January 4-10, 2025
SATURDAY 4 Someone in the new series of The Traitors is faking a Welsh accent.
SUNDAY 5 When she’s not being a top food critic, Grace Dent does some lovely life-story journalism on the radio. Her latest outing is Growing Pains, in which she explores the experience of adolescence, with quotes from both celebrities and ordinary people of the agony and the ecstasy of tipping over into adulthood. My favourite in the latest collection was descriptions of VE Day and soldiers coming home from the war to find their old world gone and a new one waiting to be built.
📌 A writer in the Observer says what everyone is thinking, that Starmer is… “like one of those builders who turns up when they feel like it and leaves the site under a tarpaulin for months at a time.” Another writer uses social care as the example of a reform that doesn’t need any more talking about. What it needs is real-world solutions, and the fact that Starmer’s government arrived in office with so very few of them beggars belief.
📌 We finished After The Party and I was slightly disappointed that a story that surfed dangerous and complex waves of moral ambiguity ended in such a dramatically conventional way.
MONDAY 6 I’d like to think that the collage landscapes we did in the studio before Christmas in preparation for the dayroom project at the Royal London Hospital have inspired Sam to have a go at landscape ink drawings, but she was probably just browsing through her holiday photos.
TUESDAY 7 One of the upsides of the irritant Elon Musk poking his nose into everyone else’s business is that Bluesky has become a far more exciting place to sit and absorb banter and repartee that includes such essentials as why Wes Streeting looks increasingly like an advert for expensive plastic surgery, and why in the near future autonomous vehicles will liberate the poor.
📌 Jonty Bloom claims he can hear the Conservative Part dying and wants all the cuddly old repressed middle-class Tories to defect to the Lib Dems and leave Kemi’s crew to duke it out with Reform in the swamplands of Britain.
📌 I finally finished the stitchwork of Fallopian Jesus. I did this one by first printing a photograph of the painting onto fabric, then stitching in the colours. It’s not brilliant, but it inspired me to experiment with printing images to fabric then working in the stitches. I shall put aside some time each week to play with this method. It’s nice because it means you can try different backgrounds and textures. The tricky bit is working out what fabric will go through our old printer.
📌 My wife has replaced our old toilet rolls, which were getting harder and shorter, with new ones, which are longer and softer. But the new ones do not have cardboard tubes in the centre, which were always useful for propagating seeds for the allotment come springtime.
WEDNESDAY 8 2025 could be the year I finally stop paying any attention to world events. If Donald Trump does everything the news media says he will, we are all done for anyway, so what’s the point. I’m tempted instead to become a hedonist, seeking pleasure wherever I can get it. Pleasure in the pipeline already includes trips to Paris, Italy and La Palma, plus a special birthday party in Ireland with a mob of fellow hedonists.
THURSDAY 9 We saw Nosferatu at the cinema last night and I still can’t decide whether this is a genius remake of the original 1922 Murnau silent classic or a dim reworking that makes the Hammer House stories look like cinematic artefacts. Maybe German expressionism only works for a certain generation, but the silent dark/light contrast of the original did find its way into my younger head. The creepy-gory and very noisy intensity of the modern version made me drop off to sleep briefly but most of the time had me giggling at its daft playschool horror hidden in plain sight.
📌 We went to St Luke’s for the first in what will be weekly “adults-only” meetings to talk about culture, and more importantly to register with a WhatsApp group that will dole out free ticket offers to galleries, museums, concerts, films etc. Carol-Ann was very excited to nail down our first group exhibition visit, which will be to Autograph for Abi Morocco Photos: Spirit of Lagos, at the end of the month.
FRIDAY 10
📌 A lot of the stories about the Los Angeles wildfires have noted the number of wealthy Hollywood stars that have been forced to flee their mansions in the hills for safer places of luxury refuge. Some of them, notably Paris Hilton, have left behind expensive artworks by the likes of Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst that will soon be small piles of ash. California has become an insurance no-go area. Ditto part of the US east coast where hurricanes have equally devastating effects. Fire on one coast, water on the other. The United States is shrinking as its population migrates inwards. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
📌 A Nottingham University professor has advanced the theory that Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his attempts to bully all the nations who think of themselves as US allies, opens up a chance for Starmer to play the patriot card and depict Trump as a filthy foreigner trying to tell us plucky Brits what’s what. Stuff your tariffs, Trump, we’ve dealt with bigger dictators than you. That kind of thing. I can’t see Starmer doing that without stuttering.
📌 Facebook today asked me if I’d like to wish someone a happy birthday – someone Facebook knows is no longer alive.
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Billy's Scrapbook 