One month as it happened…
WEDNESDAY 1 The first thing I learned in 2025 was that Norwegians utter the term hapshittens when things go wrong.
THURSDAY 2 Yesterday we found a small corner of Sky that was showing a host of Championship games. My sister-in-law supports Oxford United, so we watched them hustle a 1-0 win at Millwall. On Sunday we’d watched Liverpool knock off a sublime 5-0 hammering of West Ham United, and the difference in quality between the two tiers, Championship and Premier League, could not have been more obvious. When a Liverpool player gets the ball, there are immediately 5 or 6 players nearby to pass it to, all of them moving constantly, looking for space and opportunities. Not so with Oxford. They play in static, fixed positions, and when a player gets the ball he is on his own and expected to find teammates to pass to. Getting some kind of momentum moving forward is seen as a lucky break. Not so with Liverpool, who do it with ease and fluidity, slipping into shapes and always, always on the move.
📌 In the Conversation a Manchester University researcher names the Royal Mail as a signifier of Britain’s decline into dystopia and the public’s enforced separation from friendly public institutions.
📌 Christmas is over. The tree is already half dismantled and the baubles and tinsel are stored away for next year.
FRIDAY 3 A stinking cold has enabled me to do nothing but lie on the sofa reading Slow Horses, the first in the series of Mick Herron books about MI5 spies who have screwed up in some way. I am starting to see the character of Jackson Lamb in terms of class identity. He leads a team of second-class spooks and inhabits a world of greasy fast food, slovenly appearance and bad manners. His fictitious office is just across the road from where I live. He delights in farting in the presence of more groomed spooks from MI5 HQ in Regent’s Park. He is a ragged-trousered nonconformer. It’s always Suits versus Joe’s in Slow Horses.
📌 I never thought in a million years I’d be impressed by a Swan Lake in which all the swans were men, but that’s what happened tonight at Sadler’s Wells. All the shapes and shadows, colours and patterns gave themselves up to a chorus of exquisite movement.
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.
SATURDAY 11 Recycling In The City is an occasional opportunity to get rid of any surplus homewares, furniture, bric à brac or anything you’re done with that might have a new life elsewhere, in another home. It is run from our local church and the whole day takes on the feeling of villagey congestion as people fill shopping trolleys and push-chairs with old tat, trundle it to the church for the “give” session in the morning then return later after lunch for the “take” session to get more of the stuff they just gave away, but different.
📌 Watching Liverpool play Accrington Stanley in the FA Cup was a great chance to check out the skills of the teenagers.
📌 We were expecting Nickel Boys to be a conventional narrative film, with maybe a documentary feel. It’s an art film, the great beauty of which you can only fall into step with once you have hurdled the early part of the film in which the camera acts as the principal characters, probing, witnessing, looking away, and all the time trying to make sense of the fragmented and often random sights, sounds and impressions of an open teenage mind. Once you get the cinematic idea of seeing through the eyes of others, the story of racial abuse and exploitation in 1960s Florida is already a swirling presence in your head, which makes the dramatic “escape story” that follows even more powerful.
SUNDAY 12 I can’t say that I don’t enjoy it when I find that someone I secretly detest is equally detested by others.
📌 I’ve just started stitching a frog. It will take a long time to finish and I’m not sure I’m that much in love with it.
MONDAY 13 Trying to separate the character of Benji in the comedy film A Real Pain from the character of Roman Roy in Succession is hard because Kieran Culkin essentially plays the same quick-lipped ball of super-confidence whose presence is never far from the top of the agenda. He “lights up the room” whenever he enters, with his heart on his sleeve, his spirit alive and kicking. Or seems to. But Benji is actually a tightly coiled ball of pain. His repressed cousin David is a solid ball of pain too, and what emerges when they together embark on a Holocaust Holiday to Poland in search of their dead grandmother’s backstory, is that they show us that we all wear our pain in different ways, like outfits, and it might look different every day. Not in uniform.
📌 Alfie came to look at our leaky roof, then went away again seemingly confident that he can solve the problem in a trice.
