One month as it happened…
FRIDAY 1 The cold chips left over from my wife’s evening meal last night this morning went into the food processor, were pulverised at top speed then added to a can of mushroom soup. The finished concoction looked like a large pan of sick.
📌 To the Barbican for an RSC production of The Buddha of Suburbia, a play of two halves. The first half told me that the book is better than the play. The context was both over explained and over acted. In the second half, the characters came to life and their stories blossomed.
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.
SATURDAY 9 I finally finished GF Newman’s The Corrupted, an epic BBC radio drama in 58 episodes. It is a fascinating mix of historical fact and fiction starring Toby Jones as Joey Oldman, a Jewish Russian immigrant in London whose scuzzy odyssey spans post-war gangland crime and the racy 1960s to New Labour and the great financial meltdown of 2008, by which time Joey Oldman has become banker Lord Joseph Olinska and is nicely cuddled up with an outfit called Lehman Brothers.
📌 Squaredle‘s Bonus Word of the Day was “savvying”, the present participle and gerund of the word savvy, which I learned became became popular after the actor Johnny Depp used it in his role of Jack Sparrow in the film Pirates of the Carribbean.
📌 The latest stitchwork from Sam’s Queen of Wonky drawing workshops has finally started to grow on me and the prospect of colouring those grand ears is mouthwatering.
📌 We have loved the TV adaptations of the Mick Herron Slow Horses stories and now I am happy to report that in print they are even better.
📌 On Strictly Come Dancing, one of the contestants, the comedian Chris McCausland, remarked that disabled people are more creative, more imaginative and better problem solvers than the able bodied.
SUNDAY 10 Elif Shafak’s latest newsletter from her Unmapped Storylands collection reads almost like a sermon on the state of the world.
📌 The Harvest Celebration at the allotments was poorly attended but the children didn’t seem to notice. Towards the end we were visited by a fella called Eamonn, who it turns out is married to the Bishop of London. He gave the impression, here among the common people of the Golden Lane Estate, of being slightly embarrassed by his own lofty status as a Consort, less so about his role as a Farringdon councillor and a City of London tour guide who specialises in anecdotes about Charles Dickens and occasionally dresses in Dickensian clobber to deliver his learned tours.
MONDAY 11 Larry Elliott’s final column as economics editor for the Guardian is a six-point list of lessons learned about world economics. It makes for bleak reading but has a tone of honest nostalgia I find comforting. The upshot is that the bad people have taken over the world because the good people were too smug about being good to come up with a better plan.
📌 As promised I joined our Alderwoman Liz for Father Jack’s outdoor remembrance service next to some historical remnants of the old wall that once enclosed the City of London. Jack was assisted in his readings by two pupils from the City of London School of Girls and by a trumpet player to deliver the Last Post.
📌 The Bonus Word of the Day in Squaredle was “argil”, which Squaredle defines as: “clay, especially used by potters”, adding that, “some argil is noted for its mossy colour.”
TUESDAY 12 Articles arguing that a Trump presidency might not be as bad as expected have started to appear, alongside others describing how the Democrats effectively beat themselves.
Trump’s strategy enables him to present a party of private power as the voice of the ordinary voter.
📌 The Teams meeting for the Headway/Royal London hospital project with Vital Arts went well. Jo steered us diligently through the agenda and I felt a good rapport growing, especially with the brain-injury ward team led by Molly. They seem excited by the prospect of using arts and crafts to engage patients and their families. The six workshops will need proper planning and I have a lot of confidence in the people I’ll be working with. They all want it to be a success.
WEDNESDAY 13 I’m devastated that the old-style news narrative has been withered to death by the internet. What has replaced the classic news headline – eg, ‘Man Bites Dog’ – is now the suggestion that the dog might have bitten the man. Then you need to scroll through several paragraphs of nonsense to discover that the dog looked at the man in a threatening way, claims Mr Blah who was walking past at the time, and who wears very thick glasses.
📌 At a schmoozy Culture Mile event, Harshita introduced me to a friend who turned out to be someone I knew as Susie Barron, a fashion assistant at the Guardian when Susannah Frankel was fashion editor. We reminisced endlessly and Susie recalled a time I stood up and defended her in an argument with some superior tosser. We talked at length about then Guardian Weekend magazine editor Deborah Orr, who Susie found terrifying. I think I was one of the few people who didn’t find Deborah terrifying.
THURSDAY 14 In a moment of madness I wandered into the Headway gym and spent half an hour cycling vigorously to the Scissor Sisters. I got so caught up in the frenzy that I missed the start of the writing group. My contribution this week was from the prompt King Of America.
