One month as it happened…
SATURDAY 1 Good start to the day…
📌 To Tate Modern to meet our friend Brian, catch up on all the news and take a spin around the superb Nigerian Modernism exhibition, which chimed with the exhibition on Tropical modernism we saw last year at the V&A. The colours were the thing for me.
Later we chatted in the Corner Bar and I realised that “keeping in touch” via social media platforms such as Facebook is illusionary. Things had happened in our friend’s life that could only ever be shared face to face. I felt like I’d learned a life lesson or acquired a new skill in how to determine the truth.
SUNDAY 2 In the preamble to a piece on who might replace Keir Starmer in the event of a leadership challenge, Sam Freedman neatly sums up the PM’s failings: namely an inability to state a clear purpose, a detachment from the mood of wider party, and an inner circle at No10 that is riven with dysfunctionality and factionalism. Sounds a bit like every UK government that ever existed.
📌 Finally, someone has enlightened me on the difference between a command-and-control economy (postwar Britain) and a market-based regulatory economy (post-Thatcher Britain). It explains in a nutshell where everything took a turn for the worst.
What we are left with is a state that is both overwhelmed and overbearing. Governments appear too stretched and incompetent to formulate coherent strategies to address the big problems
📌 Meanwhile, the other Freedman, Lawrence, demolishes Donald Trump’s latest crazy concoction of falsehoods on his supposed intention to resume nuclear testing in the US. Every sentence of his recent statement turned out to be verifiably not true.
📌 We watched all three episodes of the Girl Bands Forever documentary on BBC iPlayer, which was a quiet eye opener about discrimination and the cruel exploitation of women in the music industry and its capacity for swallowing talent wholesale and spitting it out. This was an odd dislocation for two people who met in the 1980s music industry, courted, got married and have stayed married for 37 years. My wife was appalled by the non-inclusion of Girls Aloud in the documentary.
MONDAY 3
📌 The Chair of our local allotments project is an exhibitionist farter. He is not an extrovert exhibitionist farter, who proudly breaks wind with confidence. He deliberately farts then quickly offers an apology, as if the act were a mere mistake. I’d like to think that he expels his excess methane accidentally, but he doesn’t. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Something also suggests to me that farting so extrusively is an offer of friendship.
TUESDAY 4 Once again I have bitten down two of the fingernails on my right hand so severely that I fear infection. A frenzy of washing and daubing with antiseptic is in progress. Fingers crossed they don’t balloon and require antibiotics like last time.
📌 One of the contestants on Pointless admitted that he tells people he likes travelling when in fact what he really likes is going on holiday.
WEDNESDAY 5 Two radio reports this morning showed the government finally getting its message across. Changes to the national curriculum will tilt the system toward education as knowledge + citizenship. Primary and secondary programmes will be better aligned to reduce dislocation. The emphasis on boosting reading skills was the best example. Pupils who graduate from Primary to Secondary schools with poor reading skills do not thrive.
The second report was about the high numbers of young working-age people on long-term sick notes. The new intention, inspired by a report by Sir Charlie Mayfield, a former Chair of John Lewis, is to enable employers to make reasonable adjustments that will bring people experiencing health difficulties back into the workplace.
Employers must be in the lead. Some may resist that message amid tight margins and slow growth. But many already recognise they are carrying the cost of ill-health every day.
Both of these reports downplayed reference to the £cost of making these changes. The will to do it was the emergent theme, the will to change fixed ways not dramatically but with massive long-term potential benefits.
📌 What fun we have in store watching New York’s new Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, in shouting matches with Donald Trump. Mamdani’s success is said to be a triumph for young voters. I will be checking on his progress in meeting his promises to lower the cost of living and public transport, etc. In the moment it feels like Trump’s tide has turned. As in Britain, voters are no better off than they were a year ago. How fast can Mamdani change that for New Yorkers?
📌 Oh it’s a proper joy to witness Jonty Bloom in full rant. Today he attacks City bosses who pay slave wages.
