Scrapbook: March, 2025

One month as it happened…

SATURDAY 1 A neighbour had made overtures to involve me in an upcoming book fair she has planned. Today she sent me a draft proposal, which to me came across like a brief to assemble as many design and architecture poseurs in one place as possible. I told her it wasn’t the kind of book fair I’d attend. I said I’d prefer to browse Betty’s crime collection or Sue’s stash of Mills & Boons. I think Bill has several shelves full of old Westerns. I personally have a lot of old encyclopedias and school text books.

📌 Marge says her daughter spends £1,000 a month on dog food.

SUNDAY 2 Our 1.5m square raised bed at the allotment yard is falling to bits. The wooden box has rotted from inside and looks ready to disintegrate totally any moment soon, stricken by some sort of wood equivalent of leprosy. Happily, Dom, one of our fellow allotmenteers, has offered to rebuild it and complete the job by the end of March, just in time for my wife’s heritage tomato seedlings to be planted out.

📌 I have a strange feeling that Volodomyr Zelenskyy has pulled a stunt on Donald Trump with the proposed mineral deal.

MONDAY 3 Having second thoughts about combining all the work generated by patients at the Royal London into one big scene. Brain injury is an individual journey, and even though all the patients share a predicament, they do not share it collectively. I shall raise the idea of making the day rooms into comfortable, inviting spaces decorated with individual pieces. That way they can be renewed over time, thus representing the temporal nature of the patient-hospital relationship. I also like the idea that individual pieces come with individual stories, which can be used to present the works: John’s Stars, Ray’s Three Little Birds, etc.

📌 Another gem of a landscape arrived from Sam…

TUESDAY 4 Wes Streeting has for some time looked like a Prime Minister in waiting. And no more so now he has acted decisively in the business of taking back control of the NHS from its vast but diffuse management maze to the Department of Health and Social Care.

📌 W H Smith will soon disappear from the UK’s high streets, says today’s Sensemaker, because its most successful revenue stream is no longer in books, newspapers and stationery but from tiny outlets in airports selling phone chargers and other travel accoutrements.

📌 Ha! Zelenskyy is really winding up Trump (and Putin) offering to make Ukraine a US client state. Can’t wait to see what the big gobby deal maker makes of that “no cards” hand.

WEDNESDAY 5 At the Dayroom workshop at the Royal London the revelation was a patient called Winnie who, totally unprompted, drew a spiral combining blue, purple and pink. It was as if she’d read my mind. Jo responded with a wave pattern using the same colours.

📌 At the Chaka Khan tribute gig my wife continually screamed in my ear Chaka Khan anecdotes from her past that I couldn’t hear. That’s how good the singer was.

📌 Liverpool’s nicked a 1-0 win over the mighty PSG thanks to a host of miracle saves from Alisson Becker. The French newspapers were not happy.

THURSDAY 6 Michelle wants me to finish the stitchwork of Sam’s Red Shoes drawing for Monday. I was hoping she’d say don’t bother and I could relax. Now I’ll have a weekend tied up I red thread.

📌 At a performance by the Headway Drama Group we heard first-person individual stories told in the setting of a condensed replica of the Headway daily experience, where food, music, art and fun all come together in a caring and supportive environment. I learned things about my fellow members I never knew and glimpsed a bold restatement of the essence of theatre, which is to tell compelling stories honestly.

FRIDAY 7 I am looking forward to tonight’s performance of Chekhov’s The Seagull on the Barbican’s big stage to see how the performances measure up against those we heard from Headway members last night at a shoestring arts centre (Chats Palace) in Hackney.

📌 After a long day of stitching it’s one red shoe down, one to go. And I just have to hope no-one spots the accidental tea stain. On second thoughts, I don’t care if they do.

📌 For most of the three hours we sat watching a quite riveting modern performance of The Seagull at the Barbican I thought how much better it would have been in a smaller venue such as Chats Palace in Hackney. But I don’t think Cate Blanchett would have been interested in appearing in that show. Which ironically illustrates one of the play’s big themes.

SATURDAY 8 I don’t know if Chekhov was known for dabbling in  farce, but the version of The Seagull we saw last night suggested he was.

A large jungle of tall reeds and rushes stands at the centre of the stage, through which the characters enter and exit. They come and go, bringing their neuroses and departing, most often, in a psychologically much worse state than when they arrived.

Somehow this metaphorical revolving door comes to symbolise the tortured state of the  relationships the characters have with each other and the world. Cate Blanchett’s Arkadina knows only too well how to be a prima donna actress, but not a mother. She inches closer and closer to a normal maternal union with her incurably romantic son Konstantin but doesn’t quite have the guts to take it all the way. She loves herself far too much. All the love triangles play out differently but, yes, they are all tortured.

