November 23-29, 2024
SATURDAY 23 Jennifer got an award for the fantastic work she does promoting the kind of art and artists who are so often ignored.
📌 I don’t know why, but I imagined a concert at the Barbican celebrating the sounds of Louisiana generally and New Orleans in particular would be a sedate, laid back experience at best and a dull, sleepy one at worst. Barbican audiences are, broadly, old, white and very boring. But the Take Me To The River ensemble of seasoned jazz-funk and soul masters had the place reeling with joyous abandon (my wife included). Top marks go to Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph.
SUNDAY 24 I finally caved in and signed up to Blue Sky, the reasonable person’s answer to Twitter, after I discovered that Mark Steel was on it. I hope it learns to be occasionally hysterical, but the early signs are that it is far too repressed.
📌 Dawn passed on my invite to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. I didn’t know I was Dawn’s +1 and it gave me the idea that should we be introduced to the Lord Mayor or the Prime Minister on the evening of the banquet we should fake the story that I am her father, who abandoned her mother 45 years ago and have recently been reunited after my long spell in prison.
MONDAY 25 Top business people are moaning at Rachel Reeves about her first budget and how it will affect their profits and growth. The thing the chancellor probably believes but won’t say is that British business has been subsidised by the British taxpayer for too long. A business that requires financial support from a government is not a viable business. And business people who rely on screwing money from ministers are not real business people. They are parasites.
It just so happens that this thought came to me just after I’d read an early passage in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Old Major is doing his big revolutionary barn-yard speech to the other animals…
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labour tills the soil, our dung fertilises it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than his bare skin.
📌 The Squaredle Bonus Word of the Day was “jiff”, and the definition Squaredle offers is: “Slang for the informal word “jiffy” (a short period of time), as in “back in a jiff.”
📌 In a moment of weakness yesterday we started watching Series 2 of The Diplomat. I’m not sure it was a great idea. In this series the American government seems to think it is entitled to have a say on the issue of Scottish independence.
TUESDAY 26 Off to University College Hospital to see the Artbox exhibition Sharing Is Caring in the prime space on Euston Road.
Then Artbox artist Violet delivered a print/pastel/painting workshop, from which I was able to steal some ideas. I also learned about the complexities of working alongside people with learning disabilities. Their fragility is ever present. Vigilance is paramount.
📌 We got to the end of Series 2 of The Diplomat. The ambassador and her husband are not having a good time. They argue continually on the best way to save the world from evil (and Scottish independence), but slowly come to realise that some of that evil is American. The cliffhanger in the final episode suggests that Series 3 is already deep into production.
WEDNESDAY 27 The BBC “reveals” that Strictly Come Dancing contestant Chris McCausland had never watched the show before appearing on it. Maybe that is because he is blind.
📌 I’ve started buying myself Christmas presents. First, the Complete Works of George Orwell on Audible, the second a supply of English bubbly white wine from an area of Kent that claims to have the same climate and soil as Champagne.
📌 I sat in anticipation during the film of the musical Wicked waiting for the audience to burst into song. They didn’t, or if they did I couldn’t hear them. We went for free on Time Credits, so I’m not complaining, though it didn’t change my mind about musicals (stupid concoctions of daft stories, awful songs and overblown costumery). Marge thought it was a travesty, an insult to the original stage musical. I heard her laughing, but not singing, throughout. For the first time ever, my wife left the cinema during the film to visit the toilet.
THURSDAY 28 There is one fascinating Orwell/Kafka moment in the film Wicked when the green apprentice witch, deep in the innards of the Emerald City, incants an ancient spell from the Wizard of Oz’s private collection. The result is that the Wizard’s army of benign, sluggish ape servants are transformed into flesh-eating killer vultures.
The other moment I liked was when the pink princess told the green witch that “pink and green go good together”, at which the witch corrected the princess: “pink and green go WELL with each other”.
📌 Stuart gets a bit flustered when someone asks him a direct question that requires him to have remembered something.
📌 I had a conversation with Michelle about the pricing of my stitchworks. The Clogs sold for £375 and Jennifer has been asking the price of two of the stitchworks from the Queen of Wonky collection. Michelle is keen to push my prices up. Jennifer is not just a passing exhibition buyer, but as a gallerist she knows how to price things realistically, so I asked her what she would price the stitchworks at. Michelle is also keen for me to do more stitchworks with what she calls “content”. She cited Fallopian Jesus as an example of a small stitchwork that could fetch a high price. Kat has already said she wants to buy it. I’m just happy making the pieces. I hate thinking about prices and selling and all that stuff.
FRIDAY 29 Most of the arguments in support of those who believe selling the Observer is an act of treachery by its owner, the Guardian, focus not on whether Tortoise Media, the proposed buyer, will abandon the Observer‘s famous liberal principles but on whether the Scott Trust, the Guardian and Observer’s governing body, and GMG, its holding company, have handled the sale with propriety. In other words, this is not an argument about journalism but about business, and how liberal institutions conduct themselves therein. When I worked at the Guardian there was the belief in 1993 that buying the Observer was a bad move. At the time I personally believed that Britain’s oldest newspaper, established in 1791, should indeed be saved. I did not believe that it should come to suck resources from the Guardian, which was how it eventually felt working there. I don’t know what has happened in the 12 years since I stopped working there, but I still recall arguing that the Observer was a basket case, business wise, and a new owner was needed urgently. I am a fan of Tortoise (see below), so I wish the Observer well and hope one day it will be successfully rehabilitated. The Guardian tried very hard to do it, without success.
📌 To Artbox on the Cally Road for a workshop in Risograph printing with Paula from Firenze. It turned out to be more about how to use a Riso printer than about using Riso printing as an artform. The only upside was that I got to meet a man who had x-rayed the family home in which he grew up and in which his parents and one of his siblings died. Talking to him was like play-acting at psychotherapy. He said he was trying to “find the DNA of the house”. He ended up splattering red ink all over it. I think he might be a serial killer waiting to be found.
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Billy's Scrapbook 