One month as it happened…
SATURDAY 1 At Kings Place we saw an intriguing concert of violin and choral based on the non-verbal communication methods of a high-dependent autistic person, a collaboration between Kate Adams’ children Ruby and Paul.
📌 In the Parcel Yard in King’s Cross we struck up a conversation with a very tall man from York.
SUNDAY 2 I threatened to resign from the allotments committee if they didn’t start taking accessibility seriously. It backfired when they put me in charge of saying what needs to change. At least the new chairman of the committee is a rottweiler, so fingers crossed there will be improvements.
MONDAY 3 A few days ago you couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into the word DeepSeek. I successfully dodged it for a while but now, thanks to an article in the Conversation, its importance has become clear. DeepSeek is China’s answer to OpenAI and America is seemingly outraged because it believed that it was in charge of artificial intelligence, endov. To add insult to injury the cost of DeepSeek is a fraction of its US enemy’s AI baby ($6m versus $100m). It is the Primark version of AI and has the potential to become equally popular.
📌 Today’s Sensemaker would have us believe that Donald Trump thinks Saudi Arabia should rule the whole of the Middle East.
TUESDAY 4 Patricia Highsmith is having a deserved renaissance at BBC Radio. Last week we got the first five installments of Ripley’s Game. This week we have the following five installments. And for gluttons they’ve resurrected a superb adaptation of Strangers on a Train from 1996 and featuring Anton Lesser, Michael Sheen, Saskia Reeves and Bill Nighy.
📌 Someone on the radio last night said Hitler had a crush on Mussolini.
📌 Also on the radio Eleanor of Aquitaine is being lined up to marry Fat Louis in the robustly feminist historical serialisation Eleanor Rising.
WEDNESDAY 5 Got an email from the October Gallery asking if I’d like to “explore the liminal boundaries of creative materiality” of its new exhibition.
📌 Michelle needed the toilet when she arrived and Jo told her to be careful because the public toilets at the Royal London Hospital are reported to be a dogging destination.
📌 Today’s Dayroom session at the Royal London was the second of two “discovery” workshops. PLACE is becoming a theme. Jo and patient Bobby chatted endlessly about Hornchurch, but thankfully also did some drawing. Michelle got some great mark-making out of John (stars, clouds), whose attention span is about 10 seconds. Michelle is enjoying this project and learning. Getting great things in snatches is a skill I’m not sure she knew she had, or at least hadn’t used in a long time.
I liked Raymond. He enjoyed referencing me as The Scouser. When he was making his signature I asked him if he was in pain. He was, so I told him to stop. He wanted so much to be part of something that he was happy to hurt.
📌 Donald Trump’s insistence that the citizens of Greenland would prefer to be citizens of the USA is a total distortion of survey data, says an academic article in the Conversation.
THURSDAY 6
📌 I’m more and more convinced that Donald Trump is escalating his bizarre remodelling of Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” so that he can then back down and hand the plan straight to Saudi Arabia, who at the moment claim to reject it.
📌 At Headway we were visited by the filmmaker and brain-injury survivor Lotje Sodderland, who tried to get us to write a poem about Summer. I got as far as the first line…
That Summer when I cheated death twice
I will hopefully build on it, but probably not.
📌 At our residents’ association meeting a lot of frustrated voices added to a catalogue of complaints about the poor state of repairs and the indifference of the estate management. All the meetings are like this, but this one was better attended than most. At first I thought it might be the offer of free wine at the end, but very few people stayed afterwards, yet engaged robustly during.
📌 One of the commentators on the Liverpool versus Spurs game said, “Liverpool are one of the best teams in the world right now, never mind anywhere else.”
FRIDAY 7 We’ve made elaborate plans to visit Ireland in August for the special birthday of a friend and neighbour, Anne. But last night I dreamt that Anne cancelled her party and obliterated our travel plans when she spotted a coat in a shop window and decided the coat was more important than the party. My wife was livid, a micro whirlwind of perpetual rage for about a week. I was phlegmatic but did tell Anne firmly that I thought less of her.