📌 Someone on the estate WhatsApp group rudely asked that no messages be posted before 8am. I suggested she turn off Notifications, but she said it wasn’t that simple “in my case” (!). Someone else suggested, with diagrams, that she use the WhatsApp Archive function to dip in and out of messages. Then it emerged she has “age-related” memory problems and could not complete any of these tasks, so everyone suggested she contact social services for some support. All I really wanted to tell her is that I thought her WhatsApp manner needed considerable improvement.
TUESDAY 14
📌 Michelle said that a problem for her is that the interpretive stitchworks I do of other people’s drawings often eclipse the original work in terms of hours and detail, so working out a balanced authorship, and the payment split, is difficult. So in future she wants me to do more of my own work rather than use the work of others. We agreed that I will do two, maybe three, more of Sam’s drawings, then explore my own ideas. This is exactly as I’d wanted it.
WEDNESDAY 15
📌 RIP Tony Slattery, 65.
📌 The AI revolution is already upon us and Keir Starmer is right to mount the surfboard asap, says Rafael Behr. But he still desperately needs to do something to show British voters he can bring real change to their day-to-day lives. The cost-of-living crisis cannot be rubbed out with wise words.
THURSDAY 16 Did some more prep in the studio for the Dayroom Project using cut-ups of collage and block-colour landscapes. I want to concentrate early on having good conversations with the patients and interrogating what a World of Wonder looks like to them. I might start a stitchwork of a moonscape to work on during the sessions. But the basic idea is to use lots of different combinations of the “landscape” on which they will layer up their dreams and desires, be they people, places, close to home or far away. Tap into their inner worlds is my mission.
📌 The Headway writers group will soon be joined by a poet, the aim being to write a poem for an upcoming book by the filmmaker Lotje Sodderland (My Beautiful Broken Brain). All I could come up with was two lines…
Every day, same surprise
Shit, I’m still alive.
📌 At a screen talk after the showing of the 2000 Christopher Nolan film Memento, the actor Guy Pearce cried when talking about Terence Stamp, who he appeared alongside in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert. Pearce also said that after that 1994 film he was told by dozens of drag queens around the world that his character was based on them. I wanted to tell him that I personally know dozens of people on whom his character in Memento is based. A fresh viewing of the film did at least offer up another line of poetry when the Guy Pearce character Leonard mutters to himself…
How can I heal, when I can’t feel time.
FRIDAY 17 Have just discovered that my job title for the Dayroom Project at the Royal London Hospital is “creative practitioner”. That makes me sound almost like a doctor.
📌 We joined Sue for a visit to the Museum of the Home followed by a Vietnamese lunch then a drink in a very cool bikers bar we’d only ever gazed at, terrified, from outside. The Museum of the Home was previously known as the Geffrye Museum until its patron, the 18th Century merchant Robert Geffrye, was named as a slave-trade profiteer. It has recently been remodelled to include displays relating to poplar ideas of “home” and “place” alongside its traditional archive of mock living spaces from past centuries. And I think it works. On each visit my understanding of what makes a home grows.
📌 We’re on Season 2 of True Detective and I’m already very bored by the aggressive male detective archetype. It’s like the writers are auditioning for a job on the next big gangster series.
SATURDAY 18 On his travels Jake declares his love of China. At the Museum of the Home yesterday, the Home of the Future display imagined a near-future world dominated by China. And if Donald Trump tries to make life economically difficult for Britain, might China, despite its many faults, be a more useful courtship for the UK to pursue? Yes, says a learned article in the Guardian.
📌 The Guardian review of the film The Brutalist has an ambitious opening: “The Brutalist is about the design of postwar America and what was mixed into its foundations at the building stage. It asks us to decide if and how the brutalism of the title applies to something other than architecture, and wonders about the future ruin of what we all imagine at the drawing board of youth: an American Ozymandias.” It then goes on to list all the stuff that went into the concrete mixer to make America what it is today. Sadly, watching concrete dry is not much fun without compelling lines and powerful character performances. The big message works for the high-minded, but not for the rest of us. I got very little from a very long film that had me yawning in places at the dull predictability of its vast collection of clichés. During the interval I did a web search for the Hungarian architect Laszlo Toth, the main character in the film. The character turns out to be a fictional amalgam of various cult modernist architects and designers. But my search also uncovered a real Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian geologist who vandalised the Sistine Chapel and declared himself to be Jesus Christ. His story probably would have made a good film.
