One month as it happened…
THURSDAY 1 Frank Skinner was on the radio talking about class and wealth. He joked that there should be a special rate of Inheritance Tax for people who worked their way up from nothing, “and not lump them in with the Rees-Mogg children.”
📌 Keir Starmer doesn’t stand a chance of repairing broken relations with Europe unless he first keeps the promises the UK has already made in the various deals it has with the EU, says an article in the FT. This strikes me as a golden opportunity, especially in relation to Northern Ireland, where a micro economic revolution is waiting to happen in trade relations.
📌 For this week’s Headway writing group, I submitted two stories, one titled Paris and the other Fishy Tea.
📌 We were unable to visit this evening’s Open Studio because I had double booked with an Imagine Fund awards panel meeting. My wife was not happy about that.
FRIDAY 2 We went with Brian to Tate Modern for the Yoko Ono exhibition. One of the exhibits was a sound recording of a flushing toilet, another was a film of Yoko having her clothes cut off her seated body by a succession of different people. The whole exhibition was an adventure playground of conceptual art. My favourite exhibit was of a fly settled and grooming itself atop a nipple, to the soundtrack of a suckling baby.
Inevitably, there were several rooms in which visitor contributions were encouraged, so I thought why not.
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”.
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.
SATURDAY 17 We came away from the Art Workers’ Guild Summer Fête with a few special prizes from the numerous stalls, but disappointed to have failed to “splat a rat” called Brexit. We also failed to guess the weight of a dog called Lola. But we did win some original Tatty Devine plastic jewellery on a hoop-la game, and a Robert Ryan screenprint in a cheeky card game not unlike Play Your Cards Right, the 1980s TV game show hosted by Bruce Forsyth.
“police artist” Wilfrid Wood from a description by my wife…
SUNDAY 18 The Municipal Dreams newsletter has a lengthy article on the pioneering council housing schemes in Liverpool 100 years ago that has a message for today’s political classes. First, that only local authorities can get the job done. Relying of private capital to supply affordable housing is a mistake even Liverpool’s reforming politicians made over and over. Second, that housing is a health issue. Liverpool’s early reforms prove over and over that having a home stops people falling ill and committing crime. That these are the messages Wes Streeting and Liz Kendall are now advancing on behalf of the current government is good news and offers some hope that change is indeed possible. The irony for them is that in the case of Liverpool 100 years ago it was the Tories, not Labour, who made it happen.
📌 One of the bands I became momentarily fascinated by in my teenage years was Fox, fronted by the delightfully ethereal Noosha Fox. Today I discovered that one of Noosha’s four children is Ben Goldacre, author of the Guardian’s groundbreaking Bad Science column and numerous books on medical quackery.
MONDAY 19 Our local museum, the Museum of London, closed in 2022 and is in the process of being re-located to nearby Smithfield, occupying the space of the long-closed poultry market. During excavation of the site a network of underground vaults has been uncovered which never appeared in any of the plans.
📌 The funniest joke of the Edinburgh Festival has been declared as: “I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship, but I bottled it”, by Mark Simmons.
📌 While searching for a good film to see over the weekend I discovered that Kyiv’s mayor, the former boxer Vitali Klitschko and president and former TV personality Volodymyr Zelenskiy hate each other’s guts.
TUESDAY 20 In his Notes From The Underground newsletter David Aaronovitch says he’s exhausted by all the outrage one needs to absorb and understand these days. Some of it, he argues, is quite pointless and only exists because some people feel overentitled to complain about something, or other.
Meanwhile some schmo decides that a good slogan for an anti-fascist rally is ‘Zionists out of Finchley’, which is more or less equivalent to ‘Buy a Bagel from a Goy’.
📌 Harry Beck’s 1931 transport map of the London Underground, which is said to have been based on the pattern of an electrical wiring diagram, has been promoted as a thing of both beauty and function for all the years I can remember. Now there is a new map, a compact circular mobile phone-friendly proposed accomplice to Harry’s sprawling string thing, and it’s really quite a looker.
📌 As I near the end of any stitchwork project I start to resent it because of poor decisions I made along the way. In this case it was principally the delicate, silky sheen fabric I chose. It is not really strong enough to hold the intense, close stitching I do, even with an interface/backing fabric to support it. I think I actually need to become an expert in calicio, canvas and other sturdy cotton fabrics, and leave the delicate fabrics for light line work. I might even stick to one fabric and make it my signature background. Denim would be good.
