Scrapbook: Week 23

May 31-June 6, 2025

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.

SUNDAY 1 According to Paul Mason Dominic Cummings is trying to stoke up a civil war.

📌 RIP Sebastiāo Salvador, 81. The Conversation has a nice tribute.

His photographs were often shocking, yet stunningly beautiful. You couldn’t look away – and that was the point.

📌 Bev’s got a fox squatting underneath the cupboards in her kitchen. All attempts to entice it to leave with trails of food have failed.

📌 RIP Duncan Campbell, 80, a nice guy and the envy of many a Guardian journalist.

📌 Now that Germany, France and Britain have lifted their objections to Ukraine sending long-range missiles into Russia, a line has been crossed and what comes next is anyone’s guess.

MONDAY 2 The Conservatives are polling so badly that the return of Boris Johnson is being advanced as the only way the Tories can survive. He is, we are led to believe, the only one who can stop Nigel Farage. And yet, when veteran pollster Peter Kellner crunched the numbers on Boris, he found that his popularity is not what it’s cracked up to be. Boris as a person is popular among voters, but as a politician he is seen as a dead weight.

📌 Anna is trying to get some postcards printed of her mum’s watercolours, which we will exhibit during Open Gardens weekend. My favourite is the cabbage.

TUESDAY 3

📌 Found a Mick Herron short-story collection, Dolphin Junction, going cheap on Kindle, so I’m well sorted for when I soon finish This Is What Happened. Many of the 11 stories in Dolphin Junction are said to prefigure the characters in Herron’s Slow Horses and Zoë Boehm novels.

WEDNESDAY 4 My wife insisted we go to see The Salt Path because she’d read the book. I was not so keen, having seen the trailers, but was swayed by Google’s AI Overview, which described it as “Dangerous, cathartic and raw”. I think that might be an overstatement, if not a lie. The film offers up the landscape of the South-West as its real star, with the actors, principally Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, as the tortured elements within, but it also carries some very valuable lessons to campers on where not to pitch your tent (beach, edge of cliff, etc).

📌 Discovered a very useful function on Google Maps that allows you to measure accurate distances in km. With my arthritic hips, it will be useful in planning my outdoor activities.

📌 I’m now on the audiobooks of spy writer Alex Gerlis. The stories can get quite confusing when the spies use an alias. You have to remember which spy is which alias.

THURSDAY 5 The next stage of the Dayroom project for the Royal London Hospital and Vital Arts went well and I think I’m clear on my next moves. I will be leaning on Carmel a lot from now on because this type of work is so out of my comfort zone. But at the end of the session we got to the point I wanted to be at, which was to agree the base colours of the walls and the direction to select the artworks to be used as framed artworks and those to be used as space fillers. I’m quite looking forward to going for it, which isn’t a feeling about work I expected to have at my age.

📌 With my wife out at her book group, I watched the BBC documentary When Bruce Springsteen Came To Britain. Obviously it was an incredibly nostalgic experience and a chance once again to touch my youth in some way.

But it also had a dark memorial feel about it, as if Springsteen’s time of reckoning had come before he is no longer about. I hope that is not the case because more than Bob Dylan, I think Springsteen deserves some kind of international award for writing before he dies. In the documentary, superman Rob Brydon says: “what we are seeing now is rage, rage rage against the dying light”.

The companion documentary, the far more revealing Bruce Springsteen: A Secret History, which unfortunately restates the lingering  memorial message, tells a better story of the creative evolution of the songwriter lots of people now prefer to call The Boss, but who I and himself like to think of as a storyteller. His celebrity after early anonymity he describes as “just taking the ride”. Through all of it, his sincerity is hard to question, his honesty heartfelt, and Springsteen is impressively literate. But neither documentary attempts to explain why.

FRIDAY 6

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

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