‘I bumped into Big Graham at the doctor’s and he told me that Ralph is still a hopeless junkie…’
WEDNESDAY 1 The Richard Osman book The Last Devil To Die offers a top tip on how to enjoy New Year’s Eve, usher in a fresh start for the next 12 months and still be in bed by 10pm. One of the residents of Osman’s fictional Coopers Chase retirement village manages to hook up the communal TV to a Turkish station, which is celebrating the new year three hours ahead of the UK. All the singing, dancing, drinking, eating and fireworks go off as normal, but in a timescale that allows the Coopers Chase partygoers to be slumbering contentedly by midnight.
📌 In his big speech yesterday Keir Starmer pitched himself directly against Nigel Farage as the best person to be UK prime minister. According to polling taken afterwards his naming a common enemy in “racist” Farage appears to have worked, notably among the voters he had already lost to the Greens and the LibDems.
I think it’s a mistake to pretend this isn’t the fight of our times.
📌 The Zidane/Materazzi stitchwork is finished. It’s a bit grubby, but I’m just glad to have done with it, and it’s good enough for the archive.
📌 To Milton Court to see the snooty orchestral Britten Sinfonia, only because of a guest appearance on piano by the amazing Jeneba Kenneh-Mason. A load of the musicians piled into the pub (the Two Brewers) afterwards. The Mozart and Schuberts were too long and ultimately tedious, but the modern works by Elena Kats-Chernin’s and Robin Haigh were exciting.
THURSDAY 2
📌 I’ve not had a top score in Waffle for several weeks…
FRIDAY 3
📌 I bumped into Big Graham at the doctor’s and on the walk back he told me that Ralph is still a hopeless junkie and that Graham has given up on him. He said also he’d been given some back pay on his benefits. He spent most of it on a new kitchen and the rest “paying for my funeral”.
📌 At the St Luke’s Dickens workshops I was kippered up by Holly and James (the actor/writer running the A Christmas Carol workshops) into being the play’s Narrator, which I will be filmed doing before the big performance on November 21, when I will be on holiday on the island of La Palma. My intention is to do it in a stereotypical Liverpudlian street-urchin accent, but James might object. If he does I will flounce out in a fit of pique proclaiming “How can I possibly work like this!?”
SATURDAY 4 Simple running stitch using basic Sashiko patterns is a very comforting way to explore colour combinations.
📌 The Benugo cafe at Waterloo station is infested with pigeons that crawl around your feet while you sip your hot beverage.
📌 Trains to Salisbury have been cancelled because a tree has fallen somewhere on the line. It reminded me of a time in the past when the removal of this kind of obstacle might have been a one-off employment opportunity for local muscle with time on their hands.
📌 Cliff, one of the guys in the Dickens Drama group at St Luke’s, told me that his real name is Heathcliff. He got really annoyed and went into a huff when Bridge(t) insisted on telling him exactly how to bid a jovial happy Christmas to his uncle, Scrooge.
SUNDAY 5 In Magdelan House, Winchester, possibly for the last time (a sale is in progress), Liz and Bill told us that they always read the bad reviews of holidays before the good ones. In one of them, a man had requested a balcony facing the sea then later complained that the sound of the ocean waves kept him awake.
📌 On a quiz trail around Southsea we got the idea that Nelson and Charles I are a pretty big deal around here…
MONDAY 6 A day trip to Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard included a boat trip around the harbour to check out several warships, an exhibition of noteworthy women mariners and a close look at the ancient vessels HMS Victory and the Mary Rose.
TUESDAY 7 I must be getting properly old because the first thing I now do after waking up in the morning is not to check the news headlines but to finish the word game I started before falling asleep.
WEDNESDAY 8 Jonty Bloom reckons the Conservative Party is about to be made extinct by our discredited First Past The Post voting system. One poll estimates that in a snap general election the Tories would win just 25 seats. At the weekend in Portsmouth Sue told how Tory grand dame Penny Mordaunt was surprisingly unseated from her Portsmouth North constituency at the June 2024 election by Labour opponent Amanda Martin.
