One month as it happened…
TUESDAY 1 I couldn’t finish my latest audiobook soon enough. Sweet Pea, by CJ Skuse features a serial killer whose victims are just about anyone who gets on her nerves. It features severed heads and penises in scenes that normally culminate in a desire to have sex with a corpse.
📌 Buried in today’s Sensemaker is news that Asda has started using face-recognition software in an attempt, it says, to combat shop crime and staff abuse. Two months ago I would probably have not held any serious objections. Then I saw the very believable BBC TV thriller The Capture and became skeptical about the use of technology in crime detection. What is more sinister is that Asda intends to compile a “watchlist” of people its technology deems dodgy.
📌 Not sure why some French people think Marine Le Pen is above the law that insists that embezzlement is a criminal offence. If their argument is that the courts are politically motivated, they could be right, but they won’t prove it by claiming Le Pen has done nothing wrong.
WEDNESDAY 2 Another Royal London Hospital session in the gym to finish the workshop phase of the project. Winnie was again outstanding in her exploration of colour and pattern. Members of staff, SLT (Speech and Language Therapist) Jess and American rehab nurse Kayla, expressed a real interest in and understanding of the project. Jess told me of the potential uses for art workshops in SLT. The group dynamics were gentle but purposeful and the gym is clearly the best place to hold pop-up workshops. I have come to think of the gym as the studio and the day rooms as the gallery. I will keep this in mind when I sketch out ideas for the rooms’ makeover.
📌 Sam seems to have found some kind of cruise control in her production of drawings. What I envy most is that each week they get better and better, whereas every new project I start is a trip back to first principles. Or maybe I’m just not conscious of the progress in my own work. I hope that is the case.
THURSDAY 3
📌 The journey on the 153 bus to Liverpool Road for Sue’s 50th birthday bash in The Horatia on Holloway Road was like being in an episode of Wacky Races. The drivers of single-deck buses seem to inherit a devil-may-care attitude to passenger comfort as soon as they get behind the wheel.
FRIDAY 4
📌 My new audiobook fascination is for the works of Anthony Horowitz. I already sampled his Alex Rider series, which I thought too daft by far; now I’m on the Hawthorne & Horowitz series, in which the author is himself a character in the stories, retelling anecdotes of writing episodes of Foyle’s War and other autobiographical titbits.
📌 The Big Brain is sketched and stretched on the rack. I think this and Fallopian Jesus are the only two pieces of my own I can tolerate for any length of time. That affection is essential for me when stitching large pieces because they take so long and mistakes get made along the way that then have to be corrected or bodged. I much prefer smaller pieces, but this one will hopefully end up on display at the Royal London Hospital as part of my artist-in-residence project. I’m thinking of using large fine stitches in lots of colours, underpinned by black outlines.
📌 Blimey! Paul Mason really is angry with all the lefties who’ve turned on Starmer. In a very hard-hitting long essay he caustically debunks all of their claims that Starmer and Reeves are Tories with red hats on, and in the process punches up the cool facts in a way that the government itself should have been doing all along but has been too timid/frightened to do so.
📌 A patch of decaying paintwork on our estate looks like the profile of a medieval prelate.
📌 Siena: The Rise of Painting at the National Gallery has been set up successfully as the exhibition to see in April. Religious painting turns me cold and the temptation to ridicule the multitudes of Baby Jesus depictions that resemble dirty old men is never far away. I detected an emotional honesty in many of the faces, though, but the politics of 14th Century Siena (Christian oligarchy) obviously made anyone who wasn’t allowed to wear a halo miserable. I’m not sure I was in the right mood.
SATURDAY 5 I’ve started to learn Chinese on Duolingo, encouraged by an article in The Knowledge describing just how far China has moved ahead of the US.
Many in Washington still labour under the illusion that China can’t innovate. Up close, it’s downright scary to watch.
SUNDAY 6 Will Hutton believes Britain is at the front of the grid alongside Canada and Germany to build a new global trading order that excludes Trump’s America.
Trump’s America has forfeited global trust. The world has other choices…
And the Socialist Worker reckons Trump has probably shot himself in the foot.
It is an irony that Trump’s attempts to use US economic power to boost US industry may result only in the further strengthening of the Chinese economy and government.
📌 It turns out that I’m as bad at learning Chinese as I am at learning anything else. Structural learning is obviously not my thing. “I think that bird has flown,” my wife said.
MONDAY 7 Greenland might overwhelmingly not want to be a client state of the US, but it does want independence from Denmark. According to a BBC article, an economic alliance with Canada and Iceland is the preferred status.
📌 We’ve been photographing some of the old stuff we want to sell to the man who deals in second-hand goods. Only when you unearth items from the corner of a basement shed, wipe them down and position them for the camera do you notice all the little faults you will inevitably be forced to declare in advance of any sale.
