One month as it happened…
SATURDAY 1 I have an occasional habit of websearching people from my past to see where they are now and whether they look as old and decrepit as I do. It was in one of these moments that I discovered that Pete Fulwell died in 2020, aged 75. If my calculations are correct it means he was born around 1945 and was running the punk club Eric’s in Liverpool in his late 30s. He was from Shrewsbury but studied psychology in Liverpool.
📌 At the Headway Community Day we met Taz’s very cute 14-month-old daughter Sophia.
📌 On the way to Cafe Tiffin in Compton Street for a curry we spotted on the wall of St Peter & St Paul primary school a sign worthy of universal support.
SUNDAY 2 The skyline around our estate is forever changing.
📌 In my quest to work out whether The Bot (ie, Google AI) can be a force for good I asked it whether Rupert Holmes can make a living solely from the royalties generated by his 1979 hit Escape, aka The Piña Colada Song. The answer was YES, but not enough to “fund a life of extreme luxury”. Fortunately, The Bot tells us, Holmes has successes other than this infectious one-hit wonder. He has written an award-winning Broadway musical and an award-winning novel, plus numerous TV shows and songs for other artists.
MONDAY 3 An article in the Guardian about how easily Andy Burnham communicates with voters illustrates the point by comparing Burnham’s natural approach with Keir Starmer’s tendency to make all of Britain’s problems look like they were our fault rather than his. The author says: “I hadn’t fully realised, until Starmer cleared off, how much his premiership gave off the sense that the public were doing a bad job.”
📌 James at Headway sent me a joke: Q Why don’t owls mate when it is raining? A Because it’s too wet to woo…
📌 There is a joke going around that Donald Trump fully deserves to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because he has already successfully ended his war with Iran eight times.
📌 One of Elon Musk’s discarded rockets is about to crash into the Moon at 5,400mph. The news prompted me to learn that space junk fines are a thing, but only for dodgy old bits of kit that might interfere with operations within the Earth’s orbit. There could, however, be more serious trouble ahead, warns Sensemaker, if flytipping in space is not brought under control.
TUESDAY 4 Got a message from Jennifer asking if I’d like to submit anything to the next Secret Artist sale. I’d quite like to clear out some stuff from the studio, so it seems like an opportunity.
📌 Sam really is doing some very exciting stuff these days. She’s even transferring her drawings to clay.
📌 Climate change could save us from being taken over by AI. AI data centres use astonishing volumes of water to cool their overheated brains. Water that will be in scarce supply if the droughts we are living through now become a permanent fixture. Perhaps AI might consider adapting itself and allow its scorching machinery to be cooled by sea water instead of fresh. That would be a leap of the AI “imagination” no one saw coming.
📌 Russians have a limitless capacity for suffering, it says in the book I’m reading, Moscow X, by David McCloskey.
WEDNESDAY 5 I’m obviously now on a data list…
📌 When I told my wife I thought birthday cards were a waste of money she looked like she just discovered Father Christmas doesn’t exist. She is 68 today.
📌 For her birthday my wife opted for a visit to the Courtauld Gallery for a Barbara Hepworth exhibition, followed by lunch at the Delaunay restaurant.
THURSDAY 6 I screwed a good few ideas out of the Barbara Hepworth exhibition yesterday about the appearance of flow in artworks. I will attempt to use them wisely.
📌 My wife tells me that Westminster council are trying to bring in a ban on “vertical drinking” in local pubs. This, she tells me, means that buying drinks and standing at the bar is forbidden. Ditto standing outside pubs. Only seated customers will be served. We then had a lengthy conversation about how stupid this initiative is and how the project is doomed to fail miserably.
FRIDAY 7 At the pre-assessment telephone interview for my next hip operation the questioner asked if I can manage things like “washing dishes” OK. I looked at my wife for affirmation and she nodded slowly, with a knowing smile. I was tempted to tell the interviewer that we have a dishwasher but my wife believes I don’t know how to load it properly. “Bad at stacking dishwasher” was probably not on the list of questions.
