One month as it happened…
WEDNESDAY 1 You need to be careful that anything you report on April 1 is not an elaborate joke. But a New Statesman story that the revived London Routemaster buses introduced by Boris Johnson when he was Mayor are to be phased out sounds plausible enough. The report lists all the faults and shortcomings of these expensive and inefficient vehicles, but also hides a neat idea. That Britain could revive its economic fortunes by inventing, designing and manufacturing the world’s best electric buses.
📌 After breakfast in The Quarter we strolled the area around the University and took in a couple of recommended Knowledge Quarter museums. First was the Garstang Museum of Archaeology, then on to the truly fabulous Victoria Gallery & Museum.
📌 Every week Sam comes up with a drawing of a new creepy-crawly.
📌 We got to shake hands with the actor Matthew Kelly (Estragon) after tonight’s performance of Waiting For Godot at the Liverpool Everyman. He wasn’t a happy man because his co-star in the play George Costigan (Vladimir) had been taken ill and he’d struggled through the show with an inexperienced understudy.
THURSDAY 2 There’s a story in the Guardian saying that some women are using vaginal oestrogen cream on their faces in the belief that it banishes wrinkles. I didn’t read the full story because I was distracted by the idea of how this discovery came about. Was it an accident? Did someone use the wrong cream by mistake one night and woke up with the complexion of a child? I’d like to think so. One of our friends once confessed on Facebook to accidentally brushing her teeth with depilatory cream and spraying her armpits with hairspray.
📌 The ugly word “outage” really gets on my nerves.
📌 We got a message from Mike saying George hopes to be back on stage as Vladimir for the final night of Godot in Liverpool tomorrow. We were beginning to speculate that we’d seen his last ever stage performance.
FRIDAY 3 Of all the disability writers I have sampled in my years of disability, Lucy Webster is one I rarely find tiresome.
📌 There is a narrative mood around Trump’s war with Iran that says he is lost for an answer as to how he can accept that he has been outwitted by Iran. He might get mad about it, but Simon Jenkins in the Guardian suggests that meanwhile the rest of the world should just try to buckle up, step back and cautiously sit out his storm of disruption. His destructive tendencies are anyway about to be choked at the November midterm elections, at which even his great allies will start to desert him. So let the baby have his tantrum in the secure knowledge that the damage is limited. Not a great theory if you have been one of his hissy-fit victims, be you in Minneapolis or Tehran.
📌 The new stitchwork is a real fish, on which I have painted red lips and fingernails. So I guess it is an imaginary fish.
📌 Saw a fabulous clip of David Byrne leading a gospel congregation in a version of David Bowie’s Heroes.
SATURDAY 4 The Guardian has a story about the most scandalous photographs to “shock the world”. Among them is one of Rolling Stone Bill Wyman marrying child-bride Mandy Smith in 1989. The marriage lasted less than two years. The article carried the additional information that in 1993 Wyman’s 30-year-old son from a previous marriage married Smith’s mother, then 46, at the time making Mandy Smith her own step-grandfather’s ex-wife.
📌 Another crushing defeat for Liverpool leaves me wondering how long the owners will stay loyal to Arne Slot. An exit from the Champions League would be a good excuse for them to act.
📌 My new audiobook on Libby is a superb reimagining of George Orwell’s 1984 from the point of view of Winston’s conspirator and lover Julia. 1984 Julia allows us to see Orwell’s 1984 in a very different light, and oppressive totalitarianism in a way that more accurately resembles its modern incarnation.
SUNDAY 5 On Easter Sunday the New Statesman has a report claiming that young people are (sort of) flocking to Christianity like never before.
There is a desire for a framework that offers moral clarity and places limits on the self.
MONDAY 6 The first of this season’s crops have gone into the allotment box. They are garlic chives, regular chives, spring onion and radishes. The tomatoes need a few more days indoors to harden, and the experimental broccoli will stay in pots until I can be sure it won’t be a waste of space. We already have rosemary and thyme from last year, and the box next to ours has plenty of sage, which we have permission to use.
📌 Earlier in the week we started watching a Jo Nesbø Harry Hole series on Netflix. It was in Norwegian with English subtitles. The plot was twisty and I got subtitle fatigue. Then we discovered a button on Netflix that gave us a version dubbed into American-English. Thankfully there is very little lag in speech patterns between Norwegian and English.
TUESDAY 7 The political number-cruncher Peter Kellner advises any voters in Scotland who desperately want independence to vote not for the SNP but for the Greens.
📌 A bunch of local residents gathered outside the estate’s leisure centre to protest at its closure by the company that runs it, Fusion, who have gone bankrupt. I can’t say I will be sad to see the back of Fusion (they were beyond hopeless), but many residents fear that the closure will be permanent and the gym, swimming pool, tennis and badminton courts, etc, will fall into dereliction and abandonment.
