One month as it happened…
SUNDAY 1 Sutton is starting to look like the new Croydon.
📌 I must remember to at all times have with me some printed reading matter. We boarded the train from Sutton to Farringdon just in time. As the train pulled away from the station platform I realised I’d left my phone on Paula’s bed. For the whole journey I sat, staring trance-like at a fixed point about 10m away trying to summon up something to think about, while my wife nobly returned to Paula’s to retrieve the phone. One of those pocket-sized Bibles they gave you at school would have been quite useful in this moment, I thought.
📌 My wife had a craving for a Wetherspoons Christmas veggie burger. As we tucked in I heard from somewhere behind me a distinctive emphysemic cough and knew instantly that Vera was in the pub, with Iris, as is usual for Sunday. Vera told us that last week she had £900 fleeced from her bank card. The police told her most of it was spent on Deliveroo deliveries.
📌 Liverpool’s 2-0 defeat of Manchester City looked remarkably easy.
MONDAY 2 In her Unmapped Storylands notebook, Elif Shafak reflects on mass hysteria and rollercoaster movements that sweep in and out of our lives, tweaking our minds ever so slightly in the process. Luckily, she also has advice on how to step aside from such movements and stay sane.
📌 Rich, corporate landowners are using small-scale farming families to attack the government and its new inheritance tax on farmers, which, demonstrates Socialist Worker with some revealing figures, illustrate how genuine family farms will suffer no loss whatsoever by the policy.
All this means that a couple with farmland could pass on up to £3 million without paying a penny of inheritance tax.
📌 “Brain-rot” has been named as word of the year for 2024.
📌 We knew something might be about to happen when the chamber music stopped and the City of London’s finest yeomanry resplendent with spears, swords and gleaming body armour ushered all the low-ranking assembled guests to one side. It created down the centre of the Guildhall an avenue into which strolled a kilted bagpiper followed by a procession of dignitaries, starting with the Lord Mayor elect Alastair King and finishing with the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. I whispered, “he’s smaller than I thought he was”, to which our friend Anne replied, “they always are.” Then came the trumpets to signal that dinner was ready and the Lord Mayor’s Banquet 2024 could begin. In we filed, found our seats (table 4) and introduced ourselves to our nearby tablemates. In my case that was a group of fabulously bejewelled people from the Sikh and Hindu high commissions. One of them (who mistook me for a successful businessman) was especially interested in telling my host Dawn about the good work he does in Greenwich finding jobs for young people. Then came the food (is that duck or quail?), lots of wine and water, and the speeches, all of which were riddled with bad jokes and went on far too long. Pudding and port, more trumpets and drums, then out to find out if our taxi had arrived.
TUESDAY 3 The news media has managed to spin a story from what Keir Starmer said in his speech at last night’s Lord Mayor’s Banquet, even though all the guests I spoke with found it a dull statement of the obvious.
📌 Jennifer valued my Wonky stitchworks at around £300 a piece. She had expressed an interest in buying one and Michelle and I didn’t have a clue how to price them, so I asked Jennifer what she would sell them for.
WEDNESDAY 4 At the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on Monday I watched my fellow guests during the speeches to get a measure of their reactions. During the Lord Mayor’s, his forced jokes were met with either forced laughter or the scrunched faces of embarrassment. During the Prime Minister’s, some listened intently, others looked bored. Sitting opposite me one woman slipped back in her seat, gazed at the ceiling and listened carefully to what Starmer had to say. She nodded vigorously at times but shook her head, eyes down, at others. Her husband pretended to nap. Next to them one of the guests from the Indian high commission checked his phone.
📌 In the space of an hour, Buffy called me Barry (again!) and Sarah called me John.
📌 The Squaredle Bonus Word of the Day was FREMD: “Strange, unusual, foreign”.
THURSDAY 5 In the studio me, Michelle and Sam prepped up a collage landscape made from handmade colour washes and patterns. The trick is to first lay down the zones (in this case, ocean, beach, mountains, sky) then layer up the detail (fish, aquatic flora, houses, people, clouds, birds, stars, sun, moon). We also made a shopping list for the hospital project we will start in January. I will work up some ideas for “place” landscapes over the holidays (city, seaside, countryside) and look at how different methods and techniques can be applied. Almost anything can be built into a landscape and the beauty of collage is that it is universally fun and accessible.
