June 29-July 5, 2024
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 the Bureau 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.
MONDAY 1 At around 85 minutes into the England versus Slovakia game last night I did a web search on the bookies odds for the next England manager, and the favourite was former Brighton manager Graham Potter.
📌 I think I have a mild addiction to Elif Shafak’s Unmapped Storylands Substack, in which she shares “stories, anecdotes, wise proverbs and foolish thoughts from my unpublished notebooks”. Today she imagines a woman from the middle ages stepping from the safety of the painting she inhabits to ask Shafak questions about the world today.
📌 I’m in a rush to finish Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. I got a message from the library saying someone else wants to borrow it.
📌 When Diogo Jota went down in the penalty area in the Portugal vs Slovenia game my wife said he must have been taking lessons in diving from Mo Salah. The awarded penalty by Cristiano Ronaldo was saved, much to her delight.
📌 At Alice’s Summer Party Lena told me that Elly Space is alive and well on YouTube.
TUESDAY 2 In today’s Sensemaker Bill Bryson, the American writer resident in the UK since 1977, has a message for voters going to the polls on Thursday.
Some of your MPs may be a bit dim or small-minded or otherwise alarming, but you would have to search pretty hard to find any that are truly senile, serially felonious, flat-out mad or so stupid that they would boast about shooting their pet dog.
Bryson retired from writing in 2022.
📌 To Tate Britain for the John Singer Sargent exhibition showcasing his fashion portraits, which actually form a compendium of archetypes for what was to follow in the business of fashion photography and the hyper-stylised place it occupies today. Sargent presents as a smug bourgeois git making money out of dull, self-important rich people who want to be made to look grand, and good, in very large format. Sargent obliged, though he later became a war artist, so I suppose that’s OK. Not one of the faces of his many sitters held the flicker of a personality they could call their own.
📌 Beware the time-travelling tricks of TV streaming services. My wife told me that when the conflict in Ukraine arrived in Madam Secretary it wasn’t the real conflict in Ukraine, because the Madam Secretary series ended in 2019. Amazing how the TV writers could predict future world-changing events when real world leaders could not.
WEDNESDAY 3 Finished the City of London tote bag. I originally intended it as a gift for our long-serving community police officer Christine, but I’m open to other suggestions now. I enjoyed the stitching, so I might start a new one and build a collection of different versions of the same thing.
THURSDAY 4 Someone pinned a helpful notice to a nearby tree.
📌 We both emerged from the cinema after seeing Kinds of Kindness smiling at how we survived three hours of such wilful weirdness. We sat later in Baracca chuckling at some funny moments but nevertheless determined not to try any kind of analysis about power, subjugation, gaslighting, etc. Mrs Baracca confided that the restaurant will close forever at the end of the month rather than just for the usual one month they normally take to spend with family in Italy. Later we joined the local Labour campaigners in the pub to talk about the exit polls, which were predicting a landslide.
FRIDAY 5 Tortoise reports that McDonald’s has cut breakfast hours at its outlets in Australia in response to a shortage of eggs, caused by bird flu.
📌 For anyone worried about the rise of Nigel Farage after his election to the seat of Clacton a man on Times Radio pointed out that Nigel Farage has a habit of falling out with so-called close colleagues, of which he now has four sitting next to him in Parliament.
📌 In Canary Wharf we nicked a last chance to see the fabulous Fashion City exhibition at the Museum of London, Docklands. The best rooms for me were the one that included Princess Diana’s handwritten notes to designer David Sassoon and the one with David Bowie’s shirts. On the way back to the station we sat on a bench and ate Greggs vegan sausage rolls and bought some dental cement from Boots to bung up the cavity in my back tooth that can’t be fixed properly at the dentist until August (first available appointment).
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Billy's Scrapbook 