August 3-9, 2024
SATURDAY 3 The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything states the general agreement that Planet Earth has seven continents. But what is not known is how any of them got their names.
Asia: Another one whose roots are lost in the mists of ancient history… What the word originally meant, no one has the faintest idea.
📌 According to The Knowledge North Yorkshire Council have brought total humiliation on the county for the wording in one of its anti-litter ads. In the imagined voice of Geoffrey Boycott, they wrote “Gerrit in’t bin”, instead of the completely different and not at all the same “Gerrit in t’bin”.
SUNDAY 4 My wife’s birthday weekend actually started yesterday with a visit to the Headway Summer Social followed by a meal at Fish Central with Brian and Helen. Today we went south to Peckham for a big flea market, at which we bought, precisely, two reels of thread allegedly salvaged from one of the royal households (50p each) and took some pictures of stitchworks selling at £35 and £55 each.
📌 A fungal nail infection has caused the tip of the second finger on my right hand to swell painfully and turn a horrible shade of yellow. I fear it has gangrene and will inevitably require amputation. My wife says I’m exaggerating.
MONDAY 5 At 3am I woke up and was able to make an online appointment to talk to my GP at 9.30am. At 8.40am I got an SMS message from my GP requesting a photograph of my infected finger. I sent the photo at 9.02am. At 9.10am my GP called to say my injury was very common and easily cured with a course of antibiotics. He then sent a prescription to a local pharmacy, which I collected at 11am and started immediately. Fingers crossed, amputation not required.
📌 And that meant my wife’s birthday could go ahead as planned with a visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum for Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection, which I found quite creepy and voyeuristic. The fetishism of the sections on fashion and the male body seemed to infect some of the other themes such as celebrity, protest and reportage. Juxtaposing portraits of Marilyn Monroe alongside Miss Piggy seemed like a bad joke at best but at worst perverse. The John\Furnish collection is huge and some of the images emasculated others. I was pleased to have been able to spot a William Eggleston shot from 20 paces.
TUESDAY 6 Migration, far-right politics and the use of social media to incite hate crimes have been the big discussion topics around the riots currently shaming the streets of Britain. A trend towards male aggression against girls and young women is also relevant in this case, argues Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor, on a New Statesman podcast.
📌 At a 50th anniversary screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoia thriller The Conversation I became a bit too absorbed in the significance of the flimsy plastic mac Gene Hackman’s character Harry Caul wears throughout. So absorbed as to nearly miss the late appearance in the film of Robert Duval, who did not feature in any of the screen credits. So absorbed too as to miss the opportunity to ponder on relevance of the film’s subject – covert surveillance – in society today. The plastic mac, I concluded, was an exoskeleton, a thin covering barely able to conceal or protect Harry Caul from the psychological hellhole he calls home.
Point of information…
Caul Noun A membrane (= thin tissue) that surrounds a foetus inside its mother, and that covers the head of some babies when they are born.
WEDNESDAY 7 The New Statesman quotes a poll appearing to show that the British public sees the far-right street riots for the what they really are (barbarism), which must please the prime minister but bother the Conservative Party as it searches over the next five months for a dynamic new leader.
The idea that the mobs trashing streets, burning libraries, attacking migrant hotels, looting shops and hurling bricks at police are in some way channelling universal sentiment that represents ‘real people’ is comprehensively rejected.
📌 At the end of this month’s User Group meeting at St Luke’s we were treated to a workshop exploring everyday sounds. Our task was to make a mark on paper that signifies a sound heard. I got permission to use words instead of pictures. For one of the sounds I wrote, “an ambulance siren on Mars”, and for another I wrote, “the victim is walking ever closer towards the killer”. Later, while walking the streets around St Luke’s, jotting, scribbling and mark-making the sounds of our environment a heightened sense of focus and awareness took over. One of the group described the experience as “druggy”. Listening intently to the world turning did indeed seem like opening the doors of perception.
THURSDAY 8 I didn’t submit any completed work for today’s writing group at Headway, but I did offer the first paragraph of a children’s story, which was one of this week’s prompts. The story imagines my regular irritating young Hoxton couple Heidi and Martin in the future, having a child. I have no idea where this story is going, but I’ve made a start, so it’s something to play with over the rest of the Summer.
Every night, long after Heidi and Martin thought he was asleep, Joel would talk to the face in the sky he could see through his Celestron telescope. And when he’d finished, he said goodnight to his heavenly friend with the word “Amen”.
📌 James told us that whenever he bends down to pick up something off the floor he asks himself “Is there anything else I can do while I’m down here?”
FRIDAY 9 Liberated by fashion. Now that it’s OK to wear socks with sandals, I’m looking at my sock collection in a new light, making a mental note of any potential partners for the two pairs of sandals I own (excluding Crocs). Some of them will be quite plain, others will be wild and vibrant, which will almost certainly unnerve my wife.
📌 Andy, our friend in Brighton, is tickled by the name of British Olympic runner Cindy Sember. He likes to think of her name as “Sin December”.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 