One month as it happened…
THURSDAY 1 Michelle again went into a whirlwind of action on the diagrams I had prepared for the Dayroom project with Vital Arts. I was glad because it enabled us to put together some plans to show Carmel before Michelle goes away for three weeks. It makes it look like we’re doing something when in reality we are stalling it for a while and keeping the ideas in the back of our minds
📌 Someone decided the Bra Bank needed some additional signage.
FRIDAY 2
📌 We’re still reeling from a meeting last night at which our landlord, the City of London Corporation, revealed that it had failed to register our building for a special safety-compliance permit, and therefore work to replace our windows and repair the roof will not start on our block until 2030, and will likely cost us up to £100,000. There is no opt-out, we were told. We went to the pub afterwards and joked that many of our neighbours will be dead before then and the City of London extortion racket will be passed on to their next of kin.
📌 Chris is about to start a six-month art residency at a church in Hackney, so we blagged our way onto the guest list for the launch party, grabbed some food and wine, then listened to the artists droning on about their work.
SATURDAY 3
📌 Prince Harry has done an interview to repeat his belief that the British taxpayer should foot the police-protection bill whenever he decides to set foot on these shores again. His father, the King of England, has seemingly told him to sod off and refuses to talk to him. I’m kinda with the King on this one.
📌 A Crystal Palace player, Eberechi Eze, has become a chess champion.
SUNDAY 4 David Sedaris is not a fan of AI. Or more precisely he is not a fan of AI voices replacing real ones, or of AI authors replacing proper writers. If David Sedaris were about 10 years younger I could predict him waxing fancifully on how AI got him the best hotel room on his book tour, or how it successfully regulated the medication intake of a declining parent.
📌 In his first term as president of the United States, Donald Trump is reported to have told 30,573 lies.
📌 Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell on their The Rest Is Politics podcast are noticing a global swing towards China over the US.
MONDAY 5 Someone in the Green Party wants to take over the leadership and make them the antidote to Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Good luck with that. “Eco-Populism” might just be the match that sets fire to the arses of today’s youth.
TUESDAY 6 The man in the Nationwide must have thought I was proper dozy, not knowing which ISAs are which and where all the best interest lies these days. Good job my wife does know all that stuff, or I’d be stuffed. Surprisingly, the Nationwide man said they liked it when real people turned up to talk to them.
📌 The Sashiko stitch workshop I’d been planning with Harshita went off remarkably well. One person dropped out an hour before it was due to start, so I was quite angry about that. But very soon I settled into enjoying what for me should never have been enjoyable, namely a very disciplined, rules-based stitchwork that offers no scope for freeform expression.
WEDNESDAY 7 At last, it is official, I am decrepit.
Dear Mr Mann,
Your hip xray has shown quite significant osteoarthritis. I suspect when you saw me you were going through a flare. Could you make a routine appointment to discuss this further
many thanks,
Dr B.R. John
The Neaman Practice
📌 The Barbican’s new sculpture gallery pairs Alberto Giacometti and Huma Bhabha in what looks like two separate but conjoined forms of modern. Giacometti’s sculptures do often look like the main feature of a cold-case forensic investigation, whereas Bhabha’s look like what a Giacometti student does as a dissertation project.
THURSDAY 8
📌 At the James Freeman gallery on Upper Street we got to study some dark visions inspired by the Medieval. Some of them were fascinating but disturbing in equal measure. Others, such as the ceramics of Dutch sculptor Carolein Smit, were strikingly gothic but nevertheless exquisite to look at.
FRIDAY 9 Chess Boxing. Yes, it’s a thing. Wiki offers some enlightenment: “Two combatants play alternating rounds of blitz chess and boxing until one wins by checkmate or knockout.”
📌 One day in the studio Sandra did a drawing of a weird dancing man but didn’t like it. Alex thought it might make a good lino cut and knocked off a few prints for last year’s Printfest. Then she tried printing it onto calico but didn’t like it because some of the ink smudged around the dancer’s groin. She threw it in the bin, which is where I found it and decided to add stitch. Then I lost it, but found it recently. It still looks a bit grubby, but who cares? Sandra loves it.
