August 31-September 6, 2024
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 beauty in imperfection. With this in mind I’ve decided to embrace the mess of London’s streets by turning discarded rubbish into attractive images.
SUNDAY 1 Once I started embracing the mess,I found it quite hard to stop…
📌 I came home from a dinner date recently with what my wife described as a gunshot wound in the middle of my chest. The wound was in fact a splodge of sauce that came with the chocolate brownie for dessert.
📌 The pink rose branch stitchwork is back on the agenda until I can build a new pattern for my next studio project. All the flowers and the branches are finished. Now it’s 50 shades of green with bits of brass laced in for the leaves. Each one turns out differently, which is nice. It was greatly admired at the Barbican Summer Garden Party, which resembled a rehearsal for an episode Midsomer Murders.
MONDAY 2 The Orwell Foundation publishes regular newsletters of George Orwell’s writings, but by far the best of these are of his ordinary Diary entries. They do not attempt to be literary in any way, and sometimes even carry errors, which makes Orwell’s literary writings appear even more accomplished.
A [Avril Blair, Orwell’s sister] procured some specimens of edible seaweed – dulse, not carragheen. She is drying it. Directions for preparing and cooking vary somewhat, but it is said, when cooked in milk, to make a pudding rather like blac mange.
TUESDAY 3 To leafy Richmond – smug, privileged Richmond – for a friend’s birthday in a riverside pub, which was very nearly flooded by a rapidly rising Thames tide. We moved to safety inland to find that the fictitious football team from the TV series Ted Lasso gives a very good impression of being real, with AFC Richmond merchandise plus all the shops, Mae’s pub and quaintly cobbled lanes featured in the filming of the series, all proudly promoting their association with Ted.
WEDNESDAY 4 David Aaronovitch has a useful essay on Substack on how to spot a Nazi. It seems most of them have similar personality traits and backgrounds. They are, writes Aaronovitch, brutal sadists, they have a creepy attachment to the occult and they are middle class.
📌 Ireland has a budget surplus of €8.6bn, thanks to corporation tax receipts from big global firms such as Apple and Pfizer, who presumably think Ireland is the place to be. Housing, transport and infrastructure might have been good places to start spending the stash, but so far the big-ticket investment has been a Leinster House bike shed at €336,000.
📌 One poll for the Conservative Party leadership contest found that more people voted for “none” of the applicants than for any one of the six candidates.
THURSDAY 5 I’ve started to learn about ceramics by tarting up one of Sam’s cast-offs. It’s a glam-rock platform boot. The “underglaze” is the ceramic equivalent of paint, while the real glaze adds a vitreous, glassy sheen to the finished item. Sam originally made the wonky boot, but early in the process the heel broke off, which I found to be symbolic of suffering a brain injury. So I fished the broken boot out of the bin and will recreate it as a wonkist ceramic sculpture with an embroidered textile heel as decoration.
📌 Larry Elliot in the Guardian calls Labour’s slashing of the winter fuel allowance for pensioners mean and inept. There were other ways to do it, he argues, such as targeting higher-rate taxpayers, or paying it only to those pensioners in the lower council-tax bands. But he also makes another point…
There is something to be said for a universal benefit that everybody gets. It binds the better off into the welfare state, and removes the stigma and shame of having to claim.
📌 There was no writing group today, so I escaped the embarrassment of not having written anything. For next week I have chosen the title “High Society”, though I’m struggling to find any ideas that don’t reference drug use.
📌 We started the second season of Only Murders In The Building and, despite the occasional drift into farce purely for comedy value, I am still very impressed by this reinvention of the amateur sleuth, a genre that needed to be revived.
FRIDAY 6 George Monbiot in the Guardian opens his article on demagogues in the classic puzzler style that swiftly sets the reader the task of guessing who he is talking about…
I’ve been thinking about a famously orange-skinned former presenter of trashy TV programmes, who lives on a luxurious coastal estate. He has a history of racist and Islamophobic remarks, of blaming asylum seekers for bringing disease into the country and ranting about the supercilious metropolitan elite.
Then he reveals that he’s talking about Robert Kilroy-Silk and goes on to catalogue and critique a number of orange-coloured demagogues (inc Trump, Berlusconi, Farage) who have populated politics in recent times, his point being that demagogues come and go, so don’t be so surprised when they crawl their way up the tree of power.
📌 In Oxford for a birthday party for our three-year-old great nephew we took a chance on the Ashmolean Museum’s Money Talks exhibition, which attempted to shine a light, sometimes literally, on the relationship between art and money. My wife thought it was overpriced, and that wasn’t a joke. I liked a few things, including a cheeky Banksy banknote issued by the Banksy of England, some lovely art-nouveau banknotes and a Canadian contribution which alleges to show a hidden depiction of the Devil in Queen Elizabeth II’s hair-do.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 
I enjoyed your post 🙂 Thank you. Your needlework is beautiful.
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