One month as it happened…
SUNDAY 1 Once I started “embracing the mess” photographically, 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.
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.
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.
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.
SATURDAY 28 We popped into the Cubitt Open Studios in Angel to say hello to Buffy and Myra. Buffy is working on an esoteric exploration of the Greenwich Meridian in partnership with some Russian artists who seem to have disappeared underground since the start of the war with Ukraine. Nevertheless, she showed us a video of her and a bunch of others walking the Meridian in strange cultish costumes she’d made, looking at plants and insects. Next stop, Hull. Myra does massive stitchwork/paint combos and never draws or transfers her images beforehand. She told us she is developing a series (8 so far) of stitchworks based on the stories of people who have come back from the dead.
📌 At a conference yesterday I met Suzanne Alleyne, an expert in power-sharing within big organisations. She is a big fan of Liverpool FC and Jürgen Klopp especially, and when I told her I had a vintage Liverpool shirt, she asked for a photo.
SUNDAY 29 In the New European, Matthew D’Ancona has a faintly embarrassing article that more resembles an audition to become Kamala Harris’s chief advisor. The article includes a fantasy interview with an influential podcaster in which Harris (using words written by D’Ancona) fluently and convincingly explains why she is great and Donald Trump is a tosser.
📌 Media commentators have been urging Keir Starmer to be less gloomy about things getting worse before they get better. The government generally responds that this is simply the PM telling the truth and that only economic recovery will deliver better times in the future. In the Conversation, an essay about Kamal Harris by the social and political researcher Paul Whiteley touches on a point Starmer might want to pay more attention to. It is that the US economy under the Biden/Harris project is doing well, but the population doesn’t feel any better off for it.
📌 It’s rare for me to wholeheartedly agree with a Guardian review, but there isn’t much to add to Peter Bradshaw’s take on One Hand Clapping, a lost documentary film from Abbey Road Studios in 1974 of Paul McCartney and Wings recording a live album that never happened. It was like watching the musical equivalent of the best footballer in the world [insert name here] doing keepy-uppies.
McCartney’s extraordinary, unforced gusto and the delight he takes in every creative moment, his natural extrovert musicianship and casual virtuosity are such a tonic.
The one thing I will add to Bradshaw’s analysis is that with the insertion of McCartney now, at 82, doing chirpy voiceovers to camera, the project takes on the feel of a legacy, a heritage happening, a wrapping up of loose ends, and for McCartney, the Wings period of his musical career is probably the least known about and the one he feels closest to after The Beatles.
MONDAY 30 Pollsters use the expression “thermostatic” to describe public opinion, explaining that it moves in the opposite direction to policy. I’m not sure thermostatic is the right word, but if it catches on I suppose we better get used to it.
📌 Lewis Goodall spotted a move by Rachel Reeves at the Labour conference last week that is worth bookmarking. He says Reeves and Starmer both hinted at abandoning the previous government’s rigid fiscal rules and borrowing billions to invest in their vision for a new Britain. I seem to remember Ed Balls (and later John McDonnell ) saying something very similar in the past and being laughed out of the room.
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Billy's Scrapbook 