October 19-25, 2024
SATURDAY 19 Today’s Knowledge carries a dubious advert for anyone trying to dodge the clutches of Rachel Reeves’ upcoming budget: invest your money in whisky, “a tax-efficient asset class that has consistently grown in value”.
📌 One of the songs at an “Old Fashioned Singalong” in the community centre was Oom-Pah-Pah from the musical Oliver, which included an interesting verse…
Mr Percy Snodgrass
Would often have the odd glass
But never when he thought anybody could see
Secretly he’d buy it
Drink it on the quiet
And dream he was an earl
With a girl on each knee
We sat at a table with one of our neighbours, Yvonne, who told us about a Transatlantic cruise to New York on which she met and befriended David Bowie, circa The Jean Genie. Apparently David had a dislike of aeroplanes, which left him plenty of time aboard the Queen Mary to show his glam stage outfits to Yvonne, who proclaimed David to be delightful company and one of the most charming people she’d ever met.
SUNDAY 20 For a long time now I have been singing the wrong lyrics to The Only Thing, by Travis featuring Susanna Hoffs. For one of the verses I have been singing…
You are the metaphor, the metaphor
The meta for the ugly guy
When the actual lyrics are quoted as being…
You are the metaphor, the metaphor
The meta for the other guy
MONDAY 21 It’s hard to tell whether all the latest government pronouncements about sorting stuff like the NHS and HS2 are evidence that progress and reform is starting to take shape or whether ministers are just oiling their windpipes. Talking is one thing, doing is another. Neighbourhood polyclinics and patient passports are a great idea, but show me them in action, and do they work for the greatest number of citizens rather than the profiteers that are forever circling above our public health and social care systems?
📌 An airport in New Zealand has capped to three minutes the time you are allowed to hug your friends and loved ones and bid them a safe onward journey.
TUESDAY 22 Our neighbour Yvonne brought round her photo from the 1972 transatlantic cruise on which she met David Bowie.
📌 The meeting at the Royal London hospital with Michelle, Natalie and Vital Arts to discuss how I might get trauma patients on the neuro wing to engage in some art practices was like stepping back 12 years to my own experience. The physios still wear blue trousers and the OTs green. I look forward to seeing the artworks the patients make. We will display them in two small day rooms, transforming those spaces into warm, engaging hubs that will hopefully make the trauma-ward experience more bearable and more rehabilitative.
📌 Tonight’s City Question Time, at which our council pretends to listen to its residents, was held in the assembly hall of the City of London School for Boys. It has a massive organ. Of course it does.
WEDNESDAY 23 I sent my notes from yesterday’s meeting at the Royal London hospital to Natalie and Michelle. I hesitated before I pressed SEND, but I think that was more to do with tone than content…
On the surface it seems that two separate projects have been pushed together. First is the project in collaboration with Vital Arts to transform the two day rooms, 12E and 12F, into warm, welcoming and safe spaces for patients to chill. It is a short-term goal. The second is to work with Vital Arts to devise a practical use of arts and crafts in neuro-rehabilitation. This is a long-term relationship. Both are worthy projects and the first could even act as a pilot for the second. The difference between them is patient engagement. Rehabilitation from brain injury cannot be set on a timetable until patients are well clear of all their immediate post-trauma upheavals. I’m not sure it is realistic to engage with patients to create and install artworks into the day rooms in the proposed six-week time scale. If the day-room project was redefined as six “sessions” it could be feasible.
Big pieces of expressive art can be made easily, and making them is fun. Room 12E could have one style (eg, angular patterns) and Room 12F another one (eg, curved patterns). But if no longer-term engagement with arts and crafts is open to patients afterwards, the day-room project could end up being a fleeting and frustrating experience. It needs to be the door to something else, not an end in itself.
I think what I’m saying is that Headway would be best served by treating the Vital Arts day-room collaboration as one thing, but to also push for it to start another conversation about arts and crafts as a therapy tool.
Away from the formality of this message I had secretly nicknamed the two day rooms as “Corners” and “Curves”.
📌 The battery on my watch ran out and the Timpson lifetime guaranteed replacement warranty is nowhere to be found. The repair man in the shop advised me to photograph the new warranty because Timpson do not keep online records.
THURSDAY 24 Today’s Sensemaker reckons that the fuss over Labour supporters campaigning for Kamala Harris is all the work of Donald Trump and that Americans don’t give a toss who Starmer’s troops favour for president. It says of Harris…
Her campaign is well funded, well organised and on the right side of history, truth, human rights, probity, democracy, the rule of law and macroeconomics.
But goes on to add that none of that matters if she can’t win over the white working class of Pennsylvania.
📌 At Headway I got a thank you card off Jason (plus Ode to Billy) for the repair work I did on his decrepit old Headway T-shirt, which boasted a lamentable collection of rips and frays.
📌 It’s cheering to see men pushing baby buggies in the street, but I can’t help wondering why more and more of them choose to do it one-handed, as if using two hands amounts to some kind of emasculation.
📌 Jackie said she went for a blood test but they couldn’t find any. Straight away I nicknamed her Bloodless Jackie.
FRIDAY 25 At the end of this weekly scrapbook I have a footnote in which I urge readers to contact me if they spot any corrections I need to make. Every week, my sister and our friend Sue fire off messages promptly. But last week neither of them noticed that the dates for each day were all wrong by 7 days, and that last week was this week.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
I’m quite often a week ahead in my diary! My excuse is the pages stick together!
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