Scrapbook: April 2024

One month as it happened…

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.

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.

SATURDAY 13 The sun was shining when we arrived in Edinburgh yesterday. We stripped off the layers and as soon as we left our hotel and hit nearby Market Street the weather turned. We ducked into The Fruitmarket, browsed an atmospheric retrospective exhibition by the Scottish sculptor Martin Boyce, then sat at a window seat in the cafe watching the rain outside get heavier and heavier. We left when we learned they had no white wine in the fridge.

📌 On our way to Ondine last night for some extravagant seafood we passed a ginger youth in a kilt playing the bagpipes. My wife urged me not to take a photo and later said she suspected the youth of being part of a large organised gang of ginger bagppipers.

📌 Edinburgh takes modern art seriously and has given over two huge historic buildings in lush green parklands to two galleries, imaginatively named Modern One and Modern Two. Modern One had an intriguing collection of work by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh, who does amazing things with thread and paper, plus a modest but impressive permanent collection from some of the greats. Modern Two had a boring celebration of Eduardo Paolozzi, the “Scottish Pop Artist” who would be 100 were he still alive.

📌 On Princes Street we spotted another ginger bagpiper.

📌 What we hoped would be another exciting seafood dining experience, this time at the White Horse, was not to be, mainly because the headline dish (crab scotch egg) was off the menu.

SUNDAY 14 Ricky, the jovial (and English) guide on our Edinburgh tour bus, was an archetype of the misogynist-xenophobe who has no idea that what they think is funny is actually quite offensive. When he tried pathetically to endear himself to the Dutch, German and American tourists in our group by impersonating their accents we got off and went to the National Museum of Scotland, a place I could happily spend all the remaining days of my life.

MONDAY 15 Had I given it some proper thought I might have predicted that the Andy Warhol Textiles exhibition at Dovecot Studios would be a cheeky mix of the gimmicky, the humourous and the sublimely elegant.

📌 On the bus to Leith I asked my wife to repeat the tongue-twisting words, “The Leith Police Dismisseth Us”, with ever-increasing speed. But she wouldn’t do it.

📌 A trip to Edinburgh would not be complete if we didn’t visit Valvona & Crolla to spend potty amounts of money on luxury Italian foodstuffs.

TUESDAY 16 As the train sped south to London we tried to catch a glimpse of Antony Gormley’s famous Angel of the North sculpture. My wife succeeded, I failed.

📌 As soon as we felt confident enough to sing the praises of the newly state-owned LNER train service (polite, efficient, reliable, etc. The staff actually seem to care), our train broke down in York. They were very honest and practical about it, and we got notification of a full refund within half an hour. We boarded the next train and got home about an hour later than expected.

📌 Dawn posted a picture of a parakeet that parked itself in a tree opposite her flat.

WEDNESDAY 17 On his Notes from the Underground Substack David Aaronovitch is rightly fascinated by one of the demographics to emerge from the Cass Review on NHS gender identity services for children and young people. Between 2017 and 2019 there was a dramatic switch in the young people accessing the service.

Clinicians confirmed the changing demographic as demonstrated by the data above. They described how this changed over a two-year period between 2017 and 2019, from a mixed age range group with a majority of birth-registered males to 70-80% birth-registered females under the age of 25.

The Cass Review

THURSDAY 18 The City of London Corporation plan to bulldoze the site of the old Museum of London and replace it with commercial property was smacked in the face last night when Michael Gove of all people called in the planning application after a widespread and highly organised campaign to stop it. Local residents argue that the existing architecture of the Barbican building can be preserved by repurposing and refitting rather than destroying it. They also argue that this option has a much lower carbon footprint. The City of London Corporation is both the planning authority and the proposed developer of the site.

📌 It’s reported that up to a dozen Greater Manchester police officers are investigating a complaint against Angela Rayner about some tax she might or might not have paid years before she became an MP. For clarity, a dozen is 12.

📌 Art UK has a fabulous online collection of Autograph’s photo archive.

📌 My wife’s tomato seedlings are gaining strength, despite our absence over the weekend.

📌 As we walked down the street, a neighbour’s two children, out playing, stopped to chat and told us about their cat’s new kittens. Then the youngest, two front teeth missing, stared at me with curiosity and turned to my wife: “Is he your dad?”  he asked her.

📌 My wife told me over supper about a past work college who used to arrive late at work on the same day every week for “medical” reasons. He was visiting his chiropodist.

FRIDAY 19 The latest stitchwork in my plant series will be a rose that starts off pink but will probably end up featuring every colour in my thread basket. As usual, the reverse side is better-looking than the show side.

📌 It’s always a treat when Sam goes full surrealist, this time with a dog on an airbed.

📌 My wife has a spine problem that sooner or later will require surgery. We spoke to the spine doctor and decided that we’d go for a wait-and-see option for the next 12 months.

📌 We finished the second series of Blue Lights and what started in Series 1 as an almost clever look at the workings of the PSNI became a routine ensemble cop show with heightened drama in romantic relationships and sectarian politics.

SATURDAY 20 Matt Forde is back on the British Scandal podcast. I hadn’t known his absence was due to him having surgery for cancer of the spine. He can’t walk yet, but is nevertheless able to crack jokes about being a stand-up comedian who can’t stand up.