📌 The Guildhall Big Band have jazzed things up. At last night’s tribute to Prohibition Era Chicago jazz they included a large-scale slide show of archive photography, and a slick narrator told the story of black jazz musicians from New Orleans in the 1920s migrating north to New York and the Windy City. It was all very interesting, but the contrast between the black faces in the photographs and the milky white faces of the Guildhall studentry onstage started for the first time to look like a very bad joke.
FRIDAY 6 One of those unsolicited Instagram reels showed Radiohead’s Thom Yorke telling an audience that while he was helping his 16-year-old daughter with her homework she stopped to read a text from her mother saying, “What do you want from Life?” Thom and his daughter discussed this in some depth before a second text arrived five minutes later blaming predictive text on the alteration of the word Lidl.
👁️ The Funeral directors on Lamb’s Conduit Street wishes us all a very merry Christmas.
MONDAY 9 The Syrian cobbler in Hoxton Street says he can mend my favourite shoes. It will be “a big job” and will cost way more than a new pair, but I think it’s worth it.
SATURDAY 7 We’ve agreed to do away with Christmas gifts for each other and will instead offer some small token items to open on the big day. But even that meagre task has left me baffled as to what to buy, and how to keep it a secret.
📌 Conclave is a film that makes something quite boring (a workplace referendum) into a pounding drama full of subtle turns and one or two fabulous speeches. The Guardian review even notes Isabella Rossellini doing “the most passive-aggressive curtsey in cinema history”. The final twist is about the last thing you would have imagined.
SUNDAY 8 Our nextdoor neighbour’s daughter Katy won a BBC Food & Farming Award for the groundbreaking work she does with her business Wasted Kitchen in redistributing and recycling surplus food.
📌 Yippee! Greasy Pete got the boot from Strictly Come Dancing.
👁️ Sometimes everything comes together and a maximum score is possible…
TUESDAY 10 A report on the radio described how pantomime has been forced to move with the times. It’s now seen as a bit creepy for Cinderella to swoon and yield to the desires of Prince Charming. In one version this year, Cinderella asks Prince Charming “Can we just be friends?” because, she tells him, she is really in love with her best friend, Buttons.
📌 Shafting the government and the taxpayer is now such an established “way of doing business” that all political parties fall over themselves to aid the profiteering corporations doing it, writes Jonty Bloom.
📌 At a free Christmas lunch for old people organised by an eternally sunny woman called Madhumita, I apologised to her for not being a very successful old person and promised to do better next year.
📌At City Question Time, one Portsoken ward resident was quite aggressive towards Helen (councillor for the Aldersgate ward) about a school policy decision he disagreed with. It made me quite sympathetic towards councillors, so I pointed out that councillors can advise and vote, but it is City officers who write policy. Luckily, two of them were there to hear it. Helen told me later the complaining guy was a notorious self-centred windbag.
WEDNESDAY 11 At a 9.15am Teams meeting with Jo, Michelle and I fleshed out the collage idea for the hospital day rooms project at the Royal London with Vital Arts. Jo came back with some ideas of how the material we get from the six workshops can be “put into production”. I liked the idea of blowing up the collage landscapes on vinyl. It’s nice to have a frame of reference to sit as some kind of psychological guide in the back of my mind until January 22 arrives and I finally get to meet some patients. Michelle keeps banging on about accessibility, which is great and totally appropriate, but I hope when the time comes that Molly and others from the hospital team will offer some direction for that appropriate for individual patients at individual times. Jo asked if I’d do some stitchworks for the project, to go on display. I agreed, but I’m not sure what I could complete in the timescale. I might have to dust off some old work. I like the idea of using patients’ signatures or rough drawings to do stitchworks.
📌 Lady In The Lake is our new TV favourite. We started Series 2 of State of Happiness but it’s Norwegian, which means subtitles, which means concentration. Lady In The Lake is dark and weird, but fascinating. Fisk has become our suppertime viewing, and I’m still watching Peaky Blinders on the sly.
📌 I expected our new government to have pulled off a quick win by now, but it hasn’t, leaving the door open to the accusation that it is clueless. I think it is widely understood that it is penniless, but something bold would have been nice by now. All we get instead is the constant refrain that its hands are tied and that trying to untie the knotty mess left by the last lot is proving to be a bigger task than they thought it was.
