December 28, 2024–January 3, 2025
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, 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.
WEDNESDAY 1 The first thing I learned in 2025 was that Norwegians utter the term hapshittens when things go wrong.
THURSDAY 2 Yesterday we found a small corner of Sky that was showing a host of Championship games. My sister-in-law supports Oxford United, so we watched them hustle a 1-0 win at Millwall. On Sunday we’d watched Liverpool knock off a sublime 5-0 hammering of West Ham United, and the difference in quality between the two tiers, Championship and Premier League, could not have been more obvious. When a Liverpool player gets the ball, there are immediately 5 or 6 players nearby to pass it to, all of them moving constantly, looking for space and opportunities. Not so with Oxford. They play in static, fixed positions, and when a player gets the ball he is on his own and expected to find teammates to pass to. Getting some kind of momentum moving forward is seen as a lucky break. Not so with Liverpool, who do it with ease and fluidity, slipping into shapes and always, always on the move.
📌 In the Conversation a Manchester University researcher names the Royal Mail as a signifier of Britain’s decline into dystopia and the public’s enforced separation from friendly public institutions.
📌 Christmas is over. The tree is already half dismantled and the baubles and tinsel are stored away for next year.
FRIDAY 3 A stinking cold has enabled me to do nothing but lie on the sofa reading Slow Horses, the first in the series of Mick Herron books about MI5 spies who have screwed up in some way. I am starting to see the character of Jackson Lamb in terms of class identity. He leads a team of second-class spooks and inhabits a world of greasy fast food, slovenly appearance and bad manners. His fictitious office is just across the road from where I live. He delights in farting in the presence of more groomed spooks from MI5 HQ in Regent’s Park. He is a ragged-trousered nonconformer. It’s always Suits versus Joe’s in Slow Horses.
📌 I never thought in a million years I’d be impressed by a Swan Lake in which all the swans were men, but that’s what happened tonight at Sadler’s Wells. All the shapes and shadows, colours and patterns gave themselves up to a chorus of exquisite movement.
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Billy's Scrapbook 