THURSDAY 6 Whenever I make an idle suggestion in the studio and Michelle likes the sound of it, she springs into action and insists the job is done immediately. This isn’t my preferred method of working. Today I stupidly remarked that since buying jewellery for my wife is a nightmare, I will try to make her a ceramic geometric pendant for Christmas. Straight away Michelle had me cutting clay and building designs, when all I really wanted was a cup of tea and a Spotify playlist.
Michelle has now escalated this flurry of activity into a Billy Mann Collection. She has ordered some special waxed string and instructed Brian to create a velvet coated jewellery display unit for Open Studio on December 4.
📌 At a Culture Mile event to celebrate the reopening of the Great Hall at St Bartholemews Hospital I dared to comment to the Liverpudlian tour guide that a shady part of William Hogarth‘s Grand Staircase paint job appears to show someone who looks not a lot unlike William Hogarth, painting with a long stick because he was such a shortarse.
📌 Alan Carr won Celebrity Traitors and I’m still not sure why I bothered to make a note of that happening.
📌 I learned a new word today…
Broligarchy is a neologism and portmanteau combining oligarchy and broism, describing the rule of government by a coterie of extremely wealthy men who are perceived by the public as tech bros. It is also known as tech oligarchy.
FRIDAY 7 There’s a lot of speculation about the Chancellor raising the basic rate of income tax in her upcoming budget. Her opponents say tax the super-rich instead. But she will likely tax the ordinary worker rather than the cunning corporations simply because it is EASIER to do so. The super-rich are not on PAYE. They have highly-paid tax fiddlers to squirrel away their billions in places no one from HMRC can even see.
Labour needs to establish an infrastructure that will allow the government to track modern wealth, such as cracking down on tax havens and working with other countries to set a global minimum tax on the ultra-rich, so that future wealth taxes can be precisely designed without loopholes.
📌 The filming of my lines for the the St Luke’s production of A Christmas Carol (November 21, Garden Room) is done, phew! It was like being in an episode of It’ll Be Alright On The Night, with far more swearing. The director James was pleased and kindly said I performed better than most professional actors. I wore the Dickensian fancy-dress suit I got for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet (with flat cap), in the bleak hope that the audience will be more impressed by my outfit than by my fluffed lines. Kelly said I looked like the Scouser in Peaky Blinders.
SATURDAY 8 I do love the way in Mick Herron’s Zoë Boehm stories, the titular heroine does not dominate but is still forever active in the story. Zoë pops up at certain moments that at first seem a bit convenient to the suspense but are in fact rigorously consequential to the plot. The ensemble of “other people” in Zoë Boehm stories actually move the story more than Zoë does, but it is Zoë’s distinctive personality and voice that pervades the tone of the narrative. It is clever, subtle writing.
📌 Picture of the day…
SUNDAY 9 It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic. An interview in the New Statesman with a former prison inmate describes how, due to staff shortages in Wandsworth Prison, he, the convicted fraudster, was put in charge of the register that monitored the whereabouts of each prisoner at any moment in time (eg, Wally in the exercise yard, Barry in the kitchen, etc).
📌 My wife’s appearance on stage at the Barbican for the annual Symphonic Gospel event was as pleasurable as ever, only minorly diminished by the trio of attention-seeking, hand-waving neo-baptist choristers in front of her.
📌 They could both be dead already for all I know, but Radio 4 Extra’s content at the moment seems to be the sole work of either Simon Brett or Paul Mayhew Archer.
MONDAY 10 There’s been a vicious right-wing culture-war coup at the BBC and the director general has resigned.
TUESDAY 11 I will be fascinated to see how the government handles the BBC coup controversy and Trump’s threat of legal action. It could be a defining moment. Stand up to Trump, protect the admittedly flawed BBC. That sounds like a plan to me, though by the end of the week I could be eating my words.
