January 25-31, 2025
SATURDAY 25 Egg prices in the US have spiked. Avain flu has stunted production and reduced supply.
📌 At Sarah’s birthday dinner at Sue’s last night we played a kill-or-be-killed card game called Werewolves. Much of it is played with your eyes closed, during which I nodded off and forgot what card I had been dealt, and whether I was killer werewolf or villager prey.
📌 A survey-based article in the New European uncovers some interesting facts about immigration. The one that sticks out for me is that the percentage of people arriving in the UK seeking asylum is very low (11%). The other standout fact is that Reform voters are plainly anti-immigration of any kind, whereas a healthy majority of voters across the rest of the political spectrum agree that immigration to fill key-worker jobs (doctors, nurses, care-home workers, engineers, construction workers, teachers, etc) is a good thing.
📌 The young backing singer with Simply Dan looked like she was having the time of her life. She also got a solo, singing Dirty Work.
SUNDAY 26 Hot on the heels of offering a clue to the world by trying to ignore Donald Trump I find myself secretly excited to see how far he will take his mission to own Greenland. This is symbolic in so many ways that I want the fight to start as soon as possible. The outcome will establish a new world order. I can’t imagine any scenario in which Trump emerges as the winner. And we already know what a bad loser he is.
MONDAY 27
📌 Just realised that at last week’s session at the Royal London Hospital I forgot to explore with patients words in different languages. Eg, the word BRAIN in Turkish and Polish.
TUESDAY 28 A memo from Jo reminds me that I need to do some prep before the next session at the Royal London hospital. I’m starting to think the collage idea might not work, so I’d like to explore drawn landscapes. One of the ideas I liked a lot from the first session was a drawing by one of the patients of buildings with a looming great cloud in the background in the shape of a brain. The other was of a pair of eyes as two hillocks in a pastoral landscape with jagged mountains in the background. I will work on these ideas over the next week.
📌 The UK population is predicted to reach 72 million by 2032. In the year I was born it was 45 million.
WEDNESDAY 29 The Royal London Hospital project is high in my mind. I’m still finding it hard to imagine the outcome. Vital Arts wants artworks, so that’s what they’ll get. But the thing that interests me more than the delivery of artworks is the way we got to make those artworks. That to me is as valuable as being able to show something for what you spent time and money doing. So I’ve concluded that I’m more of a HOW person than a WHAT person, and that’s why I’m keeping a separate project diary, to illustrate the how.
📌 They’ve invented a new Concorde/ It’s called the Boom Supersonic/ Which isn’t as good as Concorde/ BS might be a better name.
📌 The main issue I have with the otherwise excellent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown is that it starts with a fully formed Bob Dylan, the artist we know to be a guarded and obsessive songwriter who somehow accidentally slotted into the 1960s US folk movement. There is very little sense of how he got to go from being a complete unknown Robert Zimmermann to being the arch contrarian musician Bob Dylan, though the themes of home and departure later become very big in the story. The momentum is always as if we’re waiting for a take-off. And we get it, with very solid, very convincing performances from Bob, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and all their fellow travellers. The moment I liked most was when Bob exited a party early because he was being harassed, got in the lift with his date and complained grumpily that he just wanted to be left to be. An unnoticed figure in the corner of the lift interrupted him, asking, “left to be what?” Therein lies the Dylan enigma.
THURSDAY 30 At the Headway writing group Isabelle started an intense conversation on the definitions and connotations of the words ABLE, CAPABLE and DISABLE. I couldn’t see a resolution, so I urged Claire to read a poem about pink shoes she’d just scribbled in the moment. And James read some of this week’s contributions. I’d made my first move into poetry, which I normally steer well clear of but have recently become quite fascinated by. The assigned title was My Beautiful Broken Brain.
Every day same surprise
Gosh! I’m still alive
Eyes pop, clatter, bang
Napalm in the morning, voices at the back
So not such a surprise then
Just another New
Every day
📌 To Autograph Gallery with the St Luke’s Thursday Club to see Spirit of Lagos, from which we learned that Nigeria appears to have had a 1970s every bit as stylish as Britain’s.
📌 We left the Irish bar in Shoreditch when the singer stopped singing old Irish folk songs and started on Adele.
FRIDAY 31 We’ve noticed that the actor Timothée Chalamet, who plays Bob Dylan in the film A Complete Unknown, is a dead ringer for our friend Seán.
📌 RIP Marianne Faithful, 78.
📌 To St Barnabus church in Dalston where Chris gave a talk for an event titled Disabled God: Disability, Theology and the Arts. I’m not convinced many of the people there knew the difference between religion and faith, but I did learn a new verb from an academic: Misfitting.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 