August 10-16, 2024
SATURDAY 10 An article in the New European about poverty and trials across Europe of Universal Basic Income (UBI), the scheme that abolishes all state benefits and instead pays everyone a subsistence wage, throws up a startling claim…
There are now more food banks in the UK than there are branches of Starbucks.
It also suggests a canny way of paying for UBI, by taxing land.
SUNDAY 11 Looking forward to adding the leg tone to the stitchwork of Sam’s platform clogs drawing. I’ll use a mixture of the threads we bought at the Peckham flea market on my wife’s birthday. The guy who sold them to us said he had crates of quality thread he’d bought at some royal household garage sale. I like to think he was telling the truth.
📌 The number of Olympic medals per capita always throws a new light on the Games. Well done Australia, third behind China and the USA in the official reckoning, but otherwise a clear winner against the superpowers with its one medal per half-million people. But not as successful as Grenada. They bagged one medal per 56,000 people.
📌 Our local cinema is running a series of remastered classic films. This afternoon we saw the Wim Wenders existential road movie Paris Texas, starring Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski. It’s a slow film by any reckoning, but the psychology is gripping. The individual performances are totally convincing and the soundtrack by Ry Cooder underpins in bent strings the bleak landscape of the protagonist’s mind as he tries to find an end to his mental torture.
MONDAY 12 The USA and China were the clear winners, medalwise, in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. In the past, a third conglomerated superpower, the USSR, would have been in the reckoning too. But in his daily rant, Jonty Bloom declares the EU to be the real highest, fastest and strongest of this year’s Games with 309 medals, outstripping even the combined totals of the USA (126) and China (91). The biggest loser in the Games is probably India (5 bronze, 1 silver), the most populous nation on earth but, says an article in the Independent with very little financial support for grassroots sports other than cricket, which is in any case, bossed by the mighty IPL.
📌 To the dentist for an assessment of the tooth I have been filling with a DIY product available at Boots.
The dentist said the weak tooth is infected and, to prevent it infecting adjacent teeth, needs to come out. But because I take blood-thinning medication, the extraction must be done by a “Level 2 dentist” in Canary Wharf. Thankfully and mercifully, I am still registered historically as an NHS patient, so the bill for this examination was not a huge shocker.
TUESDAY 13 In his Citizen of Everywhere newsletter John Kampfner bigs up Canada’s approach to immigration, which is based solely on numbers. It dates back to a groundbreaking policy shift in the 1970s and is today considered a model of best practice.
In order to attract the best, Canada needed to be attractive. That meant educating the existing population about the requirement – and benefits – of living alongside new citizens. It meant a comprehensive system of integration for those new arrivals.
📌 On the St Luke’s Over 55s trip to Broadstairs some cheeky fella nicked somebody else’s seat during the stopover for coffee and toilets. June gave him a mouthful and he moved back to his original seat. He does this on all the trips, June said.
📌 I’m reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath before we see the play next week. The Joads are ready to leave Oklahoma for California and Tom sits with his mother, Ma, who is skeptical about the prospects of a new life out west picking grapes and oranges and peaches. Tom is feeling philosophical, sanguine, and offers his Ma some advice…
Don’t roust your faith bird-high an’ you won’t do no crawlin’ with the worms.
📌 Broadstairs must still rank quite highly as the quintessential English seaside town. The Morris Dancers during the Broadstairs Folk Week certainly lend credence to that view.
📌 Watching the 1973 film of The Day of the Jackal I discover that the death penalty in France was not abolished until 2007.
WEDNESDAY 14 There is an old media motif to know when something is “news” and when it isn’t. It is known as MAN BITES DOG, the idea being that if a dog bites a man, nothing exceptional has happened. But if a man bites a dog, that’s news because it rarely happens. The problem with this trope is that commonplace events rarely get reported. So it is with this in mind that the Guardian has launched a longitudinal investigation called Killed Women Count, which opens with the “news” that in 2024 so far, one woman has been killed by a man every three days.
THURSDAY 15 Another day in which I said yes when I should have said no, agreeing stitching and writing tasks that will hang over me until they’re finished. For the Headway writing group I submitted a sketch with the title Rule Of Thumb, featuring the Hoxton tosser Martin as a child.
In primary school nothing delighted Martin more than making his teachers look like fools. And so it was that one day he journeyed three miles on foot to the big library in town to check Mr James’s assertion in class that the expression “Rule of Thumb” derived from a centuries-old law that legally entitled a man to beat his wife with a stick no greater than the width of his thumb. Martin knew instinctively as he crossed the threshold of the sturdy red sandstone building on William-Brown Street that the truth was in there. The library had been built in Victorian times with the sole purpose of housing the best-quality information known to man. But it wasn’t until the 1970s, Martin discovered in the library’s musty reference section, that the fallacy of digits and domestic abuse Mr James had parroted to 26 school children had first become a popular myth. And it wasn’t until the 1990s that the myth was fully exposed and rejected as troublemaking rhetoric. Martin now had a problem. Should he confront Mr James, his respected teacher, with the truth, or should he let it lie? He spent the whole of Saturday searching the library – his beloved Temple of Truth – for an answer. He found nothing.
📌 I must have been around 10 when my sister forcefully made me hand over my pocket money as a half share in a 7-inch vinyl recording of Bad Moon Rising by Credence Clearwater Revival. I complied too easily. She was bigger than me. So when we were invited to go see a Credence tribute band I wasn’t exactly keen. Bad Moon Rising was the only song I knew – or that’s what I thought. I did not, as I imagined I would, sit in a corner playing Solitaire on my phone. I bobbed and swayed and sang along with the crowd, my view only slightly obscured by an juiced-up arm-waving superfan. My favourite song was the one about Vietnam that sounded a bit like The Doors, and my favourite anecdote was that Ray was inspired to become an Arsenal supporter by his childhood milkman.
FRIDAY 16 In his Odds & Ends Of History newsletter James O’Malley picks up the debate on ID cards. Hidden in the King’s Speech, he says, is Labour’s intention not to issue all citizens with a card saying who they are and what their status is, but instead to devise an impenetrable labyrinth of digital databases that will each store a fragment of our identity that will miraculously connect with other bits of our identity whenever the need arises. For example, if you need to prove your age to gain entry to a nightclub, all the bouncer needs is to know is you are 18+. He does not need to know your address, or your fingerprints, or medical record, etc. So under the proposed system, he will be able to verify your age and nothing else, whereas a paramedic will be able to access your address, your medication record, your emergency contact, etc.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 