to go to the shops and ruin the choreography of the scene.
📌 I’m sorting out my workshop in readiness for the mass clearance of old stuff we’ve had hanging around for decades. In the bottom of a drawer full of old artwork I found my very first self-portrait from 2014. It imagines me sitting in a Frank Lloyd-Wright drawing room reading a broadsheet newspaper. The chair I’m sitting on is meant to be John Makepeace classic.
SUNDAY 7 Our friend Danielle has an issue with Andrew Scott, 47, playing the twentysomething Tom Ripley in the Netflix series Ripley. I honestly don’t care about the age difference because I’m too in love with the black-and-white photography and those memory-jogging views of the Amalfi Coast from a bus captained by a stereotypically cavalier Italian driver. The interrogation of class envy in Ripley is also compelling. I never really noticed it when I read the book many years ago, so maybe it’s a directorial emphasis. And the age difference between Scott and Ripley starts to work later in the series as the full weight of being a psychopathic narcissist con-man comes into focus.
📌 The tomato seeds went in quite late but are making a spurt now. Despite the chill and the wind outside, our living-room gets lots of sun, when it breaks free of the clouds.
MONDAY 8 Jonty Bloom reports that Conservative Party HQ has become a frontline war zone between the Ultras (Suella, JRM and other “swivel-eyed loons“) and the Wets (everyone else) in the fight for the heart of the post-Rishi Tory empire. And in the New Statesman George Eaton witnesses a new Tory battlefront opening over arms sales to Israel, in which a central figure is Winston Churchill.
📌 Tortoise reckons abortion in the US could be the issue that finally buries Donald Trump. Politically.
📌 We finished Ripley and felt quite relieved that the intensity of the suspense was over.
TUESDAY 9 We viewed a 2-bed flat in Frobisher Crescent, which was bigger and far more accommodating than we’d imagined it would be.
📌 I bought some 240gsm canvas to stitch Adie’s poem Otherwise Engaged. The fabric is so heavy that even outlining the text in French chalk was an uphill struggle. I decided to start again on lighter calico. Note to self: 240gsm is too heavy for leisurely stitchwork. It is saddle-sewing territory.
WEDNESDAY 10 I suspect I no longer notice the colour of people’s eyes. I know this because I read and watch on TV a lot of crime fiction and the interrogating cop always asks the witness to name the colour the criminal’s eyes. I can name my wife’s eye colour (brown) and those of my renal consultant Andrea (green), but after that, no, and if I were to witness a crime and be interviewed by the police, I’m not sure I’d be any help at all.
📌 We’re off to Edinburgh at the end of the week, primarily to visit an exhibition of early textile prints by Andy Warhol. So it was a shock to learn in a Guardian newsletter that Andy Warhol never said anything about 15 minutes of fame. The words were attributed to him in 1968 by someone in Sweden trying to promote an exhibition.
📌 The stitchwork of the gormless folkloric farm hand is nearly finished. I just need to add some terrain, and laces to his shoes, presuming shoelaces had been invented by then. According to one history website they were invented in England on 27 March 1790 by a chap called Harvey Kennedy.
📌 The raging trans debate and issues around identity have got me thinking, and from tomorrow I will start my transition away from the social media in which I don’t feel truly comfortable. At the start of the year I binned Twitter/X from all my devices and don’t even peek (I tried Mastodon instead, but it’s very confusing). Unfortunately, the mainstream media continues to use Twitter/X as a trusted news source, so I will ingest it indirectly. Facebook is next to go. I will continue to browse out of interest but will not post or share anything on the platform. In time I will probably also transition away from Facebook co-conspirators Instagram and Threads. I might deserve to be trolled for not including WhatsApp in my cull, but I consider WhatsApp to be a communication rather than a social-media platform. I have started gently to use Substack and will continue to explore. But for the time being, divorce from Facebook feels like some kind of weight has been lifted.
THURSDAY 11 In the Conversation an academic from Aberystwyth University says that the Welsh were remarkably lenient on witches during the persecutions in the Middle Ages. Unlike England and Scotland, who executed thousands (Wales, 5).
📌 It’s been so long since we did a writing group at Headway that I’d forgotten about the Heidi/Martin sketch I wrote week’s ago…
They were both very drunk and Heidi had just told Martin about the time she was backpacking in Australia. At a campsite near Coober Pedy she flushed the toilet and a frog came swirling out from under the rim. When she screamed it hopped from the bowl and skipped under the toilet door back to who knows where. Martin quipped something about the size of frogs’ eyes and what the view must have been like from “down under her rim” but Heidi did not laugh. Martin’s frog story could not compete with that. His was a boring description of the frog being the mechanism at the bottom end of a violin bow used to alter the tension in the bow’s horse-hair ribbon. He tried to liven the story by adding that each bow comprises a “hank” of hair, which is between 160 and 180 strands, but Heidi was already asleep.
FRIDAY 12 My wife doesn’t trust Uber. I don’t think we’ve used it enough to pass judgement, so we arrived at the railway station for our train to Edinburgh stupidly early and sat on hard wooden benches waiting for a platform announcement.
📌 We spent a lot of time during the 4.5-hour journey to Edinburgh trying to work out from Google Maps how hilly the walk to this evening’s restaurant, Ondine, will be.
📌 For two days I haven’t stopped laughing about the German museum worker who hung one of his own pictures in the gallery he works for. Unfortunately his prank got him fired, which says quite a lot about the German art establishment.
📌 We just crossed the River Tyne at Newcastle.
📌 As we sped towards Berwick-upon-Tweed my wife remarked: “I keep expecting to see Vera popping up.”
📌 My wife insists that every day of our stay in Edinburgh should be taken with a glass of whisky.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
I like your artworks. They are all so good. I am making a cross stitch mat for our granddaughter. Some of my blogger friends say they have stopped using Twitter. Somehow, I never liked it. Facebook has helped to connect me with lots of people I know but am not able to meet . My husband is in some contact with his old students. They too enjoy seeing photos of our place, where they had lived five years of their young life. Thank you for this post and hope you had a good time in Edinburgh. A blogger friend is from there.
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Thank you Lakshmi. I too have found people via Facebook and will continue to watch over it. Edinburgh was fabulous but very cold and windy, even in April. We are already planning to return when the weather is warmer.
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