May 18-24, 2024
SATURDAY 18 My wife’s sister Sue supports Oxford United and sat in row 3 at Wembley stadium to see her team beat bookies favourite Bolton Wanderers in the League 1 play-offs. Oxford were easily the better team, scoring two first-half goals and defending brilliantly in the second half. They continually made dangerous counter-attacks, which neutered Bolton’s confidence to go for a win with any heart. The best team won. Wembley rocked.
SUNDAY 19 I made a fellow blogger laugh and got a thank-you in return. To the daily prompt, “Have you ever broken a bone?” I replied briefly, “Not one of my own”.
đź“Ś Liverpool beat Wolves 2-0 at home on the last day of the season. But the day was all about much-loved manager JĂĽrgen Klopp, who now leaves the club after nine years. The reception from the fans was wild. Centre-back Virgil van Dijk broke into tears. My cousin Kate remarked on WhatsApp that the whole ceremony (which included a pitch appearance by all the club’s staff) resembled a works leaving party where “everyone stands around desperate for a drink”.
MONDAY 20 The New Statesman has a chilling interview with former Kremlin adviser Sergey Karaganov who offers a geopolitical analysis of the war in Ukraine from a Russian intellectual point of view and sketches out a new world order that includes the death of western civilisation and democracy as we know it.
đź“Ś The latest fantasy figure from Sam’s Queen of Wonky workshop at last year’s differently various exhibition is finished. That marks the end of this collection. Now I will work on stitchworks of other Sam drawings.
TUESDAY 21 A red key appeared on the washing-machine function panel and stayed there long after the washing cycle had finished. The machine’s door would not open. I was forced to send an SOS message to my wife, who was out all day. Feeling slightly humiliated by this, before my wife could reply I improvised a solution. I ran the whole wash cycle again and the red key did not linger at the end. Bingo! Success! Then a message from my wife arrived saying turn it off and turn it on again.
đź“Ś I’m stitching one of Adie’s poems on to heavy canvas. It’s tough work but helped by an occasional glance at the reverse side to see a jumble of incomprehensible hieroglyphics taking shape. I dread to think what a psychoanalyst would make of it.
WEDNESDAY 22 The Commentariat are all laughing at Rishi for trying to claim a paltry reduction in inflation as a massive victory and a great reason to let him carry on as PM. The Comment Is Freed newsletter uses the moment to point out how bad Rishi is at politics.
He has never given a memorable speech. His interviews are typically a mish-mash of unjustified boasting and defensiveness. His approach to party management is so bad that Natalie Elphicke is somehow now a Labour MP.
đź“Ś Carol-Ann arranged with Jess for us to hold this month’s St Luke’s User Group meeting at the Barbican. Jess also threw in some free tickets to see the Unravel exhibition. We added a visit to the 2Tone exhibition in Barbican Library for good measure.
đź“Ś As Rishi stood at his wooden lectern in the rain delivering his “surprise” announcement of a general election on 4 July, protestors played Things Can Only Get Better, the 1997 Labour anthem so loudly he could barely be heard. My insider said that civil servants were told this morning to get ready for the dreaded “Purdah”. As I watched him read his script I wondered whether all prime ministers at some point get to a place where they accept that being PM is just another dead-end job. Rishi looked relieved to have been able to say, “I quit.”
THURSDAY 23 Brad brought his teenage daughter into Headway and she said my latest stitchwork, of Adie’s poem Otherwise Engaged was “sick”.
đź“Ś Rishi screwed up today by asking a group of Welsh brewery workers if they were “looking forward to the football”, obviously unaware that unlike England and Scotland, Wales did not qualify for this year’s Euros.
FRIDAY 24 There’s a whiff of sympathy floating in the air. The sight of Little Rishi standing in the rain announcing the loss of his own job obviously touched people in different ways. Even hardened critics are taking pity. John Crace in the Guardian wonders what it is that makes a man who is obviously successful crave failure.
Why has the man who could have anything made it his life’s ambition to do something at which he is so obviously unsuited? One where his shortcomings are so ruthlessly and publicly exposed?
đź“Ś Jeremy Corbyn has said he will stand as an independent on July 4. He is likely to be expelled from the Labour Party for doing it. I can’t help but hope he wins his Islington North seat. He has by all accounts been a model local MP for 40 years. If Labour wins on July 4 Corbyn will be a constant reference point to the compromises the present Labour Party has made to get into power. This could be as constructive for the new ruling party as it could be destructive. It’s kind of up to Corbyn himself to establish that emphasis, but election to Parliament as an independent is probably his last chance to shape British politics for future generations.
đź“Ś In a rush to pass laws through Parliament before he’s booted out of office, Rishi has been forced to ditch some of his favourite plans, including a ban on smoking that was roundly agreed to be both ridiculous and unworkable, and his great pledge to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. On this the Daily Sensemaker from Tortoise opted to illustrate its faults by using numbers as a weapon.
£290 million – paid already to the Rwandan government.
ÂŁ541 million – the scheme’s full five-year cost if 300 people were deported.
4 – UK home secretaries since the scheme was announced in April 2022.
5,700 – asylum seekers identified by the Home Office as eligible for removal to Rwanda.
0 – asylum seekers forcibly deported.
đź“Ś Other numbers I’m grappling with are the specs for embroidery needles quoted in a helpful chart from John James needles. Amberley at textileArtist.org recommended Chenille and Crewel needles for my purposes, but what size? And so begins another phase of trial and error…
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Billy's Scrapbook 