THURSDAY 12 When snatched photos of the person who allegedly killed the medical insurance boss in the US, my wife swore it was a woman. I was fascinated by the idea that the killer had a noble motive in ridding the world of a greedy capitalist parasite. I started to paint in my head a romantic picture of Good slaying Evil. But the person the police have arrested and charged for the crime is not a woman. It is Luigi Mangione, a Baltimore posho who occasionally slums it in McDonald’s.
📌 It was the news from Tortoise that the World Cup is going to Saudi Arabia that grabbed me. It could be the geopolitical masterstroke of the century. Or not…
📌 The Headway writing group was taken over by Tessa and Steven from the ambulance-chasing legal firm Irwin Mitchell. They were in search of questions for a fundraising quiz. My only contribution was, “Edinburgh or Manchester, which lies furthest east?” I’m glad they were visiting because I’d failed to do any writing this week. The best I could do in response to the prompt “Origin of words” was to dig out my ancient copy of Chambers Etymological Dictionary.
FRIDAY 13 At Headway yesterday both Nat and Alex returned from a visit to a drawing exhibition with a recommendation. It was a stitchwork by an artist called Myrtle Glanville of one of her own pastel drawings, the poetically titled Run! Run! When the sun goes down will be done paint done. The piece used the kinds of stitches I am now experimenting with, long, random, ragged. I just used a very ragged one on the latest in the Wonky series. The nose got damaged so I filled it up with far too much scraggy pink thread to hide the blemish.
📌 We’re off to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream tonight and I’m still not sure I ever knew what was going on in that play. I think that might have been the idea all along.
📌 France has got a new Prime Minister. I wonder how long this one will last.
📌 What emerged from the conversations that followed tonight’s performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Barbican was not so much about the entertainment value of this thoroughly modern interpretation but about whether the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) still has any claim to be masters of the Bard’s works. On this evidence, an RSC production is no longer exclusive or distinctive in any way. The actors on stage tonight could not project their voices even to the back of the stalls, never mind the Circle, or the Gods. The minimal set looked good, the lighting and special effects convincing, and the new-agey music worked well. But the absence of old-school acting skills was replaced with gimmickry from so-so musical theatre and stand-up comedy. Yes, it was funny, not in any special way but in a stupid way. It was trivial but enjoyable.
SATURDAY 14 I thought I’d end up giving all my votes to Chris in the Strictly Come Dancing final, but in the end my votes went to Sarah. Chris won it.
📌 Anne, who we saw last night at Midsummer Night’s Dream, told us that every time she goes to a Shakespeare play she swots up. Before last night’s performance, she read the play, studied the synopsis and the character notes and watched two film versions of the play.
📌 In a documentary about Maggie Smith (RIP), Michael Palin recalled working with her on the film A Private Function. In Palin’s recollected scene, Maggie gets boxed into a corner of a farmhouse kitchen by a frisky pig. To get out of her predicament, Maggie jumps athletically over it and retreats to a safe distance. In the documentary Palin described her jump as “a great piece of physical acting”. What everyone else saw was someone in a state of mild panic getting out of the way of a stroppy pig.
SUNDAY 15 Larry Elliott’s first Guardian column as a retiree announces that not everyone who is worried about net migration is a bigot. He starts by naming Keir Starmer, who has described UK migration figures as “off the scale”. Larry himself notes that…
In the past two years, net migration has been equivalent to the combined populations of Liverpool and Sheffield.
The issue is “complex”, he says, and that’s not as dismissive as it sounds. He then questions the mystery of why such high numbers of working-age people have recently become long-term sick, and why British employers continually fail to offer good fair-pay jobs and training to British workers.
📌 Our friends booked accommodation in Fuerteventura for Christmas. Three days before they were due to depart a message came saying their booking was cancelled. The accommodation then reappeared on booking.com at double the price. So they booked somewhere else. Two days later the same thing happened. They are now on their way to Feurteventura hoping that the third booking is safe and that they will have somewhere to sleep tonight.