📌 Van der Valk was on our train back from Whitechapel after the launch of my Royal London Hospital/Headway/Vital Arts project in which I cut a ribbon with a very blunt pair of scissors and was asked lots of questions by various “comms” departments.
WEDNESDAY 12
📌 On the way to Gatwick Airport my wife noticed at London Bridge that she’d accidentally left a bag on a seat at Blackfriars Station. It contained all our cash euros for our holiday in La Palma and all of my wife’s medications for two weeks. The bag was still on the same seat when she returned to Blackfriars asap and we then proceeded to Gatwick with minimal time lost. And, more importantly, no money or drugs lost.
📌 Wearing shorts is prohibited in our hotel in La Palma.
THURSDAY 13 I accidentally carried a Swiss Army knife through security at Gatwick Airport. They detected it but accepted my explanation that it was part of my stitchwork toolkit and did not confiscate it.
📌 Some members of the Gatwick Airport staff refer to pilots as “drivers”.
📌 Our driver stated that Tui has a zero-tolerance of people lying or sleeping on the floor of the plane. We never even knew this was a thing.
📌 The scariest plane journey yet. As we came into land at La Palma, the wind turbulence was so fierce that our “driver” had to pull out of the descent, abort the landing just before we hit the runway, soar skyward and divert the plane to nearby Tenerife. I quite enjoyed this dramatic moment, but my wife was locked in a state of borderline hysteria, clawing at my clothes and gently sobbing on my shoulder.
📌 After four hours stranded at a Tenerife airport terminal the driver told us we would fly to Gran Canaria, stay there overnight and “hopefully” proceed to La Palma tomorrow.
FRIDAY 14 In Gran Canaria the Radisson hotel spa/resort they put us in last night is like a set from the satirical TV show The White Lotus, so vast and zoned that to enjoy it as a single experience is impossible. You could spend 2 weeks just working out where you go to get breakfast (which does at least include a free glass of cava).
📌 If you have read all the three previous books in Mick Herron’s Zoë Boehm series, you will know immediately at the start of book 4, the last in the series (at the moment), why Zoë isn’t dead… Yet.
📌 Screw-ups give birth to screw-ups. So it was at Gran Canaria airport for our short flight to La Palma. A disgruntled mob congregated at an international gate for what was technically an internal flight. The poor staff were overwhelmed but we eventually departed just after 1pm and arrived safely in La Palma half an hour later.
📌 Dining in a package holiday destination should be redefined as refuelling. The saving grace tonight was a selection of cheeses, which we were horrified to find did not include Manchego.
SATURDAY 15 First impressions of Los Cancajos is that it will be even more lovely when all the building work is finished.
📌 I have secretly named one of our fellow hotel guests “Uncle Fester“, to the disapproval of my wife, even though she could not come up with a better name for him.
SUNDAY 16 I dreamt last night that King Charles and Queen Camilla strolled casually, arm in arm, into Casa Pipo, the bar/restaurant we were in for a drink. The grovelling owner welcomed them warmly, but everyone else paid no attention whatsoever. King Charles was tiny, as I remember it.
📌 The wi-fi at our hotel pool is fairly good, so I have decided that on this holiday I will revisit the albums of my youth. Today I’m listening to 10cc. Funny thing is that when I first knew this music 50 years ago, 12-inch vinyl was the format and records inevitably got scratched and prone to jumps (they all belonged to my sister, so I didn’t care). That is not the case with Spotify streaming, so the original plan to spend two weeks walking down memory lane using my ears as feet is not as foolproof as I imagined it would be when I first hatched it. What you do get instead with Spotify is, in this case, an understanding of the huge number of instrumental layers 10cc built their boring muso-music from.
