Scrapbook: October 2024

One month as it happened…

TUESDAY 1 The Conversation has a very useful article for anyone who doesn’t quite get the connection between Hezbollah and the government of Lebanon. I’ve always told people that to think of Hezbollah as a regular Islamic terror group is to miss the point. It is much more than that.

📌 It’s always a treat when I get to decide what outfits to give the three party girls on a night out.

📌 The saga of the busted dishwasher is set to run and run. It first went on the blink a month ago. Since then two engineers have had a look. One said it needed two new parts, which were duly ordered. The second one claimed the fault was actually in the installation. Now a third engineer will come next week to establish what the real fault is. Fingers crossed.

WEDNESDAY 2 Jonty Bloom’s daily rant starts in a humorous tone then arrives at quite a serious point. He ridicules pronouncements from the Tory leadership contenders on wages, then points to where a truly radical new Conservative leader might actually stand a chance of success…

Abolish all in-work benefits and instead hike the minimum wage until it is high enough for people to live on what they earn.

📌 I have a daily “Task” message that reminds me that “the middle hen’s shoes are too big”. This refers to the image above of the three carousing women. The sketch from which this stitchwork comes needs correcting, hence the daily nudge to get on with the job. But my wife has a different way of seeing it. She says the “middle hen” has in fact keeled over on her high heels and the feet we are looking at are not too big but twisted by inebriation.

📌 I’m currently running with the thought that everyone’s idea of a good news story is as unique to them as their personality, and not as predictable as you might imagine. I know AI and the humourless Algorithms think otherwise, so I will click to confuse from now on.

THURSDAY 3 At Headway we learned that Barry was a goner, RIP. I’ll remember him affectionately for bravely taking on the role of bass player in the Neuro Skeptics, a band that also included me, Chris and Stuart formed for the sole purpose of recording a version of Elvis Costello’s Indoors Fireworks in time for November 5. We were one week late in finishing it. Sean said he was upset because on Tuesday Barry had complained that Sean hadn’t stopped to talk to him. Sean had apologised and said he’d make up for it on Thursday. But Barry never made it to Thursday.

📌 Me, Sam and Rosie visited Rob Ryan‘s studio in Bethnal Green, where we learned all about Rob’s paper cutting and screen printing combined practice. It was inspiring but also daunting because screen printing is incredibly technical and not the kind of DIY, cheap-and-easy craft I gravitate towards. And paper cutting requires years of toil to perfect the shapes.

Screen printing words and expressions I learned were “snap”, which is the distance between the print bed and the screen, and “printy”, which describes an imperfection that somehow renders the finished print more authentic in appearance, more hand-made.

📌 The visit to Rob’s studio meant I missed the Headway writers group, so I don’t know how my story based on a 10cc song title went down. It was called Dreadlock Holiday.

Even though they were now well into their 50s, Martin and Heidi still laughed about the night they tumbled into blissful agreement. And they both agreed now that it was all down to the superior quality of the dope you got back then.

It started with one of Martin’s sweeping statements about music: that only Jamaicans can make truly authentic Reggae. Everything else was fake, he claimed, with his chest puffed out. The evidence pivoted on 10cc’s Dreadlock Holiday, but roamed leisurely into the work of The Police, Steely Dan and even, yikes, Neil Diamond, who is said to have knocked out a reggae version of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Heidi bravely counter-argued, with particular emphasis on Elvis Costello’s Watching The Detectives, and Bank Robber by The Clash. They both conceded points on UB40, but by this time they’d descended into fits of giggles and an urgent need of salad-cream sandwiches and cheese-and-onion crisps.

📌 At a late-night opening of the Whitechapel Gallery we were reminded in the work of Peter Kennard that political photomontage has lost its teeth. In Kennard’s day, when the artist wielded scissors and glue, black ink, Tippex and a stack of relevant photographs ready to be dismembered, the purpose was to take sides in the big issues and shout about it – in Kennard’s case with a lot of anger. Today, while artists such as Coldwar Steve and Klawe Rzeczy undoubtedly make good political art, the message never quite seems to land as hard. And with digital technology, the task is made so much easier.

