One month as it happened…
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.
SATURDAY 8 There is fevered speculation on the theory that Rishi is now such a turkey that the Lib-Dems will become the official party of Opposition if Labour wins with a landslide.
📌 My wife has been ill all day with a digestive disorder so I didn’t get to spend much time at the allotments for Open Gardens weekend. News came through later that attendance was high and the Community Cafe made nearly £400 off homemade cakes. Sue said my wife’s fruitcake was the first to go.
📌 I’ve finally finished A Gentleman In Moscow and will not re-read it immediately as I thought I might. I decided instead to re-read George Orwell’s 1984.
SUNDAY 9 On Substack Notes the writer Natasha Poliszczuk pays tribute to her grandfather Albert, a mild-mannered and dignified veteran of the Normandy Landings. It made me wish I had my own grandfather story to tell. I know very little about any of my grandparents, and what I do know has been handed down through generations and mangled no doubt in the re-telling. And I never go in search of more information because I’m always wary that the cold facts might get in the way of a good story. I like the story about my maternal grandparents stowing away from Liverpool to Canada and slipping secretly across the border into the US, where they settled in The Bronx and ran something our ancient aunts called a “theatrical boarding house”. I love these stories so much that the truth might break my heart, so I steer clear of the of it (ie, “theatrical boarding house” probably meant brothel) and allow the stories to grow and take on new flavours with every passing. The only war story we were ever told as children was when Grandpa Willie got shot in the head during the Great War. He was saved, it was said, by a folded-up copy of the Daily Mail he’d stored in his helmet, and was later presented to a member of the royal family as a fighting hero.
📌 It’s always nice to see and hear the police horses trotting around outside.
MONDAY 10 I’d long suspected as much, but a visit to UCLH A&E confirmed that the term Accident & Emergency is now truly meaningless. One guy here had cut his finger and wrapped toilet paper around his wound. A triage nurse, who is meant to be processing accidents and emergencies, politely dressed the damaged finger and dispensed a pain-killing tablet. I tried very hard to read her thoughts but was distracted by the sight of her smiling genially all the way through this moment of absurdity.
📌 Elon Musk is annoyed because Apple are putting AI into all their devices. On the radio a series called Orwell vs Kafka observed that Big Brother doesn’t need to follow us everywhere because we have all quite happily invited Big Brother to sit in our pockets.
TUESDAY 11 Substack Notes is a very polite and gentile version of Twitter, for refined folk, people of letters and a belief in their own good taste. It goes (whimsically) without saying, then, that it can sometimes start to look like a sounding board for The Fast Show.
📌 AI Steve, a non-human candidate in Brighton at the forthcoming general election, turns out to be a guy in Rochdale who owns an AI development company.
WEDNESDAY 12 In the New European Matthew D’Ancona has a chilling profile of Nigel Farage and his real political intentions, which are not as a naughty agitator-in-chief but as a British führer for the future.
He grins, quips and chuckles; but what underpins his politics is venom, resentment and antagonism. The trademark smile is really a rictus of mean-spirited determination.
📌 I’m really enjoying Sophie’s napkin project. Signatures are such a personal form of expression that we experiment with when young but settle into later in life. The napkin everyone signed at a special lunch is soft white linen and the threads Sophie supplied are gloriously smooth.
📌 My wife says she prefers it when really old or really young couples make it to the final of Pointless.
THURSDAY 13 The Headway writing group meeting took place in Shoreditch Library, where a potted version of last year’s differently various exhibition is on display. One of the story prompts for the assembled gathering of Headway members, volunteers and staff alongside members of the public was “Heidi and Martin: The Origins”, which refers to the soap-opera characters I have been building over the past months. Other people’s ideas on how Martin and Heidi came to be a couple were far better than my own…
It all depends on who’s telling the story. The way Heidi tells it Martin was never even on the agenda; it was his friend Ben she was after. She describes Martin as “offering himself up” like some kind of consolation prize when dreamboat Ben casually sloped off with Sasha. Martin claims he planned it that way, using Ben as bait, knowing full well he was already stuck on Sasha. So the “How did you two get together?” question left them both stumped as to which version of events to tell of what they’d come to call, “That night in the Casablanca Club”. They needed an agreed statement.
Heidi: “What about A Happy Accident?”
Martin: “I suppose that will do, for now.”