📌 As I sat in Prêt having a cup of tea after my flu jab, either side of me sat two muscular young building workers, both speaking in English with European accents into their phones while eating and drinking. One of them was even offering instructions to someone on how to install a toilet by midday (it is 10.30am).
THURSDAY 9
📌 The third series of Blue Lights really is an exceptionally good blend of cop show and intelligence thriller. I might be writing that because we recently visited Belfast and got a palpable sense of the menace ordinary people live with. The acting in Blue Lights is superlative.
FRIDAY 10 It’s always nice to listen to political opponents bicker over the details of a particular policy. The size and role of the state in everyday lives is a favourite, as is the fight between the responsibilities of the individual versus the responsibilities of “society”. At the recent Conservative Party conference, leader Kemi Badenoch (aka, Bad Enoch) claimed that if the Tories win the next election, among a whole series of potty policies they will introduce is the abolition of Stamp Duty. Jonty Bloom hits back first with a deceptive jab…
Lots of economists and other experts dislike Stamp Duty on property sales because it is a tax on moving house, and we should be encouraging people to move house.
…then with the sucker punch that cuts through every detail of why the abolition of Stamp Duty would be economic suicide…
The policy will do nothing but push up house prices and give huge tax cuts to the wealthy.
📌 It’s the time of the year when I start to stress out on what to buy my wife for Christmas. I thought we’d nailed this problem a while ago with the agreement that we will buy each other “experiences”. The experience I bought for my wife’s birthday in August (a voucher for a cheese feast on a canal boat) has still not been used. Nor has the one I bought her last Christmas (a guided walk). Small items that demonstrate thoughtfulness are still expected, so I will start today. In the past these have included 48 bags of Hula Hoops and a jar of Marmite-flavoured peanut butter.
📌 At the Dickens Drama rehearsal I tried in vain to wriggle out of my assigned role of Narrator (basically Charles Dickens himself) in A Christmas Carol. I was however relieved to find that all I have to do is read one short paragraph in all of the five ultra-redacted scenes. I have permission to do this in a hardened version of my own accent, so I guess the world should probably get ready for its first taste of Dickens doing “deez, dem and doze”. I think also that Hayley from the Dickens Museum has embraced my theory that Scrooge and Marley were more than business “partners”.
SATURDAY 11 I do wish Sam would do more drawings from her imagination. She does them so rarely, and feels she’s crossing some kind of line when she does them.
📌 My wife was alarmed to hear me speaking in the middle of the night. “Help me, I’m dying!” I am reported to have said.
📌 The Rotunda garden is looking especially colourful.
SUNDAY 12 My wife’s support for the Arsenal women’s team was short-lived. Today, in their game against Brighton & Hove Albion, she started supporting Brighton, but then momentarily had second thoughts when it was revealed by the commentators that Brighton do not play their home games at the Amex Stadium in Brighton but at the Broadfield Stadium in Crawley, which is 35 miles from Brighton. Arsenal won 1-0.
📌 RIP Diane Keaton, aka Annie Hall, 79. We searched the streaming services for it but couldn’t find it. My wife theorised that it was because Woody Allen has been cancelled.
MONDAY 13 I’m much enjoying Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series in audiobooks from Borrowbox. I once tried reading a print version but became exasperated by its tedious prose style. In audio, however, the passivity of the “reading” experience renders the tedious prose into a charming “voice”. Which in the case of all the Thursday Murder Club books is supplied by Fiona Shaw.
📌 According to Jonty Bloom the government is squandering billions in national income by only charging small businesses 40% of the tax they should be paying. He also points out that the government saves vastly more money by not telling people which benefits they are entitled to than it does from chasing down benefit fraudsters.
TUESDAY 14 A news story on the radio said that some organisation had stated that Britain’s economy is the second-fastest growing in the world. My ears tingled with skepticism, but if the story were in fact true, how will we all ever get used to our country being a success rather than a failure? We’ve lived (comparatively) with the bad times for so long, I’m not sure I’d recognise the good times even if they were staring me in the face.