📌 The Barbican’s lakeside foyer is a useful reminder to look up occasionally.
📌 My wife is out all day with friends doing another stretch of the Capital Ring Walk around London, which means I have taken the opportunity to bake some muesli breakfast bars and to rationalise the fridge.
📌 There was an awful lot of vertical drinking going on in Smithfield tonight.
SATURDAY 8 Andy Beckett makes a good point about the ubiquitous Lime bikes that litter London’s public realm these days…
Lime riders in a hurry represent the revenge of a generation priced out of living near tube stations.
📌 For obvious reasons the word CURMUDGEON popped into my head while reading Simon Jenkins’ views on “vertical drinking” and its alleged crimes against humanity. But then I turned to a story in The Londoner, which claims to tell “the truth” about this seemingly controversial social habit. According to The Londoner, the issue is a stoked-up non-story based on the “misreading” and negative spin of a Guardian article, the “truth” actually being that Westminster Council does not intend to stop people standing with a drink at a Soho bar. It has merely issued a reminder that its existing licensing laws require new businesses to not add to the overcrowding of noisy drunks and pavement obstruction in London’s busy West End “impact zone”.
SUNDAY 9 Just had my first lesson on the sewing machine. My wife is the teacher and I think it’s fair to say she is not a natural. The “show don’t tell” rule seems to have bypassed her.
📌 Reform UK are now in 3rd place in the national polls.
MONDAY 10 On two occasions recently I’ve heard about train journeys cancelled because of “trackside fires”. My wife is still arguing with a shameless train company for a refund from one such cancellation (they say the fire had been extinguished in time for the return journey from the place she couldn’t get to because of said trackside fire, so not entitled to be refunded). The fires are a pointer to the lack of infrastructural resilience cities have to rapidly changing environmental events linked, say, to climate change. Jonty Bloom is fascinated by this kind of super-failure, mainly because it fits one of his pet theories of catastrophe: “What guarantee do we have that a city will continue to work?”
What means do we have of ensuring that huge population centres will always have reliable power, water, lighting, transport, sewerage and food?
It’s a good question, and the only consolation I could find was that when the day it all goes to pot arrives here in London I won’t be alone in facing it.
📌 Jennifer selected three of my stitchworks to go into the anonymous Secret Sale she is organising. It will be interesting to see if any of them sell. I will be especially pleased if one of them does.
📌 My wife has now been notified by Greater Anglia Trains that she will get a full refund.
📌 At the Barbican’s Cinema 1 we saw the Spike Lee concert film of David Byrne’s American Utopia project, which certainly lives up to its description and even manages a few surprises. Byrne’s Utopia is MULTI everything – cultural, ethnic, national, gender, rhythm – with a band of 12 musicians and dancers who roam the stage with their instruments, connected wirelessly to a sound system. It puts new meaning to the expression “freedom of movement” but serves also to remind us that America is a nation of immigrants and a much better place for it.
TUESDAY 11 My first taste of the Over 55’s fundraising group at St Luke’s went off without difficulty and a couple of nice slices of Bakewell tart. June had a big moan about people taking other people’s seats on the recent coach trip to Windsor. The accounts show that Bingo and Nails are the chief sources of revenue that subsidise the coach trips, so in future meetings I will try to encourage the formation of other revenue streams. I will make some Islington tote bags to sell on St Luke’s Day in October. Maybe some Christmassy ones too.
📌 Donald Trump’s war with Iran has practically used up the US’s entire stock of missiles.
📌 One of the boffins at the Conversation has a few good ideas on how Andy Burnham can reduce the prison population without releasing killers on to the streets. They include cutting the vast number of people put back in prison for breaching petty bail conditions.