MONDAY 17 In today’s holiday exercise in foraging my deep past I am shocked to learn that I still know every word of The Moody Blues’ 1972 album Seventh Sojourn. This is another of my sister’s vinyl 12-inch albums I listened to incessantly as a teenager. One verse from the song Lost In A Lost World was especially memorable
Some of them are living an illusion
Bounded by the darkness of their minds
In their eyes, it’s nation against nation against nation
With racial pride, sad hearts they hide
Thinking only of themselves
They shun the light (Shun the light)
They think they’re right (Think they’re right)
Living in their empty shells
I never really got into poetry as a youth, mainly because I had my sister’s album collection to deliver all the poetry any young man could ever need. Brief flirtations at school with the works of Ted Hughes, RS Thomas and Wilfred Owen were soon supplanted by the wordplay of Lennon/McCartney, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Even her stash of Motown Chartbusters albums delivered the goods.
📌 Revisiting Santa Cruz de La Palma.
But the climax of the day came later, back in our hotel lounge hearing a “typical” Spanish rendition of Tie A Yellow Ribbon from a dubious character called Joaquin Quintero.
“Stay on the bus, forget about us“…
TUESDAY 18
📌 Today’s nominated memory-lane musical artist is Paul Simon. The Paul Simon Songbook, his very first album before Simon & Garfunkel, is a source of dispute in my family. My sister claims that the 12-inch vinyl version I think of as my own, actually belongs to her. I say she is lying about that, refuse to meet her hectoring requests for repatriation and cling on stubbornly to my claim of ownership.
The album is notable for other reasons. Many of it songs were to feature later on various Simon & Garfunkel albums (tracks include The Sound Of Silence, A Most Peculiar Man, Kathy’s Song), but a few others hint at Paul Simon’s early immersion in the folk protest song (notably He Was My Brother, A Church Is Burning, The Side Of A Hill) – songs he has rarely ever performed since.
It is a pity when musicians, especially rich and privileged ones such as Paul Simon, choose to play down/disown the purity of these early works and the sentiments and messages they carried at the time. It’s as if their elevated status inflicts some sort of creative constipation.
WEDNESDAY 19 I’m counting the days before Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney falls on his sword. That’s probably the only way the PM can pull off a proper government “reset”, presuming he actually knows what he wants to reset, which might not be the case.
📌 Fatigued by news of Keir Starmer’s failings and the imminent implosion of AI, I found something a whole lot more interesting…
Scientists have discovered how parasitic ants use chemical warfare to engineer matricidal coups.
📌 We got the bus into town, then another one to the south of the island, which looked quite dull, so we came straight back to Santa Cruz.
📌 One of the big shocks that came from today’s memory-lane holiday music listening project is that Joe Jackson is British and not American. I think I only ever bought his album I’m The Man because of its cover design and the fact that it had the single It’s Different For Girls. Come to think of it, I might not even have bought it. I probably borrowed it from my mate Dave and taped it, like I did with a lot of albums back then. Dave had a job, I didn’t.
THURSDAY 20 It looks like the number-crunchers at the ONS (Office for National Statistics) have been screwing up on data collection and that net migration to the UK is actually falling rather than rising, as is popularly imagined.
📌 Michelle sent me a photo of my ceramic pendant collection after a first firing in the kiln. I never imagined any of them would survive. I will glaze them when we get back next week.
📌 We spent the day exploring by bus the precipitous uplands of the northeast of the island, where all the exposed volcanic rock outcrops remind you that La Palma, in common with all the other Canary islands, is in fact an ancient tectonic pustule.
📌 My wife is appalled by the holidaymakers at hotel buffet dining sessions who cram together random foodstuffs (pasta, fish, roast meat, cheese, potatoes, etc) onto a single plate.
📌 In case it rained continuously while we were on holiday, my wife downloaded several TV mini-series. The first, Trespasses, based on the novel by Louise Kennedy, we have finished already, and as an inter-faith love story consumed by the Troubles in Belfast, it touches in many ways that defy explanation. The second mini-series, House of Guinness we’ve watched only the first episode and it already looks like Peaky Blinders meets Succession. My wife fell asleep (too much wine) half way through Episode 1, so we had to watch it again. Then we started Episode 2 and she fell asleep during that, too (too much wine again), so we now have to watch that again.