📌 Buried near the bottom of today’s Sensemaker is news of a quiet revolution that will not be finished for 30 years. Boomers are slowly dying off and bequeathing their money and property to their Millennial grandchildren. The result is that much of the new house-buying is by this new monied class, a trend estate agents have been quick to pick up on.
📌 Trump may be strutting the world stage demanding a Nobel Peace Prize, but…
Maintaining order in post-war Gaza carries risks, especially when Israel remains opposed to a two-state solution. If their aspirations are thwarted, Gazans may come to resent Arab peacekeepers as an occupying force which is doing Israel’s dirty work.
WEDNESDAY 15 Rafael Behr has some thoughtful reflections on the lessons Keir Starmer might learn from the desperate political plight of French president Emmanuel Macron.
📌 For the second time in recent history I cut my toenails in the bathroom but forgot to hoover up the clippings from the vinyl flooring.
THURSDAY 16 The physio says I probably have tennis elbow but will schedule an x-ray to make sure nothing “bony” has happened with my right elbow.
📌 To the V&A for a lunchtime lecture from Ekta Kaul and her life’s journey in stitch from India to London.
FRIDAY 17 There’s a “wall of worry” that a new financial crash is on the way.
📌 The Dickens Drama group at St Luke’s resumed with a full read-through and some conversation about each character’s motivation. James the tutor/director spent some time trying to persuade Mrs Cratchit to be more angry with Scrooge than merely disappointed. English, let alone Dickens English, is not a first language for most of the group, and literacy levels vary enormously, which makes the project all the more interesting. My role as Narrator is at the moment quite clumsy because the Narrator does not have another character to play off. I will work this week on creating an imaginary Listener to which I will offer my spoken links.
📌 Chris’s Kingsland High Street collage exhibition at the weird church in Hackney was awesome. It comes at the end of his artistic residency and it’s a pity the collection will now be dismantled. It deserves to be in a museum somewhere as a snapshot in history, a moment in time.
SATURDAY 18 Prince Andrew is the media gift that just keeps on giving.
📌 In the Conversation there’s a fascinating essay on the psychology at work on the TV game show The Traitors, arguing that what happens with 20 people and a film crew in and around a remote Scottish castle is a mirror of the lies, deceit and petty rivalries that take place in all of our everyday lives.
📌 A UBI (Universal Basic Income) scheme in Ireland started during Lockdown to protect those working in the creative industries is to be made permanent. It is said that for every €1 of state subsidy to artists, the payback was €1.39.
📌 Mick Herron’s Zoë Boehm books are full of curious little phrases that could mean something or nothing depending on your state of mind. And yet the mind that really matters is Zoë’s, and she is the one pondering phrases such as…
Survival was a lifetime project, and bound to fail in the long run.
…Which almost amounts to a philosophy.
SUNDAY 19 More and more often the conversation among local friends and neighbours eventually comes round to the doctors in our GP surgery. We all have our favourites and we all dread being sent to the miserable phlebotomist for a blood test. Bad blood-test puncture bruises are each a story waiting to be told about the casual brutality inflicted.
MONDAY 20 The Socialist Worker commonly refers to Prince Andrew as the lowercase “paedophile prince”.
Prince Andrew once claimed to be too “honourable for his own good”. But he represents the sense of entitlement of the “Droit de Seigneur” – the right of feudal lords to rape peasant women on their wedding night.
Fascinating also is Socialist Worker‘s unflinching description of the Royal Family as a “grooming gang”.
📌 Waffle announces that it is World Statistics Day with the claim that 92% of all statistics are made up. If they were all made up of verifiable data, I’m not sure that is a problem. If the remaining 8% are totally fictitious and get a disproportionate amount of attention, then that could be/is a problem.
📌 Doing stitchworks of Sam’s drawings always involves a surprise discovery embedded in the complex detail she excels at.
