December 21-27, 2024
SATURDAY 21 I suspect Winchester is as typical as any other British market town at this time of year. Everyone seems to be eating while walking to the next chance to spend money on things they never would have imagined wanting or needing. In Marks & Spencer’s a man picked up a large bag of walnuts just because they were there.
📌 In his daily blog, Warming Up, the comedian Richard Herring publishes his son Ernie’s picture of the nativity, in which, Herring claims, baby Jesus appears simultaneously as being born and being crucified. Birthday and death in one image.
SUNDAY 22 A 1946 Christmas message from George Orwell says festive restraint is overrated and urges total excess. He says poets and writers throughout time have been inspired by food, drink, gluttony and good company, whereas…
No one has written memorable prose about vitamins, or the dangers of excess of proteins, or the importance of masticating everything thirty-two times.
MONDAY 23 Hoxton Shoe Repairs was not open as advertised, so I won’t be wearing my favourite handmade shoes for Christmas.
TUESDAY 24 At a Christmas dinner last night, our friend Graham droned on about how he once touched the sleeve of David Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson. Then, in what Graham saw as a side show, he told us about coming third in a talent contest (prize, £5) as part of a vocal quartet called Two-Plus, alongside his brother Keith, Lesley Manville and her sister Diana. Everyone thought his Lesley Manville collaboration was a far bigger claim to fame than his Mick Ronson shirtsleeve anecdote.
📌 My wife reports that Waitrose has sold out of olives.
📌 Our library has an audio download of Andy O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, so I nabbed it quickly. Listening to it I can’t help be drawn to the idea that it is really about him and his journey from the low culture of Glasgow to the high culture of literary London.
📌 At the Courtauld Gallery we saw what Monet saw at the turn of the 20th Century from some windows overlooking the Thames. The eccentric British weather was obviously his friend, and gave him innumerable opportunities to paint the same view in different shades of rain, mist, fog, etc. He even wrote a letter to his wife expressing his gratitude for this climatic gift.
📌 Before we departed Monet my wife spotted a scene from one of the Courtauld’s upstairs windows that would have merited inclusion in the gallery’s superb European Art collection, then it was off to the Savoy for a Christmas glass of champagne and an endless supply of olives that put Waitrose to shame.
WEDNESDAY 25 We started with the need to find a streaming platform showing Bugsy Malone, quickly moved on to champagne and ripping open our presents like children, then to the Fox & Anchor for something to eat.
📌 Another brilliant Wallace & Gromit film saw the return of Feathers McGraw, the penguin who disguises itself as a chicken to perform dastardly deeds. Then Nessa and Smithy got it together in a hilarious climax to the last ever episode of the Gavin & Stacey.
THURSDAY 26 Most of today’s excitement fell in the last 20 minutes of the Chelsea vs Fulham game.
FRIDAY 27 Sajid Javid was the guest editor on Radio 4’s Today programme. His pet subject was AI and the good and bad things it will inflict upon us in the future. He claims to be an optimist and hopes that good uses of AI will prevail over bad. Others are not so sure, including one of the guys who won the Nobel Prize for developing an AI programme for machine learning.
His comments had me picturing a time in the future (about 5 years from now) in which nothing you don’t personally witness can be believed to really exist. And as Abba’s Voyage show proves, not even something you witness first-hand can be believed to be real. In these circumstances, might people actually come to care more about the information they consume and become more critically aware? And might a better world become possible?
Or will everyone just roll over and enjoy the entertainment as being the last great spin of the dice before human existence becomes extinct? The Nobel prize-winner believes the world will be split into those who buy into it and those who don’t, and that only government regulation can determine where our fate lies.
Which brought me back to George Orwell’s 1984, which I’ve been enjoying on Audible. A Big Brother that monitors all digital devices in a specified jurisdiction is obviously a future possibility, if not a certainty.
📌 It sounds obvious to say it, but watching Liverpool beat Leicester last night and now watching Brighton toiling against Brentford, the best performances are by teams that move constantly. Players who stand still are fossils.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
The last two months have flown by and I don’t know why I missed reading your posts. Yesterday I was hearing a lecture and the speaker said as an example that when we go to a supermarket we buy more things than we really need. Here we have more of the smaller shops. We make a list of what we want and get just that.
Birth and death in one image is interesting. Monet’s paintings are different. When I look at the photos of paintings by great artists I keep wondering why they are considered great 😀.
I am listening to Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari on Audible. It is very interesting. Thank you for this post. We wish both good health and happiness in the coming year.
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