September 7-13, 2024
SATURDAY 7 My interest in the Conservative Party leadership election was resurrected when Priti Patel was the first candidate to be eliminated. Now it is growing as I learn that the contest is run on a “pay to play” rules system. The remaining contenders are each now required to pay £50,000 to the Party. The price then goes up to £150,000 for those left in the race by the time it reaches the party conference next month.
📌 It won’t surprise me if Starmer now engineers a reversal out of the winter-fuel rumpus by saying “We listened”. In fact, the whole thing might just have been a ruse to make it look like things have changed.
📌 At the birthday party in an Oxford park for our 3-year-old great nephew Ozzy, the sideshow was a performance from student trapeze artists.
📌 When I mentioned casually that Oxford city centre might be an OK place to live, the reply was swift: “Well, you’d have to find another wife to do it with”. The remark came with lurid recollections (from 45 years ago) of upper-class male student yobs on the rampage, terrorising anyone stupid enough to have manners.
📌 On Netflix we’ve started watching The Perfect Couple, a psycho-drama around the monied classes of Nantucket Island in the US. It has a strong whiff of Agatha Christie, with a corpse and a bunch of suspects all nailed down in one place. The drama, Christie-style, moves through the moral and ethical centres of each of the characters/suspects, with appropriately dramatic cliffhangers at the end of each episode.
SUNDAY 8 Whenever we can’t be bothered to make an effort to cook, we buy a ready-roasted chicken from Waitrose. Today, within 15 minutes of coming out of the oven all of the first batch of Waitrose chickens had sold out. We had to return half an hour later for the second batch, and even then were lucky to get one of only two remaining birds.
📌 We finished The Perfect Couple before we planned to, because what we thought were 8 episodes were in fact 6.
MONDAY 9 I notice that new pop music sensation Chappell Roan talks about her real self, Kayleigh Amstutz, in the second person, as if outrageous Chappell is just a character being played by plain, mousey Kayleigh. Maybe this sly showbiz publicity stunt has a history worthy of academic study.
📌 My wife came home from choir practice singing loudly about Jesus.
📌 The hunt is on for a stylish budget tuxedo before we attend the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in December. I never knew that a lot of charity shops now have online sales.
📌 There was an impressive scene between Lesley Manville and David Morrissey to signal the big Healing Moment in the final episode of Sherwood, a series that at first looked like a one-off local historical drama but will now probably extend to a third series as a national political legacy drama.
TUESDAY 10 RIP the Voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, 93. We’ve never seen Star Wars, so Jones’s celebrity for us is based entirely on his appearance in an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon first stalks, then ends up in a sauna with the Star Wars legend. For good measure, the 2014 episode even includes an appearance by Carrie Fisher, and that it was on the set of Big Bang that Jones and Fisher actually met for the first time. Carrie Fisher died in 2016.
📌 Jonty Bloom claims that the annual triple-lock increase to the state pension far exceeds the disputed winter-fuel allowance.
📌 The hunt for a tuxedo is over. I’ve always quite enjoyed jousting playfully with the snobbier British classes, but the very restrictive (and expensive) “white tie” dress code required to attend the Lord Mayor’s Banquet was both a sartorial and an ethical red line, so I have declined the offer to attend but have agreed to buy my wife a ballgown of her choice should she wish to go without me.
📌 A great line in Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders… Poirot is waffling on in his pretentious way and one of the group insolently tells him he is all words and no action. Poirot replies: “Words, mademoiselle, are the outer clothing of ideas.”
WEDNESDAY 11 The search for an outfit for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet is back on, mainly because I am a hypocrite and very easily persuaded by free fine food and wine. There is also the VERY REMOTE possibility that I will be seated next to the Prime Minister, in which case I will give him a piece of my mind. (That is “very remote” = “impossible”.) I have also been told that an ordinary James Bond casino suit will do, so I now look forward to searching the charity shops between now and the big day. To get in the mood I checked out what kind of behaviour is expected of guests at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. Under the sub-heading “Topics of conversation at dinner”, the guidelines state:
Diners should make every attempt to find more imaginative topics of conversation to discuss than their everyday work, unless they professionally fly space-craft, drive on Top Gear, sail an aircraft carrier, mine gold or work for the Security Services. Personal relationships, religion and politics are not suitable subjects for the dinner table and are best avoided.
📌 The doctor refused to decide whether I should suspend taking blood-thinners prior to a tooth extraction. She said that was the dentist’s decision but nevertheless sent me a copy of the NHS guidelines.
📌 Lovely article by Katy Hessel on artist Mary Husted, who in 1962 sketched the baby she had at 17 but was then forced to give up for adoption. The baby later effectively became Hudson’s absent muse.
📌 I needed to find the link to one of my YouTube workshops from four years ago, and when I googled it I discovered that the internet has mysteriously mistaken me for the comedian Billy Connolly.
📌 Sam’s broken boot is out of the kiln. Now I need to fit the new heel.
THURSDAY 12 For today’s writing group I opted for the story title High Society…
Heidi and Martin were having one of those moments when they stopped being a double act and shared stories of when they each were one. At the end of these conversations they always mysteriously felt a bit closer to one another.
Heidi was reminiscing. As a young fresher at Trinity College she became part of an infamous set known as The High Society, whose motto was Ut Altorem. Getting high was all very well, but getting higher was an altogether more serious ambition. The High Society was in fact a drug-taking contest for brats. Opening the doors of perception was just a front.
When Heidi described in detail the cold Winter’s day she finally cracked on crack, Martin was both horrified and full of awe at the same time. His doors of perception about Heidi swung wide open. He’d never imagined her as so driven to win. Her naked desire to be supreme at something so destructive was, er, terrifying.
But all ended well and Heidi was here now, with him, and all the other members of The High Society were dead. Martin squirmed slightly at the thought, then pulled himself together. “So you won!” he uttered nervously. “Yes,” she came back, “I guess I did.”
📌 James claims that the original Aborigines were from Rome.
📌 We went to Sophie’s book launch at an upmarket furniture shop in Marylebone but slipped away (we didn’t know anyone other than Sophie) after two glasses of free wine to the comforting table 14 in Pasta Nostra, which has replaced Baracca as our go-to Italian.
FRIDAY 13 My wife opted to spend her “birthday day out” gift from a friend at Costco in Croydon, which we were able to join as members and rampage the aisles for wholesale goods in eye-watering quantities.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 