Scrapbook: Week 45

November 2-8, 2024

SATURDAY 2 I think I’ve hit on a process. I start most of my stitchworks on a large hoop or frame, then shift to small hoops to complete sections or zones of the image. The creature in my latest studio piece sat in a big hoop while I outlined the figure. During that time I worked out the colours, shapes and stitches I will use for, eg, the hair, the ears, the eyes, mouth, etc. Now I can use my favourite plastic hoop to detail the image.

📌 Several years ago for fun I made a digital montage based on the idea that when man first landed on the moon, one of the things he discovered was a dog having a poo. Today I asked ChatGPT to create that image for me, and it turned out to be remarkably similar to my own pre-AI creation, though not as good, I believe. My astronaut (tiny, top left in image) staggers over a big rock to see in the distance a Labrador in full squeeze. ChatGPT’s image crudely places the astronaut and the dog (a Labrador, even though that wasn’t specified in the description) next to one other. My Labrador is not scaled well, but that is a peanuts error compared with ChatGPT’s lousy composition.

📌 My wife refers to one of the contestants on Strictly Come Dancing as “Greasy Pete”, which I think is quite an accurate description of both physical appearance and personality. He’s the one we hope gets voted off next.

📌 Steve McQueen’s Blitz is a film that pushes you to look at London’s experience of WW2 in contrary ways. It sees the evacuated child as a POW. It sees the black experience as heroic, it sees London burning as a piece of Turner-inspired art and it renders the sound of Germany’s doodle bug bombs prior to explosion and death as a last, ominous gasp. It is a remarkable, vivid reworking of the propaganda film, a factual fairytale that toys with the truth from angles you never expected to see things.

SUNDAY 3 Members of the Conservative Party have elected Kemi Badenoch as their new leader. She won on less than 60,000 votes, and her election is more notable as a reflection of the diminished state of the party. James Ball in the New European reports…

Impressively in a contest with two candidates, 45 members managed to invalidate their ballot by voting for both of them.

📌 The Orwell Foundation’s daily essay is a Tribune article from 1944 about melons growing in “Shakespeare’s England” and includes a reference to climate change that seems too relevant to be 80 years old.

📌 At my wife’s annual appearance at the Barbican with her choir I finally came to understand the beauty of maestro André J Thomas‘s Symphonic Gospel oeuvre as distinguished from the annoying churchy stuff.

📌 Greasy Pete survived on Strictly Come Dancing, which was very disappointing.

MONDAY 4 RIP Quincy Jones, 91.

📌 Kemi appoints Priti to shadow cabinet. It’s bonfire night tomorrow.

📌 The New Statesman asks, “Should Labour fear Kemi Badenoch?” then supplies 750 words explaining the word NO.

TUESDAY 5 Before the results of the US presidential elections start rolling in, I had to remind myself how the nation’s electoral college system works. It is a 200-year-old mechanism to guarantee that a mad person never becomes president. But almost from the moment of its noble inception, the skilled fiddling of its component parts has become such a political artform that the guarantee has been suffocated to death.

📌 To the Royal Academy as a birthday treat from Paula to see the Michael Craig-Martin exhibition. Conceptually clever, technically clever (there’s even a gallery of heat-sensitive paintings that change hue), very funny, but with no real soul, and obviously art on a grand scale for rich people who live in vast properties. Perhaps that is the point.

WEDNESDAY 6 In the TV drama Until I Kill You the character of Delia, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, asks during a police interview to be referred to as a female and not as a woman.

📌 When Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019 we went on a news blackout, carefully steering ourselves away from the political path, not watching, listening or reading the news and simply not bothering to clutter our minds with distressing thoughts about the future. It was a refreshing stunt, and one we’ve decided to repeat with the election of Donald Trump as Potus.

📌 If you don’t hear on the first few days of the month, you are unlikely to have won on the Premium Bonds. So it was a pleasure while avoiding all the news about Donald Trump to get a message saying I was £150 richer. That, and the likelihood that we will have a functioning dishwasher before the start of next week, made me want to squeal with delight.

THURSDAY 7 My wife had a dream in which she was bitten by TV’s Taskmaster Greg Davies and became a zombie.

📌 Even when you are working hard not to pay attention to the news, the sound of Paul Mason’s Conflict & Democracy newsletter dropping into your email inbox is impossible to ignore. And its message – that a Trump victory should force Britain to take the lead in a new pan-European, anti-Russia security alliance – is full of good sense, which is why it won’t happen.

📌 At Headway James told us that his ascetic father, the once notable science-fiction writer DG Compton, always referred to the toilet as the lavatory, with the occasional loo. He even used the term “lavatory paper”.

📌 My story submission to the writing group was one from last week, the prompts for which were all references to Shakespeare. I chose the title As You Like It…

Every so often, to remind her he was capable of sensitivity, Martin told Heidi a secret story from his past. One night, after a visit to the theatre, Martin sipped his pint of Harvey’s Sussex Ale in the Two Brewers and told Heidi of the time he worked early-morning shifts as an office cleaner. On his way to work he’d stop at a cafe for a takeaway drink. “Strong tea, no sugar,” was the order. Very soon, whenever he went through the door of the cafe, the words “strong tea, no sugar?” came at him from behind the counter. A quick nod got him his wish. This exchange, repeated daily, soon dispensed with words, and body language alone completed the transaction. The only words ever used from then on were the ones the cafe worker uttered as he handed over Martin’s brew: “As you like it.”

👁️ On Kingsland Road at St Leonard’s bus stop…

📌 My cousin Kate recently met one of our childhood friends for the first time in 30 years and reported back that the friend’s main memory of me was on her 18th birthday when I wrote her name in soy sauce on the white tablecloth of a Chinese restaurant in Liverpool.

FRIDAY 8 In working out what items to pack off into deep storage, we ask ourselves whether it is likely we will ever own a turntable again, a conversation that is likely to be revisited some time in the not too distant future.

📌 Italy, the first of a series of geographical miniature stitchworks, is finished. Critics will note the absence of Sardinia. I honestly don’t care. It was a mistake. I might even unpick Sicily to make it look deliberate, like I intended Italy to look like it was part of a carnival costume.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

---