WEDNESDAY 8 Don’t expect whoever eventually replaces Donald Trump as US president to turn the clock back, says Rafael Behr. The European democracies need to stand together, without American security. Trump’s reign of tyranny has in any case left America with its own identity crisis. It can’t even claim to be a democracy any longer.
There is now deadlock in the struggle between a president who would be king and a constitution drafted in repudiation of monarchy.
📌 The Apollo lunar missions of my youth captured my imagination in so many amazing ways. So it is I suppose a reflection of age that the Artemis II mission has captured my attention mainly for its busted toilet.
📌 Very embarrassingly I have been made the centrepiece of the video to promote the studio’s upcoming exhibition at The Art House with Acrylicize.
📌 We’ve started watching The Pitt on TV, which looks like a resurrection of ER, which is quite a medical feat. It is shot in what resembles real time (“8am-9am, 10am-11am”, etc), so we still have several hours of hospital stuff (terminally-ill patients, health politics, stolen ambulances, amputations, scalpels opening flesh, blood, guts, urine, etc) before we see the staff of The Pitt at home or out on the streets doing everyday things. That’s presuming life outside their place of work eventually features in this tight drama. If it doesn’t, these people will become very irritating very soon.
THURSDAY 9 Alex, a new recruit to the comms department at Headway, filmed an interview with me talking about the Royal London Hospital project. I told her I’m happy not to see the final edit.
📌 The last item in the above list looks like a non-story, but is based on a claim by the New York Times that computer scientist Adam Back is the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the alleged inventor of cryptocurrency who has been able so far to remain anonymous à la Banksy.
📌 The ceramic pendants are out of the kiln. Some are a bit dodgy, but as an experiment I’m quite pleased.
📌 Cecil’s memorial at Headway was delayed slightly by birthday cake with both Sam and Kim. It was sombre, as expected, but Michelle teased out some nice memories and we got to see some nice pictures in a slideshow.
📌 Netanyahu is really publicly screwing Trump now. He may come to regret that.
📌 To Barbican Cinema 2 for The Drama, a dark rom-com so dark it borders on horror. My wife and our friend Marge didn’t rate it much, but I controversially liked it a lot. I could sense our fellow cinemagoers squirming as what was meant to be a happy courtship and golden wedding day descends into hell, and I even laughed out loud while it was happening.
📌 Father Jack at St Giles has started using his church for free small-scale intimate jazz and folk recitals, with a few vocal numbers from musicals thrown in. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.
FRIDAY 10 The BBC have been repeatedly stating this morning that “only a handful” of oil tankers are passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
📌 The day of my hip replacement operation gets ever closer, so we’ve now turned to thoughts on practical matters such as getting up and down stairs, showers, etc. My wife even suggested that I could get a taxi to Marge’s, use her walk-in waterfall shower and then we could go to a concert, film or play at the Barbican.
📌 I’m intrigued as to why Melania Trump needed to make a televised address to the nation saying she wasn’t friends with Jeffrey Epstein.
SATURDAY 11 Proof that history is indeed written by the victor emerges in a 1945 article by George Orwell as he travelled through the devastated postwar cityscapes of Germany. The horrifying images of rubble and death we see on TV from Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran are what Germany’s cities looked like after British bombing raids.
📌 Just as I thought I’d finished writing the artist bios for the upcoming exhibition, Michelle requests two more. Luckily they are Sam and Ade, so it should be quite easy. But as I write that last sentence I realise I will struggle trying to say anything new about Sam.
📌 When Richard Herring started his Craven Newsround alongside Ally, a battered old ventriloquist’s dummy he probably found in a skip, he was the worst ventriloquist in the world, but didn’t seem to care. Now he is quite good at it, but has a look in his eye that suggests he knows he has improved but wishes he hadn’t.
SUNDAY 12 I finally managed to add a chain to the ceramic pendant I made for my wife. It wasn’t an easy job because the jump rings I’d bought from Amazon were too small.
📌 On the way home from Sunday lunch at Spoons I ran into a rowdy parade of men on Penny Farthing bicycles.
MONDAY 13 In what feels like something that has happened several times in the past already, workmen turned up at 9am to start repair work on our balcony. Fingers crossed the outcome will last longer than the last attempt did.
📌 The new stitched community tote bag features an architectural sketch made during the development of our estate.
📌 My wife is preparing for my hip replacement operation like it it is a major event rather than a routine procedure. She insists I have new pajamas to wear in hospital and has contacted adult social services to let them know they may need to offer support after I am discharged.
📌 The doctor says it’s not wax in my ears that stops me hearing what my wife is saying, so it must be something else. An audiology test is the next step.
