October 12-18, 2024
SATURDAY 12 Wikipedia’s Timeline Of The Far Future is a compendium of fascinating information on topics such as the end of the earth and human extinction.
The scientific consensus is that there is a relatively low risk of near-term human extinction due to natural causes. The likelihood of human extinction through humankind’s own activities, however, is a current area of research and debate.
📌 An item on Farming Today claimed that Welsh farmers risk polluting rivers by spreading slurry on to their agricultural land in times of high rainfall. The problem is that times of high rainfall in the UK are getting harder and harder to predict.
SUNDAY 13 An article in the Observer states that before 7 October 2023 Israel had spent decades supporting Hamas because the existence of a healthy anti-Israel group at the heart of Palestine meant that no way could it ever agree to the two-state solution proposed worldwide as the only path to peace.
📌 In Winchester our friend Liz introduced us to an infuriating new word game called Squaredle, the purpose of which is to locate words you’ve never even heard of on a grid. Examples in our first game included “ziti”, “ains”, “aits”, “deutzia” and “inion”.
📌 While pottering around Hampshire we passed a signpost for Lower Upham but never reached one for Upper Upham, which was disappointing.
📌 In the village of Wickham we visited an indoor vintage flea market where I found, but did not buy, a Russian doll of past Russian presidents for £26. They looked as scary in caricature as they did in real life.
📌 I overheard my wife telling a friend that she doesn’t believe our dishwasher will ever be repaired and that a protracted battle will begin next week with the seller to replace or refund.
MONDAY 14 The latest submissions for the Old Street Digital Canvas are a really dull set of processed photographs from a bunch of college students. But I suspect I will end up saying YES to all of them just because they have made the effort to submit their work.
📌 Last week at the Headway writers group Elisa urged us to consider writing a group letter to Keir Starmer naming policies that might help people with brain injury. I shelved the idea as a poor one but have realised lately that one good policy change would be for my disabled person’s travel pass to be accepted throughout the UK and not just in England.
📌 I finished today’s Squaredle before lunch. Liz says it gets more difficult on each successive day of the week. Monday is the easiest.
TUESDAY 15 Today’s Morning Call has a brilliantly clever introduction that uses numbers…
The government’s new industrial strategy contains 276 mentions of the word “growth” in its 64 pages. This is considerably more than the number of times “war” (184) and indeed “peace” (63) are mentioned in all 1,200 pages of War And Peace.
There follows a revealing account of Starmer’s grovelling conference with business people at the Guildhall in London. The article notes also that Starmer has recruited a host of Big Tech bigwigs into government (via ennoblement to the House of Lords). But, it says, the lunge for growth in the Big Tech sector Starmer aspires to is freighted with risk. Big Tech only feeds itself and will want something back in return, and that thing will be deregulation. Britain’s recent economic past is littered with casualties of government trying to cosy up to vicious profiteers dressed up as civic champions, and Starmer appears to think the way forward is to go back for more.
WEDNESDAY 16 I caught up with a short piece from 1944 at Orwell Daily about the role of the artist. In it Orwell gets straight to the heart of the matter…
What the artist does is not immediately and obviously necessary in the same way as what the milkman or the coal miner does.
He goes on to describe the artist as a truth-teller, and that so long as the artist is economically dependent on some form of patronage (be it state or private) truth-telling is not possible, because all patrons ultimately expect to be served in some way by those they patronise. Given that the milkman and the coal miner have been driven into extinction, perhaps the same fate is in store for the artist.
📌 At a St Luke’s workshop on speaking with confidence I was wildly applauded for my two-minute speech on the beauty of income-protection insurance. The six attendees were two English, one Scot, one Lithuanian, and one each from France and Portugal.
THURSDAY 17 My outfit for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in December is shaping up. The tailcoat has arrived, as have the trousers and the wing-collar white shirt. Bow-tie and waistcoat to come…
📌 A third engineer arrived to tackle the busted dishwasher but failed, stating that the machine had a faulty heater, which is what we’d learned it had from the Troubleshooting section of the maintenance manual when the red light on the instrument panel started flashing a month ago. Phew, that was a long sentence (geddit?)!
📌 Oops, I forgot to add Sardinia to the stitchwork map of Italy. I might do away with Sicily too next time.
📌 In Squaredle I only got 51 of the 54 target words, with 13 bonus words, which included “deni”, “dita” and “dite”.
FRIDAY 18 Agatha Christie is back in my bad books for the ridiculous way she chose to end And Then There Were None.
📌 The dishwasher saga has taken another Kafkaesque turn with neither retailer nor manufacturer willing to attempt a resolution. Three different engineers have already diagnosed three different faults and the process to simply install a replacement machine is likely to take so long we will be dead by the time it happens.
📌 It looks like there isn’t a single member of our new Labour government who hasn’t been given free tickets to see Taylor Swift.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 
I think we are going on the road to our extinction. The dinosaurs could not survive but I read somewhere mosquitoes have been around for longer :). That word game does sound infuriating 🙂 I hope there is a solution to your dishwasher soon. I like your posts. Thank you.
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