December 14-20, 2024
SATURDAY 14 I thought I’d end up giving all my votes to Chris in the Strictly Come Dancing final, but in the end my votes went to Sarah. Chris won it.
📌 Anne, who we saw last night at Midsummer Night’s Dream, told us that every time she goes to a Shakespeare play she swots up. Before last night’s performance, she read the play, studied the synopsis and the character notes and watched two film versions of the play.
📌 In a documentary about Maggie Smith (RIP), Michael Palin recalled working with her on the film A Private Function. In Palin’s recollected scene, Maggie gets boxed into a corner of a farmhouse kitchen by a frisky pig. To get out of her predicament, Maggie jumps athletically over it and retreats to a safe distance. In the documentary Palin described her jump as “a great piece of physical acting”. What everyone else saw was someone in a state of mild panic getting out of the way of a stroppy pig.
SUNDAY 15 Larry Elliott’s first Guardian column as a retiree announces that not everyone who is worried about net migration is a bigot. He starts by naming Keir Starmer, who has described UK migration figures as “off the scale”. Larry himself notes that…
In the past two years, net migration has been equivalent to the combined populations of Liverpool and Sheffield.
The issue is “complex”, he says, and that’s not as dismissive as it sounds. He then questions the mystery of why such high numbers of working-age people have recently become long-term sick, and why British employers continually fail to offer good fair-pay jobs and training to British workers.
📌 Our friends booked accommodation in Fuerteventura for Christmas. Three days before they were due to depart a message came saying their booking was cancelled. The accommodation then reappeared on booking.com at double the price. So they booked somewhere else. Two days later the same thing happened. They are now on their way to Feurteventura hoping that the third booking is safe and that they will have somewhere to sleep tonight.
MONDAY 16 My first thought on the government’s plans to reorganise councils into bigger, fitter unitary bodies is that I like it. I accept the criticism that it is in effect enforced partnering, a kind of civic shotgun wedding, but at least it is partnering. Councils and voters need urgently to accept that the prosperity lies in partnership and collaboration. So I’m trying to picture a zoned London as, for example, North, South, East and West, each a co-dependent governing entity. Future prosperity will depend on neighbouring rich and poor areas sharing resources, talent and, yes, problems. But that’s what politics is meant to do. If central government steps out of the way and legally sanctions large unitary councils (500,000+ population) to finance and run their own micro-economies, a new form of devolution will have been established. It might look like a smaller version of the metro-mayoral system that already operates in large city areas, where new business and political talent is nurtured and allowed to flourish. My second thought on the government’s reorganisation plan is to look at how it could all go wrong.
📌 Pointless Celebrities was on the TV and the only celebrity my wife could recognise was Alan Titchmarsh.
📌 I got a gift at the St Luke’s Christmas gathering for volunteers, but I’m not allowed to open it until Christmas Day. It is biscuits.
📌 Other things that happened in the world today include…
TUESDAY 17 I managed to fix the busted light switch in the bathroom, which turned out to be on a circuit with one of the downstairs lights and one in our bedroom. It took four attempts to get the sequencing correct because all of the three wires were coloured red, so knowing which ones to pair could only be established through trial and error. I got the bathroom pull-switch to turn on the bedroom and the downstairs lights before I got it to turn on the bathroom light.
📌 Nat sent over the poster she’s made for the art workshops at the Royal London hospital, starting in January. Everyone now seems terribly excited about the project, so I guess I should start panicking soon.
📌 At Madhumita’s memory group a bunch of corporate sponsors from a bank lavished vast amounts of food and drink on us, sang festive songs and delivered a lesson in how to dance the salsa, which is basically an elaboration on three steps (forwards, backwards, side to side). Then we did the marengue. Madhumita certainly has a talent for spotting a generous sponsor.
📌 In a Christmas Zoom hook-up with my sister and my cousin Kate I learned that a Facebook group called Growing Up In Anfield is infested with people we knew as children. But since many of them now have different surnames to the ones they had when we knew them, working out who is who is a toughie. The conversation was a strangely depressing step back into the past. Not because we have all left our Liverpool neighbourhood long ago but because so many of the people we played in the street with back then stayed in Liverpool and still love it. I felt like some sort of soft-centred traitor.
📌 Spotify’s Swing Jazz Christmas is a playlist that goes on in the morning and stays on all day. It’s like being permanently sat in an upmarket hotel lobby.
WEDNESDAY 18 I’m not sure that buying myself George Orwell, The Complete Works audio for Christmas was such a great idea. As brilliant as Orwell’s work undoubtedly is, falling asleep to a description of Winston Smith’s pustulating varicose veins is not likely to add to the season of joy. The essays on power and class are equally miserable. And don’t get me started on that self-pitying tosser George Bowling in Coming Up For Air… There’s 96 hours of this stuff.
📌 Finally, the latest Wonky stitchwork is finished. That lurid pink nose hides a multitude of sins.
📌 Swing Jazz Christmas has been replaced by Covers That Are Better Than The Originals, the strongest of them being Johnny Cash doing a version of U2’s One. It’s a collection Robin (RIP) would have both enjoyed and disliked in equal measure.
📌 To the Barbican for a toe-tapping evening of classical jazz, featuring the arranged works of Gershwin, Bernstein and Kapustin. Plus Christmas tunes combining Duke Ellington and Tchaikovsky. The solo drummer at the front of the stage was a novelty, as were the whole of the often stuffy London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) actually looking as if they were having a good time. That’s Jazz for you. It’s storytelling music, full of heart, a big, human landscape of rhythm and beat. The programme has a lovely paragraph about Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington…
When Bernstein and Duke Ellington were interviewed together in 1966, Bernstein made the optimistic remark that the two men’s music had more or less the same audiences: that ‘the kids’ these days were excited by both Bernstein’s ‘symphonic jazz’ and Ellington’s ‘jazz symphonies’.
All of it was brought together tonight in flamboyant style by the Barbican’s classical music maestro Antonio Pappano, who conducts like he wants to make a name for himself as the guy who’s always last to leave the party.
THURSDAY 19 Larry Elliott’s retirement from frontline economic reporting at the Guardian has given him the freedom to oil his voice. He always was an EU skeptic, but in his column today he hardly dithers in saying the UK dodged a bullet getting out when it did. France and Germany are each on a precipice. Hardline parties across the Eurozone are marching on. He stops short of saying Starmer and Reeves should stand firm in their talks with the EU, but the implication is that Europe should fall in behind Britain rather than the other way round.
📌 There is a mystery unfolding at Headway to work out the source of a perennially blocked toilet. Evidence so far includes it being a male toilet and it being hooked to the same plumbing as the washing machine. A number of suspects have already been identified.
📌 We finished the Jodie Foster series of True Detective baffled by a few loose ends, mainly the mystery of who cut out Annie’s tongue.
FRIDAY 20 Disturbing facts continue to emerge from the Pelicot trial in France, yet it is hard not to sense that the momentous public outrage is also sadly of the moment, and that little will change in countries – bizarrely including France – where rape is seen as “normal behaviour”.
📌 I’m starting to quite like the Reclaim EC1 blog, a muckraking project that does its best to out the corruption and evildoing of our local council, the City of London Corporation. It often sounds shrill and has a quaint obsession with freemasonry, but its energy is its strength. It’s quite good with facts, but rubbish with pictures.
📌 My wife tells me that today is “Black Eye Friday”, the last working day before Christmas on which workers go out, get drunk, fight, and wake up tomorrow with a black eye (or inflict a black eye on someone else, I suppose).
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