Most of the spoken words are expressions of internal thoughts about the character’s relationship status rather than a tool for plot advancement. Art and life, real love and pretend love, the self and devotion to others is a human minestrone that for me only lost its rich taste towards the end when angst with a capital A took over and what had been a truly enjoyable experience became a drag.

SUNDAY 9 In an old Arena documentary on the BBC’s iPlayer, Bob Dylan describes himself as a “musical expeditionary”. In the recent biopic, A Complete Unknown, a young Dylan is seen writing his lyrics on a portable typewriter. At the time I thought this odd. I’d always imagined him sitting in the corner of a coffee shop scribbling in a notebook. No, as the Arena documentary shows, he typed his lyrics. Maybe the rhythmic tapping of the keys helped him get the right form. 

📌 Note to self: never agree to do a stitchwork to a deadline. This version of Sam’s Legs With Red Shoes drawing has been one of my least favourite recent experiences. Aside from agreeing to finish it to a deadline, I made several bad decisions that haunted me throughout the process. I’m just glad it’s over and done with.

MONDAY 10 Jonty Bloom reckons Boris is on the verge of doing a reverse ferret and going full pro-Europe.

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📌 Donald Trump is getting an early taste of voter backlash as he struggles to contend with the price of eggs and a wider discontent at the cost of living.

These problems will look very small indeed if the bird flu ravaging the US at the moment turns into a new global pandemic.

📌 A Canadian newspaper beautifully described Mark Carney as a “fast learner in the art of prevarication and hairsplitting”.

TUESDAY 11 Spent the whole morning working on muted background patterns to use on the dayroom walls at the Royal London, then I noticed a detail in some stitchwork I’m working on that might provide a solution. I feel like I’m auditioning for a job in the wallpaper business.

WEDNESDAY 12 Rafael Behr sees a hidden purpose in Trump’s merry dance with Putin over Ukraine.

The proposed model, unnamed but also unhidden, is partition. Washington gets access to Ukrainian mineral resources. Moscow gets a fat slice of Ukraine. Russia and America reset diplomatic relations and renew commercial ties without any of the old fuss around rule of law and human rights – an oligarch entente.

📌 Keir Starmer is right to hold his nose and talk to Donald Trump from a safe distance, says George Eaton in the New Statesman. Trump is not liked by the British public generally, Other European leaders are backing away cautiously from his bad smell, and even among his biggest supporters in the US, the economic downturn he has triggered is taking its toll on his popularity.

The tech billionaires who attended Trump’s inauguration have collectively lost $209bn since his second term began.

📌 Local newspapers still run some great stories. In Yorkshire, the Telegraph & Argus reveals that Lee Child (6ft 4in) called his hero Jack Reacher after his wife noticed that Lee was often asked by little old ladies in Asda to get them a can of something or other from a high shelf: “If this writing caper doesn’t work out, Lee, you can always become a professional Reacher”.

📌 At the Lines That Refuse To Behave private view, Jess said she missed working with us.

THURSDAY 13 Jeanette Winterson is a big fan of a new AI creative writing program. She also wants us to start using the term “alternative intelligence” because the world hasn’t got enough of that, whereas it is actually already stuffed to the gills with artificial intelligence. I decided to test AI’s creative writing potential with a three word prompt: SONNET, ONIONS, REVELATION. The result was deemed by the Headway Writing Group to be a masterpiece…

In layers deep the onion’s secrets lie 

A bulbous form adorned in earthy sheen 

With every peel a truth we can descry

Revelations writ in whispers unseen

Beneath the skin a world of spheres confined  

Each slice unveils the essence bold yet shy

In fragrant tears the heart of flavour twined 

As cutting through the surface we comply  

From humble roots the alchemist prepares 

A potion wrought from nature’s artful hand

In kitchens gleam the boldness that declares 

The humble onion graced with glow so grand

In this a metaphor for tales untold

To seek the heart let layers unfold. 

The only edits I made were to remove a mass of unnecessary commas.

📌 To Barbican Cinema 1 to see a big-screen remastering of the 1956 Douglas Sirk film There’s Always Tomorrow, plus a screen talk afterwards with some boring academics about props and their use and status within films. The screening was notable for the moments when the young, supposedly knowing audience laughed at things that weren’t funny. Gender-role conformity in 1950s America may seem quaint by today’s standards, but it isn’t funny. Ditto smoking indoors. One of the key props in the film is a toy robot, which is meant to represent the machinery of the so-called happy middle-class family. Towards the end of the story the tabletop robot marches off, alone, out of frame. The same shot by a contemporary film-maker might have included a loud clunk three seconds after the robot’s exit to symbolise it crashing to the floor. Douglas Sirk knew how to let meaning breathe.

