October 5-11, 2024
SATURDAY 5 An aching arm from yesterday’s injections and a stinking cold are all the excuses needed to lounge in front of the TV watching football. Unfortunately, the Crystal Palace versus Liverpool game added stress to the cocktail of ailments. Liverpool scraped through 1-0, but by the end of the game it was a close thing, and goalkeeper Álisson Becker picked up an injury that looked quite serious.
📌 Turns out that the taxi containing Ian Hislop was not hit by gunfire but instead suffered a mechanical failure that obviously sounded enough like the impact of a bullet to get the headline-writers excited.
SUNDAY 6 Listening to a radio programme from 2020 called Unsung Heroines I was reminded that whenever and wherever we are out and about, my wife keenly notices and points the absence of women. Now I notice it too, but possibly for a different reason. My teenage hero was Holden Caulfield from JD Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye, and in the book Holden remarks upon the absence of women in the New York bars he stumbles into while trying to find himself. He thought the absence of women was creepy.
📌 Agatha Christie really can be quite annoying. She pushed me to the end of my tether recently with The Body In The Library and it’s mindbogglingly stupid, ridiculously convoluted and dragged-out plot. I nearly gave in forever, but was won over by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Now I’m on And Then There Were None and my admiration for Christie’s sheer cleverness grows with each page.
MONDAY 7 Boris’s new book is a source of great amusement for media commentators. Jonty Bloom uses it to point out a simple truth that seems quite ridiculous with hindsight.
The biggest post-war disaster for the UK [Brexit] was perpetrated by two schoolboys reliving their earlier rivalry.
📌 The web-based music streamers have caught up with those of us who signed up for the free service but used it like it was a paying service with ads. Amazon Prime Music and Spotify Free always had a good selection of albums to listen to, but lately they’ve been nailed down as shuffle-only services. In other words, you select an album and a message tells you you can play it if you subscribe to the premium service (£10+ per month), otherwise it will be “shuffled with similar songs”. This is a blow, but not unexpected, and probably fair. We have decided to dust off our CD player and use that for listening to albums and the streaming services for curated playlists (eg, Film Soundtracks, 80s Anthems) and background music (eg, Rain, Wind, Meditation). CDs in charity shops now cost next to nothing.
📌 I’m stitching each of the 25 wards of the City of London in two subtly compatible colours, the exception being the ward of Tower, the home of the Tower of London. This I am stitching in a mixture of blue (royalty) and gold (the crown jewels).
TUESDAY 8 Kemi Badenoch has been widely ridiculed in the media for claiming she “became working class when I was 16 working in McDonald’s”. An article in the Conversation reveals that Badenoch was obviously citing her class status according to a government statistical programme called the NS-SEC occupational coding tool, so what is actually ridiculous, but also fascinating, is that Badenoch does not see her identity as related to the class of her parents (GP and professor) or even her Nigerian ancestry, but to statistical methodology. BTW, my dad was a toolmaker.
📌 The Conservative Party leadership contest (four become three) looks a lot like the book I’m reading. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None starts in classic Christie style. Ten strangers are brought together in a posh house, then after dinner on the first night a disembodied voice accuses each of them individually of a heinous crime. They have obviously and mysteriously all been brought to the same place to meet natural justice (ie, death) for their misdeeds, presumably with a heavy dose of humiliation.
📌 My relatives on the Gulf Coast of Florida are in the path of Hurricane Milton but have not been told to evacuate. Yet.
WEDNESDAY 9 Jürgen Klopp has a new job, though no one seems able to describe what it is he will be doing as “Head of Global Soccer” for Red Bull, a drinks manufacturer.
📌 One lot of our relatives (the young ones) in Florida have been evacuated in anticipation of Hurricane Milton’s arrival this evening. The older generation seems determined to dig in and see it through. Or not, as the case may be.
📌 Must do documentaries on the big screen more often was the lesson from a visit to the Curzon Bloomsbury with Brian for The Battle for Laikipia, a dramatic replay of the Nomad vs Settler rivalry in the Kenyan cattle-herding/ranching communities of an area north of Nairobi. Must do Curzon Bloomsbury more often too.
THURSDAY 10 Relatives in Florida all declared safe after Hurricane Milton.
📌 The main conflict in the documentary we saw at Curzon Bloomsbury last night is between ancient tribes of pastoralists and the families of European colonial livestock ranchers. Before the climate crisis there were enough lush pastures throughout Kenya to support both the nomadic herdsfolk and the rich white incomers with their fancy jeeps and safari holiday businesses. Now that equatorial Kenya is prone to drought, good grass for grazing is at a premium and the pastoralists believe they have the right to roam and to feed and water their herds anywhere. The ranchers, some of them fourth-generation, think otherwise and will kill to protect the land their ancestors bought and developed. The human standoff is as fragile as the environmental one. When the rains finally came to Laikipia, some sort of balance was restored, but you sensed quickly that both sides were on borrowed time.
📌 At Headway Elisa asked us to write a letter to Keir Starmer saying what people affected by brain injury want him to do to help. I think it’s a poor idea, but I will join the project just in case it is successful.
📌 It looks like Israel is at war with Lebanon.
FRIDAY 11 Today’s Sensemaker notes that two of the recent winners of the Nobel Prize for physics came not from academic institutions dedicated to scientific research but from Google Mind (aka, DeepMind), a profit-seeking commercial enterprise. The anomaly, it says, has more to do with the inadequacies of the Nobel category system than anything else, which was devised in 1895 by Alfred Nobel and hasn’t changed since. Back then there was no prize for Computer Science or Engineering, and as those fields have grown rapidly during the 20th and 21st centuries, the Nobel committee has forced computer scientists and engineers into categories such as Physics, when what is clearly needed, says Sensemaker, is new categories. Interesting to ponder, though, whether computer science is just another branch of Applied Physics. Discuss.
📌 I’ve worked out slowly over time that the beauty of Sam’s drawings lies not in the intricate detail but in the drunken shapes.
📌 Note to self… Be sure to visit the Come As You Really Are exhibition in Croydon before it finishes on October 20.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
I have many books by Agatha Christie and have re read them over the years. My brother used to tell me there are better writers than her in that genre but I could never agree 😊. I liked Curtain. You must have read it. We are seeing how easy it is to manipulate the thinking of people. Your stitch work is very good. Thank you for this post.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you, Lakshmi. At age 65, I have only just started reading Agatha Christie, so years of murderous pleasure lie ahead.
LikeLiked by 1 person
🙂
LikeLike