April 12-18, 2025
SATURDAY 12 In the face of Donald Trump’s witchhunt on wokery, European universities are facing a dramatic upswing in applications from “academic asylum seekers” from the US.
📌 At the Guildhall Art Gallery we saw paintings by Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919). The publicity department describes her as “a pioneering artist whose richly coloured paintings reflect themes of feminism, spirituality, and a passionate rejection of war and materialism.” Yes, ok, up to a point. All of that probably came quite easily to the silver-spoon privileged classes of Victorian England. Her skin tones are impressive, her sketches beautiful. Her books are always on the floor, open at a significant page. But all of her women are seen carrying the baggage of tragedy, a very classical, stifling tragedy. Their misery is meant to be mythological, but unfortunately they all just look like bad actors at work.
📌 We finished This City Is Ours, aka the Scouse Sopranos, and my wife was spot-on in her prediction of the outcome. BTW, we thought “lemo” was heroin, but it is cocaine.
📌 People we would like to see on Scouse of Games, an imaginary TV quiz show hosted by Richard Osman, are: Stephen Graham, Jodie Comer, John Bishop and Coleen Rooney.
SUNDAY 13 Chicken jockey moments and other forms of neo-savagery are becoming so frequent now in cinemas especially, but also in other shared spaces (shops, restaurants, buses), that soon we will simply lose the desire to do anything alongside our fellow citizens.
📌 The Courtauld Gallery already has a fine collection of top-notch impressionist paintings, so I’m not sure what the exhibition Goya To Impressionism adds, other than some exquisite individual pieces to add spice to what for me is already a perfect collection.
MONDAY 14 Donald Trump has forced up the price of a PlayStation by 25%.
📌 We thought we had two more installments of Adolescence but it turned out we just watched the last one, with Stephen Graham crying very convincingly with a teddy bear.
TUESDAY 15 The doctor says I could have arthritis in my left hip. X-ray and physio are the next steps. Cut out the ibuprofen and use paracetamol instead. It’s not as effective as ibuprofen but is also harmless to the kidneys.
WEDNESDAY 16 Physio appointment to pamper my decrepit left hip is booked for May, closely followed by the news that the legal definition of women does not include people with penises.
📌 My pocket stitchworks get dragged from pillar to post, pulled out and tossed around carelessly. They are for me like a notebook. I use them to experiment with stitches and blending colours. They inevitably emerge looking wrecked, which annoys my studio manager. I spill tea on them, drip blood from pricked fingers. Nevertheless, I’d never be without one and they probably say more about me than any of the finely finished work I also do. In this one I used stitches so small you need a magnifying glass to get the picture.
THURSDAY 17 We saw One To One, the Kevin Macdonald documentary about John & Yoko last night and I still can’t decide if I liked it. It didn’t seem to add up to much, and the overall impression for me was that it captured 1970s radical protest in the US, but not Lennon and Ono in any meaningful way. There was one hilarious moment when John joked with a journalist that Yoko was Irish and that her surname was originally O’no. He even wrote her an Irish song featuring leprechauns and the Blarney Stone to prove it. May Tang is featured only as a hapless assistant who is tasked with buying 1,000 flies for one of Yoko’s weird art exhibitions.
📌 Harvard University seems determined to stand up to threats by Donald Trump. I’m quite excited to see what happens next.
FRIDAY 18 Met Carmel at the studio with Alex yesterday to open a conversation about the Royal London Hospital dayroom makeovers. I had already in my head come to rest on the idea that “Ten-second” John and Raymond symbolised ward 12e, while Dan and Winnie symbolised 12f. Carmel very gently brought me round to the belief that my initial idea of soft-pattern background on which pieces could hang gallery-style was not the way forward.
Now I’m looking at painted walls with artworks hung gallery-style and cameo pieces dotted around as eye candy. It’s based on the magazine idea of Feature plus Sidebar. Whereas I had come to think of the two rooms as Angles (12e) and Curves (12f), I want to find colour palettes that do a similar job. The two words I’m playing with at the moment are CONTRAST (12e) and HARMONY (12f). These words for me tell the experience of brain injury, a movement from upheaval and dramatic change to one of accommodation, adaptation and acceptance.
📌 In July last year, Donald Trump boasted to an expectant US electorate that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in one day. I’m sure he would now add that he never specified which day, in which year or decade. Just, like, whenever it happens, it was me that did it.
📌 I think I might be forming an unhealthy attachment to Owl Daily.
📌 Great quote from Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky…
Harry felt so unformed as a person, as a character at the centre of his own drama, that he didn’t feel ready to be definitive about anything.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 
In the present times I would prefer not to see tragedy in paintings or read such books. Too much tragedy is happening in real life. I like your post. thank you 🙂
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