September 13-18, 2025
SATURDAY 13 One of the remarkable aspects of last night’s performance by the Kanneh-Mason family at the Barbican was the educational content of the music. The Handel was noticeably a Handel, the Schubert likewise. It was as if they were offering an easy-to-grasp starter pack for young people to get into classical music in all its different ways. Yet this wasn’t to boil down the music to its simplest. The Shostakovich and Liszt were as full of angst and mood as they need to be. In fact the Shostakovich was borderline psycho.
📌 Blimey, you learn something every day. And today we learned that beneath the Barbican, a sprawling brutalist complex comprising housing and an arts centre, lies an ancient Jewish cemetery dating back to 1070. Father Jack of St Giles Cripplegate unearthed some dusty old documents, handed them over to the Jewish Square Mile group, who then put together an exhibition of Jewish religion and culture in the City of London in bygone centuries. All in an Anglican church, with organist playing in the background.
📌 I learned a new word. I was thinking about Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy) and disability in film, when I discovered from AI that Ratso was a “deuteragonist”, which is… “the person second in importance to the protagonist in a drama”. I then started to wonder whether deuteragonists get paid a special rate.
SUNDAY 14 A new Banksy on a wall at the Royal Courts of Justice in London is said to be a striking departure for the infamous street artist because rather than making a general small-p political comment about trends in society it refers directly to the persecution of protesters by the law of the land. And as usual, the radical right (including Elon Musk) has managed to grab hold of the wrong end of the stick completely, seeing the image as a declaration that protesters get what they deserve.
📌 There’s a disturbing right-wing intellectual spin being put on the death of Charlie Kirk.
It is a bitter irony that violence claimed the life of someone who dedicated himself to conversation.
📌 In the New World Matthew D’Ancona reports on the opening of the new David Bowie Centre at the V&A East Storehouse. In it D’Ancona reflects on Bowie’s determination to hoard just about everything he did, owned and thought about…
The man whose persona was based upon the distance between rock icon and devout audience has turned his comprehensive archive into a carnival of intimacy and human connection
And…
He intuited that, as digital media became more dominant, contact with physical artefacts – triggers of memory, inspiration of new ideas – would become even more important.
📌 For those of us who grew up determined to be skeptical and fearful, if not cynical, about the capitalist marketing monster, the antics of Taylor Swift are living proof that we wasted our time.
MONDAY 15 World politics might appear to be stumbling along in its old ways, but in fact nations across the globe are looking at subtle ways to swerve around the lunatic unpredictability of Trump’s America and form new power alliances.
The choice now for many US allies is between handing their sovereignty over to Trump, or finding ways to shore it up by other means, while not making an enemy of the US president.
📌 Our neighbour Yvonne’s cat died. She was heartbroken but decided to go to the cat dating agency to get another one. In due course, she adopted Prince, a pure breed, and looked forward to many years of cat-lady bliss. But Prince wasn’t a happy kitty. He hid in cupboards and wailed endlessly and loudly throughout the night. He was obviously unhappy and Yvonne was starting to wonder if he’d be better off with someone else. Reports today say he has started to settle and is roaming around playfully. Fingers crossed this is the start of a beautiful friendship.
📌 Just imagine… Downing Street announces that at 12.30pm, the Prime Minister will address the nation on the subject of his appointing Peter Mandelson to the job of UK ambassador to the US. At 12.32, Keir Starmer steps forward to a wooden lecturn outside 10 Downing Street. It is raining, but he goes for it nevertheless and says something along the lines of… “I took a risk and it blew up in my face. I didn’t realise at the time what a total scumbag he was. I took a risk because the previous government had played Risk with this country’s fortunes for 14 years. They also lost. So now all the cards are on the table, let’s start over, a new deal and see if we can’t at least break even.” Then he stupidly tries to paraphrase Glen Campbell in reference to his sacking of Peter Mandelson by saying, “You gotta know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.”
TUESDAY 16 Woke up in the middle of the night midway through a beautiful radio drama, A Flame In Your Heart, written as poetry, delivered in the form of letters back and forth between a WW2 fighter pilot Len and Land Girl/nurse Katie, a young couple separated by war but whose love for one another deepens daily.
📌 RIP Robert Redford, 89. My mother used to say he was the most handsome man in the world.
WEDNESDAY 17 A report on the CapX site says that Britain could soon face the 20-hour blackouts that afflicted Spain and Portugal back in April.
📌 We finished Coldwater, at the same time checking Liverpool’s progress against Athletico Madrid in the Champions League. Liverpool managed to screw a 3-2 win out of that game and it looks as if ITV intends to screw another series of Coldwater’s occasionally laughable take on the modern psycho-killer drama set in a creepy corner of Scotland, where Ewen Bremner (Spud in Trainspotting) is the resident serial killer.
THURSDAY 18 Yesterday at Stitchers Karen asked me why my wife and I don’t have the same surname. I said we believed the convention of a woman taking her husband’s name seemed ridiculous to us, and anyway not a legal requirement of marriage. So we kept our own surnames. Sue then told us how when she got married she tried to hold on to her own surname “for professional purposes” (architect). Her surname then was Rogers, but her plan to stay a Rogers at work was scuppered when persistent phone calls came in asking for “Susan Pearson”. So she just gave in and used her husband’s surname.
📌 All of the billions in US investment in AI data centres allegedly promised to the UK in the trail of Donald Trump’s state visit will quickly fizzle to nothing, said an expert on the radio, when the investors realise Britain does not have the energy capacity to power the electricity-hungry AI.
📌 The finished version of Sam’s Shoe, complete with blingy metallic stitching on the ankle cuff and clasp, is now safely portfolioed, if that’s a word.
FRIDAY 19 The government is just over one year old. It came to office promising change. The only noticeable change is the speed with which it has entrenched real disappointment in the voting population. The previous government took more than 10 years to embed disillusionment into the public psyche. This one has done it in 15 months. It failed from the start to score a “quick win” that might have persuaded voters to give it the benefit of the doubt. And it has allowed its enemies to seize the initiative. In the Guardian today, a number of commentators describe what’s gone wrong and what needs to be done, the most eloquent and coherent coming from a former Tory minister, Rory Stewart.
📌 Bumped into Georgia on the gates of the Bartholomew Fayre on its first day of opening. She is this year’s event producer. So glad to see her again. Great music and lots of family activity in Smithfield Rotunda, and a guest collage workshop from the Marx Memorial Library.
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