MONDAY 16 My first thought on the government’s plans to reorganise councils into bigger, fitter unitary bodies is that I like it. I accept the criticism that it is in effect enforced partnering, a kind of civic shotgun wedding, but at least it is partnering. Councils and voters need urgently to accept that the prosperity lies in partnership and collaboration. So I’m trying to picture a zoned London as, for example, North, South, East and West, each a co-dependent governing entity. Future prosperity will depend on neighbouring rich and poor areas sharing resources, talent and, yes, problems. But that’s what politics is meant to do. If central government steps out of the way and legally sanctions large unitary councils (500,000+ population) to finance and run their own micro-economies, a new form of devolution will have been established. It might look like a smaller version of the metro-mayoral system that already operates in large city areas, where new business and political talent is nurtured and allowed to flourish. My second thought on the government’s reorganisation plan is to look at how it could all go wrong.
📌 Pointless Celebrities was on the TV and the only celebrity my wife could recognise was Alan Titchmarsh.
📌 I got a gift at the St Luke’s Christmas gathering for volunteers, but I’m not allowed to open it until Christmas Day. It is biscuits.
📌 Other things that happened in the world today include…
TUESDAY 17 I managed to fix the busted light switch in the bathroom, which turned out to be on a circuit with one of the downstairs lights and one in our bedroom. It took four attempts to get the sequencing correct because all of the three wires were coloured red, so knowing which ones to pair could only be established through trial and error. I got the bathroom pull-switch to turn on the bedroom and the downstairs lights before I got it to turn on the bathroom light.
📌 Nat sent over the poster she’s made for the art workshops at the Royal London hospital, starting in January. Everyone now seems terribly excited about the project, so I guess I should start panicking soon.
📌 At Madhumita’s memory group a bunch of corporate sponsors from a bank lavished vast amounts of food and drink on us, sang festive songs and delivered a lesson in how to dance the salsa, which is basically an elaboration on three steps (forwards, backwards, side to side). Then we did the marengue. Madhumita certainly has a talent for spotting a generous sponsor.
📌 In a Christmas Zoom hook-up with my sister and my cousin Kate I learned that a Facebook group called Growing Up In Anfield is infested with people we knew as children. But since many of them now have different surnames to the ones they had when we knew them, working out who is who is a toughie. The conversation was a strangely depressing step back into the past. Not because we have all left our Liverpool neighbourhood long ago but because so many of the people we played in the street with back then stayed in Liverpool and still love it. I felt like some sort of soft-centred traitor.
📌 Spotify’s Swing Jazz Christmas is a playlist that goes on in the morning and stays on all day. It’s like being permanently sat in an upmarket hotel lobby.
WEDNESDAY 18 I’m not sure that buying myself George Orwell, The Complete Works audio for Christmas was such a great idea. As brilliant as Orwell’s work undoubtedly is, falling asleep to a description of Winston Smith’s pustulating varicose veins is not likely to add to the season of joy. The essays on power and class are equally miserable. And don’t get me started on that self-pitying tosser George Bowling in Coming Up For Air… There’s 96 hours of this stuff.
📌 Finally, the latest Wonky stitchwork is finished. That lurid pink nose hides a multitude of sins.
📌 Swing Jazz Christmas has been replaced by Covers That Are Better Than The Originals, the strongest of them being Johnny Cash doing a version of U2’s One. It’s a collection Robin (RIP) would have both enjoyed and disliked in equal measure.
📌 To the Barbican for a toe-tapping evening of classical jazz, featuring the arranged works of Gershwin, Bernstein and Kapustin. Plus Christmas tunes combining Duke Ellington and Tchaikovsky. The solo drummer at the front of the stage was a novelty, as were the whole of the often stuffy London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) actually looking as if they were having a good time. That’s Jazz for you. It’s storytelling music, full of heart, a big, human landscape of rhythm and beat. The programme has a lovely paragraph about Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington…
When Bernstein and Duke Ellington were interviewed together in 1966, Bernstein made the optimistic remark that the two men’s music had more or less the same audiences: that ‘the kids’ these days were excited by both Bernstein’s ‘symphonic jazz’ and Ellington’s ‘jazz symphonies’.
All of it was brought together tonight in flamboyant style by the Barbican’s classical music maestro Antonio Pappano, who conducts like he wants to make a name for himself as the guy who’s always last to leave the party.
THURSDAY 19 Larry Elliott’s retirement from frontline economic reporting at the Guardian has given him the freedom to oil his voice. He always was an EU skeptic, but in his column today he hardly dithers in saying the UK dodged a bullet getting out when it did. France and Germany are each on a precipice. Hardline parties across the Eurozone are marching on. He stops short of saying Starmer and Reeves should stand firm in their talks with the EU, but the implication is that Europe should fall in behind Britain rather than the other way round.
