March 22-28, 2025
SATURDAY 22 At Brunch Sandra gave us all the exciting details of her victory in the local elections. She came third in the Aldersgate ward after Helen and Steve. I told them all about my lost wine and the connivance of the dodgy delivery firm to keep it lost.
📌 The promised replacement of my 36 cans of delightful sparkling Sicilian white wine arrived via Royal Mail. Yippee!
📌 My wife found a US comedy whodunnit on Netflix called The Residence, which features an eccentric consulting detective, Cordelia Cupp, who, when in need of a breakthrough clue, steps to one side and takes a moment to do some impromptu bird watching. The first episode featured Kylie Minogue singing to guests at a Whitehouse party while upstairs the body of the president’s chief usher lies dead on the floor of the billiard room, and he’s wearing some other man’s shirt.
SUNDAY 23 I’ve just finished a Lee Child Jack Reacher audiobook in which the killer hypnotises the victims into climbing naked into a bath full of green paint. Then they choke themselves to death by swallowing their own tongue.
📌 In his latest Comment Is Freed newsletter Sam Freedman reports on the widespread declining interest in reading books and the rise among younger people of entertainment culture as a means of understanding and interpreting the world. Psychology is the most studied subject and Tik-tok, Instagram and YouTube are the dominant sources of information.
📌 In the video for The Only Thing, by Travis with Susanna Hoffs, singer Fran Healy, dressed in a red boiler suit and playing an acoustic guitar, performs a good two metres from Bangles star Susanna Hoffs, in yellow boiler suit and no guitar.
Put aside that the record was released in 2020, so the separation might be accounted for in Covid safe-distancing. Even if that were the case Hoffs looks on screen as if she’d rather not be there. Her passive-aggressive body language says it all, unambiguously.
Maybe she was having an off day. Maybe the duetters had been arguing about something before the recording. Maybe it was that Healy got to play guitar while Hoffs, normally with a big Rickenbacker strapped across her tiny body, was left exposed to sway in a gentle, submissive way to a soft wistful tune. It’s not a good look for a hard rocker.
Whatever the truth, it looks excruciating, and it got me thinking about the circumstances under which celebrity duets come about. Was this a willing partnership or an arrangement between artist managers? The same thought applies to the duet between Bryan Adams and Mel C on When You’re Gone. That video looks phony, too. Both singers strut around in matching costumes, trying desperately to make the soft-rock outing look like a marriage made out of mutual fun and respect.
The question I’m stuck with is, would either Travis or Bryan Adams have released those very hooky songs without their famous female accomplices? I lean towards NO, which is why I conclude that both hits were a management confection.
MONDAY 24 Occasionally and most often when writing about Catherine Standish, Mick Herron turns out some beautifully poetic prose.
There were reasons why her sobriety had nearly ended, but those reasons, in the end, were inches best held on to.
TUESDAY 25 I’m starting to wonder whether our willingness to suspend disbelief withers with age. Last night at the Barbican we saw a screening of The Silence of the Lambs with the Howard Shore soundtrack played live by an orchestra. Shore himself was also in the audience. In the film Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) makes his dramatic escape from custody by unpicking the lock of his handcuffs using the insides of a ballpoint pen. How he actually stole, concealed and dismantled the pen without detection is a mystery left dangling for us to blindly accept. The first time I saw the film 35 years ago, I didn’t question this, presumably because I wanted to believe it was true. Last night it was one of several unbelievable plot points that nowadays seems like a joke.
📌 My wife insisted on shaving my light-brown Shetland wool crew-neck from Zara.
📌 I’m sensing the start of the quiet revolution I’ve spent years hoping for. It’s a real “nothing to lose but your chains” moment, I hope. In Britain, consumers are starting to recalibrate their spending levels in response to a poorly performing economy. And in Sweden shoppers are using social media to organise boycotts (“bojkotta”) against supermarkets charging ever-increasing prices on day-to-day goods. It was always the obvious answer for those living in greedy market economies: your power is in your pocket.
📌 Just remembered that on Friday Jocelyn said she’d like a photo of herself, me, Sean, Brian and Trevor “before I die”.
WEDNESDAY 26 According to the Guardian‘s resident leftwing firebrand Owen Jones, Britain’s progress ground to a halt in the financial crash of 2008.
Sure… smartphones got more features, the internet was faster, artificial intelligence is marching on. But by the time the Tories were ejected from power, real wages were still lower than when Lehman Brothers collapsed.
📌 Also in the Guardian is a very useful summary of the tipping point of democracy that is Turkey. The piece is an alluring mix of metaphors that includes paralysed giants, shipwrecks and reefs.
What is occurring in Turkey right now is youthful energy schooling and shoaling around this shipwreck, breathing life into it by transforming the wreck into a reef.
📌 Beatriz gave us some of those biscuits she brings back from the Philippines, which always seem to sit in the biscuit tin until all the others have gone.
THURSDAY 27 At the Headway writing group we decided we’d try to write song lyrics James can add music to. I honestly don’t hold out much hope of this project coming together successfully.
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📌 To Barbican Cinema 1 for a screening of Dr Strangelove, the play, starring Steve Coogan in four roles. Coogan certainly knows how to mine the comedy gold from character archetypes and the play is hilarious from start to finish. Staging such a revered film was a daring act to start with, but taking the implicit humour in the play’s subtitle, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, was the most daring act of all. You could almost say it was an act of bravery.
FRIDAY 28 Browsing past issues of this scrapbook I noticed that two years ago my wife spotted a message on our neighbourhood online noticeboard from someone offering “cash in handjobs”.
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📌 Andy Beckett has an explanation for those who think Starmer is a secret Tory…
📌 My wife finds it incredible bordering on implausible that the upper Thames as depicted in The Marlow Murder Club is populated by such a high number of non-white people..
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Billy's Scrapbook 