December 7-23, 2024
SATURDAY 7 We’ve agreed to do away with Christmas gifts for each other and will instead offer some small token items to open on the big day. But even that meagre task has left me baffled as to what to buy, and how to keep it a secret.
📌 Conclave is a film that makes something quite boring (a workplace referendum) into a pounding drama full of subtle turns and one or two fabulous speeches. The Guardian review even notes Isabella Rossellini doing “the most passive-aggressive curtsey in cinema history”. The final twist is about the last thing you would have imagined.
SUNDAY 8 Our nextdoor neighbour’s daughter Katy won a BBC Food & Farming Award for the groundbreaking work she does with her business Wasted Kitchen in redistributing and recycling surplus food.
📌 Yippee! Greasy Pete got the boot from Strictly Come Dancing.
MONDAY 9 The Syrian cobbler in Hoxton Street says he can mend my favourite shoes. It will be “a big job” and will cost way more than a new pair, but I think it’s worth it.
👁️ Sometimes everything comes together and a maximum score is possible…
TUESDAY 10 A report on the radio described how pantomime has been forced to move with the times. It’s now seen as a bit creepy for Cinderella to swoon and yield to the desires of Prince Charming. In one version this year, Cinderella asks Prince Charming “Can we just be friends?” because, she tells him, she is really in love with her best friend, Buttons.
📌 Shafting the government and the taxpayer is now such an established “way of doing business” that all political parties fall over themselves to aid the profiteering corporations doing it, writes Jonty Bloom.
📌 At a free Christmas lunch for old people organised by an eternally sunny woman called Madhumita, I apologised to her for not being a very successful old person and promised to do better next year.
📌At City Question Time, one Portsoken ward resident was quite aggressive towards Helen (councillor for the Aldersgate ward) about a school policy decision he disagreed with. It made me quite sympathetic towards councillors, so I pointed out that councillors can advise and vote, but it is City officers who write policy. Luckily, two of them were there to hear it. Helen told me later the complaining guy was a notorious self-centred windbag.
WEDNESDAY 11 At a 9.15am Teams meeting with Jo, Michelle and I fleshed out the collage idea for the hospital day rooms project at the Royal London with Vital Arts. Jo came back with some ideas of how the material we get from the six workshops can be “put into production”. I liked the idea of blowing up the collage landscapes on vinyl. It’s nice to have a frame of reference to sit as some kind of psychological guide in the back of my mind until January 22 arrives and I finally get to meet some patients. Michelle keeps banging on about accessibility, which is great and totally appropriate, but I hope when the time comes that Molly and others from the hospital team will offer some direction for that appropriate for individual patients at individual times. Jo asked if I’d do some stitchworks for the project, to go on display. I agreed, but I’m not sure what I could complete in the timescale. I might have to dust off some old work. I like the idea of using patients’ signatures or rough drawings to do stitchworks.
📌 Lady In The Lake is our new TV favourite. We started Series 2 of State of Happiness but it’s Norwegian, which means subtitles, which means concentration. Lady In The Lake is dark and weird, but fascinating. Fisk has become our suppertime viewing, and I’m still watching Peaky Blinders on the sly.
📌 I expected our new government to have pulled off a quick win by now, but it hasn’t, leaving the door open to the accusation that it is clueless. I think it is widely understood that it is penniless, but something bold would have been nice by now. All we get instead is the constant refrain that its hands are tied and that trying to untie the knotty mess left by the last lot is proving to be a bigger task than they thought it was.
THURSDAY 12 When snatched photos of the person who allegedly killed the medical insurance boss in the US, my wife swore it was a woman. I was fascinated by the idea that the killer had a noble motive in ridding the world of a greedy capitalist parasite. I started to paint in my head a romantic picture of Good slaying Evil. But the person the police have arrested and charged for the crime is not a woman. It is Luigi Mangione, a Baltimore posho who occasionally slums it in McDonald’s.
📌 It was the news from Tortoise that the World Cup is going to Saudi Arabia that grabbed me. It could be the geopolitical masterstroke of the century. Or not…
📌 The Headway writing group was taken over by Tessa and Steven from the ambulance-chasing legal firm Irwin Mitchell. They were in search of questions for a fundraising quiz. My only contribution was, “Edinburgh or Manchester, which lies furthest east?” I’m glad they were visiting because I’d failed to do any writing this week. The best I could do in response to the prompt “Origin of words” was to dig out my ancient copy of Chambers Etymological Dictionary.
FRIDAY 13 At Headway yesterday both Nat and Alex returned from a visit to a drawing exhibition with a recommendation. It was a stitchwork by an artist called Myrtle Glanville of one of her own pastel drawings, the poetically titled Run! Run! When the sun goes down will be done paint done. The piece used the kinds of stitches I am now experimenting with, long, random, ragged. I just used a very ragged one on the latest in the Wonky series. The nose got damaged so I filled it up with far too much scraggy pink thread to hide the blemish.
📌 We’re off to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream tonight and I’m still not sure I ever knew what was going on in that play. I think that might have been the idea all along.
📌 France has got a new Prime Minister. I wonder how long this one will last.
📌 What emerged from the conversations that followed tonight’s performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Barbican was not so much about the entertainment value of this thoroughly modern interpretation but about whether the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) still has any claim to be masters of the Bard’s works. On this evidence, an RSC production is no longer exclusive or distinctive in any way. The actors on stage tonight could not project their voices even to the back of the stalls, never mind the Circle, or the Gods. The minimal set looked good, the lighting and special effects convincing, and the new-agey music worked well. But the absence of old-school acting skills was replaced with gimmickry from so-so musical theatre and stand-up comedy. Yes, it was funny, not in any special way but in a stupid way. It was trivial but enjoyable.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
I do agree with a lot of your comments about ‘Dream’ It was good in parts, but there weren’t enough good parts to trump the disappointing ones.
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I remain agnostic as I don’t know the play well enough and have not much to compare it with. I found the humour crude and forced, but I liked the set. It was trying too hard to be down with the kids, which is a bad sign. Hermia was terrifying. The Wall thing was childish.
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2 things: yes Jane, I thought it was a woman as well – those eyebrows. and why did Pete Wicks always look as tho he needs a good wash?!
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