WEDNESDAY 12 Nigel Farage is expected to win tomorrow’s by-election in Clacton because none of the other major parties are standing against him. But they can’t continue to step away from the fight with Farage, says Rafael Behr. He has already changed the tone of political conversation far too much.
It doesn’t take a great leap of political courage to draw a line between rigorous migration control and racist demagoguery.
📌 I think my right arm is longer than my left arm. Whenever I roll up the sleeves of my shirt, three rolls either side, the result is not, to my eye, symmetry. The left cuff is now noticeably closer to the elbow than the right side. Could this be related to the shoulder injury (left) I sustained in 2023? I might ask my wife to measure me for full confirmation.
📌 At Tate Modern, in what was intended to be a cultural hookup with Martine and Brian from Brighton we simply sat in the bar getting more and more drunk, laughing and laughing, waiting for the solar eclipse, which for us turned out to be a total nonevent on Platform 4 of Blackfriars Station.
THURSDAY 13 Days when you just feel so stupid. I sat quietly at 9.30am waiting for a phone call from my doctor to discuss the results of a recent heart scan. At 9.55am my wife asked if it was DEFINITELY a phone consultation. Turns out it was meant to be a face-to-face appointment and I’d obviously missed it. DOH! The doctor then later tried to call me and I missed that too. It will be several days before the shame drifts away.
📌 Very embarrassingly Michelle got Brian to make a special display unit for the ceramic pendants I made ages ago. They will go into the Clay open studio event in a few weeks.
FRIDAY 14 Nigel Farage increased his vote share by 1,000 at the Clacton by-election. Count Binface won a staggering 27% of the vote share.
📌 Amazon tech billionaire Jeff Bezos is in talks to buy a 30% stake in Liverpool Football Club. Fans are said to be considering a protest. Publicly burning their Prime memberships is not, I’m told, one of the options.
📌 Not much could be more alarming, but I guess that’s the point. As I sat comfortably scoffing through my harissa chicken salad pitta pockets, a very loud screeching sound came from an unknown part of the apartment. On further investigation the screech came from my phone, on charge in another room, which carried a warning that wildfires are highly possible given the weather conditions, so be careful, watch out, and get ready.
SATURDAY 15 I recently made some quite successful breakfast bars by mixing granola with a condensed milk binder and baking at 110C for 30 minutes. I have since learned that condensed milk contains massive teeth-rotting quantities of sugar, so I’ve been on the lookout for a more healthy binder. Next I will try mashed ripe bananas mixed with peanut butter, though that combination does sound quite fattening. The other option, I read, is to use dates as a binder but that sounds like a recipe for hyperactivity in the bathroom.
SUNDAY 16 On the 56 bus to Angel we saw a woman fall down the stairs from the upper deck and onto her child, aged around 5. The noise was horrible but the driver responded very quickly and hopefully they were both not too seriously injured.
📌 A Spotify Premium subscription comes with 15 hours of audiobook listening. This equates to around two books, depending on exact lengths. In the past two months I have failed twice to calculate my allowance and been cut off half way through a book because I have used up my 15 hours. Now I must wait 11 days before I can finish Mick Herron’s Dead Lions.
MONDAY 17 An item from Fesshole reads: “At age 7 my idea of showing girls I liked them was to open my mouth during lunch and show them the half-chewed food.” I sometimes still do that to attract the attention of my wife.
📌 For years I have been searching for the best way to transfer drawings to fabric in preparation for stitching. Each has their strengths and faults. Tracing on a lightbox is good for light fabrics but not so good for darker ones. Sublimation pens are hit and miss, as are Japanese transfer pencils. Every project is different and the transfer is a one-off process. Screw it up and you will start a project on a negative note by trying to fix the error. One thing I have learned is that the transfer cannot be hurried. That is a surefire way to a bad start, and I’ve made enough of them to last me a lifetime.
📌 The government’s use of the emergency alarm system that went off on everyone’s mobile phone on Friday evening has been criticised for putting at risk victims of domestic abuse who hide secret phones from their abusers.