They’d avoided talking about Donald Trump for several days. It wasn’t a deliberate choice, but both Heidi and Martin found themselves skulking miserably around their small Hoxton apartment with a bereaved look on their faces, not quite knowing how to process the news that he’d won, he’d won also by a good margin and was now loudly proclaiming himself King of America. The deadness inside them couldn’t be expressed in words. The inevitability of endless global trade wars amid an endlessly overheating planet and a Henry 8 reign of misogyny seemed conclusive. And their fellow citizens in the United States, a supposedly advanced nation, were responsible. They felt let down. Martinfound some equilibrium in the opening words of an Elvis Costello song…
He thought he was the King of America
Where they pour Coca Cola just like vintage wine
Now I try hard not to become hysterical
But I’m not sure if I am laughing or crying
Heidi was still a bit stuck in a state of hysteria.
📌 Before lunch at Headway we all sang songs with former members of the 1970s band Darts. After lunch, in the studio there was a memorial for Barry, who died recently. Lots of people said nice things and we all looked at fabulous retro pictures of Barry. I didn’t think it was appropriate to say he always reminded me of Catweazle.
📌 A perfect spur-of-the-moment visit to the cinema for Anora was stained by a group of young women behind us who seemed to be involved in some kind of performative giggling contest. They laughed forcibly at things that were clearly not funny, but ultimately did not spoil a cleverly slapstick parable film about getting the kind of relationships you give. Standout performance for superb character transition – from happy and joyous to miserable, angry and desperate – goes to Mikey Madison (Max in Pamela Adlon’s Better Things), whose character name is Anora but prefers to be known as Annie. That was a clue we got right from the start that didn’t quite sink in until about half way through when Annie got quite stroppy with authority figures who referred to her as Anora. Another clue was that Annie’s antagonist was a Russian who spoke bad English and English-speaking Annie also spoke Russian badly.
FRIDAY 15 I wonder if in 4 years’ time we will still be bothered by news of how badly and stupidly the previous government wasted taxpayers money.
📌 In a moment of curiosity inspired by a Spotify playlist I learned that Alannah Currie from the 1980s band Thompson Twins is now an avant-garde artist called Miss Pokeno and part of a group that does arty pranks with old pieces of furniture.
SATURDAY 16 Two events from last week are still swirling in my head, their flavours becoming more and more complex the longer they swirl. First is the film Anora and the imagined life of the title character from the end of the film until this moment now. The second is The Imaginary Institution Of India, the Barbican’s big exhibition, which radically replaces wall text with the options of a book written in English or an audio guide. This is all fine by me because I always prefer to pass over the explanations and just look at the images. And they are superb (even the “dung paintings”), but the subdued lighting in the gallery was not strong enough for those who needed it to read the small-print book, and the image of visitors squinting, heads down, became as distracting as any wall text would have been. The review in Time Out works best for me, and even supplies some text that might have been useful at the start of the exhibition…
In 1975, India declared a state of emergency and suspended democracy; in 1998, it developed nuclear weapons. The 25 years in between were decades of total tumult, which all of the art here tries in some way to address.
…More useful than a lone large-scale painting of two men standing next to a hand cart and a wall of red house bricks, which at least gave the nod to the richness of the colours on display here and the suggestion of barriers being put up and got round.
📌 At the Leadenhall festive craft market Sue spotted a possible new product line for the Golden Lane Stitchers.
📌 On the 58th floor of Horizon 22 all of London looks squashed uncomfortably together, and buildings that look sleek in profile from street level are revealed to be ugly machines. Then you spot a lovely thing embedded in the wreckage.
📌 The lighting in the basement of Pizza Express, Holborn, made it all but impossible to get a decent picture of the fabulously evocative Buena Vista Social Club tribute band.
👀 As seen on the pavement at the Red Lion Street bus stop…
SUNDAY 17 Andy Beckett has spotted a potential thorn in Starmer’s side. His left side. A group of five independent MPs elected in July have formed a Corbynist alliance that has the potential to snowball into an irritant for Starmer as he continues to pull the sharpest teeth from the mouth of the parliamentary Labour party.
📌 It’s fingers crossed again that Greasy Pete gets booted off Strictly Come Dancing.
📌 The bad news is that Greasy Pete once again survived and lives on in Strictly Come Dancing. The good news is that I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here has started and I know already that Tyrone (Alan Halsall) will win, so I don’t have to watch any more of that rubbish.
MONDAY 18 A meeting in the Barbican’s Garden Room with three of the arts centre’s key directors told us nothing new, but at least we were able to complain that Barbican Cinema is not scheduled to show the new Paddington film.
