August 22-28, 2026
SATURDAY 22 Yesterday’s Open Studio at Headway was a ceramics fair in the garden. The atmosphere was less intense than when it is held in the studio. The comings and goings seemed more relaxed and the mood more gentle. My ceramic pendants sold well at £20 a pop, so I will get another batch ready for Christmas.
SUNDAY 23 I thought knew it was my birthday because my phone started pinging from about 8am. Unfortunately it was Duolingo reminding me to do my French lessons and learn a few more moves in chess. I later got some well-wishing messages, and some fabulous gifts from my wife and family, then it was off to the newly opened V&A East to browse leisurely but also to visit an exhibition devoted to British black music.
The best feature was a set of top-quality headphones that played all the relevant music as you passed each exhibit.
It was nice to see the Olympic Park flourishing after a period in which no one seemed to know what to do with it, and with the V&A moving in with two massive venues, plus Sadler’s Wells East, a cultural counterbalance to the shopping, eating and drinking has been set.
MONDAY 24 I got Amazon vouchers for my birthday, which I had intended to spend on PG Wodehouse audio books. Amazon does not make buying audio books from its Audible platform easy. They want you to take out a money-sucking subscription but I prefer to own individual collections. I have a two complete Dickens collections, George Orwell’s entire works and a Mark Twain collection, plus others. What Amazon does do is offer you the chance to “add audio” to your existing Kindle purchases, which is why I might do that rather than buy a stock of Jeeves audio books. Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a bargain.
📌 On Mike’s recommendation we watched the film Dragonfly, which starts off looking like a slice of 21st Century British social realism but quickly adds suspense and ends up as a horror movie. The acting is superb and the drama riveting.
TUESDAY 25 The sad fact of my artistic life is that I am more a craftsman than an artist. I can’t draw for toffee, not even badly. All my drawings are compositions. I build them rather than create them as an act of expression. I rarely stitch my own drawings, preferring the works of others. So from now on I will learn to accept my artistic shortcomings and, when inspired to do so, ask the real artists if can stitch their drawings. I will ask Sam if I can stitch the flamenco dancer on the right…
I see it as being like a successful literary translator, or a screenwriter who adapts the classics for TV. I guess I want to be the Andrew Davies of stitchwork.
📌 The location of data centres is becoming a national controversy. They are now as toxic as fossil fuels in the arguments over climate change and the environment. Scotland is an ideal location for data centres, but objections are soaring daily.
They are coming up here because we are energy-rich, and we are water-rich, and England is in drought and the grid is struggling.
AI needs them to do its work and the government is banking on AI to boost the UK’s economic fortunes. Whole towns built around the location of data centres is not a niche sci-fi story but a firm reality. If the UK says no, other countries will say yes. The ethical questions are as important as those around Big Oil and other monocultures.
📌 RIP Dolly Parton, 80.
WEDNESDAY 26 Scarcely a day goes by when Thames Water does not appear in the news for its grave misdeeds: pumping raw sewage into rivers, pushing up prices (again) and leaking 600m litres of water a day. And all because this vital resource is owned and controlled by profiteers. The story could be very different if England learned from Scotland and took water into public control, says a public health expert in the Guardian.
Water is vital to human life – you’d die without it in about three days – and should be a basic part of public infrastructure provided by government.
📌 James at Headway asked me to write something about the V&A exhibition The Music Is Black. I used the opportunity to explore prose writing in the form of a letter.
When you asked me to name the one thing I liked most about The Music Is Black I got flustered and said the wrong thing. I said the thing I liked most was the headphones, which switched channels as you moved around the exhibition space, playing the music or commentary relevant to whatever exhibit you were standing in front of at the time. The music was well chosen and it was fun watching visitors dancing joyously, silently to all the different types of music. Best of all was watching them do the same dance to Lovers Rock as they did to 2-Tone or Brit Funk. Because in that moment, in their own little dance thing, they owned the music, and that’s important.
When you asked me what I liked most about The Music Is Black I should have been able to say something more intelligent, because it is such a thoughtful exhibition. I should have dragged up that memory of how brilliant Steel Pulse were on that afternoon in 1978 in Vicky Park. We’d come all the way from Liverpool on a coach trip, me and Kate, to have our say and stick it to the Nazis. In that moment hope buzzed through our bones, and that’s important.
When you asked what I liked most about The Music Is Black I should have said it made me feel like I was on the Kop singing You’ll Never Walk Alone, in that moment when none of us individually can hit the high notes, but together it’s a breeze.
THURSDAY 27 On our way to the Horniman Museum Sam told us that Whitechapel is the only London station where the Overground is underground and the Underground is overground.
📌 Sam said yes to me doing a stitchwork of one of her flamenco dancers (see above). Michelle said I should add some feet to it, which is a good idea.
📌 At the Horniman one of the anthropology researchers gave us a tour of the musical instruments section, the most fascinating part being the story of how music, musical instruments and methods of playing them moved around the world on the back of global trade routes and became embedded and absorbed from one culture to the next.
📌 RIH (Rot in Hell) Ratko Mladic, 84.
FRIDAY 28 A long but very readable article in Foreign Affairs shows just how deeply sunk Donald Trump has become in his pointless war with Iran.
📌 In Zara I took the escalator to the lower-ground floor menswear department, only to later discover after browsing that no up escalator existed and the lift was out of order. Thus I accompanied the only member of staff on a tour of the building’s unseen innards to a service lift normally used to transport stock. I took my time. As the staffer ushered me back into the store at ground level I heard him being reprimanded on his radio for abandoning his workstation.
📌 Boots now do an over-the-counter Paracetamol/Codeine tablet, a sort of Cocodamol Lite, which might be useful after my next hip replacement.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 