TUESDAY 18 I noticed that Seàn has been learning chess on Duolingo, so I thought I’d give it a try as I am hopeless at games that centre on plotting and killing. I reckon that learning to plot and kill will be a valuable skill to have in navigating the future. And Duolingo doesn’t disappoint. Right from the start you are trained to seek and destroy in the most effective way.
📌 Wooly Mammoths were still around when the Pyramids were built.
📌 The fascination starts the moment you walk into the David Hockney A Year in Normandie exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. First there is the spelling of Normandy, showing perhaps where France and Frenchness sat in Hockney’s imagination. Then there is the opening text, which includes the paragraph “When you draw from the eye, you’re drawing from memory. A memory five seconds ago, a memory of ten seconds ago, a memory of a minute go. If you think about it, it’s all memory.”
This is just the start of a long and thin eye-opening panorama through the seasons of northern France, a journey that for me galvanised the view that Hockney’s greatest skill was to capture essence rather than pure likeness. Even the faces of his portraits are pure essence.
📌 Finally we got to give Mark the birthday present I’d made for him but was too embarrassed to do it at his party, in case any of his “three women” were there.
WEDNESDAY 19 My quest for the perfect transfer method for image to fabric has become a minor YouTube obsession, but I reckon I am close to a final choice. Three more days glued to the screen should do it.
📌 On our way home from our day out with David Hockney yesterday the taxi driver accused me of trying to break his door handle. When I told him I was not doing anything of the kind but just trying to exit his taxi he got quite shirty. I responded with sarcasm. I think my wife was embarrassed.
THURSDAY 20 At the early-start meeting of the Headway Coproduction committee Chris was surprisingly quiet. I wonder if it was because after the last meeting he was told he was “dominating”. Or maybe it was because it was in the music room and everyone got into harmony.
📌 Most of Squaredle’s Bonus Word of the Day entries are in or near my vocabulary, but some hit you completely unawares…
📌 I can’t see me finishing the Big Brain stitchwork in time for the Headway Conference in October, but Michelle has said no worries because they will display it unfinished alongside the five Stroke paintings I did about 10 years ago.
📌 After a second visit to the Barbara Hepworth exhibition at the Courtauld gallery with Marge we went to Nando’s and decided on a new mission – to always be the oldest people in Nando’s.
FRIDAY 21 I sweated buckets getting a pile of old books to the local church book fair. I just hope they get some decent money from it.
📌 Haven’t had a top score in Waffle for some time. Also haven’t come across the word “spiffy” in a while, and only ever on TV.
📌 At the book fair I bumped into Karen who was with an old college friend. It made me think of a TV game show called Friend Or Foe, in which a studio audience votes on the likely relationship status of two people presented to them by an over-excited host. The problem with this idea is that the possibility for prizes is quite limited.
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 I 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.
SATURDAY 29 It started raining almost as soon as we arrived at Liz and Bill’s new place in the village of Otterbourne. It didn’t stop me exploring, and the best find was at the bottom of their garden. Through a wooden gate is a dark and chilly dell with a dry creek running through it and tall, haunting trees standing bolt upright in an obvious attempt to intimidate, like a scene from The Blair Witch Project. I instantly named this dark, wild zone of their new property The Satanic Garden.
SUNDAY 30 Otterbourne is really not well served by a good mobile phone network signal. Which means, diddums, that our normal daily word-game playing activity is disrupted. Yesterday I even agreed to go, by car, to a shopping complex just to get a decent signal. I’m surprised how much this irritates me.
📌 We still haven’t seen any otters in Otterbourne. Maybe tomorrow.
MONDAY 31 Still no otter sightings, but magpies have taken up residence in the Satanic Garden, despite the presence of Jill’s slobbering dog Myrtle.
📌 I just read somewhere that Dolly Parton once secretly entered a Dolly Parton lookalike competition and came last.
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Billy's Scrapbook 