📌 Keir Starmer is getting kicked for telling us all repeatedly that his father was a humble toolmaker. If he had an ounce of wit he’d turn the joke around and explain like a nerd what exactly a toolmaker does, and indeed if real people actually still do such a job as toolmaking. I’d be surprised if all toolmakers hadn’t by now been made redundant by computers. Starmer could use this fact to talk about a whole range of issues relating to work and the workplace, but he just keeps parroting the toolmaker line, so much so that some wag has edited the Wikipedia entry for toolmaking to include the line: “Tool and die makers are highly skilled crafters working in the manufacturing industries and create future barristers who will undermine their own Country.”
FRIDAY 14 Today’s Sensemaker from Tortoise has a curious graphic showing the policy content, page by page, of the manifestos delivered so far by the main political parties. Each page of the manifestos is represented by a glass (or test tube) full or half full of policy content. Labour has the greatest volume of emptiness.
📌 The pink rose stitchwork is outlined and ready to be filled in. My preference is to blend the greens and pinks of the leaves and petals using the seed stitch as used by textile artist Richard McVetis, who we met not long ago at an Art Workers’ Guild event.
📌 I’ve run out of suitable bedtime audiobooks on BBC Sounds and Librivox has too many American readers for my taste. So I checked our local library’s audiobooks for loan and have become mildly fascinated by a character called Alex Rider in a series of books by Anthony Horowitz, who is the spy world’s answer to Harry Potter. Alex is only 14 but he has MI6 DNA coursing through his young body, inherited from his father and uncle, both of whom, disturbingly, groomed Alex in spycraft from a very young age to become a proper junior James Bond.
SATURDAY 15 The Socialist Worker has a typically robust reflection on the Labour election manifesto, pointing sharply to what is not there, including massive taxes on the rich, nationalisation, demilitarisation… in other words the usual suspects.
📌 At a Barbican workshop I learned all about what it means to be a “producer”. It sounded an awful lot like what used to be called a “project manager”, but on closer examination it turns out to be all the bits that make up a project manager with individual job titles (event producer, budget producer, etc). Or, depending on the pay rate, all of it.
📌 Paula and Seàn came over to ours and we went for lunch in the Black Olive, where me and Seàn made an AI artwork of the heap of cold chips and mayonnaise he left on his plate.
SUNDAY 16 At Barbican Cinema 2 for the 11am screening, we saw The Dead Don’t Hurt, a beautiful if sometimes oversweetened romantic reinvention of the old-school Western, in which a love story between two different but somehow kindred outsider settlers representing France and Denmark comes to tell a bigger story about America both past and present. It has the persistent feeling of a parable, the scripture being the American Dream. Outstanding performance goes to Vicky Krieps as Vivienne (France) with a hats-off to Viggo Mortensen as Olsen (Denmark) who wrote, directed, stars and composed the haunting music. I got baffled by the timeline in one moment but my wife whispered me back on track.
📌 News arrived that Liz has been appointed Alderwoman to replace Sue. She was the only one to apply for the job. At Sue’s birthday party a couple of weeks ago I drunkenly threatened to stand against her but I think she was too drunk herself to pay any attention. Anne posted on WhatsApp an article from the FT that exposes the enduring domination of City of London politics by freemasons.
MONDAY 17 An item in the Conversation, the website on which academics are deployed as journalists, claims that BBC TV’s flagship political debate show Question Time is biased towards using panel guests with right-wing views. It suggests that this is because right-wing pundits are more entertaining than left-wing commentators and therefore a more attractive proposition for the show’s bookers.
TUESDAY 18 Jonty Bloom reckons the letters page of the Daily Telegraph is full of readers writing to say they’re done with the Conservatives. But, writes Bloom, these are not the bluestocking, Austin Reed one-nation Tories. They are the ones who believe the Conservative Party has become a hotbed of socialism, the ones who believe their party has…
…not been right wing enough, hardly bigoted at all, have not tried enough to destroy the NHS or to promote the spread of rickets, and are yet to make school children learn to goose step.
📌 My Euro24 team allegiances are all over the place. On Sunday I found myself rooting for Slovenia against Denmark purely on the basis that Slovenia has a woman as President. Yesterday I got behind Slovakia against Belgium for what reason I have yet to work out. And today I’m leaning towards Czechia against Portugal.
