July 13-19, 2024
SATURDAY 13 We’ve decided to take a break from Madam Secretary at the end of Series 3 (there are 6). It’s already hard to see how much more of the planet Madam Secretary Elizabeth McCord can save, how many more dodgy Russian and Chinese ministers she can casually seduce onto the moral high ground (Madam’s hunky hubby Henry is a theologist and classicist who works a side-hustle as a secret spy handler for the CIA/FBI/NSA), how many more red-faced Republican bloviators she can humiliate. We will return at some point later to see if eldest daughter Stevie and her English physicist boyf work it out, and if Nadine picks things up with the guy from NASA. Will Jay repair his disintegrating marriage? Will Matt write a successful novel and finally leave the State Department? And will Mr President get re-elected? Ukraine, Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, Armageddon… It’s all there and I’m sure it will still be waiting for us when we return after our well-earned break from the propaganda machine. But right now we are exhausted, oversoaked in a marinade of sanctimony. Last night I even described Madam Secretary as the Little House On The Prairie of US politics. Maybe that was the studio pitch.
📌 ITV is in trouble for a new comedy series about a police training centre. Its title is Piglets.
📌 Finally managed to catch the Shifting Narratives exhibition in Barbican Library, a refugee storytelling project in textiles.
📌 To St Luke’s Music Education Centre for a concert by the remnants of my wife’s old LSO Community Choir, now renamed the St Clements Community Choir. She said the sopranos were a bit screachy.
SUNDAY 14 I’ve never counted myself as a real supporter of England’s national football team. In the Euro 24 competition I found myself rooting for the Netherlands because their national team had more Liverpool players than any other. But as hope rises across the nation that a more stable future might be possible, an England victory in tonight’s Euro 24 final against Spain would be a big boost to the national mood. If England can win by being boring in both politics and football, we might just have found a new national identity.
📌 Spain beat England 2-1, but England seemed happily boring in defeat. Best headline: “The Lions Weep Tonight”.
MONDAY 15 The attempted killing of Donald Trump (which my wife suspects was a stunt arranged by Trump himself) has apparently made him more electable, say the pundits. So I daringly suggest that this might not be an entirely bad thing, as it will force Europe to rearrange itself around the new European Political Community (EPC) and to strategically distance itself in a conscious uncoupling from America as a so-called global partner. A Trump victory might just be a moment for Britain and its new government to shine. Paul Mason has something to say about this in his Conflict & Democracy newsletter and reading it I almost started to relish the idea of cleverly backing away from the American monster.
Britain may be just a mid-sized country, with a hollowed out army and a nuclear deterrent whose firing tests go wrong, but it can punch way above its weight if it can find the willpower to do what Boris Johnson walked away from: leadership in Europe.
📌 The Patricia Highsmith collection of short stories Eleven includes one called The Snail Watcher, a horrific critique of capitalist greed in metaphor. In it financier Peter Knoppert’s enthusiasm for watching snails breed turns into a suffocating, slimy nightmare.
📌 To the Royal Court in Sloane Square for ECHO: EVERY COLD-HEARTED OXYGEN, an intriguing piece of concept theatre about migration that involved a star actor onstage in an unrehearsed live dialogue with an Iranian playwright/actor, supposedly in “Berlin”. The point being that all human beings are migrants in time and that we become new people every time we form a new bond with someone else. And that’s what you’re seeing in real time tonight, folks, a kind of migration of the soul. The star actor onstage for this show (every one is a different actor) was Benedict Wong, who is so starry we’d never heard of him. But that’s because we don’t watch the right kind of fantasy films (we don’t watch any kind of fantasy films). Others lined up to appear include Adrian Lester, Jodie Whitaker, Meera Syal, Monica Dolan and Toby Jones. We loved tonight’s show so much that we will return next week to see how the same role – part improvised, part verbatim scripted performance – plays out with a woman on stage (Jessica Gunning, from The Outlaws and Baby Reindeer).
TUESDAY 16 At the annual Hackney CVS awards the Headway/Barbican team won in the community achievement category for last year’s differently various exhibition. HCVS always puts on a good party, with great food, and the stories behind the awards always have a powerful spirit.
WEDNESDAY 17 In an attempt to avoid any news about Donald Trump I’ve finally got to work on the next stitchwork in the series of adaptations I’m doing of Sam’s drawings. It’s a wonky pair of massive cloggy women’s sandals, worn with crinkled socks. The outline is always the most frustrating part for me. Only when it is finished and has the right shape can I relax and enjoy the rest of the stitching. This one will take a very long time to complete and will undoubtedly be painfully stitched, unpicked and restitched before the end. And always in the back of my mind is the next Sam drawing I’d like to stitch, a fish skeleton.
THURSDAY 18 In the middle of the night I woke up from a dream in which I was in a meeting, deep in discussion, when Peter Hooton entered the room, glanced at me knowingly, walked over, whispered in my ear, and left.
📌 At the Headway writing group, music maestro James confessed to once working in a band with Gary Glitter. He said it was fantastically easy “because he was so stupid”. At the end of the tour, James says, Glitter gave all the band members a signed copy of his favourite self-help book.
📌 My story contribution to the group this week had the title Lonely Flower.
They’d both agreed that Advanced Couples Counselling might help, but doubts surfaced when the therapist asked them if they ever had pet names for their genitals. They both sensed each other starting to psychologically itch. Martin went first, with something Heidi later called bravado.
“Nudger!” he stated boldly. “That’s what my mother and her noisy sisters called it, so that’s what I called it. All the other kids at school had willies, but I had Nudger.”
Heidi knew this already, and even she gave his Nudger its proper name, mostly. She said so and the therapist wrote it down. Now it was her turn:
“Lonely Flower,” she spluttered. Martin stifled a giggle. Heidi jumped at the chance to explain: “I had a Japanese picture book and Lonely Flower was one of the stories. It just stayed with me from that moment. It was kind of mystical. I never told anyone. My Lonely Flower was my secret friend. I even called my pet snake Lonely Flower when I was at uni.”
Martin was squirming by now, searching his mind desperately for an exit plan.
“And did you know…” he started, but not exactly sure where he was going with it… “That male snakes have penises and female snakes have vaginas, and clitorises. Or is it clitori?”
They all took the distraction as a sign. “Same time next week?” mumbled the therapist.
I submitted one other short piece of writing with the title Carried Away…
Don’t get carried away is the kind of advice you get given when you look like you’re losing control. But that afternoon in October when Heidi lost control she was more than happy to get carried away, to hospital.
Then we watched a YouTube video of an interview with the man who did the voices of Bill & Ben, in the voices of Bill & Ben.
📌 In the studio a reggae version of the Piña Colada song was playing.
FRIDAY 19 One of the artists I follow online has invited her online drawing pupils to come up with a badge in defiance of artificial intelligence…
📌 Starting to wonder how the horrible word “outage”crept into common use. Maybe it’s because words such as failure sound too doomy.
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