📌 Joe Biden sounded a bit pissed off to me in the speech he gave to the Democratic Convention, like he still doesn’t think he made the right decision in stepping down.
WEDNESDAY 21 I was beginning to think the moment had passed and that the contrast in the media coverage would never be made between lives lost when a rich-person’s luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily and the lives lost as overcrowded small boats full of desperate poor people likewise capsize. Every day.
📌 We were meant to do an outdoor cinema session at the Barbican tonight, but a chilly wind drove us to stop indoors but watch on TV the film we were meant to have seen shivering on a hard seat in a courtyard, with Bluetooth headphones clamped around our skulls. The film was the supreme Wes Anderson 2014 comedy The Grand Budapest Hotel, with an exotic ensemble cast led by Ralph Fiennes. Tilda Swinton appears almost momentarily at the start of the film, and from that point on the fun is in spotting the stars (Jude Law, Saoirse Ronan, Edward Norton, Harvey Kietel, plus many more), which is always best done in a cozy environment eating chocolate and jelly sweets. Top marks go to the set designer for evocative use of plastic nostalgia dipped in a big bucket of ice-cream colours.
THURSDAY 22 In a column about alleged infighting in the Labour government between Sue Gray and Morgan McSweeney, Rafael Behr references a disposition known in Germany as Torschlusspanik, which he describes as a fear of the gate closing. I know this feeling. Every time I leave the house and close the front door, a moment of utter dread lingers until I “check pocket for keys”.
FRIDAY 23 Birthday gifts included the Anne Kelly stitchwork book I’d borrowed from the library but had to take back, a very funny lapel badge and some fabulous wool threads, which I can’t wait to try. A new sonic toothbrush, too. Wow, what a good haul.
📌 Finally finished the Sam stitchwork, which I have decided to officially title Platform Clogs With Chunky Socks, even if Michelle objects.
📌 The Barbican’s Ricochets exhibition was a gallery full of hundreds of large screens showing film of children playing. In between were some lovely small paintings, beautifully lit, of scenes depicting the same, in different environments and in different times.
📌 The Grapes Of Wrath at the National Theatre, despite some nice touches in lighting and music, was proof that the Joads’ story is a book and not a play.
SATURDAY 24 Farrow & Ball are under the social-media cosh for not being vegan enough in the naming of their fashionable paints, which allegedly include colours such as Smoked Trout and Potted Shrimp. This reminds me of a colour my wife once invented while on holiday in Malta. She noticed that a lot of people wore T-shirts in what she described as “Nuclear Salmon” (bright orangey-pink). You don’t see much of that colour any more, and my wife is a massive fan of Greggs’ vegan sausage rolls.
📌 Our new binge-watch is the first series of Only Murders In The Building, a mischievously inventive amateur detective pastiche that pushes together three strangers who are all fans of true-crime podcasts. Season 4 is about to go live, so we’ve a lot of catching up to do. American TV writers sure know how to pack an awful lot of character and plot into 30 minutes. And American TV studio bosses sure know how to keep a winning cast together – by awarding all the principal actors the title (and the pay) of “Executive Producer”.
SUNDAY 25 A long and sometimes tedious article in the New Statesman discusses the rise of “Cultural Christianity”, but nuggets of enlightenment nevertheless do surface, eventually.
Can Christian morality survive the loss of belief in the biblical story – the “supernatural framework” – underpinning it. What does the future hold for those who believe in “the principles of Christianity”? Can we, as Tolstoy did in The Gospel in Brief, remove the miracles while finding in its Scriptures guidance on how to live?
In one section the article quotes Nick Cave describing his surprise discovery that he had found some of his beliefs in the “wholly fallible, often disappointing and deeply weird” institution of the church. You probably only had to listen to Into My Arms to pick up that message.
In another section Clement Atlee is quoted as saying he believed in the ethics of Christianity, “but not the mumbo-jumbo”.
In all of these discussions, I always come back to a line written by John Lennon: “God is a concept, by which we measure our pain”.
📌 On our way to one of Leadenhall’s occasional flea markets we spotted a huge gold paper-bag sculpture in the street.
📌 In her Unmapped Storylands newsletter, Elif Shafak turns an existential tale of hiking badly (in espadrilles) with expert hiker friends into a biographical essay on Franz Kafka.
MONDAY 26 The film Blink Twice arrived with a lot of publicity attached to its director Zoe Kravitz and the psychology of its #metoo content, which revolves around a rich man and the druggy sexploitation cult he nurtures on a remote island inhabited by stary natives and hungry snakes. But it’s still more or less a revenge slasher movie in warm colours with one good twist.
