August 9-15, 2025
SATURDAY 9 Last night my wife saw a fake Dolly Parton at Brighton’s open-air theatre. Today the pictures arrived, and fake is probably an unkind way to describe it. Yet one of our friends still remarked cruelly that Dolly’s calfs were so big they’d turned into cows.
📌 We got the 700 bus to Shoreham to meet Elias. I haven’t seen him in about 20 years and his lovely, even temperament is unchanged. It was a joy. He told us two very fascinating stories. One about the quest to get paid for filming and editing a Hare Krishna funeral, and another about the quest to eliminate rats from his conservatory.
📌 Shoreham is much changed and really quite chi-chi. On the high street a gathering of wedding guests became an exhibition of undersized clothing. Both men and women appeared as specimens crammed into outfits made for people smaller than themselves. We dined in Teddy’s Tearoom and one of the antique shops had a collection of vintage juke boxes.
📌 At dinner in a Turkish restaurant in Preston Street, Lil bet Sue that Liverpool would beat Palace 4-0 in tomorrow’s Community Shield game.
SUNDAY 10 You have to imagine that Paul Mason and Jeremy Corbyn had a massive fight over some obviously important point of principle. There is no other way to account for Mason’s continued attacks on the new ultra-left political party Corbyn is said to have formed with Labour defector Zarah Sultana. Mason’s latest sideswipe labels the new Corbyn party as a collective of privately-educated poshos, whereas Starmer’s Labour cabinet, he says, is a cabal of comprehensive-school alumni.
📌 With Paul, Sarah and Stephanie, we drove out to Saltdean for a weird lunch in a beachside cafe that did not offer bread as a side order. Then to the excellently refurbished, and very busy art-deco Lido.
📌 At lunch, Steph told us that Isle of Wight tomatoes are said to be the best in Britain but very few places sell them. Then in the evening at Hove Place we spotted them on the menu.
📌 Palace beat Liverpool in the Community Shield.
MONDAY 11 Half way through the night and half awake, I thought I was dreaming when I heard the sound of Les Dawson’s voice. I wasn’t dreaming…
📌 There are a lot of headlines about discontent among Liverpool players.
📌 An article in the New Statesman names Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood as a rapidly rising star in government for her canny handling of tricky subjects such as prison reform, immigration and foreign criminals.
As the child of migrant parents, who came to the UK from rural Kashmir, she has an authentic outrage over foreign criminals: ‘To be welcomed into this country, as my parents were, is to assume responsibilities as well as rights.’
TUESDAY 12 We’ve started watching The Assassin, starring Keeley Hawes as a “menopausal hitwoman“. It is charmingly stupid but compelling and thrilling. It carries with it a strand of sarcastic humour I suspect might turn some viewers off but which makes me laugh out loud, much to my wife’s irritation.
📌 My wife told me she read a report in which someone brandishing a sign saying “Plasticine Action” was arrested by police.
WEDNESDAY 13 The Big Brain stitchwork is nearing the finish line with a curvy flourish in two shades of brown.
📌 Every day Tortoise Sensemaker arrives with a new atrocity from a government that was not meant to be in the business of atrocities.
Today’s also includes news that half of the 532 people arrested in London on Saturday at a protest in support of Palestine Action were over 60, including a former advisor to King (then Prince) Charles and an 81-year-old with Parkinson’s disease.
And…
In recent weeks several people have been arrested for displaying pro-Palestine messages, without supporting Palestine Action. This includes a man who held up a Private Eye cartoon in Leeds and a woman who held up a sign saying ‘Free Gaza’ in Canterbury.
The New Statesman called it “the radicalisation of grandma”.
📌 In a fabulous reflection on how voting habits have become more and more transactional (based on polling by his pal Peter Kellner) David Aaronovitch urges the nation’s political moderates to find a defining cause (DC) on which they can campaign to beat opponents such as Reform (DC: Immigration) or the Greens (DC: Climate Crisis). My choice has always been the NHS, but others might lean towards Housing, Transport or Energy. The present government has failed to take ownership of those causes.
THURSDAY 14 Michelle asked me to write a short pitch arguing why our studio should have a permanent partnership and representation with the Whitechapel Gallery. It seems obvious to me, but obviously not to art-world elitists who have been gifted the privilege of filling galleries with their own petty obsessions rather than with works that are in and of the community in which they exist.
📌 I learned today that the term ‘Beard of Zeus’ is used to describe a “long, full, and well-maintained beard, often associated with wisdom, maturity, and accomplishment. It’s a symbol of a life well-lived and goals achieved, similar to the mythical Zeus, the king of the gods, who was often depicted with a majestic beard”. And the reason I learned it?
📌 The Daily Mash has a powerful explanation for why A-levels don’t matter, from people who didn’t get any. The best quote is from ‘Simon Cowell’… “…instead of swotting up, try and be the child of a powerful executive. It’ll open up even more doors than a first in PPE from Oxford.”
FRIDAY 15 I had a touching conversation with Mathew (real name Mathieu) yesterday at Headway. I told him I never wear quality clothing in the art studio because it inevitably gets soiled with paint. I cited a cashmere sweater that was accidentally ruined in this way and Mathew said cashmere sweaters reminded him of when he had friends and went out. Nowadays, his disability has robbed him of that life. He said wearing quality clothes is a thing of the past and trying to recover a social life is very difficult.
📌 The seven actors onstage for Goodnight Oscar at the Barbican steered a play about TV celebrity and its skill in rebranding people with complex needs as oddities into a soft virtuoso comedy in a way fans of TV’s The Big Bang Theory will be familiar. The difference is that the mental health of the protagonist in The Big Bang Theory is protected by friendship; in the celebrity TV world of Goodnight Oscar it is exploited mercilessly.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 
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