FRIDAY 4 At the Whitechapel Gallery last night we also saw work by a Brazilian artist called Lygia Clark, who in 1959 forged a movement called “Neoconcrete”, which appeared to have something to do with architecture and geometry and was in total opposition to the “Concrete” movement, which, argued the Neoconcrete Manifesto, was far too obedient to the technological advances of the 20th Century.

📌 Now officially OLD, I claimed my entitlement to the double Winter vaccination against flu and Covid.

📌 The TV series Joan ended in one of those tantalising ways that suggests Joan’s life of crime is not over and will extend into Series 2.

📌 It’s always nice to end the week with a solid achievement under one’s belt…

SATURDAY 5 An aching arm from yesterday’s injections and a stinking cold are all the excuses needed to lounge in front of the TV watching football. Unfortunately, the Crystal Palace versus Liverpool game added stress to the cocktail of ailments. Liverpool scraped through 1-0, but by the end of the game it was a close thing, and goalkeeper Álisson Becker picked up an injury that looked quite serious.

📌 Turns out that the taxi containing Ian Hislop was not hit by gunfire but instead suffered a mechanical failure that obviously sounded enough like the impact of a bullet to get the headline-writers excited.

SUNDAY 6 Listening to a radio programme from 2020 called Unsung Heroines I was reminded that whenever and wherever we are out and about, my wife keenly notices and points the absence of women. Now I notice it too, but possibly for a different reason. My teenage hero was Holden Caulfield from JD Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye, and in the book Holden remarks upon the absence of women in the New York bars he stumbles into while trying to find himself. He thought the absence of women was creepy.

📌 Agatha Christie really can be quite annoying. She pushed me to the end of my tether recently with The Body In The Library and it’s mindbogglingly stupid, ridiculously convoluted and dragged-out plot. I nearly gave in forever, but was won over by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Now I’m on And Then There Were None and my admiration for Christie’s sheer cleverness grows with each page.

MONDAY 7 Boris’s new book is a source of great amusement for media commentators. Jonty Bloom uses it to point out a simple truth that seems quite ridiculous with hindsight.

The biggest post-war disaster for the UK [Brexit] was perpetrated by two schoolboys reliving their earlier rivalry.

📌 The web-based music streamers have caught up with those of us who signed up for the free service but used it like it was a paying service with ads. Amazon Prime Music and Spotify Free always had a good selection of albums to listen to, but lately they’ve been nailed down as shuffle-only services. In other words, you select an album and a message tells you you can play it if you subscribe to the premium service (£10+ per month), otherwise it will be “shuffled with similar songs”. This is a blow, but not unexpected, and probably fair. We have decided to dust off our CD player and use that for listening to albums and the streaming services for curated playlists (eg, Film Soundtracks, 80s Anthems) and background music (eg, Rain, Wind, Meditation). CDs in charity shops now cost next to nothing.

📌 I’m stitching each of the 25 wards of the City of London in two subtly compatible colours, the exception being the ward of Tower, the home of the Tower of London. This I am stitching in a mixture of blue (royalty) and gold (the crown jewels).

TUESDAY 8 Kemi Badenoch has been widely ridiculed in the media for claiming she “became working class when I was 16 working in McDonald’s”. An article in the Conversation reveals that Badenoch was obviously citing her class status according to a government statistical programme called the NS-SEC occupational coding tool, so what is actually ridiculous, but also fascinating, is that Badenoch does not see her identity as related to the class of her parents (GP and professor) or even her Nigerian ancestry, but to statistical methodology. BTW, my dad was a toolmaker.

📌 The Conservative Party leadership contest (four become three) looks a lot like the book I’m reading. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None starts in classic Christie style. Ten strangers are brought together in a posh house, then after dinner on the first night a disembodied voice accuses each of them individually of a heinous crime. They have obviously and mysteriously all been brought to the same place to meet natural justice (ie, death) for their misdeeds, presumably with a heavy dose of humiliation.

📌 My relatives on the Gulf Coast of Florida are in the path of Hurricane Milton but have not been told to evacuate. Yet.

WEDNESDAY 9 Jürgen Klopp has a new job, though no one seems able to describe what it is he will be doing as “Head of Global Soccer” for Red Bull, a drinks manufacturer.

📌 One lot of our relatives (the young ones) in Florida have been evacuated in anticipation of Hurricane Milton’s arrival this evening. The older generation seems determined to dig in and see it through. Or not, as the case may be.