📌 I must start messing around with AI art effects a bit more. Below is a photograph taken through a window of a garden.
📌 Reflecting on Wednesday’s art session at the Royal London Hospital, my artistic instincts are pulling me to favour one very difficult patient called John, whose very limited mark-making is exquisite, but whose behaviour is totally unpredictable. My team instincts, however, are telling me to be broadly inclusive and generally nurturing. One way is dangerous, the other is safe. I think I’ll talk to Michelle about it.
📌 My wife is out with friends, so I had a glass of wine with my lunch, because that’s what she’ll be doing.
SATURDAY 8 Sadly, after taking the lead with a superb goal, Leyton Orient were ultimately defeated 2-1 in the FA Cup by a once great Manchester City, who now look like a very mediocre team. Their coach, the celebrated Pep Guardiola, looks forever on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It’s hilarious to watch.
📌 On The Masked Singer, a musician called Example (real name Elliot John Gleave), costumed as a gigantic Bear, sang the Charles Aznavour song She but later, unmasked, expressed his joy at being at last able to sing an “Elvis Costello song“. Example is 42 years old.
📌 We can now almost predict to the minute when there will be a gunfight/fistfight/car chase/flashback in The Night Agent.
SUNDAY 9 An Observer story about Federico Chiesa turns out to be more interesting for its insights into Arne Slot’s methods as a football coach. If UK football is a metaphor for how UK society will ultimately pan out, Bossy Collectivism is what we can expect next.
📌 If Eric Storm in the Conversation is right and we are in a new age of Empire, smaller countries such as the UK might end up in one of two geopolitical camps: collaborators and non-collaborators. Successfully using this collaboration system in tactical ways could reinvigorate the idea that messy old nation-state democracy is still preferable to the authoritarian regimes of Trump, Putin, Xi, etc.
📌 Plymouth Argyle beat a team of young Liverpool players in the FA Cup, which prompted me to ask Google whether any of today’s footballers wear black boots.
MONDAY 10 Populism is a doomed project, says Peter Kellner. But until its opponents devise a commanding and competent way to improve the lives of voters, it will not go away. It is not issues such as overseas aid, abortion, gay marriage, immigration, Britain’s place in Europe and transgender rights that voters object to per se as much as the poor performance of the people in power. Populists portray the two things as the same when they are far from it. Kellner concludes by reminding us that even Margaret Thatcher knew that.
📌 My wife has been experiencing mild bronchial difficulties since Christmas. Today she contacted the GP and was whizzed in straightaway for an x-ray and the results studied promptly. She was then told politely that her chest is “unremarkable”. She didn’t take it as an insult.
TUESDAY 11 At a meeting with the Chair of our allotments group to discuss accessibility, cluttering and priorities for the coming season, I learned that J hates A and A hates J, that another A hates J and J hates the other A, that D fancies J and that J knows it, that S hates L and L hates S, that I has been kidnapped by her son and that the whereabouts of M is still unknown. Otherwise we both agreed that our allotments project has turned into an episode of Amandaland.
WEDNESDAY 12 I had a dream in which the UK government did a sly, behind-the-scenes deal with the Netherlands on freedom of movement. The result was an influx of Dutch labour. Around the same time Waitrose started selling wraps of “healthy” weed, which, if requested, could be rolled into a joint by a skilled Dutch checkout worker. The surplus weed from your joint was then handed to you like it was small change.
📌 At an online meeting with Jo and Michelle I agreed to carry on working with the mark-making we get each week from patients. Shapewise, stars seem appropriate for ward 12E and I’m thinking of introducing spirals as a vibe for 12F. Next week we will work in strongly coloured paint and I will display some of the existing work I have myself coloured up for impact in the hope of inspiring some fab marks.