TUESDAY 14 We were visited by a crowd of surveyors from the council trying to work out how much extra ventilation our property will require when the new windows are fitted and we are hermetically sealed in an atmosphere of our own breath.
📌 Michelle got in a panic when she couldn’t find the stitchwork I did of the model Iris Apel. She eventually located it in a cupboard in the studio.
📌 To the Courtauld Gallery for some post-impressionist pointillism. It was nice to be able to get really close to the paintings, which is a rare treat in these days of barriers and alarms.
WEDNESDAY 15 Today’s Sensemaker has a warning. Don’t get too excited about the overthrow of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Wherever insecure jobs and high living costs prevail, so will the ultra-right. The Guardian agrees.
📌 To Barbican Cinema 3 for the new Jim Jarmusch film Father Mother Sister Brother, a seemingly simple collection of three short stories about the relationships between parents and their grown-up children. At times it was like watching a bunch of actors improvising a “family tension” sketch, but beautifully done and with a real sense of place for the three locations (rural America, Dublin, Paris) and some cute continuity motifs on subjects as diverse as water, cars, roads and English idiom. Plus a magic moment from Tom Waits, madly swinging an axe in a growing state of anxiety.
THURSDAY 16 One further reflection about the film we saw last night was the skill of actors who can act by not doing anything. Just thinking the thoughts of the character, and their transmission to the audience through the actor’s eyes, is a type of acting that can only ever work well on screen. It would never work satisfactorily on stage.
📌 Another nice column by Lucy Webster in her The View From Down Here series, strangely in defence of Donald Trump who, she says, is not evil because he is “disabled”, as portrayed by left-wingers in social media memes, but because he is a racist, misogynist fascist.
📌 At the Barbican Art Gallery we saw some paintings, sketches and sculptures vivid in both colours and thought by the Colombian artist Beatriz Gonzales. Every image featured a person.
FRIDAY 17 To my wife’s acute embarrassment, I lost my temper during a phone call with the hospital that will be doing my hip replacement, during which the decorators arrived to finish the job they started earlier in the week.
SATURDAY 18 That word “outage” again! Please stop it!
📌 It’s starting to look like Starmer’s days are numbered, in single figures. The Mandelson vetting fiasco, says the New Statesman, is for Starmer what Partygate was for Boris. He’d be best advised to walk the plank now, while no individual (ie, Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting) can be accused of fomenting a coup.
📌 A woman just came into Costa Coffee on London Road in Brighton and asked the two young staff if there were any jobs available. The staff told her no, not right now, but if she’s still looking later in the Summer, come back then. The staff then wished her good luck in her hunt.
📌 Last night we joined Pip at the Bonsai Plant Kitchen. The food was beautifully flavoured but the scheduling of the various shared dishes was too random for our liking. The last dish we were served was two bowls of rice.
📌 Brighton remains the same but different. It makes me feel old.
📌 Tonight we had an early drink with Sue, then visited a secret shady bar called Alphabet my wife found just around the corner from our apartment.
SUNDAY 19
📌 On Sue’s recommendation we started watching The Other Bennet Sister on TV and noticed a lot of hairy armpits, which prompted a web search asking when women started shaving their armpits.
📌 I’m re-reading Mick Herron’s Dolphin Junction short-story collection. One of them, The Last Dead Letter is about Jackson Lamb’s time as a field agent in Berlin, before the wall came down, and contains the following reflection…
Even if the Wall were to disappear overnight, its stones picked apart by the youngsters who’d grown up in its shadow, where would that leave everyone? Berlin was a city twinned with itself: it had two zoos, two operas, two everything. Even if it healed, its divisions would remain; it would be a pair of mirrored images, neither side trusting the other.
I wonder if this has proved to be true. It made me want to visit Berlin to find out. Or maybe Berlin has always held so many “truths” about itself that it would be impossible to know which one to believe.
MONDAY 20 Today’s Sensemaker reveals that a Chinese humanoid robot has broken the human half-marathon world record by more than six minutes. The old newspaper test of what makes a good story is “man bites dog” because a dog biting a man would constitute a non-event, whereas a man biting a dog would be sufficiently rare to be exceptional, and therefore “news”. I think the Chinese robot story (“machine does something faster than a human”) is a non-story because that’s what machines have been doing for centuries.
📌 In Liverpool classical music is being used to disperse unruly crowds of people. Classical musicians are unhappy about it.
📌 Harshita just finished a fantastic version of my three hens on a night out image.
📌 My expectations took a tumble at the Barbican tonight. I expected soaring Fado but got plodding, overly stage-managed Europop melodrama instead. At least what looked like the entire Portuguese population of London enjoyed themselves.