📌 Must do documentaries on the big screen more often was the lesson from a visit to the Curzon Bloomsbury with Brian for The Battle for Laikipia, a dramatic replay of the Nomad vs Settler rivalry in the Kenyan cattle-herding/ranching communities of an area north of Nairobi. Must do Curzon Bloomsbury more often too.

THURSDAY 10 Relatives in Florida all declared safe after Hurricane Milton.

📌 The main conflict in the documentary we saw at Curzon Bloomsbury last night is between ancient tribes of pastoralists and the families of European colonial  livestock ranchers. Before the climate crisis there were enough lush pastures throughout Kenya to support both the nomadic herdsfolk and the rich white incomers with their fancy jeeps and safari holiday businesses. Now that equatorial Kenya is prone to drought, good grass for grazing is at a premium and the pastoralists believe they have the right to roam and to feed and water their herds anywhere. The ranchers, some of them fourth-generation, think otherwise and will kill to protect the land their ancestors bought and developed. The human standoff is as fragile as the environmental one. When the rains finally came to Laikipia, some sort of balance was restored, but you sensed quickly that both sides were on borrowed time.

📌 At Headway Elisa asked us to write a letter to Keir Starmer saying what people affected by brain injury want him to do to help. I think it’s a poor idea, but I will join the project just in case it is successful.

📌 It looks like Israel is at war with Lebanon.

FRIDAY 11 Today’s Sensemaker notes that two of the recent winners of the Nobel Prize for physics came not from academic institutions dedicated to scientific research but from Google Mind (aka, DeepMind), a profit-seeking commercial enterprise. The anomaly, it says, has more to do with the inadequacies of the Nobel category system than anything else, which was devised in 1895 by Alfred Nobel and hasn’t changed since. Back then there was no prize for Computer Science or Engineering, and as those fields have grown rapidly during the 20th and 21st centuries, the Nobel committee has forced computer scientists and engineers into categories such as Physics, when what is clearly needed, says Sensemaker, is new categories. Interesting to ponder, though, whether computer science is just another branch of Applied Physics. Discuss.

📌 I’ve worked out slowly over time that the beauty of Sam’s drawings lies not in the intricate detail but in the drunken shapes.

📌 Note to self… Be sure to visit the Come As You Really Are exhibition in Croydon before it finishes on October 20.

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 Dailyabout 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.

SATURDAY 19 Today’s Knowledge carries a dubious advert for anyone trying to dodge the clutches of Rachel Reeves’ upcoming budget: invest your money in whisky, “a tax-efficient asset class that has consistently grown in value”.

📌 One of the songs at an “Old Fashioned Singalong” in the community centre was Oom-Pah-Pah from the musical Oliver, which included an interesting verse…

Mr Percy Snodgrass
Would often have the odd glass
But never when he thought anybody could see
Secretly he’d buy it
Drink it on the quiet
And dream he was an earl
With a girl on each knee

We sat at a table with one of our neighbours, Yvonne, who told us about a Transatlantic cruise to New York on which she met and befriended David Bowie, circa The Jean Genie. Apparently David had a dislike of aeroplanes, which left him plenty of time aboard the Queen Mary to show his glam stage outfits to Yvonne, who proclaimed David to be delightful company and one of the most charming people she’d ever met.

SUNDAY 20 For a long time now I have been singing the wrong lyrics to The Only Thing, by Travis featuring Susanna Hoffs. For one of the verses I have been singing…

You are the metaphor, the metaphor
The meta for the ugly guy

When the actual lyrics are quoted as being…

You are the metaphor, the metaphor
The meta for the other guy

MONDAY 21 It’s hard to tell whether all the latest government pronouncements about sorting stuff like the NHS and HS2 are evidence that progress and reform is starting to take shape or whether ministers are just oiling their windpipes. Talking is one thing, doing is another. Neighbourhood polyclinics and patient passports are a great idea, but show me them in action, and do they work for the greatest number of citizens rather than the profiteers that are forever circling above our public health and social care systems?

📌 An airport in New Zealand has capped to three minutes the time you are allowed to hug your friends and loved ones and bid them a safe onward journey.

TUESDAY 22 Our neighbour Yvonne brought round her photo from the 1972 transatlantic cruise on which she met David Bowie.

