June 1-7, 2024
SATURDAY 1 The Conservative election campaign is starting to look interesting for all the wrong reasons. Rishi is proving to be as bad at talking to real people as he was at being a prime minister. He went to Belfast’s Titanic Quarter and asked people if they thought he was the captain of a sinking ship. He probably meant it as an ironic joke, but irony rarely lands the way you imagine it would in an open environment. Keep your in-jokes for your in-crowd, Rish. But Rishi’s manoeuvres also offer a glimpse of the future. Pollsters are predicting a result so bad for the Tories that they will be overtaken by the Lib-Dems as the official party of Opposition, and Rishi’s surprise announcement in calling the election a grave error of judgement.
It’s quite the thing to catch yourself off guard by calling your own snap election.
📌 At Sue’s birthday party I spotted Vera sneaking a quarter bottle of Jack Daniel’s from her handbag. Iris had a full bottle of Bailey’s hidden under the table.
SUNDAY 2 We will finish the TV version of A Gentleman In Moscow tonight but I’m only 76% into the book, which is so richly complex I’ll feel bereft when I finish it. I’ve never started re-reading a book straight after finishing it, but maybe this is the one.
MONDAY 3 When I started stitching Ade’s poem Otherwise Engaged into heavy 240gsm canvas I nearly gave up after the first line, so difficult was it to even get the needle to pull through. Now I’m nearly finished I am glad that I carried on. Shaping the characters of each word was also a daily fight, and not always one I won. But over time what emerged was a kind of typography akin to spidery handwriting, and I quite like it. It wasn’t planned to be like that but I’m glad I was able eventually to see what was being created and let it grow.
📌 In 2021 Keir Starmer made a bungled attempt to sack Angela Rayner as party chair and national campaigns coordinator, or at least that is what was reported. Now there is the fiasco of Diane Abbott, who was one day barred from standing as a Labour MP on July 4 only to be inserted as the candidate the next.
TUESDAY 4 There will be parties this week commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings of 1944. I am unable to attend any of them, but at least the occasion has forced me to discover for the first time what the D stands for in D-Day. The Royal British Legion came straight to the point…
The ‘D’ stands for ‘Day’, meaning it’s actually short for ‘Day-Day’ (which is nowhere near as catchy). Before the allied attack in June 1944 there would have been many D-Days, however it was so iconic that it came to be used solely when referring to the beginning of Operation Overlord.
📌 Oh, the bad luck. You get half way through the penultimate word on the last line of a piece of stitched text and the horror of a mistake hits you. “Oterwise” is not how you spell “otherwise” in a poem that is titled Otherwise Engaged.
WEDNESDAY 5 I asked my wife where she’d like to go on our next city break. I suggested Antwerp or a return to Brussels as possibilities. She liked the idea of Antwerp, but added that “we’d better do it before October”, which is, she says, when new travel restrictions are introduced that will hinder European transit for UK citizens even more than the tedious delays Brexit has already inflicted.
📌 Rishi has been outed by the Civil Service for playing fast and loose with Labour’s alleged tax plans.
📌 I ventured back into east London (Whitechapel) for an appointment to be screened for something called an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm, an ailment that is said to affect older men (I got the all-clear). In the clinic on the wall was a stitchwork that typifies the vitality of the craft in this part of London.
📌 Inequality has grown since Narendra Modi came to power in India in 2014, reports today’s Sensemaker. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens now Modi has lost total control of the Indian parliament and is forced to make friends with some of his rivals.
THURSDAY 6 Jonty Bloom reckons Keir Starmer deliberately let Rishi tell his tax lies in their TV debate, knowing that the Tories would need to spend the rest of the week trying to get Rishi off the hook.
📌 At Headway the writers’ group met but I was busy helping with a workshop on sensory mapping in which I did bad drawings of ears, eyes and noses. The story I had submitted to the writers’ group had the title Rule of Three, but I’m not really sure why.
Some time during the Pandemic Heidi and Martin stopped reading the news in bed on a Sunday morning and started browsing Facebook Marketplace instead. Beyond the gendered rivalry between homewares and guitars they both secretly knew that all the browsing was symbolic of a search for something bigger. The pretense took the form of a competition to find something they agreed would make their Hoxton home complete. An Orla Kiely vase? A smart speaker for the bathroom? No. Third time lucky?
Heidi: “Look at this!”
Martin “I’m on it already.”
They were both staring at a 2-litre Thermos jug in orange, with the original Thermos sticker still intact.
Both: “That’s eight cups of tea. We’d only need to boil the kettle once a day. Yes!”
📌 Also at Headway Robin told us that David Bailey is in the same care home as Alan’s mum.
📌 Delivered the finished stitchwork of Ade’s poem Otherwise Engaged. He seemed quite chuffed. I was glad to be rid of it. It wasn’t a terribly enjoyable project despite the obvious beauty of the written sentiment.
FRIDAY 7 There’s still three weeks to go before the general election but I bet Rishi is already wishing the ground would open up and swallow him whole before he suffers any more humiliation. The Knowledge quotes both the FT and the New Statesman saying essentially the same thing about the Tories…
The party of the contented has become the party of the angry; the party of prudent finance became the party of fiscal recklessness; the party of stability became a party of chaos, political purism and iconoclasm
📌 I titivated our allotments slightly in preparation for Open Gardens weekend. I was about to tackle a huge pile of discarded dead wood and leaves when Shirley passed by and told me it looked “authentic”. I settled for that and went home for a cup of tea.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 