📌 In his latest Substack on gender issues, Graham Linehan promotes a movement called the New Gay Agenda, which aims to separate LGB from TQ+ because, the NGA claims, they are separate identities and should never have been forcefully married in the first place. I think the NGA might have its work cut out because the alphabet string just got longer: LGBTQIA2S+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and trans, queer and questioning, intersex, asexual or agender, and two-spirit, plus more to come.
WEDNESDAY 19 I fell asleep last night last listening to the audiobook of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and woke up this morning to find that it includes a reading of the book’s References (called Notes), which are a delight in themselves. The References are always the part of a book I skip over, but in audiobook they can take on a life of their own and tell you a lot about the author. Gray’s Notes for Poor Things are full of wild fantasy and characteristic dry humour. When dipstick Duncan Wedderburn confesses to being “hoist by my own petard”, the Notes explains this as…
This phrase means ‘blown up by my own bomb’. Shakespeare used it.
📌 Rafael Behr has no doubt about the future ownership of the Conservative Party after the July 4 general election. Any notion that the soft centre will harden its will should be abandoned, he says. They are all too wet and cowardly to put up a fight against the rabid right…
If there were enough moderates capable of winning a struggle for the Conservative soul, it might not have been sold in the first place.
📌 The first of the two pink roses in seed stitch is finished. This project will not be finished for A LONG TIME.
THURSDAY 20 At Headway Stuart showed us the letter of rejection he received from the Chair of the board for his application to become CEO.
📌 Dodged writing group this week to spend time sorting the mountain of stitchwork I have in the studio. Michelle selected a couple of small pieces for open studio and photographed five others for my slot on the website. The story I’d written for this week’s prompt (“More Biscuits”) was in any case pretty lame.
Martin and Heidi fought over lots of things, but none more passionately than when the biscuit tin needed refilling. Heidi favoured HobNobs. Martin would be OK with HobNobs if they were chocolate HobNobs. But no, Heidi’s biscuit of choice was PLAIN HobNobs. Martin occasionally tried to slip in some luxury Jaffa Cakes from M&S but Heidi quickly intervened, removing them from the tin and shrilling about a cross-contamination of flavour. It all ended very badly one week when Martin opted out of their pretend Biscuit Treaty and started his own tin of Chocolate HobNobs mixed with Scottish shortbreads. Heidi hit back with a very decorative jar of very boring biscuits (Rich Tea and Plain HobNobs), but it wasn’t long before Martin caught her with her fingers in his tin.
📌 At the Ed Cross gallery in Garrett Street I enjoyed the clever interplay of mirrors and mise-en-scène in paintings by Eritrean artist Ermias Ekube. The trick of pulling viewers into pictures must be easier when the canvases are as big as these, but the domestic details are alluring too.
📌 At half-time in the Euro24 group game between England and Denmark (1-1) the TV commentariat seemed to be slowly pulling knives from sheaths in preparation for planting them in Gareth Southgate’s back.
FRIDAY 21 Jonty Bloom has an excellent line in his daily rant. For anyone who knows what it is about it is a strong comment. For anyone who doesn’t know what it’s about it is a nice slice of prose.
Their little greedy eyes lit up at the thought of making money, any amount of money for free, a bet that could not lose.
📌 Simon Jenkins seems to think that come July 5 Keir Starmer will face an angry army of welly-wearing yokels demanding the protection of the countryside from his plan to use titchy bits of it to revive the fortunes of Britain’s ailing economy.
📌 Denmark’s supporters have been reprimanded in the British media for singing “stick your fucking teabag up your arse” at England supporters.
SATURDAY 22 Lots of engrossing conversations about inclusion and accessibility at a Barbican workshop. One of the attendees, Paul, who is wheelchair bound and profoundly disabled with cerebral palsy, used to volunteer in a hospital as “Satnav Paul”, scooting around in his electric chair guiding visitors to where they need to be, with full commentary on the inner workings of the hospital.
📌 In the TV show Madam Secretary, Bess became Potus for about 2 hours when Kwai-Chang Caine’s son went missing on Air Force One.
SUNDAY 23 One of the Tories guilty of betting on Rishi’s “surprise” July 4 election date was given a price of 5-1, which suggests the date was not such a surprise after all for BetFred, PaddyPower, William Hill, et al.
📌 Reading about the NFP political collaboration in France reminded me of one Saturday many years ago when me and my cousin Kate joined a coach party from Liverpool to London for a rally organised by the Anti Nazi League. Back then there was a popular partnership of music and politics. Today I struggle to find any similar alliance, although young professional footballers seem to have an appetite for making a stand.