📌 An item in The Knowledge states that cat ownership among 18-to-34-year-olds has risen “dramatically” in recent years, with 41% of Gen Z owning one, meaning cats will outnumber dogs within two years. Apparently, the trend is driven by celebrity feline fans such as Taylor Swift and Bob Mortimer.
📌 There’s a growing queue of commentators lining up to say the “landmark” trade deal Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson have done with Donald Trump is really not that great after all.
📌 A pair of stupid vandals went on the rampage and chopped down a tree deemed to be sacred because of its situation in a picturesque valley that looked good at sunset. The stupid vandals are now being depicted in the media as if they were child killers.
📌 While the rest of the world is still trying to make up its mind about the new Pope, Leo XIV, the Guardian seems convinced that the progressive reforms started by his predecessor Pope Francis will continue.
SATURDAY 10 A Russian🚀space ship launched in 1972 with the intention of snooping around Venus is about to come back to Earth with a bump. Shortly after its launch Kosmos 482‘s engines failed and it has been spiralling in Earth’s orbit for over 50 years. Now the spiral is reaching its endpoint and the intact craft will hit Earth, location as yet unknown. It was fascinating to listen to a space scientist on the radio describe the wild elliptical motions of the orbit’s ever-narrowing path.
SUNDAY 11 While my wife was elsewhere I revived my quest to make my own fish paste using low-cost tinned fish and assorted other ingredients. This one is sardines and hard-boiled egg, with chopped cornichons, spicy tomato chutney and tartare sauce.
📌 I’m dealing with my newly diagnosed arthritis in my hips in the same way Winston Smith came to terms with Big Brother. It’s a three-step process: LEARN, UNDERSTAND, ACCEPT. That and the prospect of hungry rats chewing his face off.
📌 Catherine Bennett was somewhere in the audience at the Boy Blue ensemble performance tonight at the Barbican. I saw her milling around before we took our seats. The show was truly amazing, inspiring, beautiful and funny, though I imagine Cathy Bennett could find something sour to say about it (too much of a crowd-pleaser is my guess). Because that is her thing. The show was memorable also for the appearance on stage of Boy Blue co-founder and choreographer Kenrick Sandy, now a bulky 40something, who performed a cameo with young dancers to signal his intention to start dancing again after establishing a world-famous hip-hop dance phenomenon and nurturing new generations of talent. Generation Blue.
MONDAY 12
📌 Today’s Sensemaker says Donald Trump has lost interest in the defence of Europe and the Middle East because he is preoccupied with starting a big hi-tech fight with China.
In a memo from 30 April, the defence secretary outlined plans for:
- each division of the US army to field as many as 1,000 drones;
- troops to be able to cheaply 3D print spare parts in their dugouts;
- AI to be integrated into battlefield strategy;
- ammunition to be stockpiled at scale; and…
- advanced long-range missiles to be developed for sea and land.
TUESDAY 13 The prime minister is cutting an increasingly desperate figure. His attempts to look tough on immigration fool nobody. Most people are in favour of legal migration if it means more doctors, nurses, care workers and other specialist workers. Reducing those numbers will impress no one. What the voting public gets angry about is the titchy-tiny number (comparatively) of illegal immigrants arriving in small boats. It’s that number Starmer needs to bring down if he wants voters to believe he is in control of our borders.
WEDNESDAY 14 Keir Starmer’s uncomfortable posturing is a sign, says the ever-trustworthy Rafael Behr, that he lacks the skills to communicate his purpose, the WHY of his policies.
It should be possible to recognise that there are perverse incentives that need ironing out of the benefits system, while also striving not to drive vulnerable people into destitution.
In other words it is the messaging rather than the policy that is defective. The article is useful in that it shows exactly how unpopular cost-cutting decisions around issues such as benefits could have been recast to point up the positives of the long-haul national overhaul Starmer and his government have embarked upon. The underlying point Behr seems to be making is that the real party of reform is the Labour Party, and not Reform UK.
📌 Dolphins 🐬 have been spotted in the Mersey.