FRIDAY 14 Foreign Affairs has a lengthy analysis on the economic costs for Russia of its war with Ukraine. Turns out that most of the economically useful members of Ukraine’s population have either left the areas occupied by Russia or fled the country entirely. So if Russia sticks to its war plan, it will in the end inherit an old, badly educated unhealthy population living in cities and towns that are now little more than rubble.

If Russia benefits economically from the occupation of Ukraine, the war may be remembered as a strategic success, albeit a coldblooded one. If Russia instead suffers economically, the invasion will be seen as a self-defeating, barbaric blunder.

📌 In his massive overhaul of the NHS Keir Starmer has handed Wes Streeting the chance to rise or fall. Spectacularly.

📌 At the Lines That Refuse To Behave exhibition they hung one of Affiong’s pictures upside down. Even she said that no one other than herself would notice.

📌 Smalltime jazz in the Barbican’s vast Hall is a mismatch. First up is the Guildhall School Ellingtonian ensemble: nine music students (all white bar one) desperately trying to squeeze out some of the earthy mojo their music suggests. No atmosphere, no drama, no dancing. It was like Duke Ellington done over by a terminally uptight Victorian chamber outfit. The Lincoln Center Youth Orchestra that followed at least brought a bit of heart and spark with music that played out in scenes and told stories, moved and bumped. The musicians stood up, walked around and blasted out a solo, to uptight applause. Otherwise the evening was a triumph for the Barbican’s sterile Hall, a venue that can suffocate as easily as it can liberate.

SATURDAY 15 Spotted Nic in the audience at the Barbican for a performance of Wynton Marsalis & Co with the London Symphony Orchestra. Marsalis was a musical figure of my youth, so it was pleasing to see he can still blow the arse off a trumpet, as demonstrated at the end of his Symphony 4 The Jungle with an amazing solo of squeals and yelps. Nic was over from Spain on a long weekend with husband José.

SUNDAY 16 An article in the New European argues that the UK should back off cosying up to Donald Trump and instead court Canada as its chief ally in the north Atlantic. I’d be tempted to add Greenland, Iceland and Scandinavia to that alliance.

📌 Re-watching The World At War is a sobering experience.

MONDAY 17 Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia in 1938 is being widely used to warn against accepting the outcome of Trump’s negotiations with Putin on territorial claims over Ukraine.

TUESDAY 18 At last we were able to locate a streaming source for Season 3 of The White Lotus and were instantly wallowing in the incremental intrigue of a bunch of tourists settling into a stay at a health and wellbeing resort in Thailand. Just like on a real holiday you form instant impressions about those around you. There are three 40-ish women on a reunion, trying to be nice to each other. But as soon as one of them goes to bed the other two get the knives out. There are two brothers who are obviously gay but pretending not to be. There are two stupidly mismatched couples. And there is the business mogul who while on holiday is being investigated back home for some kind of financial wrongdoing. And of course there is intrigue among the staff, who are all about to have their own carefully buried secrets unearthed. What is missing at the moment is laughs and, two episodes in, the show is starting to feel like a suspense story rather than a satirical comedy. It is nevertheless extremely absorbing.

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Plus a useful summary of Trump’s proposed peace deal with Putin for Ukraine. More echoes of Hitler and Czechoslovakia in 1938.

WEDNESDAY 19 Today’s session in the gym at the Royal London Hospital gave us more space to spread out and splash the paint. Winnie was once again the standout contributor, settling easily into her own groove exploring colours and patterns. John and Simon held up the social end of the table. Jo told us that “10-second” John, Bobby and Dan had all been discharged. And Michelle went one-on-one with a Polish guy who didn’t seem very comfortable at all and was obviously struggling. Finally, I got Molly and Esther to knock off some pictures.

📌 Had a very long online ruck with DPD, who screwed up a delivery and lost me £90 worth of lovely sparkling white wine.

THURSDAY 20 At the Bomb Factory I joined Sam, Tony, Brian and Johnnie at a table to sit and do exactly what we do in the studio, which is paint, draw, stitch and natter, while exhibition visitors circulated. We were effectively a human zoo of creatives listening to Spotify’s Easy 70s playlist. Affiong joined us later and one of our neighbours, Christine, tapped me on the shoulder saying she decided to pop in on her way to a keep-fit class.

My own task was to carry on with the stitchwork of a frog, which I’d lost interest in but was won back when I started on the face, which seemed to have character. I have provisionally named this piece The Miserable Frog

📌 At a local history walk with the St Luke’s social group we learned that Bunhill graveyard (contains Bunyan, Defoe, Blake and more) was originally Bone Hill because it was a dumping ground for thousands of bodies removed from St Paul’s graveyard. There were so many bodies that bones stuck out visibly from a large mound. We also learned that Golden Lane, our street, was originally Gelding Lane.