FRIDAY 21
📌 My wife is cruelly disdainful of my imitation of the phrase “Pròxima parada: Centro Cancajos” (next stop, central Cancajos) uttered by the woman on the bus’s speaker system.
📌 The deterioration of my hips means serious walking is a thing of the past. But the spirit of adventure remains, and La Palma’s buses are surprisingly nimble (courtesy of fearless drivers) on the many hairpin bends that litter this beautifully craggy landscape. Today we did a pretty comprehensive exploration of the top of the island: first West to Los Llanos, then North to Puntagorda, over East to Barlovento, then back South to Santa Cruz.
SATURDAY 22 The 1977 Cheap Trick album In Color (And in Black And White) reminds me that I did once have an interest in rock guitar bands, though I think the initial attraction of this album was once again a single, I Want You To Want Me. And that track is quite poppy. Again and again I seem to know all the words to every song on the album. The band also had two intriguing characters in the form of guitarist Rick Nielsen and drummer Bun E Carlos.
📌 I’m beginning to think Saturday’s Waffles are the easiest to score the maximum 5 swaps remaining.
📌 Another great line from Mick Herron in Smoke & Whispers, the fourth book in the Zoë Boehm series. A character is drunkenly reflecting on his eight-month old profoundly disabled child…
Anything can seem like a pleasure, if you compare it to a life utterly bereft of possibility.
📌 About 30 years ago I paid an extravagant sum for a pair of quality deck shoes from a boating shop in Brighton. Amazingly, I still have them and they still fit me. They have become especially useful on this holiday because as rainy weather set in today, my feet were glued securely to the ground.
SUNDAY 23 Elton John’s 1970 album Elton John has amazingly never been off my playlist from the day I first heard it more than 50 years ago. Those familiar only with his flamboyant later work will barely recognise this gentle bluesy singer-songwriter. At times his voice is so bluesy it overtakes Mick Jagger. This is an album full of sadness and reflection, held together by the ever-present piano and subtle orchestral arrangements, though the Spotify Deluxe version adds a curious set of demo versions of the tracks in which all the detail outside of voice and piano are missing.
📌 The surf was up today so my plan to go for a swim in the Atlantic was hastily abandoned. The last time I swam in this tempestuous ocean was probably about 40 years ago, at Westward Ho!
MONDAY 24 Two Irish journalists have written a book in the hope that a referendum on the unification of Ireland does not slip into the trap the UK fell into with the Brexit vote, where a simple yes/no question resulted in a slim result but with devastating consequences because no one bothered to state exactly the full ramifications of voting either way. The authors hope to start a national, balanced interrogation of what a united Ireland might look like and how it would function.
We do not want a referendum on a thumbs-up-thumbs-down, vague proposition whose consequences have not been spelled out because then you find yourself with an extraordinarily divided society where people who have lost are not reconciled to losing and the people who have won don’t know quite what it is that they have won.
TUESDAY 25 It will be interesting to see what Chancellor Rachel Reeves puts into this week’s budget. What Labour Party members themselves would like to see is increased taxes on gambling and bank profits. Giving local authorities the power to levy a tourism tax is also popular. They might get these things, but they will likely also get things they don’t like so much.
📌 Listening again to Queen’s 1974 album Sheer Heart Attack not only made me nostalgic for Freddie Mercury’s beautifully daring wordplay but reminded me that the vinyl albums of my past were often a game of two halves. Side 1 of Sheer Heart Attack has all of my early Queen favourites (Brighton Rock, Killer Queen, Now I’m Here, Lily Of The Valley), but I never quite got into Side 2. Even that long ago the guitar of Brian May and the piano and vocals of Freddie Mercury were a marriage made in heaven, and remain so to this day.
📌 Images from an evening in Santa Cruz include the island’s designated spaces for copulating wheelchair users, a dubious character from the Traitors Christmas special and a plant pot my wife says gives kitsch a bad name.