📌 Alison returned from Australia to find that Jacqueline had done a great job watering her plants. What she didn’t notice was that Jacqueline had also watered the plastic flowers.
📌 Our financial adviser Katie once again urged us to spend lots of money and not worry about the future.
📌 The odds on Kemi Badenoch losing the leadership of the Conservatives party this year are 13/8.
THURSDAY 15 Today’s Sensemaker is all about Syria and Trump’s visit. I don’t know how I missed it but I am ashamed to say I hadn’t even clocked that Bashar al-Assad had been deposed and replaced by an ultra Islamist, who Trump is now sucking up to, for some reason. The takeover took place in December last year, but the only reference to Syria I can find in my scrapbook for that time is a note saying that the Syrian cobbler in Hoxton Street said my favourite shoes could be mended, but at a very high price.
📌 At Headway Stuart asked me if I’d nicked any decent hubcaps recently.
📌 We’re now on the second series of Gangs of London and my wife is still remarkably undisturbed by the gross levels of graphic violence.
FRIDAY 16 Another great line from Mick Herron in This Is What Happened.
Every passing stranger is a beacon in a sea of static
📌 The sun is shining on the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, just round the corner from our hotel.
📌 At a loose end in Cardiff, we went to the pictures to see the lame but borderline charming Steve Coogan film The Penguin Lessons. My wife had read the book from which the film was adapted, which is where the word “charming” crept into the description. I’m not sure pathos is Steve Coogan’s thing, despite his determination to work at it.
📌 The city centre of Cardiff on a Friday night is right up there in the hierarchy of drunk and debauched, especially down a narrow but brightly lit thoroughfare known as “Chippy Lane”. I got to the end to find Greggs unfortunately closed.
SATURDAY 17 My wife arrived back in our hotel room at 5am!
📌 Out and about in Cardiff we revisited the National Museum and once again marvelled at its very digestible pocket collection of art from across movements and time. Inevitably a new favourite emerged. For me that was Welsh artist George Poole, but some other surprises popped up, notably a David Hockney that you’d never guess was a David Hockney and a cold Welsh landscape populated by a collection of lunatic naturist men.
📌 The Eagles (Crystal Palace) beat Man City in the FA Cup Final. Our friend Sue was very happy and the TV commentators could scarcely contain their delight in finally being able to use the line, “The Eagles Have Landed”.
SUNDAY 18 Our hotel in Cardiff is full of people who look like they are on an all-in package holiday in a sunny part of Europe. They arrive at breakfast in shorts and sandals, with sunglasses perched on top of their heads. In the evening they dress up as if ready for a night at the casino followed by drinking and dancing till the early hours.
📌 Greene King IPA in Cardiff is £1.79 a pint. In London it is £1.99.
📌 After visiting our friend Rachel in Whitchurch, where she is staying, we used our 1-day bus pass to visit the seaside at Penarth, where Rachel hopes to move to soon. At least that was the plan. We failed to get off the bus at the right stop and ended up staying on it, through countless housing estates, all the way back on its circular route to Cardiff city centre.
MONDAY 19 As we departed Cardiff, capital city of Wales, it was interesting to note the differences in the bus service with that of London, capital city of England. Two principal differences were: the length of time between buses and the way bus times are communicated to customers. In Cardiff the bus stops are miles apart, there is no live schedule and the buses do not appear to be linked to GPS. If you are lucky, buses run every half hour (or so says the published schedule), but hourly is common. In London, if you arrive at a bus stop you can expect to wait 10-15 minutes tops, more commonly 4-5 minutes. Also, buses in London carry GPS, so you can, via the internet, check the exact whereabouts and arrival time of your required bus.
📌 Ringo’s drummer son Zak has been sacked by The Who, just weeks after being reinstated after a previous sacking.
TUESDAY 20 I’ve been late in arriving at the news that Finland has passed a law that restricts the use of smart phones in schools. At first I was against the idea in much the same way I am against most restrictions on technology. In my A-level exams at school I was allowed to use a slide rule to assist in complex calculations, but not a pocket calculator. Then I learned that the Finish law on the restriction of using smart phones has a cunning flexibility…
Pupils will be allowed to use them only with the teacher’s permission for healthcare or learning purposes.