📌 The meeting at the Royal London hospital with Michelle, Natalie and Vital Arts to discuss how I might get trauma patients on the neuro wing to engage in some art practices was like stepping back 12 years to my own experience. The physios still wear blue trousers and the OTs green. I look forward to seeing the artworks the patients make. We will display them in two small day rooms, transforming those spaces into warm, engaging hubs that will hopefully make the trauma-ward experience more bearable and more rehabilitative.

📌 Tonight’s City Question Time, at which our council pretends to listen to its residents, was held in the assembly hall of the City of London School for Boys. It has a massive organ. Of course it does.

WEDNESDAY 23 I sent my notes from yesterday’s meeting at the Royal London hospital to Natalie and Michelle. I hesitated before I pressed SEND, but I think that was more to do with tone than content…

On the surface it seems that two separate projects have been pushed together. First is the project in collaboration with Vital Arts to transform the two day rooms, 12E and 12F, into warm, welcoming and safe spaces for patients to chill. It is a short-term goal. The second is to work with Vital Arts to devise a practical use of arts and crafts in neuro-rehabilitation. This is a long-term relationship. Both are worthy projects and the first could even act as a pilot for the second. The difference between them is patient engagement. Rehabilitation from brain injury cannot be set on a timetable until patients are well clear of all their immediate post-trauma upheavals. I’m not sure it is realistic to engage with patients to create and install artworks into the day rooms in the proposed six-week time scale. If the day-room project was redefined as six “sessions” it could be feasible. 

Big pieces of expressive art can be made easily, and making them is fun. Room 12E could have one style (eg, angular patterns) and Room 12F another one (eg, curved patterns). But if no longer-term engagement with arts and crafts is open to patients afterwards, the day-room project could end up being a fleeting and frustrating experience. It needs to be the door to something else, not an end in itself.  

I think what I’m saying is that Headway would be best served by treating the Vital Arts day-room collaboration as one thing, but to also push for it to start another conversation about arts and crafts as a therapy tool.

Away from the formality of this message I had secretly nicknamed the two day rooms as “Corners” and “Curves”.

📌 The battery on my watch ran out and the Timpson lifetime guaranteed replacement warranty is nowhere to be found. The repair man in the shop advised me to photograph the new warranty because Timpson do not keep online records.

THURSDAY 24 Today’s Sensemaker reckons that the fuss over Labour supporters campaigning for Kamala Harris is all the work of Donald Trump and that Americans don’t give a toss who Starmer’s troops favour for president. It says of Harris…

Her campaign is well funded, well organised and on the right side of history, truth, human rights, probity, democracy, the rule of law and macroeconomics.

But goes on to add that none of that matters if she can’t win over the white working class of Pennsylvania.

📌 At Headway I got a thank you card off Jason (plus Ode to Billy) for the repair work I did on his decrepit old Headway T-shirt, which boasted a lamentable collection of rips and frays.

📌 It’s cheering to see men pushing baby buggies in the street, but I can’t help wondering why more and more of them choose to do it one-handed, as if using two hands amounts to some kind of emasculation.

📌 Jackie said she went for a blood test but they couldn’t find any. Straight away I nicknamed her Bloodless Jackie.

FRIDAY 25 At the end of this weekly scrapbook I have a footnote in which I urge readers to contact me if they spot any corrections I need to make. Every week, my sister and our friend Sue fire off messages promptly. But last week neither of them noticed that the dates for each day were all wrong by 7 days, and that last week was this week.

SATURDAY 26 At Barbican they were celebrating the Darbar Festival with a full programme of music, meditations and market stalls.

In the Curve gallery we had a quick look at the giant wooden narrative paintings of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and emerged with a pledge to return for a longer visit so as to better understand the shifting noirish story of the character depicted.

SUNDAY 27 Jonty Bloom hammers home a very rusty nail in his declaration that Britain’s so-called “Special Relationship” with the United States has been dead or non-existent for a long time already.

We used to be a bridge to the EU, now we are a bridge to nowhere.

A Trump victory in the November Presidential elections would make the case very clear. Out of revenge he would humiliate and insult Britain, which, says Bloom, might not be such a terrible thing. But whoever is the next president, Britain needs to face up to its post-Brexit world status.

We are a small island, off the shores of a huge regional power, our economy is inadequate and our armed forces pathetic and we don’t have any ‘special friends’.