TUESDAY 21 I don’t have very many lines as the Narrator in the St Luke’s potted version of A Christmas Carol. First I say something confirming that Scrooge is a cold, heartless and perpetually miserable old duffer. Then I have lines relating to his youthful courtship with Belle and how he squandered his chances of real love. At the end I announce his total transformation into a regular human being. Not many lines at all, but learning them off by heart is starting to feel like an uphill struggle. I don’t know how actors do it.
Oh he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, was Scrooge. A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner, to be sure! Secret, self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
📌 The “wall of worry” that a new financial crisis is on the way just got a bit higher.
📌 Carmel sent over pictures of the Royal London Hospital day-room makeovers, which are nearly finished. All of the display elements were made in workshops with brain-injury patients.
WEDNESDAY 22 Andrew Marr is stepping down as political editor of the New Statesman. His articles are one of the reasons I recently revived my subscription. His final piece is a “we are where we are” story about Keir Starmer, the hope he claimed to be offering the nation when elected and the claggy political bog he has become mired in. There is a sadness about Marr’s final reckoning, that all of the hope of a progressive future is evaporating too quickly. But there’s also a sense of foreboding, that things might be on the cusp of going badly wrong.
📌 Another stitchwork of a Sam drawing is finished. I never tire of stitching her crazy work.
THURSDAY 23 The German company that made the removals lift used by the Louvre robbers is using the daring heist in adverts illustrating the brilliance of their product.
📌 Islington Museum is doing trials of late-night opening for community groups to enjoy the museum’s rich content after work. We went with St Luke’s to see the permanent collection plus a new exhibition of community art projects. My favourite was an archive video about Islington’s Victorian music halls.
FRIDAY 24 Interesting to see two examples of counter-spin on recent political events. The win for Plaid Cymru in a Welsh by-election is being parlayed as a defeat for Labour but an even bigger defeat for Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK, who came second. And in the controversy around the inquiry into grooming gangs, the resignation of four survivors from the panel and their demand for safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to resign is countered by the announcement that five survivors will only stay on the panel if Phillips continues in post.
📌 I really don’t like the word “outage”. I don’t much like the word “droughtflation” either, but can live with it for the time being, what with things the way they are, etc.
📌 At the Dickens Drama workshop at St Luke’s the director James started rewriting Dickens, which came as a relief because I was itching to rewrite my own lines to make them easier to deliver.
📌 Wendy & Peter Pan at the Barbican was quite hammy, a bit pyrotechnic panto and annoyingly graced with an audience overpopulated by privileged children and their smug parents. When my wife asked me earlier this week if I’d ever read Peter Pan I told her no, it was too middle class and I was more of a Treasure Island kind of child. There was a curious moment in the second half of the play in which I suspected Peter became a special-needs case, possibly autistic with signs of ADHD.
SATURDAY 25 There’s a cracking short essay in the Guardian from a history boffin about the politics of France and its apparent descent from a supposedly united nation to a supposedly divided one. Note the use of the word SUPPOSEDLY because the argument for all the gloomsters and doomsters is that France has been here before and came through stronger and fitter, etc. So buck up and remonte tes chaussettes is the message.
Diagnosing national decline and blaming it on a kind of pervasive moral rot is practically a French national sport.
📌 Our neighbour Sue was part of a panel discussion about Housing in the City of London at the prestigious London Centre. It is an impressive exhibition and conference space so we were surprised that the microphone they passed around for the audience to question panelists did not work. The one used by the Chair and panelists did, but even then when Sue came to speak her soft voice was too quiet.
📌 We always forget that the air conditioning in our local Nando’s next to the booth seats blows cold air down your neck. We asked this time to move and pledged to remember not to make the same mistake next time.
📌 Liverpool lost again.