📌 I was quite impressed by the rapid arm manoeuvres I employed this afternoon preventing a wasp from coming through the balcony door.
📌 At the cinema we saw The Bikeriders, which I think was meant to be about the death of primitive masculinity. The problem with trying to make a new biker movie is that ultimately you are trying to reinvent the wheel, and this one despite its best efforts too often looked like an excuse to choreograph physical violence and catwalk a lot of stereotypes through an alleged love story between biker Benny and biker’s moll Cathy, who at least manages to pull off an occasional act of oneupgirlship.
MONDAY 23 The Guardian’s evening political newsletter has a word I never knew. It describes Nigel Farage “edgelording” his way through an interview. I looked it up…
An edgelord is someone on an internet forum who deliberately talks about controversial, offensive, taboo, or nihilistic subjects in order to shock other users in an effort to appear cool, or edgy.
Another new word cropped up this afternoon when I was interviewed by Oliver about my experience on the Barbican’s Imagine Fund panel. He used the word “lacunae”, the plural of lacuna. Lacuna is one of my least favourite words and doesn’t improve in the plural. Oliver quickly realised how pretentious he sounded using such a word as “lacunae” and laughed out loud, at himself.
TUESDAY 24 A well-pointed essay on the James O’Malley Substack Odds & Ends of History first points to a correlation over the past 10 years between the TV trope of the “Asshole Genius” (eg, Sherlock) and the consequent emergence of real-life asshole geniuses (eg, Elon Musk).
The notion that to truly excel as a detective, doctor or manager, one must not only possess genius-level abilities but also have an important personality flaw.
The essay then moves to the more recent emergence of the super-nice TV genius (eg, Ted Lasso). The thesis seems to be that TV characters such as Lasso will give birth to a society of goodies rather than baddies.
WEDNESDAY 25 On top of their major geopolitical differences North and South Korea are engaged in what sounds like a petty squabble between unhappy neighbours who end up chucking their rubbish back and forth over the garden fence. To prove what it believes to be its societal superiority, the South has been sending balloons filled with food, medicine and money across the border. The North has now retaliated by sending south balloons filled with landfill, garden waste and raw sewage, the latest volley of which caused airplanes to be grounded at Seoul airport, where Marge’s son Steve and his Korean wife were waiting to travel to London.
📌 Vera is chuffed. Waitrose has Jack Daniel’s on special offer.
📌 The woman with the incredible shelf-like chest (whose name I’ve forgotten) popped into Stitchers. She said she was just killing time before the food bank opened. Karen was talking gibberish about tennis again and I tried and failed to look interested.
📌 Ukraine got eliminated from the group stage of the Euro24 tournament with 4 points, the same as the three other teams in their group – Belgium, Slovakia and Romania. They came 4th on goal difference.
📌 I think my wife’s enthusiasm for the TV show Madam Secretary is wearing thin. We are into Series 2 (of 6) and the conflict in Ukraine has arrived, with all the paraphernalia of the propaganda movie.
THURSDAY 26 Today’s Sensemaker from Tortoise contains a warning, that the twisting of facts and context by real people is a worse contributor to misinformation than anything drummed up by AI. It quotes words by Keir Starmer talking about illegal immigration that have been made to claim he advocates the forced repatriation of British Bangladeshis.
📌 And as if on cue, the story prompt I chose for the Headway writing group Babyshoes was True, Not True.
Jane Austen wrote, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Unfortunately for Martin, Heidi had the irritating habit of applying “It is a truth universally acknowledged” to anything she simply agreed with, as if her viewpoint would somehow carry more weight by having a bit of Jane Austen in it. This angered Martin, especially when Heidi casually dismissed his assertion that in the opening sentence of Pride & Prejudice (1813) Jane Austen was not only wrong, but very wrong – about Truth, about men, about rich men and about marriage. Truth, he argued, was merely fact plus human intelligence. He went on…
“Fictional Fact 1: Mr Darcy dived fully clothed into his own lake.
“Fictional Fact 2: Miss Eliza Bennet saw him do it.
“Truth 1: Miss Eliza felt an ardent love for Darcy explode within her.
“Truth 2: Miss Eliza thought, WHAT A KNOBHEAD!”