📌 Tortoise Sensemaker reports that Britain is at the centre of proposals to form a European “Bomb Bank” to finance rearmament after the flouncing off of the USA. Other countries involved include Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland and the Netherlands. Southern European countries are reticent and seem to prefer a rival proposal from the EU. A northern European alliance based on defence sounds like a great idea. But without Germany it surely runs the risk of looking like a side hustle in weaponry rather than a serious defence project.
TUESDAY 8 The Letters of Note newsletter today has a letter written by Salvador Dalí to his friend, the poet Federico García Lorca. Surreal isn’t the word…
I feel a great love for grass, thorns in the palm of the hand, ears red against the sun, and the little feathers of bottles. Not only does all this delight me, but also the grapevines and the donkeys that crowd the sky.
📌 More stuff unearthed to tempt the man who deals in old junk.
📌 Theatre snobs look away. Six The Musical was never likely to make it on to my to-do list, and the idea of a Spice Girls-inspired sextet telling the stories of Henry 8’s six wives seemed ludicrous. But the show was more of a revelation than I could ever have imagined, great entertainment, and not just for the neat wordplay built into cheesy pop songs (eg, history becomes herstory). Another pop-cultural leap forward for feminism, I hope.
📌 Got sent an amazing photograph of my cousin and my sister, which I put through an AI app to make it look a bit like a painting, because that’s the kind of image it is. Look at those hands.
📌 Bumped into a long-lost friend tonight. He looked old, overweight and seedy. I wonder if he thought the same about me. I don’t really care if he did.
WEDNESDAY 9 Just as I was about to quit learning Chinese on Duolingo out of frustration at my inability, the daily lesson got exciting, with lessons in drawing the “hanzi” characters for simple things such as water and coffee.
THURSDAY 10 How annoying it is when the “manage your preferences” cookie button does not offer the “reject all” option and you are forced to scroll through a long list unclicking all the cookies that have already been automatically clicked.
📌 Another properly sage comment piece from a retired Larry Elliott clarifying the multiple ways in which Donald Trump has lost his biggest bet.
📌 There are moments when I simply stare in wonder at the Chinese hanzi I am learning. This is the hanzi for “this is…”
📌 I unearthed another item to sell from our vast and dusty collection, only to be told moments after photographing it that my wife wants to keep it.
📌 Frankie was in the Guardian‘s Dining Across The Divide feature. We thought she was older than 28.
📌 I’d suggested the Ed Cross Gallery for our Thursday cultural excursion with the St Luke’s mob, so here we were. Ed did a fascinating if overlong presentation about how he got into being a dealer in African art, but I suspect it’s just because he’s filthy rich.
FRIDAY 11 A very long article in Foreign Affairs on the dangers of underestimating China argued that the US should be making friends rather than shedding them.
As Washington turns away from its coalition, China is constructing its own. Driven together by anti-Western grievance and their own parochial interests, China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are creating substantial authoritarian scale.
📌 In This City Is Ours, a horrible little tea leaf called Billy made off with 50 keys of Jamie’s lemo in the back of his girlfriend’s blue mini.
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.
SATURDAY 19 Nigel Warburton’s philosophy column in the New European is a welcome re-statement of the fact that great things and great ideas are often made not by individuals but by groups.
The moral of this is that when you encounter something impressive, don’t assume it is the work of one genius. A team of lesser mortals working together can produce amazing results – often more amazing than could have been achieved by acting alone.
📌 At Autograph I stole some ideas for colour palettes from an exhibition of portraits by Eileen Perrier. I especially like the pink/turquoise combo.
📌 Wetherspoons’ Chicken Jalfrezi really is a standout dish for me now that I know that three chillies is just about as hot as I can handle.
SUNDAY 20 We’ve tried to keep out of the arguments about who is legally a woman and who isn’t. Because that’s what it is, even though it has been manoeuvred into an argument about trans rights, which it isn’t. Luckily, in her final Observer column Sonia Sodha tells it like it is.
📌 Pope Francis appeared in St Peter’s Square and waved from a balcony.
MONDAY 21 The first thing we did this morning on hearing of the death of Pope Francis, aka Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was to check if the film Conclave was on the TV anywhere. Amazon Prime had it for £4.99 and YouTube had it for £3.49. We eventually found it for free in a dark corner of the Canadian streaming service we subscribe to.
📌 On the recommendation of Marge, we started watching the Danish TV series Seaside Hotel and now we can’t stop.
TUESDAY 22 All the news media is still full of what a great guy Pope Francis was. Wonder how long it will take for the dark side to emerge.
📌 We still had a large panettone left over from Christmas. It has sat on the sofabed upstairs for four months. For Easter Sunday my wife used it to make a special tiramisu, which we had after our Easter meal of trout, new potatoes and green veg. But there is still half of the panettone left, so today I made a jumbo bacon panettone toastie, with brown sauce.
WEDNESDAY 23 The bespoke, hand stitched TK Maxx shoulder bag for a friend’s special birthday is finished and ready for posting. She shops there an awful lot and even has clothes she bought there long ago and still hasn’t worn.
