27 April-May 3, 2024
SATURDAY 27 At The Arc in Winchester we saw an exhibition of work by Grayson Perry called Essex House: The Life of Julie Cope, the centrepiece of which is two huge tapestries depicting stages in the life of Perry’s fictional Julie Cope character. The tapestries are soundtracked by a “3,000-word ballad” delivered by Perry. The whole vibe to me came over as an eccentric rose-tinted but very multicoloured cartoon of an imagined post-war British life story.
SUNDAY 28 My wife had a win on the National Lottery. She won a free Lucky Dip for the next draw.
MONDAY 29 The New Statesman says that the Conservatives are now seen as a party of high taxes, clobbering the middle classes. It then goes on to highlight an analysis that points to where the real tax burden falls…
The Conservatives might be accused of a tax raid on Middle England, but in reality they’re cracking on with the project of taking money from single mums and giving it to their managers.
New Statesman
📌 I started scoring the Barbican’s Imagine Fund applications and realised that the panel didn’t work hard enough on wording the questions. That, plus the fact that some applicants don’t read the questions properly, some just casually insert references to marginalised groups they think will impress, and some don’t know the difference between London and the City of London, makes scoring harder than it should be.
TUESDAY 30 I’m trying to read between the lines of the trauma that has gripped the SNP, but failing badly. The best I’ve managed so far is that under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, the SNP could talk a good game but were not very good at delivering results. Now they are bad at both, and without a leader.
📌 Jane and Marge jointly recommended the book A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles and I’m gripped.
📌 I’ve unsubscribed from Patti Smith’s poetry Substack. Too weird.
📌 The differently various touring exhibition has made it into the Evening Standard and Claire says it will be in the Guardian next week.
WEDNESDAY 1 The book I’m reading, A Gentleman in Moscow, features a man under house arrest in an elite hotel in Bolshevik Russia. He learns how to adapt to and shape his imprisonment, ultimately creating for himself an enriched and full life. The audiobook I fall to sleep to at the moment is Bel Canto, in which an opera singer is among a group taken hostage by terrorists at a wealthy businessman’s birthday party. Again, in this forcibly confined environment, a rich quality of life (and love) emerges. The message from both stories seems to be that the human spirit can triumph over tyranny, which is cheesy and corny in one sense, and dangerously delusional in another.
THURSDAY 2 I opted out of the writers’ group at Headway when an offer came up for a visit to the Wellcome Collection, where we saw an exhibition by disabled artist Jason Wilsher-Mills of all the pop-cultural and comic memories that kept him going during a long spell in hospital in 1980 following a viral infection.
📌 Had I attended the Headway writers’ group we would have discussed the story I’d already submitted, which carried the title Treatment.
Martin’s job with Hoxton Films was to read the TV and film treatments sent in by writers and decide whether they should be passed on to someone higher up in the company for deeper consideration. The job went with the title Taster, and it struck Martin, as he neared the middle of the 14th submission of that day, that the world was full of treatments and tasters of one sort or another. Take him and Heidi, for example. They met at that gig, they metaphorically tasted one another and carried on, for a while. Then, to adopt that line from the Adam Ant song, the “chewing gum lost its flavour”. They fell into a rut, took each other for granted, and watched their life together grow stale and grey. They tried to put some octane back into things with walking holidays in Tuscany and rum-drinking tours of the Caribbean, but none of it worked. What did work was Esther Rantzen’s noisy campaign for Assisted Dying. Heidi’s mum Val was almost done for and in chronic pain. Together as one they pledged to dignify the end of her life. And they did. Val finally drifted off to a place called Bliss on February 14, 2026. Martin and Heidi lived happily ever after.
📌 At the Barbican we saw Boy Blue, an award-winning hip-hop dance ensemble whose new show, Cycles, is said to embrace all of life’s circularities (birth/death, arrival/departure, politics, seasons, atomic theory, etc) and show how they all run round and bump into each other. It was an impressive display of stamina and bodily motion, but I’d prefer to have heard a few acoustic instruments inside the relentless bass-driven earth tremor of synthetic sound. Even one lovely piano movement early in the second half sounded like it had been put through a special-effects gizmo beforehand.
The work’s principal pleasures lie in the flickering, almost synaptic connections between sound and movement.
The Guardian
FRIDAY 3 Boris was turned away from his local polling station yesterday because he failed to bring with him the required photo-id, a stipulation of the 2022 Elections Act he brought in as PM.
📌 The Conservatives have taken a pasting in the local elections but no one is yet predicting a move to kick Rishi out and instal a new PM who might save a few votes for desperate Tory MPs facing defeat at the general election. Some have been tipping Penny Mordaunt, but who would want to take over a sinking ship? Mordaunt should give it a second thought. She couldn’t do worse than Rishi between now and the general election, and if allowed to stay on after defeat would at least stop the lunatics from seizing immediate control of the party. Penny could end up being be the very last chance for One Nation Tories.
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