In other words, stay off social media while you are in school. Other European countries are now moving in the same direction. Norway seems especially strong on the issue…
Tech companies, the Norwegian government said, were being “pitted against small children’s brains”.
Britain currently takes a hands-off approach and allows headteachers to lay down the law for their respective schools. Maybe Sturmführer Starmer will change that.
📌 The guy who cuts our communal lawn apparently got confused. He thought “no-mow May” meant you didn’t start mowing until May. He got half way through the job before Bev told him what it really meant.
📌 The Guardian seems to be of the view that Keir Starmer just did a CTRL+ALT+DELETE on Brexit.
WEDNESDAY 21
📌 An article in the New Statesman reports that a solid number of moderate British Jews, are starting to question Netanyahu and his determination to rid the planet of all Palestinians.
To be clear, Israel has the right to exist, and the right to defend itself against the brutal terrorism of Hamas. But the Israeli government’s actions are achieving nothing, other than death and destruction, and sowing hatred of Israel and Jews… Israel is a democracy. It must hold itself to a higher standard than homicidal terrorists.
📌 As soon as Xabi Alonso was out of the door a Leverkusen and heading for Madrid, Liverpool swooped in on two of its top players, Jeremie Frimpong and Florian Wirtz.
📌 Gill spotted a really cool brick tent sculpture in Charterhouse Square, so I went to have a look. It is smaller than I expected but a quite clever idea.
📌 In Gangs of London the Georgian mafioso Koba met his end in a characteristically flamboyant way. Séan laced his burger with rat poison and two minutes after Koba had hungrily necked it, he started bleeding: first from his nose, then his eyes and ears until finally he choked on a reservoir of his own blood that had surged upwards from his internal organs into his mouth. To say the scene was dramatic would be an understatement. My wife was mesmerised.
THURSDAY 22 Keir Starmer’s reverse Brexit stunt made it on to Farming Today, where we heard numerous complaints about the cost of the compliance mechanisms exporters were compelled to install under the previous government’s Brexit rules that are now likely to be wasted by the present government’s different approach to trade with Europe. They also said something about sea potatoes, which I never even knew was a thing and which actually seem to be animals.
FRIDAY 23 Paula told us last night that while she was ranting on about something political, her 15-year-old son Seán asked her, sarcastically, “Mum, would you like me to buy you a membership to the Reform Party?”
📌 I’m not sure why I need to be reminded weekly about how crooked the world of big business is, but Sensemaker Boardroom nudges me every Friday with its accounts of the eye-watering sums of money that move around the planet, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, unimpeded.
📌 Not for the first time have I been caught meditating the meaning of the lyrics to Don McLean’s American Pie. Today I found a useful article on the BBC website that lays out all the interpretations scholars have arrived at. None of them tallies with anything I ever thought about the song, which goes to prove that in music we build our own worlds, and they are exclusively our own, forever.
📌 In certain moments of madness I honestly believe Keir Starmer is doing the right thing. The move to saddle businesses, not workers, with bigger National Insurance contributions seemed to place the Labour Party on the side of ordinary people, as is it’s history. Ditto with the agreement to fall in with the EU on carbon taxes. But businesses always pass on higher costs to their customers, not to their shareholders, which leaves Sir Keir looking like he clobbered the little people when he didn’t, actually.
SATURDAY 24 To my wife’s immense displeasure, Sunderland beat Sheffield United to win the Championship playoffs final. They will now play next season in the Premier League.
📌 Moderate commentators are all now falling into the view that Donald Trump is a bad thing and that China and Russia are laughing their heads off at his mood-swinging tariff antics. I feel like I might be ahead of the game because I’m currently reading Mick Herron’s brilliant This Is What Happened, in which a young office post-room worker is caught up in what she is told by someone who claims to be an MI5 spook is China’s attempt to take over London and turn it into a CCP dictatorship.
📌 My wife tells me that Boris Johnson has welcomed a “surprise new baby”. I’m still trying to work out how the arrival of a baby can be a surprise. We are watching the Australian TV drama Bump to find out.