TUESDAY 21 In his 1947 essay The English Class System George Orwell defines a type of “classlessness” that emerged in England after the Second World War: “People like radio engineers and industrial chemists… middle class in income, but not much interested in social status, whose education has not been of a kind to give them any reverence for the past, and who tend to live in blocks of flats or housing estates where the old social pattern has broken down.” Orwell calls this the “technical middle class”, people “necessarily” elevated by war from the working class to the middle class. This class, said Orwell in 1947, was England’s fastest growing social stratum.
📌 I keep getting notifications from the hospital about my upcoming hip replacement operation. Every time one arrives I presume it is to tell me that the operation has been cancelled. But it never is. The messages are just unfinished admin that needs to be completed before I go under the knife.
WEDNESDAY 22 I’ve stopped looking at news about Donald Trump. I think maybe someone has finally managed to put a leash on him.
📌 After reading George Orwell’s views on class and classlessness yesterday, I found a bargain book online, A Class Act: The Myth of Britain’s Classless Society, which brings the analysis up to date. And from the book’s description its ideas differ greatly from George Orwell’s. I shall read it while recovering from my hip replacement, along with Clown Town, the latest in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series.
📌 The Knowledge reckons America has now taken a significant turn against Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. It also says the propagandist equation Anti-Israel = anti-Semitic has finally been broken.
THURSDAY 23 I sometimes do a web search of people I worked with 30-odd years ago and stupidly expect them to look like they did back then. Very few of them are recognisable, the one exception being the writer and broadcaster Jon Ronson.
📌 Michelle says there has been a lot of interest in my stitchwork of the deceased centenarian style icon Iris Apfel, so I’m thinking I might follow it with one of risque 1930s Hollywood film character Gold Dust Gertie.
📌 I think I might be expected to make some kind of speech at tonight’s opening of the new exhibition. Buggered if I know what I can say.
📌 I got through it with some jibber-jabber about art exhibitions being about starting conversations.
FRIDAY 24 There’s a lot of speculation that Keir Starmer will be forced to resign after the May local elections. Exactly how anyone will force him to do it is unclear. I know someone who used to play football with Starmer and he says the PM was a tough and often dirty opponent.
📌 My wife has spotted a new trend in toilet signage. Instead of “Men” and “Women”, or variations thereof, the gender compromise solution is to label toilet doors with “Stand Up Wee” and “Sit Down Wee”.
📌 They gave John Tomlinson the full works for his memorial at St Giles: organ, choir, homilies, prayers, standing up, hymns, sitting down, food and drink, Father Jack in all the ceremonial garments.
SATURDAY 25 More predictions of Starmer’s demise abound. There is a fun parallel in the fortunes of his favourite football team Arsenal. Until the middle of this week The Gunners looked like this season’s Premier League winners. Then they were sneakily overtaken by Manchester City. Can they still emerge triumphant, and can Starmer survive? Veteran contrarian Simon Jenkins believes Starmer’s stupidity over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador is a small fuss about very little and to oust him would be madness.
Getting rid of Starmer at present is out of all proportion to this affair.
SUNDAY 26 Someone allegedly tried to kill Donald Trump, but because he was caught on camera smirking just before it happened, everyone is saying the “assassination attempt” was staged by Trump’s goon squad to deflect attention from his tanking popularity.
📌 At The Art House Sean and I held a Sew Bros workshop that was attended mainly by women.
MONDAY 27 At 6am, waiting for the taxi to take me to hospital to have my peachy left buttock mutilated, I took comfort in a perfect score in Waffle.
📌 Standing room only in the hospital waiting room. Looks like hip replacement surgeries run like buses.
📌 They put a tube down my throat during surgery, so swallowing is very difficult.
📌 The young patient in Bed 21 (I’m in 20) has just had his second hip replaced. He used to be a professional rower. We both agree that the cherry flavoured morphine they give you to drink is really quite nice.
📌 TUESDAY 28 The word existential is now easily one of the most overused words in the British media. Or is it just in the Guardian?
📌 According to an article in the New Statesman, “the Raynerites and the Burnhamites are coagulating into a single group.” Coagulating, I ask you.
WEDNESDAY 29 My first day at home following hip replacement surgery is a learning process. On Mark’s recommendation I have ordered a dog lead, which can be hooped over the foot of my surgery leg and pulled to raise and lower the swollen “dead” injured leg.
THURSDAY 30 For the past two months our friend Anne has been on a post-retirement travel tour and posting photos of her numerous destinations. If the project was meant to signal a new chapter in her life, one of the great oversights is learning how to take a selfie.
📌 The second full day post surgery has been depressing. My wife thinks I’m putting undue pressure on her organisational skills. I am just unhappy that after nearly 38 years of marriage she doesn’t know the difference between my reading glasses and my distance glasses. Nevertheless a visit from an OT tomorrow will hopefully offer some relief. Walked a bit further than yesterday.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 