Scrapbook: Week 49

November 30-December 6, 2024

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. Our local squatters are on a mission…

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…

SUNDAY 1 Sutton is starting to look like the new Croydon.

📌 I must remember to at all times have with me some printed reading matter. We boarded the train from Sutton to Farringdon just in time. As the train pulled away from the station platform I realised I’d left my phone on Paula’s bed. For the whole journey I sat, staring trance-like at a fixed point about 10m away trying to summon up something to think about, while my wife nobly returned to Paula’s to retrieve the phone. One of those pocket-sized Bibles they gave you at school would have been quite useful in this moment, I thought.

📌 My wife had a craving for a Wetherspoons Christmas veggie burger. As we tucked in I heard from somewhere behind me a distinctive emphysemic cough and knew instantly that Vera was in the pub, with Iris, as is usual for Sunday. Vera told us that last week she had £900 fleeced from her bank card. The police told her most of it was spent on Deliveroo deliveries.

📌 Liverpool’s 2-0 defeat of Manchester City looked remarkably easy.

MONDAY 2 In her Unmapped Storylands notebook, Elif Shafak reflects on mass hysteria and rollercoaster movements that sweep in and out of our lives, tweaking our minds ever so slightly in the process. Luckily, she also has advice on how to step aside from such movements and stay sane.

📌 Rich, corporate landowners are using small-scale farming families to attack the government and its new inheritance tax on farmers, which, demonstrates Socialist Worker with some revealing figures, illustrate how genuine family farms will suffer no loss whatsoever by the policy.

All this means that a couple with farmland could pass on up to £3 million without paying a penny of inheritance tax.

📌 “Brain-rot” has been named as word of the year for 2024.

📌 We knew something might be about to happen when the chamber music stopped and the City of London’s finest yeomanry resplendent with spears, swords and gleaming body armour ushered all the low-ranking assembled guests to one side. It created down the centre of the Guildhall an avenue into which strolled a kilted bagpiper followed by a procession of dignitaries, starting with the Lord Mayor elect Alastair King and finishing with the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. I whispered, “he’s smaller than I thought he was”, to which our friend Anne replied, “they always are.” Then came the trumpets to signal that dinner was ready and the Lord Mayor’s Banquet 2024 could begin. In we filed, found our seats (table 4) and introduced ourselves to our nearby tablemates. In my case that was a group of fabulously bejewelled people from the Sikh and Hindu high commissions. One of them (who mistook me for a successful  businessman) was especially interested in telling my host Dawn about the good work he does in Greenwich finding jobs for young people. Then came the food (is that duck or quail?), lots of wine and water, and the speeches, all of which were riddled with bad jokes and went on far too long. Pudding and port, more trumpets and drums, then out to find out if our taxi had arrived.

TUESDAY 3 The news media has managed to spin a story from what Keir Starmer said in his speech at last night’s Lord Mayor’s Banquet, even though all the guests I spoke with found it a dull statement of the obvious.

📌 Jennifer valued my Wonky stitchworks at around £300 a piece. She had expressed an interest in buying one and Michelle and I didn’t have a clue how to price them, so I asked Jennifer what she would sell them for.

WEDNESDAY 4 At the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on Monday I watched my fellow guests during the speeches to get a measure of their reactions. During the Lord Mayor’s, his forced jokes were met with either forced laughter or the scrunched faces of embarrassment. During the Prime Minister’s, some listened intently, others looked bored. Sitting opposite me one woman slipped back in her seat, gazed at the ceiling and listened carefully to what Starmer had to say. She nodded vigorously at times but shook her head, eyes down, at others. Her husband pretended to nap. Next to them one of the guests from the Indian high commission checked his phone.

📌 In the space of an hour, Buffy called me Barry (again!) and Sarah called me John.

📌 The Squaredle Bonus Word of the Day was FREMD: “Strange, unusual, foreign”.

THURSDAY 5 In the studio me, Michelle and Sam prepped up a collage landscape made from handmade colour washes and patterns. The trick is to first lay down the zones (in this case, ocean, beach, mountains, sky) then layer up the detail (fish, aquatic flora, houses, people, clouds, birds, stars, sun, moon). We also made a shopping list for the hospital project we will start in January. I will work up some ideas for “place” landscapes over the holidays (city, seaside, countryside) and look at how different methods and techniques can be applied. Almost anything can be built into a landscape and the beauty of collage is that it is universally fun and accessible.

📌 The Guildhall Big Band have jazzed things up. At last night’s tribute to Prohibition Era Chicago jazz they included a large-scale slide show of archive photography, and a slick narrator told the story of black jazz musicians from New Orleans in the 1920s migrating north to New York and the Windy City. It was all very interesting, but the contrast between the black faces in the photographs and the milky white faces of the Guildhall studentry onstage started for the first time to look like a very bad joke.

FRIDAY 6 One of those unsolicited Instagram reels showed Radiohead’s Thom Yorke telling an audience that while he was helping his 16-year-old daughter with her homework she stopped to read a text from her mother saying, “What do you want from Life?” Thom and his daughter discussed this in some depth before a second text arrived five minutes later blaming predictive text on the alteration of the word Lidl.

👁️ The Funeral directors on Lamb’s Conduit Street wishes us all a very merry Christmas.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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