📌 Nick Cohen also has a big rusty nail to hammer home, and his victim is David Cameron…

By any standards, including, crucially, his own, David Cameron was a disastrous prime minister.

But in the way Cohen tells it, Cameron becomes a sinister reminder that public deference to the monarchy and the ruling classes leaves open the continued possibility that tyranny is never far from the living rooms of Britain.

MONDAY 28 Uber has held a monopoly in the on-demand cab business for too long, so we tried Freenow, one of London’s upstart rivals, to get to the Smile & Align dentist in Canary Wharf, where one of my bad old bottom teeth was promptly wrenched out and thrown away. I honestly can’t say I noticed any difference in a service that costs £5 less with Freenow than it costs with Uber. The Align & Smile dentist was a model of no-fuss politeness and competence.

TUESDAY 29 The gigantic sink hole in my lower right gum, where a bad tooth was extracted yesterday, has started to heal over. Which I’m a bit sad about, because I have become quite the avid student of imaginative things to do with mashed potato and rice pudding. I think therefore I will feign woundedness for a little while longer yet.

📌 On Threads, someone posted a fascinating piece of memorabilia, which literally made me picture a habitually grumpy man, sitting on a sofa with a pad and pencil in hand…

📌 Just discovered that the pink tablet I take each morning to keep me alive is not pink at all. It is a white tablet coated in something pink, which rubs off easily.

📌 Today’s lunch is mashed potato stirred into smooth tomato soup with a healthy dash of Worcestershire Sauce.

📌 My wife often gets compliments about her jewellery, but the other day one came from an unlikely source. A child around 10 years old cycling with friends stopped his bike in front of us and said to my wife, “Excuse me, I love your beads.”

WEDNESDAY 30 At a focus group to bash out the issues around how AI might in future help older people with their health and care needs, we heard Peter the coordinator start a conversation with a bot he has named Klaus, who immediately asked after the wellbeing of Peter’s pet pug.

📌 A canny budget, confidently delivered, that was surprisingly redistributive, with a clever reduction in the price of beer. And the chancellor chose not to raid my pension pot. Happy days!

The previous government had in the past decade turned British citizens into reluctant survivalists, where hanging on was a way of life. Business was set free to screw every last penny from customers (even during the COVID crisis), and working parents were forced to visit food banks to feed their children. The streets became littered with rough sleepers, unable to make the pace of a callous, greed-infested society. Schools and hospitals were coshed into submission, or dereliction. The message? Don’t thrive, just survive.

Now it’s business that must buckle up. Or not, maybe. Decent profits are still available, but only to businesses who offer decent wages and conditions. The two go hand in hand, implies the chancellor. What was most surprising about this speech was its toughness. It was telling, not asking: this is how it is from now on. Get with it or get off.

On the same day, Next, the very ordinary UK clothes and homewares retailer, was reported to have hit a £1bn annual profit. Last month Next was found guilty in an equal-pay judgement that is likely to cost it £30m in compensation. Shareholders must be questioning the skills of those who run the company. Or let’s hope they are. A different way of doing business might be on the agenda. Only might. To state otherwise would be stupidly optimistic.

THURSDAY 31 I wrote my story for the Headway writing group last week, but the group didn’t meet, so I submitted it this week, which happens to be more timely as its title is It’s Halloween!!!!!

Five exclamation marks! “How twattish is that?” thought Heidi on reading the handwritten note Martin had left on the kitchen table. He knew she knew what day it was and what it meant. 

It meant watching The Blair Witch Project all over again and pretending it was scary, but not as “really scary” as the first time they saw it together and Martin bit off what he thought was the head of a Jelly Baby but was in fact the tip of his tongue. It meant yet another pompous reiteration that Halloween is meant to be a day to remember the dead and not, as is popularly imagined, to bring the dead back to life in stupid zombie walks.

But most of all Halloween meant not talking about that time Martin challenged a group of children on the doorstep to “trick” him, losing his temper on the way and telling one of them to go fuck himself.

So that’s why Halloween nowadays means sitting in the dark, out of sight, in case the doorbell rings.

📌 Jonty Bloom thinks Britain’s farmers should stop whining about the chancellor’s budget and cough up inheritance tax just like the rest of the population.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

---