📌 At brunch today, Shirley recalled a recent meal she described as “Instagramable but not edible”, which I thought was quite poetic.
📌 I think Rose Ayling-Ellis is being lined up as the new Sarah Lancashire-type everyman character. Lancashire made ordinary a superpower, Ayling-Ellis is pioneering a type of drama in which ordinary disability (hearing impairment ) is a superpower.
SUNDAY 25 In a Guardian editorial I found a great quote about, er, tax.
Good tax policy plucks the most feathers with the least hissing
It is attributed to Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
📌 For the first 20 minutes of the League 1 play-offs final at Wembley I thought Leyton Orient were playing in red. They were playing in grey.
MONDAY 26 A hankering for the music of Björk this morning eventually led me to the Wikipedia page for Iceland, where I learned that historically Iceland had family clans rather than tribes and that Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, who served as the fourth president of Iceland from 1980 to 1996, was the first woman to hold the position and the first in the world to be democratically elected president of a country.
📌 Sue’s artichokes are looking good.
📌 From The Chelsea Detective we learned that BSL has regional variations. One of the suspects signed the number 10 with a “Manchester accent”.
📌 The introduction to the BBC Radio version of Graham Greene’s The Third Man states that it was written as a screenplay treatment for the classic 1949 Carol Reed film starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime.
TUESDAY 27 According to a lengthy analysis on the Centre For European Reform website, Britain has lost its ability to trade. The global financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent pandemic crippled trade worldwide. But unlike other similar countries, Britain did not regain its appetite for competitive trade after those traumas and now lags behind as a basket case. Starmer’s reset with the EU could be a moment, the article argues, but only if the will is there, which at the moment it is not.
📌 Anna returned from visiting her elderly mother with a massive stash of watercolours we can use to put on an exhibition during Open Gardens weekend.
WEDNESDAY 28 Sue has returned from her sailing exams in the Med. She passed her Day Skipper exam and promptly went off sailing with friends. But the weather was often poor and one night during a storm, they were tied up in port playing Scrabble when someone noticed that the anchor had worked loose. They had drifted 2 miles out and had to motor back to safety.
THURSDAY 29 The reviews for Wes Anderson’s latest film Phoenician Scheme, swing quite comfortably from “best” to “worst ever”. It’s certainly bonkers, which goes with what we’ve come to expect from Anderson, but for me lacks a coherent story, leaving you to just gawp at the sets and costumes and count the number of top-drawer actors who troop in and out in a series of deadpan ironic cameos. Kate Winslet’s daughter Mia Threapleton steals the show, but so does Anderson in a way, for getting away with it once again and spinning his weirdo fantasies into a cinematic empire.
📌 At Headway Paul told me that the robin is symbolic of the departed soul, which is why he made several ceramic robins in the studio for people he knows to have lost a loved one.
FRIDAY 30 At the Barbican last night to see the glorious Americana harmony trio I’m With Her, we were reminded that sometimes it’s a good idea to make your support act talented musically but mildly underwhelming to an audience. So it was with Keenan O’Meara, who cut a precarious line between early Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen circa Nebraska, with a dash of irony thrown in. But as time wore on Keenan just sounded a bit too whiny.
SATURDAY 31 In a sprawling essay from 1947 George Orwell probes the possibility of there ever being a democratic socialist United States of Europe in a nuclear age. As I read it I couldn’t help but sense its prophetic tone. Prophecy in 1947 and prophecy now.
📌 Our friend Sue has been taking painkillers for what she believed might be gout or arthritis in her toes. Turns out she had three broken toes and knew nothing about it. She even soldiered on, oblivious, for a mammoth walk on the Capital Ring last week.
📌 The physio at St Leonard’s said the arthritis I have in my hips is the bone equivalent of grey hair and wrinkles.
📌 PSG beat Inter Milan 5-0 in the Champions League final, but it’s hard not to think they actually won it when they beat Liverpool on penalties at Anfield back in March. They were the winners then and they are the winners now.
📌 Another great line in Mick Herron’s This Is What Happened.
Identity could be obliterated when you were poor. When you were rich, it could be redacted.
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Billy's Scrapbook 