📌 After our walk we ate at Pasta Nostra then arrived at St Giles just in time for the election count. All our favourite candidates won, but I think one newly elected councillor, Mercy, was embarrassed when her brother guffawed loudly when she uttered “God Save The King” in response to the Beadle’s forceful instruction for the assembled masses to honour the monarch. My wife mumbled jfjfjfhfhfhf under her breath. I said nothing.

FRIDAY 21 The day after the local elections brings the news of a failed coup attempt in the ward of Castle Baynard. Two of the councillors we most dislike got the boot. Hooray!

📌 Vinca Wine were upset to hear I’d lost my 36 cans of Italian sparkling white because of a screw-up by the delivery form they use and have said they will replace them, and send them via Royal Mail rather than the evil DPD. Hooray!

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📌 A second visit to the Noah Davis exhibition at the Barbican did not warm my frozen blood any more than the first visit. In fact, Davis’s privileged background made me even more skeptical about his art and it’s worth.

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.

SATURDAY 29 The Knowledge has a very timely summary of what makes the modern tyrant, but concludes optimistically with the message that statistically most of them will soon be dead.

Donald Trump’s pathologies are well known, his character having been shaped by his bullying, high-functioning sociopath father.

📌 Surprised to hear that Vladimir Putin is all for Trump’s plan to invade and take over Greenland. Maybe he sees it as the kind of place where a limited nuclear war can be fought and won.

📌 A Day of Action on our estate centred on residents documenting in photos the poor state of repairs and maintenance, the aim being to collectively shame the council into doing something about it. I photographed some leprotic paintwork on an overhead duct along our corridor.

📌 If Donald Trump’s ridiculous bullying antics ultimately force the rest of the world to switch off and do without the US, I’m not sure it will be a bad thing.

SUNDAY 30 An article in the New European suggests a reverse brain drain. Just as persecuted scientists and artists in the early 20th Century fled tyranny in Europe for sanctuary in the United States, so US talent is now locked in the dilemma of fleeing tyranny at home for a more tolerant environment elsewhere. The article says Ireland has been the first nation to get a grip of this trend and open its doors with welcome, closely followed by France.

📌 Even though I no longer subscribe to the New Statesman, every week they send a free newsletter telling me all the great articles they have in the current issue. The summaries they provide are quite adequate.

📌 The best news I could find on Wiki Future today is that in 24,000 years the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone will be safe to enter. Terraforming Mars to give it an atmosphere breathable for Earthlings could be finished in just over 100,000 years.

📌 Finally finished Susie Dent’s Guilty by Definition audiobook, on loan from Borrowbox. I can imagine its casual littering of etymological references throughout to be quite irritating in print, so audio was probably the best choice.

📌 From Paul Mason in the New European on US detachment from Europe…

Who cares if a bunch of Bible-thumping, gas-guzzling Red staters, force-fed chlorinated chicken and algorithmic control, want to throw away their global leadership role, and tank the value of their currency with it? Not the people of Paris, Brussels, Rome and Warsaw.

Plus…

📌 Collecting my medication from the local pharmacy does have its upsides.

📌 From Fesshole…

When working from home, I sometimes book fake meetings in my calendar with my dog.

📌 We saw Alex on Death in Paradise. He played a dopey ex-boyfriend on a mission to save his ex-girlfriend from a predatory online lothario. Alex was one of the actors we met in Chichester a few years ago when Mike was in the Royal Williams play Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads.

MONDAY 31 In its Teach Yourself Marxism section the Socialist Worker describes how Trump and Musk’s dismantling of and attack on US state institutions will soon be their undoing. Because in any capitalist society the state is the apparatus that twists and turns in devious and ever changing ways to protect the ruling class. Which in the case of the United States is its business and civic institutions.

Trump is posing as the master of the US state rather than its servant.

📌 Yesterday, while collecting my medication from Boots, I noticed they had a machine you can plug your phone into and print photographs. At only 55p a go, I decided to give it a try and in the process accidentally hit on a new craft method that for the moment I will call, grandly, “Iteration”. It involves repetition and the exploration of repetition. Here are two examples. The image below is a digital photograph of the Boots  photoprint, which originated as a digital photograph of a stitchwork in progress put through an AI filter to make it look like a watercolour painting.

Another example of my grand theory of Iteration is the image shown below, which is a digital photo of an inkjet print of a digital photo of an action painting in acrylics. Furthermore, the inkjet printer was running out of ink and the print was made solely to use up any residual ink. The Iteration method thus transforms existing works according to happenstance. Each Iteration will thus always be a one-off.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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