February 15-21, 2025
SATURDAY 15 The messages on present-day Love Hearts are, frankly, ridiculous. My wife handed me one today that proclaimed “Epic”.
📌 I’m hoping that on Wednesday at my session helping brain-injury hospital patients to make some art that I can pass off some of my own mark-making alongside theirs and make the project look like a genuine collaboration.
SUNDAY 16 Andrew Rawnsley took the words out of my mouth.
Trump’s geopolitics is one in which carnivorous great powers cut deals with each other and the smaller ones fall into line or get crushed underfoot. If you are genuinely shocked by these developments, I can only assume you haven’t been paying much attention.
📌 Liverpool secured a sticky 2-1 over Wolves to maintain their lead at the top of the Premier League.
📌 Marge told us she’d been in contact with Arthur Scrargill in Barnsley and he’s really quite distressed at the state of world politics and of the Labour Party in particular. Last year he told the Barnsley Chronicle that his mineworkers pension pot earns him £3 a week. Marge also said that in the company of women other than Margaret Thatcher, Scargill is always the “perfect gentleman”.
MONDAY 17 He’s said it before and he’s saying it again. Trump’s election, and his determination to de-couple Europe from America’s global security plans, writes Paul Mason, is an opportunity for a new, fully re-armed united Europe to emerge, with leading role for Britain.
Rearmament now is not just about filling capability gaps. It is about out-innovating China, detaching ourselves from reliance on US technology for conventional weaponry, and creating European-scale “strategic enablers” – in space, cyber, intelligence, bluewater navy and AI.
Optimistically, Mason also sees this as an opportunity to jump-start Britain’s ailing economy. All it needs, he claims, is for Rachel Reeves to stop being so upright about borrowing.
📌
TUESDAY 18 I got rather excited by the Guardian‘s Poem of the Week and its reference to the nature of a house fly’s eye balls. Eye balls plural is especially relevant because we learn in the analysis of the poem that flies’ eyes are in fact a compound of thousands of individual microscopic 360-degree eye balls. The poem’s author, Rebecca Watts, uses this fact to build tension into the image of a fly trying to escape a confined space. From this I took the idea that a broad field of vision is not always much use in a narrow environment.
WEDNESDAY 19 Today’s session at the Royal London Hospital went well. Ray and Bobby returned, as did John, who managed to concentrate for around 10 minutes on and off when not gassing with Jo and Bobby about Essex. New member Dan, a New Yorker settled in the UK, managed to hold his own and even offered up an old Jewish expression he uses to encourage his 13-year-old son on the football pitch (they support Arsenal). The expression as Dan stated it was “Kick ’em in the kishkuz”, which on later investigation turned out to be a reference to “kishkes”, a Yiddish word for guts.
I came away slightly deflated because Ray was obviously struggling. When I asked him if he liked a portrait he’d tried to mark out he said no. Later, Michelle asked him if he liked art at school and he said he did. Not only has he suffered a brain injury he has lost both legs below the knee. He clearly has memories of his life before his accident and finds his new situation tough. He probably remembers when he was able to draw a face easily. I noticed him flinching as he marked the lines, though he seemed to brighten when we all sang Bob Marley songs.
THURSDAY 20 There was no writing group at Headway so I broke the mould by doing both an hour in the gym and an hour of yoga. Stiff hips were in all honesty the main motivation.
📌 I talked with Michelle about how to unite all the mark-making we are doing at the Royal London Hospital sessions into a scene and we settled on an images of houses along a road flanked by green fields with stars, clouds, birds and the moon in the sky. I like this idea a lot. The problem for me is that Michelle favours wild, expressive images whereas mine are always quite tightly composed.
📌 The Knowledge reports on an anonymous artist who has drawn a picture of the Titanic on every day for 10 years.
FRIDAY 21
📌 Today’s Sensemaker also has a story about Spain’s economic turnaround, which is attributed high immigration and green technology, the very things we are told are economically detrimental.
📌 The floors of the gym were dangerously wet and slippery. I wasn’t sure if it was cleaning still waiting to dry at 10.30am or whether the damp mist from outside had somehow seeped into the gym. There was no staff member around to ask but then I later got a message saying the gym is due for a big refurbishment and would I like to take part in a “have your say” survey.
📌 I’m listening to an audio version of a John Lewis Carré book, narrated by John Lewis Carré. He is as boring as a reader as he was as a writer.
📌 Yet another example of the Barbican getting things wrong: the Noah Davis exhibition was good on mood, but since most of the works are paintings, being forced to stand 1.5m from them and not able to see the strokes undermines the medium. One of them looked especially interesting and was later revealed to be not a painting but an inkjet print on oil paper, a method I used recently to great effect. In the end only one painting stood out for me.
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