WEDNESDAY 26 Rafael Behr reckons that until the government gets a deal from the EU that effectively reverses Brexit, Britain’s economic plight will remain dire. He also urges the government to start talking honestly about this, and with a stated sense of purpose.
The prime minister and the chancellor are uncannily alike in their communicative deficiency, stilted and reticent in a way that pushes audiences away instead of drawing them in.
📌 Another of my sister’s vinyl albums I feasted on as a youth was Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks (1975). It was the moment I finally gave in and accepted Dylan’s genius as a songwriting storyteller. I wasn’t surprised when he won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. My favourite track is undoubtedly Tangled Up In Blue and the bonus of listening to it now all these years later on Spotify is that bootleg and unreleased versions of all the tracks show how Dylan liked to play with his own songs, often even changing the lyrics. For example, the vinyl album version of Tangled Up In Blue is sung in the first person…
Early one morning the sun was shining/ I was laying in bed/ wondering if she’d changed at all/ if her hair was still red
Whereas the Spotify bootleg version starts in the third person…
Early one morning the sun was shining/ he was laying in bed, etc
But then switches back later to the first person…
She was working in a topless place/I stopped in for a beer/ I just kept looking at the side of her face/ in the spotlight so clear
📌 RIP Jack Barron, age unknown. Neil posted on Facebook that he was a goner. Lots of nice memories in the Comments. I posted one about Jack’s car (white Triumph Stag) and Blixa Bargeld. His real name was Nick. He got his writing name from the title of a science-fiction novel.
THURSDAY 27
📌 The green bag my wife left on a bench at Blackfriars station right at the beginning of our holiday became a point of stress at the end of the holiday when she asked me if I had my wallet and house keys in preparation for our return to the UK. I didn’t have them, and I had forgotten to check I had them. In a late panic search they were found to have been stored in the infamous green bag. My wife graciously accepted 80% of the responsibility for this mishap. She wanted 70%, but I beat her up to 80%.
FRIDAY 28
This story is being cast as yet another example of the government backtracking on its election promises. Two things come to mind. First, I’m not sure voters are as hung up on election promises as political commentators are. The Labour government was elected overwhelmingly in order solely to get the previous Conservative one out. Second, a minister on the radio this morning did not emphasise far enough that the policy change was done after intense wrangling with both business and trades union leaders. In other words, two traditional enemies are complicit in a compromise outcome.
📌 To Milton Court for an orchestral celebration of 50 Years of Bohemian Rhapsody. The words were missing, but they are always in your head.
SATURDAY 29 It would be foolish to join the badmouthing brigade over Rachel Reeves’s Budget, says Jonty Bloom. It was cunning, and sensibly cunning, and in the long run it could prove to be a genuine turning point for the nation’s economic fortunes. Even though Reeves (and by implication Starmer) might have been ousted from their jobs by the time the turn is complete.
📌 We had our first meal from this year’s Wetherspoons Festive Menu. My wife was unhappy that the blue-cheese dip that came with the burgers has this year been replaced by a Brie dip.
📌 Overheard in Wetherspoons: the odds against West Ham beating Liverpool tomorrow are 4-1.
SUNDAY 30 My sister sent me a message saying she had “just realised that you look like John Travolta”. I was concerned. Which version of Travolta did she mean? Was it this one, I wondered…
Or was it from another time, when John Travolta was good looking? Yes, she replied, it was more like Travolta circa Get Shorty, which I reckoned was OK. Then she narrowed down this dubious comparison to the fact that Travolta and I share similar “psycho blue eyes”.
📌 Had a good laugh with Tina Crawford at the Golden Lane Festive market. And discovered that Martha’s parents live in El Médano.
📌 My wife and I were deeply appalled to be stumped in Squaredle by the word “Lollygag”. Deeply, deeply appalled at the inclusion of such a non-word.
📌 Liverpool beat West Ham 2-0.
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