📌 There is a mystery unfolding at Headway to work out the source of a perennially blocked toilet. Evidence so far includes it being a male toilet and it being hooked to the same plumbing as the washing machine. A number of suspects have already been identified.
📌 We finished the Jodie Foster series of True Detective baffled by a few loose ends, mainly the mystery of who cut out Annie’s tongue.
FRIDAY 20 Disturbing facts continue to emerge from the Pelicot trial in France, yet it is hard not to sense that the momentous public outrage is also sadly of the moment, and that little will change in countries – bizarrely including France – where rape is seen as “normal behaviour”.
📌 I’m starting to quite like the Reclaim EC1 blog, a muckraking project that does its best to out the corruption and evildoing of our local council, the City of London Corporation. It often sounds shrill and has a quaint obsession with freemasonry, but its energy is its strength. It’s quite good with facts, but rubbish with pictures.
📌 My wife tells me that today is “Black Eye Friday”, the last working day before Christmas on which workers go out, get drunk, fight, and wake up tomorrow with a black eye (or inflict a black eye on someone else, I suppose).
SATURDAY 21 I suspect Winchester is as typical as any other British market town at this time of year. Everyone seems to be eating while walking to the next chance to spend money on things they never would have imagined wanting or needing. In Marks & Spencer’s a man picked up a large bag of walnuts just because they were there.
📌 In his daily blog, Warming Up, the comedian Richard Herring publishes his son Ernie’s picture of the nativity, in which, Herring claims, baby Jesus appears simultaneously as being born and being crucified. Birthday and death in one image.
SUNDAY 22 A 1946 Christmas message from George Orwell says festive restraint is overrated and urges total excess. He says poets and writers throughout time have been inspired by food, drink, gluttony and good company, whereas…
No one has written memorable prose about vitamins, or the dangers of excess of proteins, or the importance of masticating everything thirty-two times.
MONDAY 23 Hoxton Shoe Repairs was not open as advertised, so I won’t be wearing my favourite handmade shoes for Christmas.
TUESDAY 24 At a Christmas dinner last night, our friend Graham droned on about how he once touched the sleeve of David Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson. Then, in what Graham saw as a side show, he told us about coming third in a talent contest (prize, £5) as part of a vocal quartet called Two-Plus, alongside his brother Keith, Lesley Manville and her sister Diana. Everyone thought his Lesley Manville collaboration was a far bigger claim to fame than his Mick Ronson shirtsleeve anecdote.
📌 My wife reports that Waitrose has sold out of olives.
📌 Our library has an audio download of Andy O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, so I nabbed it quickly. Listening to it I can’t help be drawn to the idea that it is really about him and his journey from the low culture of Glasgow to the high culture of literary London.
📌 At the Courtauld Gallery we saw what Monet saw at the turn of the 20th Century from some windows overlooking the Thames. The eccentric British weather was obviously his friend, and gave him innumerable opportunities to paint the same view in different shades of rain, mist, fog, etc. He even wrote a letter to his wife expressing his gratitude for this climatic gift.
📌 Before we departed Monet my wife spotted a scene from one of the Courtauld’s upstairs windows that would have merited inclusion in the gallery’s superb European Art collection, then it was off to the Savoy for a Christmas glass of champagne and an endless supply of olives that put Waitrose to shame.
WEDNESDAY 25 We started with the need to find a streaming platform showing Bugsy Malone, quickly moved on to champagne and ripping open our presents like children, then to the Fox & Anchor for something to eat.
📌 Another brilliant Wallace & Gromit film saw the return of Feathers McGraw, the penguin who disguises itself as a chicken to perform dastardly deeds. Then Nessa and Smithy got it together in a hilarious climax to the last ever episode of the Gavin & Stacey.
THURSDAY 26 Most of today’s excitement fell in the last 20 minutes of the Chelsea vs Fulham game.
FRIDAY 27 Sajid Javid was the guest editor on Radio 4’s Today programme. His pet subject was AI and the good and bad things it will inflict upon us in the future. He claims to be an optimist and hopes that good uses of AI will prevail over bad. Others are not so sure, including one of the guys who won the Nobel Prize for developing an AI programme for machine learning.