📌 The Hogarth Shakespeare series is a collection of books in which famous authors reimagine the works of William Shakespeare. At the moment I’m on Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood’s hilarious retelling of The Tempest. It features a dethroned and humiliated celebrity theatre director who is forced to showcase his dream production of The Tempest using a cast of prison inmates.
THURSDAY 24 Michelle went into a frenzy of action on the hospital dayroom project, whirlwinding ideas all over the place. I was quite overwhelmed, largely because I think she overestimates my interior design skills.
📌 When I moved to London from Liverpool in the 1980s to work in the music press, the London black music scene felt intimidating, fearful even. Only when I met my wife did I come to enjoy black music more and learned that fear was as much about ignorance as anything else. So the Barbican Library’s exhibition celebrating the evolution of London’s black music scene was a mixed experience, but ultimately a welcome one.
📌 I got a vague message from my cousin that my sister had “wrenched her knee somehow”. Once I’d put aside my irritation at the imprecision of this message, I contacted my sister, but she was busy having an MRI scan.
📌 While my wife was out with a friend I watched Celebrity Big Brother and didn’t know who any of the celebrities were. I can’t decide whether celebrities being indistinguishable from non-celebrities is a good or bad thing. I hate to say it but none of the “celebrities” looked special in any way. None of them was especially good looking, or even talented in an obvious way.
FRIDAY 25 I’ve finished Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and now I’m on Macbeth by Jo Nesbø, swayed totally, I’m not afraid to admit, by the book’s blurb…
He’s the best cop they’ve got.
When a drug bust turns into a bloodbath it’s up to Inspector Macbeth and his team to clean up the mess.
He’s also an ex-drug addict with a troubled past.
He’s rewarded for his success. Power. Money. Respect. They’re all within reach.
But a man like him won’t get to the top.
Plagued by hallucinations and paranoia, Macbeth starts to unravel. He’s convinced he won’t get what is rightfully his.
Unless he kills for it.
📌 I do love a flipside story, especially when it downgrades the popularity of Nigel Farage and Reform, who are widely and loudly reported to be a magnet for an emergent cohort of young males. Young women, meanwhile and on the other hand, are apparently flocking to the sanctity of the Green party.
📌 My wife has a theory that my hip pain is due not to arthritis or any life-threatening degenerative disease but to do with the hip-opening exercises I’ve been doing in yoga. She thinks I’ve overdone it. Do it gently, she says, and give it time to heal. She reckoned I’d not opened my hips properly for 65 years, “so it must have been a shock to the system.” The doctor has scheduled an X-ray and has booked me a physiotherapy appointment, so I will keep an open mind until more evidence is available.
SATURDAY 26 According to an article (a profile of Labour peer Maurice Glasman) in the new Tortoise-owned Observer, the on-trend thinkers in the Labour Party are much closer to Donald Trump’s method madness than traditional Labour people would like to think.
In a weird way, Trump is behaving like a Marxist. Of course he has no idea he’s executing a Bennite policy, but that is what he’s doing.
📌 In a scintillating game, Crystal Palace beat Aston Villa 3-0 to reach the final of the FA Cup. Our friend Sue was in the crowd and with every goal scored we basked in her joy.
SUNDAY 27 After half an hour at a spectacularly uneventful and poorly attended community meeting we decanted to the British Museum for a sneak preview of the Hiroshige exhibition that opens on May 1. These are images, mainly woodcut prints, you could happily stare at all day long. Even static elements appear to sway gently with the movement of the moment.
📌 At my wife’s instigation I now own a pair of Skechers, the old people’s cushion-soled walking shoes.
📌 Liverpool beat Tottenham Hotspur 5-1 to become Premier League champions. It was a scintillating one-sided game and the scenes afterwards were ecstatic.
MONDAY 28 I returned from the shops deep in thought and walked straight past our front door. My wife, indoors, saw me do it through the window and called me back from my trance. When she asked me what thought had made me forget where I live I told her that I was trying to work out the pros and cons of our local pub, The Shakespeare, becoming a Wetherspoons, and whether one of the pros would be greater community engagement.
TUESDAY 29 Nowhere can I find out what caused the nationwide electricity failures in Spain and Portugal. Speculation ranges from orchestrated cyber attacks to a freak incidence of hot weather.
📌 RIP Mike Peters, 66. We had a long chat in the Philharmonic pub a long time ago. He dressed in double denim and expressed a secret fondness for Rhyl.
WEDNESDAY 30 I’m still trying to make up my mind if the new Tortoise ownership of the Observer is worth continuing my subscription. I subscribed initially to Tortoise because of its content, mainly its daily Sensemaker newsletter (see elements below) and for its investigative podcasts via the Tortoise app. Now, as a subscriber, I am daily bombarded additionally with Observer content, most of which is exactly the same, and as bland, as it was when it was free under the ownership of the Guardian. If at any point the price goes up, I will regretfully decline to renew.
📌 Sue P is in the Greek islands doing a sailing exam. If she passes she will be allowed to skipper a vessel. She says it’s all very stressful. I can’t honestly imagine why she ever wanted to do it.
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Billy's Scrapbook 