📌 Also at the Headway writing group I explained that poetry was never my thing. I just didn’t get it, but lately I have revisited the idea and realised that I got my poetry through songs. As an example, I read one by Paul Simon…
The last train is nearly due
The underground is closing soon
And in the dark deserted station
Restless in anticipation
A man waits in the shadowsHis restless eyes leap and scratch
At all that they can touch or catch
And hidden deep within his pocket
Safe within its silent socket
He holds a coloured crayonNow from the tunnel’s stony womb
The carriage rides to meet the groom
And opens wide its welcome doors
But he hesitates, then withdraws
Deeper in the shadowsAnd the train is gone suddenly
On wheels clicking silently
Like a gently tapping litany
And he holds his crayon rosary
Tighter in his handNow from his pocket quick he flashes
The crayon on the wall he slashes
Deep upon the advertisement
A single-worded poem comprised of four lettersAnd his heart is laughing, screaming, pounding
The poem across the tracks rebounding
Shadowed by the exit light
His legs take their ascending flight
To seek the breast of darkness and be suckled by the night
📌 To Kiss Me Kate at the Barbican. Still can’t quite shake off the feeling that musicals are simple and sometimes funny stories ruined by the bad plastic surgery of song insertion. NB, Adrian Dunbar can sing.
📌 Outside the studio, some newly created clay people lay peacefully in the sun.
FRIDAY 27 The statistical prophet Nate Silver thinks Joe Biden should step aside for a younger person immediately. Then he rambles on endlessly about statistical models, quoting his work in the field of sport, which is fascinating but sadly not quite at the right end of the age spectrum for any political analogy..
Major athletes improve rapidly through roughly age 22, improve more slowly from age 23 to 25, peak from about age 26 to age 28, and then enter a decline phase.
📌 Oh how I love Cyndi Lauper’s accent.
SATURDAY 29 Everyday Philosophy examines the concept of the professional foul and Kierkegaard’s belief that such rule-breaking is…
the teleological suspension of the ethical
The reference is apt because the analysis goes on to reference a 1970s Tom Stoppard play, Professional Foul, about an academic who wangles a lecture trip to Prague in order to attend a Czechoslovakia versus England football match (nb, Slovakia v England, tomorrow, 17.00).
📌 The stitchwork/paint combine I did of Marge’s portrait of her grandson Max was hidden away somewhere in the studio, but now rescued and spruced up a bit.
📌 Every week I get a newsletter from theBureau Of Investigative Journalism blowing its own trumpet. And this week I think they probably deserve it…
We uncovered a network of Reform UK-linked Facebook groups, spreading hate and misinformation and recruiting candidates for the election.
Dutch football club Vitesse lost its licence after we revealed it was secretly funded by Roman Abramovich.
Morrisons and Iceland agreed to stop stocking Del Monte pineapple products following our year-long investigation into violence on Kenyan farms.
📌 Oliver sent over the transcript of the interview we did last week. He used an AI transcription program called Otter, and among the 8,000 words it managed to spew out was a transcription of “Barbican Communities” as “barbecuing communities”.
📌 A performance by the devine Cape Verde singer Mayra Andrade was destroyed by Barbican staff continually allowing latecomers to disturb the intimate environment up to one hour after the show had started. The setting was simple but very atmospheric, in which Andrade sat singing in a cosy old armchair, with lush green house plants and her acoustic guitarist Djodje Almeida as company, the two musicians clearly engaged in a bonding exercise throughout. In sequence the lighting changed subtly across the warm-colour spectrum while between songs Andrade told backstories about growing up in Cape Verde.
SUNDAY 30 Orwell Daily has a neat short essay on drones, the master pointing out in 1944 that the original drone bombs used by Germany on Britain at least offered an ominous pause when the droning stopped as the engines cut out before the bombs hit their target.
you have only about five seconds to take cover and no time to speculate on the bottomless selfishness of the human being.
📌 The makings of a team spirit has infected the upper reaches of the Labour Party. Yesterday on the radio I heard Health shadow Wes Streeting up against former Brexit minister David Davis. At no point did Streeting’s powerful arguments for big-scale reform sound like he was performing for himself. He saw the interests of a strong, stable team being greater than those of the individual.
📌 To the cinema for a timely re-release of the remarkable Network, starring Peter Finch, Faye Runaway, William Holden and Robert Duval. The film is well known for Finch’s onscreen wailing of “I’m mad as hell, and I won’t take it anymore” and if all you do is swap the medium (TV for social media), you get the point.
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Billy's Scrapbook 