Scrapbook: Week 30

July 20-26, 2024

SATURDAY 20 The BBC has started using the words “IT meltdown” instead of “outage”, which at least makes it sound less like an act of god.

📌 Of the four carriages on our train to Nottingham, two of them were First Class.

📌 Have Gregg’s and Wetherspoons become new markers of civilisation as we know it?

📌 My wife reckons Microsoft’s global computer system failure is a golden opportunity for money launderers to wash tonnes of cash, as retail businesses have been forced by the crisis to operate as “cash only”.

📌 In the Nottingham Contemporary art gallery my wife overheard a woman asking at reception if it was OK to bring her ferret into the gallery. Once they learned it would be safely contained in her rucksack they said Yes.

SUNDAY 21 We are in Nottingham to see Jennifer’s latest exhibition, Kaleidoscopic Realms, featuring the work of eight artists from supported studios. Hats off to Nottingham Castle for backing an exhibition of this size (until November) with the full big-gallery treatment. And it’s a credit to Jennifer’s energy and commitment that under-represented artists finally get a platform on a par with established names.

MONDAY 22 A trip to Nottingham would not be complete without a visit to the Danish Homestore on Derby Road.

📌 Most of Nottingham’s galleries and museums are closed on Mondays so we took a bumpy number 35 “History” bus out to the west of the city on a route that namechecks attractions such as the original home of Raleigh bicycles and a location used in the film version of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night & Sunday Morning starring Albert Finney. The bus deposited us in a outpost called Bulwell, which was such a depressing conglomeration of nail bars and charity shops that my wife immediately argued the case for getting straight back on the next bus out of there.

📌 We did a web search to find out the divergence between supporters of Notts County and Nottingham Forest. The message boards were helpful. County supporters are older, posher and less intelligent than Forest supporters, apparently. Another clue to the difference is to note that few people outside Nottingham can name anyone who ever managed or played for County, whereas my wife insisted on having her photo taken with Brian Clough.

📌 Incidental things we learned about Nottingham include lone men of various ages hanging around in Wetherspoons pubs, and something revealing about charity shops that don’t stock a lot of recipe books.

📌 We were led to believe by the weather forecasts that rain was on its way, so we went to the cinema in the Lace Market area to see a soppy but sweet film called Thelma about a grandmother in her 90s, the victim of a telephone scam, who hunts down the fraudsters and gets her $10,000 back.

TUESDAY 23 I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Substack Notes is riddled with pretentious utterings. You just have to look for them.

📌 Still haven’t quite got the hang of how to pronounce Kamala Harris’s first name (Comma-la). I sense her elevation to presidential nominee after Joe Biden’s withdrawal is a moment, when the US Democratic party sees a chance to become the political party it hasn’t been for some time – liberated, expressive and progressive, shackled by convention, yes, but not chained by conservatism. It is, I suspect, a moment of innocent euphoria that is ultimately doomed, buried beneath the loaded earth of Joe Biden’s closing moments.

Whenever he said ‘anyway’, or ‘here’s the deal’, or ‘by the way’, you knew another cognitive car-crash was on its way and winced in anticipation.     Matthew D’Ancona, New European

📌 At an Imagine Fund meeting to talk through the scores for each of the 26 Alumni Projects, the one I most admired and strongly supported came way ahead of all the others. I didn’t even need to speak on its behalf.

📌 In 45 minutes Madam Secretary saved a US journalist banged up in Sudan on charges of espionage secretly trumped up by the Chinese state. And Jay had a wild fling with a work colleague, which he dutifully confessed to chief-of-staff Nadine.

WEDNESDAY 24 It looks like vindictiveness could be Keir Starmer’s weak spot. He’s suspended a bunch of people who disagreed with him, again. Those who have played football with him say his on-field aggression is a defining characteristic.

THURSDAY 25 The Treasury has said it will stop minting new coins for general circulation because there are already enough of them in the system.

📌 Zara turned up at Headway with her newborn son, Ellery. It’s been so long since I last saw her that I never even noticed she had a bump.

📌 Had a conversation with Michelle about the difficulty of pricing stitchwork. She said Trevor’s horses sell for around £375.

📌 Back to the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square to revisit Echo, the cold-read play about migration. We wanted to see a woman (in this case Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning) in the stage role opposite playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s detached online video performance from Berlin. The play seemed to have been tweaked to flatten the role of the onstage performer to sidekick and the lasting impression for me on this showing was that this is art cinema welded to verbatim theatre, and quite indulgently so.

FRIDAY 26 Jonty Bloom’s daily rant paints a hilarious picture of fuming Brexiteers screaming about plastic bottle tops that cannot easily be detached from the bottle. It was a measure introduced as an industry standard by the EU to reduce pollution that British manufacturers have opted to mirror, presumably to guarantee sales in Europe.

📌 Met Sophie in Barbican Kitchen to deliver the finished napkin with all the family signatures stitched in. She was delighted.

She went on to give me the inside story on exhibiting at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. Prior to the exhibition’s opening day there is a “Varnishing Day” in which all the exhibitors arrive, file into some kind of blessing in the church across the road, then enter the gallery and jostle petulantly with each other to see where their artwork has been hung. Pity the ones who end up just below the ceiling.

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