September 14-20, 2024
SATURDAY 14 In his latest newsletter David Aaronovitch paraphrases a friend’s analysis of Starmer’s early performance as PM.
Why does he sound like a GP who has just examined a very unfit and ailing patient, has got out his pad and is about to prescribe laxatives, a strict diet and a weekly trip to the gym?
📌 The 19th Century is still quite visible in the formal Cotswold Stone buildings of Gloucester city centre. And its maritime past is preserved variously in the redevelopment of its quayside warehouses and the surrounding waterways. The River Severn flows gently to one side while on the other lifestyle apartments, bars, restaurants and shopping centres do their best to give the impression of a city up for a grand day out, turbo charged on Costa Coffee.
SUNDAY 15 The River Severn at Gloucester is barely a stream. I don’t know why I expected something more vigorous, but maybe rivers have personalities and I always had the Severn in my mind as a tough, no-nonsense hard-working river.
MONDAY 16 As our train hurtled back to London from Gloucester it was hard to forget last night’s opening episode of the TV thriller Nightsleeper, a very cheesy mash-up of the disaster genre in which hackers take over the operation of a high-speed train and send it whizzing to a destiny to be determined in Episode 6. What will happen to the lost child separated from his anxious mother, who was left standing on the platform at Motherwell, screaming and staring at the arse end of the rogue locomotive as it disappeared into the night with her little cherub on board, sobbing his heart out, poor mite?
📌 In Agatha Christie’s The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, visitors to Poirot’s King’s Abbot retirement cottage in the depths of the countryside are greeted at the door by a woman in “an immense Breton cap”, an item of headgear I wasn’t sure I knew…
TUESDAY 17 The studio has finished my artist web page and it includes lots of images and activities I’d long forgotten, but understandably majors on stitchwork and workshop facilitation.
📌 We are hooked on Nightsleeper, especially now that it has been revealed that one of the hackers gang who have taken the Glasgow-London train “hostage” is on the train itself. Especially also because, despite it being a trashy compendium of the ridiculous and the absurd, Nightsleeper is riveting.
📌 My wife was outraged to the point of swearing by today’s Wordle word, which was BEAUT.
📌 There was an incredible moment during Portuguese singer Mariza‘s stunning performance at the Barbican in which, half way through one song, she switched off her microphone, unplugged her ear piece and sang with her lungs to the back of the 2,000-seat hall. It was a mesmerising, awesome single act of performance that held a multitude of people in a transcendent state where even to breathe while it was happening seemed like the wrong thing to do. Later, she walked, singing, into the front stalls and my wife swears she stopped right in front of us, looked her in the eye and smiled. She didn’t smile at me.
WEDNESDAY 18 We joined a focus group investigating the types of technology that might be useful for old people to stay healthy and live longer. One superior old bag droned on endlessly about how her ageing mother was too stubborn for her own good and opposed to all kinds of technological aids. My wife observed that some people, as they age, replace the loss of control they have over their bodies by asserting a negative control over external agents such as Alexa reminding them to take their medication.
📌 One of our neighbours slipped into dementia shortly after his wife died four years ago. Each week, his daughter visits and sometimes escorts him to our local community centre. On one recent visit, his daughter tells us, when they arrived home after a day out, her father asked her, “Shall we have sex now?”
📌 James sent a message to say there is no writing group at Headway this week because he is rehearsing for a tour with one of his old bands (Darts, Microdisney, I can’t remember which). It was good news because I hadn’t written anything, but instead I had unearthed an old storyline from years ago as an apology…
Killian has an imaginary dad he calls Jack. His real father, Pat, is undisturbed by this. Killian tells Pat of the daily conversations he has with Jack, but never once is Pat tempted to compare his parenting skills with those of Jack.
THURSDAY 19 It looks like the saintly Keir Starmer is having his “Ecclestone” moment as he struggles to justify accepting expensive gifts from a big Labour donor. The stupidity of it all beggars belief.
📌 I can’t resist a pun, so it was with pleasure that I learned that someone at the Lib Dem conference in Brighton sang a version of the Beatles song Let It Be, reworking the lyrics to create a new song about Liz Truss called Lettuce Be, in reference to the fact that she was in office as PM for such a brief period that she was outperformed by a rotting lettuce.
📌 At Headway I joined a research study by people from Exeter University into personality and if/how it changes after brain injury. None of the two academics seemed capable of defining personality as distinct from behaviour or psychology, so I resorted to Google…
The combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character.
I added that I’m really not the best person to give evidence and that my wife uses the terms “Old Billy” and “New Billy” to make the before-after distinction.
📌 At Brian’s exhibition at Periscope in Dalston I got excited about how powerful the pocket exhibition (small, often temporary spaces, carefully used to show art) can be. We will visit another one on Saturday in Walthamstow, where Myrto is showing some work.
FRIDAY 20 The prime minister is daily being accused of accepting gifts and donations, so I decided to check whether our MP, Rachel Blake, is likewise on the take. She is not, but a quick scroll through the source of this evidence, The Westminster Accounts, reveals that the seat of government is awash with gifts, donations and sundry bungs. The beauty of The Westminster Accounts is that it names names and uses simple graphics to show us the money.
📌 We took Marge to the Art Workers’ Guild for an event launch. She loved it, met the Master, Rob, and felt comfortable in what is quite an austere place. In the atrium was a superb mosaic sculpture that was graceful, clever and funny.
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Billy's Scrapbook 