📌 At a St Luke’s User Group meeting in St Giles church in the Barbican, Father Jack not only turned on the underfloor heating, he made us hot drinks and dished out plates of walnut cake. He told us that St Giles was a woodsman who spread the word of the Lord in France and became a celebrity in the process. He was, Jack said, the patron saint of “cripples”, becoming disabled himself when he outstretched an arm to intercept an arrow destined to end the life of a deer. When I asked Jack who would win a beauty contest between Saint Giles and Saint Luke he conceded that St Luke was a bit of a looker, but added, wittily: “Whichever of us gets to Heaven first will find out.”
THURSDAY 13 There’s a fabulous simile describing Everton in the match report from last night’s drawn game against Liverpool.
like buying designer suits but renting your underwear.
📌 Last week at the Headway writers’ group Errol proposed the title Taxi Man Dreams, which is a painting he is working on in the studio. I decided to try a poem with an ABCB rhyme scheme. There was some debate as to whether the final rhyme actually works…
The taxi man sized time in dreams
Each fare a fantasy
He loaded pictures in his head
That only he could see
Sometimes he drove in Rotterdam
Or Liverpool, or Rome
Then a voice from behind his head asked
Am I nearly home?
One day he was the getaway
For a daring jewellery heist
His passenger on that memorable day
Carried a black bag full of Russian ice
The cops always failed to add two plus two
They never felt no collars
They never even came within an inch
So the ice got swapped for dollars
Now the taxi man lives in two worlds
In one he watches the road
In the other he is always elsewhere
Living like a Lord
FRIDAY 14
📌 I just read an article written by someone who recently attended a big AI conference. The upshot of it was that autonomous intelligent AI is closer than we think, and soon AI will pretty much run the world in whatever way it sees fit. I think the article was meant to be a scare story, but I found myself weirdly up for the challenge of surviving and doing guerrilla warfare with such a regime, driven by a mission to make AI a force for good rather than bad. As I see it.
📌 February’s haircut went without a hitch, unlike last month when my wife coughed while operating the clippers, leaving the hair around my right ear noticeably shorter than on the left.
📌 Over a glass of pink champagne, my wife deduced that this is the 38th Valentine’s Day we have spent together.
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.
SATURDAY 22 At Waterloo station it felt like I was in an episode of The Capture, surrounded by a multitude of CCTV cameras, presumably being monitored constantly by MI5 in case I somehow fit the facial-recognition profile of an international terrorist.
📌 Our great niece Rosie appeared in the Basingstoke Gang Show, a song-and-dance sketch production heavily populated with Scouts and Guides. It had a level of professionalism, especially in sound, lighting and costumes, that seems to have become standard in small-scale revues.
SUNDAY 23 In the New Statesman Lawrence Freedman says not to get too worked up about Donald Trump’s threats against our way of life because he has a habit of blowing his trumpet but then backing off quietly when he realises his threats hold no weight.
📌 A draw would have been an acceptable result for me in the game between Manchester City and Liverpool. But a ruthless and composed Liverpool came away with a 2-0 win.
📌 Very pleased to learn there will be a Season 3 of The Capture. Maybe if it has been on terrestrial TV rather than Netflix, a change in the law would be forced to make CCTV footage inadmissible as police evidence.
MONDAY 24 My wife reports that Dina is still a nuisance at the Monday coffee afternoons, continually on the hunt for free cake and a bit too loose with her reactionary views.
TUESDAY 25 A House of Commons letter arrived asking if we’d like to have tea and biscuits with our MP.
📌 Annoyingly, our local library doesn’t tell you when your membership is up for renewal, and the first thing you know about it is when you can’t access their online services. Annoyingly 2, it is not possible to renew online.
📌 Peter Kellner has crunched the numbers on Donald Trump’s popularity in the US and found that contrary to Trump’s own claims, he is actually the worst ranking president of the post-1945 years.