TUESDAY 19 Farmers will descend on Downing Street today to protest the chancellor’s decision to charge them the same rate of inheritance tax as everyone else.
👂Overheard by Polly Toynbee in Kent…
Housebuilding is the great market failure, where high demand doesn’t produce high supply: it urgently needs government intervention.
📌 I joined the St Luke’s Men’s Shed for an Italian cookery session in the cookery school, plus food, drink and games in celebration of International Men’s Day. Me and Graham came third in the quiz. We got an extra half point for our team name, If Luke’s Could Kill. I was the only one who made time to thank our cookery instructor/chef, Tracy.
WEDNESDAY 19 I just read a great line in the PG Wodehouse yarn The Prince & Betty: “Tears are the Turkish bath of the soul.”
📌 Nelia disapproved of the stitchwork I am doing of Fallopian Jesus, a painting I did for an exhibition in Dundee hosted by a religious charity. Nelia didn’t like it because, “she was a virgin”. I didn’t have the courage to ask whether she believes virgins had vaginas.
THURSDAY 21 RIP John Prescott, 86. An old video of him drinking beer is getting traffic.
📌 Every day Sensemaker offers a terse list of things you need to know about, if you can be bothered. It then goes on to cover one story in detail. I like the attitude.
📌 The story I offered up to the Headway writing group had the title Midwinter Nightmare, though what I wrote stretched it…
It wouldn’t be Christmas if Martin didn’t get a bee in his bonnet, thought Heidi. Every year he concocted some variation of Bah Humbug. They’d been together 7 years and already he’d dusted off the Pagan Roots Of Christmas sermon 3 times, with endless tortured puns on the word Yule.
This year it was Scrooge and the multiple ghosts that crowded his head on that fateful night before the Big Day of reckoning. Martin’s theory was that the ghosts were evidence that Scrooge was a highly complex, misunderstood character and not the grumpy old tightarse as widely depicted.
Heidi agreed that he was indeed complex, but she saw the ghosts as a manifestation of Scrooge’s hidden homosexuality. Why otherwise would anyone leave the name of his “former partner” Jacob Marley on the sign in the shop window? For SEVEN years after he died! Marley and Scrooge were bum boys, no doubt about it.
📌 I was surprised at how unsentimental the new Headway documentary film, The Magic of Chaos, is. It also has Miriam talking about the early days, which was a neat inclusion.
FRIDAY 22 The community group Marge volunteers at were given a bunch of free tickets for Guys & Dolls as performed by the elder pupils of the City of London School For Girls, a very wealthy private fee-paying school in the Barbican. The actor Rory Kinnear was in the queue behind us last night as we waited in a CLSG corridor to go in.
The show being about GUYS and DOLLS meant the guest appearance of some pupils from the City of London Boys School (an equally snooty local institution), but not always. Eg, the character Nicely Nicely (normally a guy) was played by a doll, and a guy (ie, two people, two Nicelys, identically dressed). This gave the show a clever nod to the on-trend gender conversation, plus a historical nod to Shakespeare’s casting of men in the role of women, ++ a popular nod to pantomime, a season that is already upon us.
The show also being about SAINTS and SINNERS meant we got an idea about which pupils their teachers saw as which, and as the daft story unfolded we got to see the guys in the dolls and the saints in the sinners. It was an enjoyable excursion in an sometimes fussy presentation.
The production’s stage-management gave all members of the vast cast a chance to get their moment, and the performances were steely sharp and polished to a terrifying level of self-confidence. These teenagers – many of them with very good singing voices – oozed hard-faced privilege and entitlement even in a school musical! And a comedy at that! Who knows what havoc they will unleash on society later in their lives!
My favourite appeared in the cast list only as “Poppy”, who played a divine Arvide Abernathy (doll/saint, or maybe not, depending on which way you see/feel about things today, yesterday, or whatever).
📌 I narrowly missed finishing yesterday’s Squaredle before the 11.30am cut-off, but I was pleased to have got MAYONNAISE.
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.
SATURDAY 30 Squatters have occupied an empty office building just across the road from us. The direct-action collective movement seems to be on the rise. Yesterday I read about a collective of child migrants in Paris whose determination has forced the politicians to act, and the police to back off.
And their statement…
We’re a broad collective: squatters, homeless people, artists, social workers, lawyers; average people from many walks of life coming together in the shared belief that housing is a human right.
We’ve made use of disused spaces since 2021. To resist harsh social and environmental climates, to reject marginalisation and find community through autonomous practice.
It’s a failure of decision making that buildings are left to rot in plain view while people are left to die on the streets. We know there are ways to address these failures, but they require us to come together and make new decisions.
And they suggest ways we can help…
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 