Scrapbook: Week 39

September 21-27, 2024

SATURDAY 21 My wife said that before she went shopping for groceries this morning she needed to do a “cheese audit”.

📌 In somebody’s converted garage in Walthamstow Village we saw Love Object, an exhibition by Myrto and a few of her friends, which included some impressive drypoint etchings and touch drawings.

📌 On Strictly Come Dancing, judge Shirley said one of the Week 1 contestants had “the best leg action I’ve ever seen”, which is the kind of superlative anyone would be happy to have put on their gravestone, with some obvious exceptions.

SUNDAY 22 On a visit to the British Museum for a sneak preview of the new Silk Roads exhibition I was struck by the number of societies throughout time and location that depict animals in their art. It’s as if there is a perpetual and everlasting urge for humans to connect with other species.

I used the opportunity also to take photographs that I might one day turn into stitchwork patterns. I suppose technically this is theft, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that practically everything in the British Museum is stolen anyway.

MONDAY 23 My wife tells me we have been married for 13,150 days.

📌 In my first proper experiment with sublimation printing on to fabric I managed to not only print on to the fabric I intend to stitch, but the ironing-board cover too.

📌 I still don’t understand why intellectuals feel the need to explain to other intellectuals why they like Bruce Springsteen. This column, which is actually just an extended quote from Joe Strummer, is a classic. Avoid finding a way to declare your allegiance simply by repeating the words of someone more famous and more respected than yourself, but who happens to concur with your point of view.

I’m not sure the intellectual who quoted this note ever considered the thought it might have been written in irony.

TUESDAY 24 The first of three Mona Lisa Piss-Easy Portraits monoprinting workshops at the Barbican was sparsely attended, but picked up once passers-by saw some of the results.

WEDNESDAY 25 A frustrating morning trying to work out the best way to fuse fabric to fabric.

📌 An article in the New European observes the dwindling influence of the right-wing press which, it argues, like the previous government it supported, is ever more distant in its views from the mass of British opinion. Broadcast organisations listen to its pronouncements because they need to fill their schedules, but no one else does. Quoting data from British Attitudes, it notes…

We still have a country that is, by and large, quite redistributive, quite social democratic, that doesn’t mind the idea of public spending within reason, is actually quite tolerant, including on things like immigration, and yet you have a press which is pretty much out of line with all of this… We don’t have a press that reflects the general sense of where the UK is at.

But will the right-wing press  reinvent itself someday soon and start singing a different song? Or will it merely continue to run its hackneyed hysterical headlines until it goes out of business? That day of reckoning is getting ever closer.

📌 The third Piss-Easy Portraits workshop at the Barbican produced by far the best Mona Lisa.

THURSDAY 26 An article in the Conversation discusses the sharp UK rise in health-related benefits as compared with other countries. At the heart of it are claimants who are too stretched to survive on ordinary benefits now self-describing as disabled and claiming health-related benefits. The whole subject in many ways goes to the (bigger) heart of Britain being incapable of developing an economic model that can adequately support the wellbeing of its citizens.

📌 While James is away on tour with one of his bands (I think it’s Darts) Jason has decided to take on the role of providing story “seeds” for the Headway writing group. Unfortunately he has decided to source them all from the lyrics of 10cc.

📌 The next stitchwork miniature, which in future will all be modelled on the clothing patches of yesteryear, is to be the three women on a drunken night out.

📌 Our 27-year-old nephew is in London. After a recent visit to Japan he’s got the travel bug and now plans to spend the next year on flash visits to European cities as a solo traveller. We applaud his decision.

FRIDAY 27 At a meeting to discuss what was described to me as a “Golden Lane Winter Festival” I discovered that what is actually being proposed is a community wreath-making workshop, and possibly one to build bird boxes.

📌 The Winter clothes are out of storage and ready to  replace the Summer wardrobe that is no longer required and will go into hibernation until Spring next year.

📌 The most popular segment of a Barbican discussion on power-sharing in large institutions was after the Q&A when everyone retreated to the Garden Room to be served fabulous finger food by Searcy’s Brasserie. Shirley quietly filled the plastic tub she’d brought in her bag. I think she saw it as some kind of payment for the short speech she gave with Karen about their experience with the Imagine Fund. It was nice to catch up with old acquaintances such as Kaya and Jo Chard, who tells me that after a year of planning her fabulous Disrupt project is about to move into a new phase.

📌 The Winter clothes are comfortably wardrobed and the Summer ones packed up for storage. I even found space to set aside some Summer clothes in case we get the chance of a holiday in a warm place.

📌 RIP Maggie Smith, 89.

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