June 28-July 4, 2025
SATURDAY 28 In the hauty apartments of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, normally a repository for the overblown homewares of the filthy rich across several centuries, we saw a hundreds of mannequins wearing haute-couture frocks by a galaxy of star designers. Each of them stood elegantly in reflection of each room’s theme. It was a clever piece of curation that must have at least doubled the footfall for this less explored gallery.
📌 Last night my niece told her mother, my sister, to stop being “such as Karen”. I had to look it up: “Karen is a pejorative slang term typically used to refer to a middle-class woman who is perceived as entitled or excessively demanding.”
📌 Graffiti in toilets is always a welcome sign of resistance, even if you have no idea what it’s saying.
SUNDAY 29 The Pompidou Centre will close for a refit in September. For five years. So we thought we’d give it a last look, hoping we’ll still be able to visit again in 2030.
The second-floor library space has already been partially emptied in preparation for the makeover, and in the short term handed over to what the Pompidou says is definitely not a retrospective of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, but which in fact looks exactly like that.
Then on the sixth floor we saw Paris Noir, which frankly left us awestruck and exhausted by its depth and breadth, the outstanding artist for both of us being Beauford Delaney.
MONDAY 30
📌 Another top score in Waffle…
TUESDAY 1 It was nice to see Sim again at an Art et al. online meeting, in which she told us about some exciting new collaborations with autistic artists in Indonesia.
📌 The big brain stitchwork for the Royal London Hospital project is starting to take shape.
WEDNESDAY 2 Most of the MPs who voted against the government’s welfare bill are in favour of reforms to the nation’s social security contract with the public. The opposition parties voted against it because they want to see a government defeated. That is their job. MPs on the Labour benches who voted against the bill did so because it was poorly presented, not because what it was trying to do was wrong. The bill’s near failure was a failure of politics rather than of policy.
For most it was a heartfelt desire to protect the most vulnerable, a conviction that this particular policy was wrong and that a new path could be found, without undermining the government on other issues.
📌 I’ve transferred the big brain stitchwork for the Royal London Hospital from the big rack to the big 18-inch hoop, the theory being that being able to see the whole thing rather than just a segment will boost productivity and I might even finish it before the Summer is over.
THURSDAY 3 RIP Liverpool player Diogo Jota, 28.
📌 Nora gave me some exercises for my deteriorating hips. Most of them can be done lying down, which is nice. My favourite is The Clam, which involves virtually no movement whatsoever.
📌 The camera on my phone is misbehaving. Greens look like blues, so I asked Eliza to take a ‘work in progress’ picture for me on her iPhone. Even that is not so great.
📌 James gave me some research documents to read and comment on. The temptation to eviscerate and rewrite the turgid nonsense academics use to try to say what they’re doing is colossal. I will, however, stay polite and make some broad general remarks.
📌 For lunchtime dessert at Headway we had Moroccan doughnuts sprinkled with cinnamon, which were a dense heaven of delicious.
FRIDAY 4 I woke up with the frightening recollection that while visiting my sister in Paris last week that I promised to gift her one of the ‘Memory’ collages I did several years ago.
Jeremy Corbyn is starting a new political party because the Labour Party is no longer left-wing enough for him and many others. He is doing his very best to avoid being titled the “leader” of this new party, arguing that it will have a collective structure that doesn’t fit the conventional hierarchies of British politics. I wish him great success with that.
📌 The prompt I have chosen for next week’s Headway Writing Group is ‘Galactic Snot’. Just waiting for an opening sentence to come into my head.
📌 Not sure anyone in Britain celebrates America’s Independence Day any more. If they ever did.
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