📌 At St Bart’s we got to hear about Benjamin Franklin’s excursion to London to work as a printmaker. He was quite the big-head, apparently, describing himself as the fastest compositor in the world. Bart’s had a facsimile of the press he used and sample prints of his endeavours.
Franklin came to London as a callow, cocky youth aged 19. His self-assurance obviously irritated some of his fellow English print workers because they used to mess up his type tray to prolong the time it took Franklin to compose a page (compositors were paid by the page, not the hour).
WEDNESDAY 26 The Complete George Smiley Radio Collection is now available for me to download from the library, and The Londoner is fast becoming my favourite new read.
📌 In one of those dark moments when I imagined no longer being able to afford a Spotify subscription, I decided to test YouTube Music. Surprisingly, if you know what you want to listen to (me = “neoclassical”) the ads algorithmically tailor themselves to fit in with the groove, and you don’t get that horrible transition from peaceful piano to the piercing shriek of the in-your-face ad pitch.
📌 Oh what fun it is to watch Donald Trump pulling strings while behind his back someone is tying his shoelaces together.
📌 Rafael Behr in one paragraph hits the nail on the head…
Britain is transitioning to a wartime economy. If there was a lingering question about what this Labour government was for – what Starmer’s ministry would ultimately be about – this is the answer. It is a gruelling mission of rearmament and renewed national focus on security, in a dangerous world where the US is an unreliable source of protection and its president can’t be counted as a friend.
All Starmer needs now is for the voting population of the UK to eat another helping of the Dunkirk Spirit without being sick.
📌 John Elledge’s Newsletter Of (Not Quite) Everything starts off with a detailed scrutiny of the German elections (young men are fascists, young women are hard lefties) then shifts towards an analysis of the media and its message that far-right politics is at your front door, when in truth it’s not, it’s just the story that suits the media best.
📌 Liverpool’s solid 2-0 defeat of Newcastle United proved that what was thought to be a blip in performance was no such thing.
THURSDAY 27 In a dream last night I visited the disabled toilet in a hotel restaurant to find that one of the hotel’s guests had marked it out as a personal (male) bathroom, with deodorant, toothbrush and shaving gear, etc, littering the surfaces. On the toilet’s cistern lay a pair of boxer shorts. When they accidentally fell into the toilet pan I hesitated, briefly, then flushed twice.
📌 RIP Gene Hackman, 95. His death at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, coincides with that of his wife Betsy, 63, and their pet dog. Investigations continue, but speculation abounds. Was it a suicide pact? If so, I’d like to know what input the dog had on the agreement. I consulted Wikipedia for clues…
There are yet to be definitive, unanimously agreed upon, instances of non-human animal suicide.
📌 The prompt for this week’s task at the Headway Writing Group was “Desert Island”, which I very unsuccessfully tried to twist into a joke by changing the title to “Dessert Island”…
Île Flottante is where French chefs go on holiday
Typographers prefer Sans Serif
Crème Anglaise is another word for custard
Meringue is 80 percent air
Americans call it the “floating island”
They add stale cake, fruit and booze
Benjamin Franklin had one in 1771
The English call that Trifle
Soft peaks in an ocean of custard, then
Is where you want to be
Drifting with your taste buds
Reciting je pense donc je suis
FRIDAY 28 Our neighbour Yvonne took us out to dinner last night as a thank you for helping her sell her bungalow in Clacton (my wife did all the helping). Yvonne is a notorious moaner and one of tonight’s moans was the time she got stuck overnight in a hospital waiting room with “one of The Kinks”. She mentioned this as breezily as she had when she told us some time ago that she once, aged 27, enjoyed a transatlantic ocean crossing with David Bowie.
📌 A tea-and-biscuits meeting with our MP Rachel Blake was taken over by a vocal group of residents from Crescent House to the exclusion of everyone else. Only when the meeting was brought to a close and people dispersed did any meaningful conversation take place.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
Thank you. I too liked Raymond’s approach to life.
LikeLiked by 1 person