📌 We’ve set ourselves the challenge of naming our 3 chosen ways to spend Christmas this year. Only one of mine was to stay in London, but as I wrote it down, the prospect became more and more attractive.

SUNDAY 21 Rishi has gone way off the rails. A new survey says the culture wars are a real voter turn-off, he’s failed miserably in his mission to stop the boats and start shipping asylum seekers to Rwanda, the number of his MPs has shrunk from 365 to 346 because of sleaze, fraud and other misdeeds in office, and now he’s persecuting disabled people. An early election would be a merciful release for everyone.

📌 I bumped into Richard, who I haven’t seen in ages, and he told me ominously that his doctor had found “shadows in my back”. He looked well enough but seemed to struggle keeping his train of thought. He was on his way to Waitrose for one of their ready-cooked chickens (£6.95).

📌 We started watching Baby Reindeer on Netflix as a half-hour filler but were soon hooked on the tale of a no-hope stand-up comedian who falls prey to a crazy stalker called Martha. This is another curious hybrid where aching plot-drama flirts with dark comedy and horror. For me the loose strings are held together by Martha, played by Jessica Gunning, who also shone as the over-enthusiastic PCSO in the Stephen Merchant comedy The Outlaws.

MONDAY 22 In the wake of the Cass Review, the trans debate looks like it’s taking a turn. On last week’s  Have I Got News for You the host, Alexander Armstrong, made a scripted sarcastic quip about a group of health workers who made the news by declaring their recognition of 21 different genders and sexualities, and on a New European podcast two metropolitan media men, Matt D’Ancona and Matt Kelly, felt emboldened enough to argue on behalf of honest reasoned debate over the cultish bullying of the social-media gender zealots.

📌 In the first episode of Red Eye, intrigue and death stalk a long-haul flight from London to Beijing. In an onboard orgy of suspicious glances and incriminating looks, a British-Chinese cop is trying to repatriate a suspected killer back to Beijing after he did a runner following a bad night out. Meanwhile, back in Britain, MI5, in the shape of Lesley Sharp, are up to something that can only be spoken about in coded utterances that imply something to do with national security. Stupidly gripping. Can’t wait for Ep2.

📌 Wilna at the Barbican’s Imagine Fund desk promised to deliver this year’s submissions to be graded (I’m on the awards panel), but nothing turned up.

TUESDAY 23 Someone on Substack got jumped on for starting his review of the new Taylor Swift album, Tortured Poets Department, with the words, “Sylvia Plath did not put her head in an oven for this.”

📌 While my wife was upstairs on a long phone call I got all the old veg out of the fridge, peeled it, chopped it and put it on to roast for a soup we (I?) shall eat (drink?) on our return from Winchester on Sunday.

📌 If I hadn’t read the caption I’d have shot right past the picture of the inside of a cello.

WEDNESDAY 24 The whole vibe of Nye, a play starring Michael Sheen about the life and work of Aneurin Bevan, was quite loud, hectoring and depressingly binary. Moments I liked included a memory scene down a mine with his father in which Nye is urged to find and feel “the seem”. Other parts (the play is too long and too dense) seemed designed as an over-simplified explainer on the political birth of the NHS and a rallying cry to save the child from the filicidal desires of the market, both then and now.

📌 Red Eye update. The suspicious Chinese woman at the doctor’s conference in Beijing is thought to have secretly planted some vital evidence on one of the doctors, all bar one of whom have now been bumped off during a long-haul flight. The secret service agencies in London are involved and the mystery is said to be linked to an Anglo-China nuclear deal. On the plane a lone British-Chinese police officer is searching for the killer but only seems able to find more bodies, and her renegade journalist sister is back in London poking her nose in all the wrong places.

THURSDAY 25 At Headway Fiona told me that her ageing mother finds stitchwork quite difficult these days. Nevertheless she has completed three “Personality Quilts”, one for each of her daughters, made from Liberty fabric. They each in their design reflect the individual nature of their owner. For example Fiona’s quilt has structure, whereas her youngest sister’s is more wild and freeform.

📌 Also at Headway we learned that lunches are now free, for a year, rather than £3.50. This is thanks to Simon The Fireman, a one-time volunteer who made an early killing in bitcoin and now lives in luxury in Thailand.

📌 I’ve started to look at the Barbican’s Imagine Fund applications and did a quick Zoom with Georgia, Divya and Raluca to iron out any queries. They are all in their 20s and I really felt like a thought criminal when none of them deemed it inappropriate, as I did, with one of the fund applicants describing their project as a jewellery-making workshop for “menopausal ladies over the age of 45”. My wife agreed with them.

📌 In Winchester Dave told how long ago he used to hide spare cash in an old shell-suit that was gathering dust in the wardrobe. It contained £1,000 by the time his wife Sue threw it in the bin: “It was black, with green flashes. It was disgusting.” Dave also showed us the vintage Fiorucci advertising posters they found while clearing out their house in Spain. Sue thought they’d uncovered a stash of their son’s porn.

FRIDAY 26 The Watercress Line is a Hampshire tourist attraction for steam railway nerds. Seven of us spent the day trundling up and down, back and forth in throwback railway carriages in the company of chronic British nostalgists. My wife took lots of pictures of train nerds (white men) taking pictures of vintage steam trains.

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 life story.

SUNDAY 28 My wife had a win on the National Lottery. She won a free Luck 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 in 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 we 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.

📌 Both Jane and Marge had 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.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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