SUNDAY 26 In the Observer the economics grandee Will Hutton describes something known in business circles as “creative destruction”. I like the sound of it. At a conference recently I advanced the idea of “quiet disruption” in the hope that a group conversation might follow. It didn’t. “Creative destruction”, says Hutton, is the supposed mechanism by which old, established businesses with their fixed practices are allowed to fail so that newer, brighter, more forward thinking enterprises can flourish. The problem, he says, is that as soon as bright, new, go-ahead enterprises get created (and Britain has plenty) they are sold to overseas investors, mainly American. That, claims Hutton, is why Britain is stuck in a productivity hell-hole.
MONDAY 27 I tried to video record myself doing the lines I’m meant to deliver for the St Luke’s performance of A Christmas Carol. It was excruciating and made me want to crawl under a rock and hide until it’s all over.
TUESDAY 28 My audiobook diet at the moment is plenty of helpings of cozy crime. Having finished the Richard Osman Thursday Murder Club series, I graduated to his new series, We Solve Murders, the first of which introduces the characters of Amy and her ex-cop father-in-law Steve, who likes nothing more than a pint and a pub quiz but somehow ends up sharing space with international hitmen and money smugglers.
📌 In an attempt to learn the lines I’ve been given for the St Luke’s version of A Christmas Carol (clue: most of the parts, including Scrooge, are played by women), for some reason I’ve been trying them in a bad Welsh accent.
Scrooge saw himself. A man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years, but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.
WEDNESDAY 29 Jonty Bloom reckons the clue to Britain’s poor economic performance is hidden in plain sight, but now it has been identified by the World Trade Association from the banks of Lake Geneva. It’s Brexit and the exports lost as a result. And until whichever political party is in power breaks with stubborn denial and finds a way to rejoin the Single Market, nothing will change and the depressing grind of economic stagnation will continue.
📌 It’s World Stroke Day reports the Stroke Association, adding that in the UK only 35% of stroke survivors get a medical review 6 months after leaving hospital. It seems the kind of aftercare I got, and continue to get 13 years later, is now history.
📌 At last the national media has caught on to the cowboy approach of our local council to the maintenance and repair of the architectural landmark Golden Lane Estate, a model of civilised high-density housing.
📌 Last night Dawn went on a harrowing patrol of the Fleet Street/Chancery Lane area as a volunteer to record the number of rough sleepers on the streets and to get information about their circumstances. She said some of them had their spots carefully organised and were happy to answer questions. Some even looked prepped to go to work the next day. Others had obviously bedded down for the night more randomly in a sheltered or hidden corner, defensive and resentful of any intrusion, regardless of its good intentions. Dawn got home at 3am with her eyes wide open and filled with tears.
THURSDAY 30 It’s always a pleasure to start the day with a “Beard of Zeus“…
📌 Headway members have been busy making ceramic angels for Christmas…
📌 To Barbican Cinema 3 for the documentary Kenny Dalglish. My dad used to say that the clue to King Kenny’s footballing genius was that “he stuck his arse out and backed into defenders”.
FRIDAY 31
📌 The New Statesman has an article by David Lammy cheerleading for the Starmer project and claiming to know how Nigel Farage’s popularity can be reversed. But what I liked most about the piece is the Ralph Steadman portrait used to illustrate it.
📌 The halls of the ancient guilds are always good places to remind yourself of the obscene wealth of the City of London and the cultural value it places on stuffy tradition, pomp and gold paint. At the Plaisterer’s Hall we saw an exhibition of wood turners.
📌 Harshita dropped off her Golden Lane pictorial composite stitchwork, which I might frame instead of turning into a tote bag. It made me want to start a collection of local pieces to exhibit. And it made me want to stitch some of my own.
📌 My wife tells me that the comedy duo Mitchell & Webb have done a TV parody of TV’s beloved The Repair Shop called The Weeping Shed.
📌 Ruth, the physio at my doctor’s surgery, sent me some exercises for my tennis elbow, a YouTube video made by the British Elbow & Shoulder Society. I’d like to think that every country in the world had an Elbow & Shoulder Society, but my guess is they don’t.
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