His comments had me picturing a time in the future (about 5 years from now) in which nothing you don’t personally witness can be believed to really exist. And as Abba’s Voyage show proves, not even something you witness first-hand can be believed to be real. In these circumstances, might people actually come to care more about the information they consume and become more critically aware? And might a better world become possible?
Or will everyone just roll over and enjoy the entertainment as being the last great spin of the dice before human existence becomes extinct? The Nobel prize-winner believes the world will be split into those who buy into it and those who don’t, and that only government regulation can determine where our fate lies.
Which brought me back to George Orwell’s 1984, which I’ve been enjoying on Audible. A Big Brother that monitors all digital devices in a specified jurisdiction is obviously a future possibility, if not a certainty.
📌 It sounds obvious to say it, but watching Liverpool beat Leicester last night and now watching Brighton toiling against Brentford, the best performances are by teams that move constantly. Players who stand still are fossils.
SATURDAY 28 I questioned my wife’s description of the 1970s band Boney M as “dodgy”. She didn’t have a clear explanation, so I did some clicks to unearth the root of the alleged dodginess. Dodgy might not have been the right word, but it seems the band were the cosmetic plaything of a German record producer called Frank Farian, and that only two of the four original Boney M members actually sang or played on their records.
SUNDAY 29 It is common during the festive holiday to forget which day is which. The individual days lose their identities to an all-embracing feeling of forced jollity and the mission to get Christmas done. Yesterday, for example, was Saturday, but did not feel like a Saturday because Saturday is normally football day, but all this week’s football was moved to Boxing Day, which was on Thursday, which is normally, for us, the start of the weekend.
We did sniff a moment of normality, a return to the days behaving in the usual way, on Friday evening, when we went to the local pub for a drink prior to a visit to the fish and chip shop. The pub was full of noisy workers and they’d run out of my favourite beer. But the chip shop was closed, despite its website saying it was open.
SUNDAY 29 The task of fitting a hanging mechanism (ie, two hooks) to a cupboard door for the new ironing board went more or less as I had visualised it. I’d anticipated the heavy use of a product called No More Nails, but that was not required. All the screws went in sweetly and nothing untoward got in the way of a good job done well.
📌 The British Museum is a hellhole of human congestion as more and more tourists are crammed in to view all the ancient artefacts Britain has stolen from the rest of the world over past centuries. It is a destination to be avoided, but we nevertheless fought our way to Room 90 for Picasso: Printmaker, at which we learned that Picasso is the artist that just keeps on giving and that his fixation with sex, death, breasts and buttocks knows no boundaries.
📌 RIP Jimmy Carter, 100.
MONDAY 30 I Awoke from a dream in which I had just bumped into Kevin Keegan in a local cafe. He told me he remembered my mum from when she was the lollipop lady on Oakfield Road and he would stop his car to let the schoolchildren cross the road. He never escaped a jovial greeting from my mother. This was before he moved to Cilcain to become a horse breeder, or something else to do with horses.
📌 The Christmas gift from St Luke’s that I confidently predicted was a box of biscuits was a DIY candle-making kit, which now requires deep research into the prices of essential oils and paraffin wax pellets. We already have a substantial collection of shabby-chic retro teacups to use as vessels. Wicks are very cheap.
📌 We finished Black Doves with a chorus of laughter at the shootout that left the streets around Borough Market strewn with bodies and Keira Knightley strolling off quietly to read bedtime stories to her children. Not once during the whole series did her husband, the Secretary of State for Defence, once remark that she came home late at night smelling of gunsmoke.
📌 My wife predicted with confidence that Wayne Rooney will very soon be out of a job.
TUESDAY 31 New Year’s Eve has the unfortunate vibe of the prelude. It could do with a makeover, since most of us accept that what is about to happen in the future is only very marginally within our control. So from now on I will refer to New Year’s Eve as The Last Day. Happy Last Day! That sounds quite doomy. One minute after I signed an email with Happy Last Day! I visited the Positive News site to remind myself why I embarked on this stupid rebranding exercise in the first place. It was to force me to think of all the things that went well in the past year and to hope for more of them in the next one. Among the inspiration on offer by Positive News was…
In Australia, three iconic species – western quolls, bettongs and bilbies – returned to Sturt national park, New South Wales, while the UK’s crane population hit new highs. Not bad for a species that was wiped out by British hunters in the 16th Century.
2025, bring it on!
📌 Wayne Rooney is out of a job.
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Billy's Scrapbook 