📌 I started to investigate the possibility of taking a holiday alone. I like walking, but since my brain injury, walking is not what it used to be. It’s very slow, and forever full of risk and the annoying need to stop and rest. My mind never stops being drawn from my surroundings to the very small space in front of my feet. It’s a focus full of jeopardy. My wife is normally 20m ahead, often stood still with a resigned look on her face. Walking for me is a lonely pursuit.
But since the Lea Valley in Essex and Herfordshire has been reimagined and repurposed as a vast expanse wild and wet wilderness, a park full of walking trails, nature reserves and outdoor activities, I quite fancied the idea of doing a slow walk of discovery over a period of three days. Then I read the comments on the park’s website and the main complaint from walkers was that the walking trails are always busily occupied by rude cyclists.
TUESDAY 27 The Daily Sensemaker tells us that air conditioning is adding to global warming because it uses so much energy, much of it not coming from renewable sources. Globally it names India as one of the AC business’s biggest customers…
In Delhi and Mumbai, AC already accounts for up to 60 per cent of all electricity consumption. Three quarters of that power comes from coal, the most carbon-intensive source.
This made me think of the psychological possibilities of labelling future twin wall-mounted plug sockets “renewable” and “non-renewable” and charging a very tiny different price for each, even though the electricity they supply comes from the exact same grid. Then I realised this was just a dressed-up energy tax.
📌 The NHS is to add mental health to the services it covers on the 111 phone line. On the radio this morning a report stated that during the Pandemic a lot of expert mental-health support services sprang into action locally. Now the NHS will act as a “national front door” to services in your area. It will be interesting to track the success of this endeavour. One of the commentators on the radio said the 111 connection would offer a helpful ear to those who “just want to talk”.
📌 Keir Starmer has decided to not renew the £40m contract Rishi had with the RAF to whizz him around the country in helicopters.
📌 At the Memory Group Summer Party I finally got to identify the woman my wife and her friend claim to have seen regularly sitting in a window seat in Côte sipping wine at 10am. Blimey.
WEDNESDAY 28 Having suffered a multitude of time-wasters on Facebook Marketplace, we finally thought we’d cracked it with Louie, who would “definitely” meet us in our local pub 6-6.30pm to collect a huge cast-iron Le Crueset casserole pot. We still own the pot.
THURSDAY 29 Sam’s crazy glam-rock boot sculpture shattered in the kiln, leaving it without a heel. I really liked it so Michelle suggested I create a stitch-sculpture heel to attach to it as part of the great Billy/Sam collaboration. Must admit I’m quite excited about working on this.
📌 There’s a good observation at the heart of Martin Kettle’s otherwise arse-licking essay about Keir Starmer in the Guardian: that Starmer is to Social Democracy what Jeremy Corbyn was to Democratic Socialism.
Starmer is attempting to frame his picture of Britain’s 10-year future… His social democracy is extremely steely… and he is ruthless.
📌 At the Imagine Panel celebratory dinner at the Barbican, Georgia said her “lash lady” has gone missing, and Bee claimed that more people regret getting Harry Potter tattoos than having gender reassignment surgery.
FRIDAY 30 Patsy’s daughter Katie was on the BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme about food waste. Unlike the “dumpster divers”, who patrol the back yards of the supermarkets for free food that’s been thrown out, Katie’s company, Wasted Kitchen, actually buys and distributes surplus foods. It also encourages cooking from scratch with courses and workshops. But the idea that food waste has itself become a sustainable and profitable business is a telling comment on the cost of food production and distribution in relation to its price.
SATURDAY 31 Was slightly exasperated when my wife of 36 years failed to notice that my feeble excuse for leaving a restaurant early was a sign that I just wanted to go home NOW. Fortunately, the friend with whom we were sharing lunch knew exactly what I was up to and started giggling when I said I needed to brush my teeth.
📌 In Only Murders In The Building Steve Martin’s character Charles decides his life is so meaningless that his best option is to “embrace the mess, that’s where the good stuff lives.” It’s a great motto and one I have been an unknowing advocate of for some time, even though my wife probably disagrees. I don’t see it as permission to be a slob, but I do look for the beauty of imperfection. With this in mind I’ve decided to embrace the mess of London’s streets by turning discarded rubbish into attractive images.
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Billy's Scrapbook 