SUNDAY 19 Buried in a profile on the business pages of the Guardian is the news that the UK’s lousy economic performance is caused by lousy management, and most badly when Daddy hands over the family business to his eldest son.
📌 From the Observer…
We need to rethink what we mean by internationalism in this age of assertive nationalism.
📌 Tried a Shakshuka recipe that uses Ras el Hanout spicing instead of cumin and paprika. Quite a revelation, and so easy.
MONDAY 20 Prompted by an encounter with Natasha at the weekend we bought our first meal via Too Good To Go, an app that hooks you up with shops, restaurants and cafes who have surplus food at the end of the day. In most cases what you end up with in your “Surprise Bag”, is a gamble, but the discount prices can be worth the risk. For £5.20 we got a large tub of cooked food left over from lunchtime that included chicken, roasted cauliflower, broccoli and carrots, rice and beans, pasta and potatoes. Even so, my wife declared it poor value for money.
📌 Desperately trying to steer clear of anything to do with Donald Trump, which prompts a short poem…
Trying hard
To steer clear
Of Trump stuff
📌 In the latest Poem of the Week in the Guardian, Jonathan Swift proves in The Day of Judgement that he was one of literature’s great all-rounders, though I stumble a bit on the last few lines.
TUESDAY 21 The Knowledge recently quoted a Times article in which the author claimed that Gen Z pays people to change its lightbulbs. Amusing as this is, and anecdotally fascinating to learn that basic home skills are no longer considered by young people to be life skills, I find it hard to believe. My suspicion is that it is only the children of Times journalists who can’t change lightbulbs. All other members of Gen Z can probably work out how to do it.
📌 Orwell Daily has a gentle piece from 1944 in which he praises the roses you could buy at Woolworths back then for 6d. The best thing about them, he says, is that they were rarely the species indicated on the label, so buying one was an exercise in pot-luck, so to speak.
📌 Alan Sugar thinks Elon Musk is heading for a fall.
📌 At a consultation gathering for local people to have their say on the new London Museum in Smithfield I came away with the knowledge that not one minute of thought had been given to accessibility.
WEDNESDAY 22 On our way through the Royal London Hospital for the first of six sessions to re-design two day rooms, Michelle told us about when her husband was on the toilet as she arrived home. She shouted, “Where are you?” Her husband answered, “On the toilet.” Whereupon Siri interjected with, “Don’t forget to flush.”
📌 The response from patients and staff on our first day at the Royal London brain-injury unit was a success. The theme I plugged was names, faces and places. I got a sense from the patients that the places aspect is one to develop. Ali was from Turkey and his surname means “Cloud” in Turkish. Tomás was from rural Poland and Michael was a proper east London geezer.
THURSDAY 23 Kat says she wants her boyfriend to buy her the stitchwork of Fallopian Jesus for her birthday. I told her to talk to Michelle.
📌 Told James that I think the Headway writing group should be more collaborative. I mentioned I had the first two lines of a poem based on my 4 months in hospital but nothing else.
Every day same surprise
Gosh! I’m still alive.
📌 The driver of the 394 very kindly waited for me to arrive and hobble on board. He did the same later for another passenger.
📌 We visited Jennifer’s stall at the London Art Fair. Terence was her wingman and by the time we left she hadn’t made any sales but had someone interested in some of the drawings she had in show for a rich client to hang in their posh house. The whole event is a horrible orgy of ordinary galleries being done over by greedy dealers. The amount of art on display is vast, all of it technically competent and sometimes very clever, but lacking soul in nearly all cases. The overwhelming feeling is of a self-satisfied grubby business at work.
FRIDAY 24 Jonty Bloom says that if Canada became the 51st state of the US, it would secure so many electoral college votes that it could effectively control the outcome of every future election. I’m not sure that’s what Donald Trump intended when he made his invitation. I’ve always found the relationship between the two countries fascinating. Canadians I’ve met are quick to tell you they are not American. Gun ownership in Canada is said to be very high, but unlike its neighbour further south, gun crime is not high. Canadians own guns but rarely use them, least of all for criminal purposes. Maybe the US becoming the 11th province of Canada is a better idea.
📌 Bruce Springsteen and Robert de Niro are both moving to Canada from the US.
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.
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