Scrapbook: Week 7

February 8-14, 2025

SATURDAY 8 Sadly, after taking the lead with a superb goal, Leyton Orient were ultimately defeated 2-1 in the FA Cup by a once great Manchester City, who now look like a very mediocre team. Their coach, the celebrated Pep Guardiola, looks forever on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It’s hilarious to watch.

📌 On The Masked Singer, a musician called Example (real name Elliot John Gleave), costumed as a gigantic Bear, sang the Charles Aznavour song She but later, unmasked, expressed his joy at being at last able to sing an “Elvis Costello song“. Example is 42 years old.

📌 We can now almost predict to the minute when there will be a gunfight/fistfight/car chase/flashback in The Night Agent.

SUNDAY 9 An Observer story about Federico Chiesa turns out to be more interesting for its insights into Arne Slot’s methods as a football coach. If UK football is a metaphor for how UK society will ultimately pan out, Bossy Collectivism is what we can expect next.

📌 If Eric Storm in the Conversation is right and we are in a new age of Empire, smaller countries such as the UK might end up in one of two geopolitical camps: collaborators and non-collaborators. Successfully using this collaboration system in tactical ways could reinvigorate the idea that messy old nation-state democracy is still preferable to the authoritarian regimes of Trump, Putin, Xi, etc.

📌 Plymouth Argyle beat a team of young Liverpool  players in the FA Cup, which prompted me to ask Google whether any of today’s footballers wear black boots.

MONDAY 10 Populism is a doomed project, says Peter Kellner. But until its opponents devise a commanding and competent way to improve the lives of voters, it will not go away. It is not issues such as overseas aid, abortion, gay marriage, immigration, Britain’s place in Europe and transgender rights that voters object to per se as much as the poor performance of the people in power. Populists portray the two things as the same when they are far from it. Kellner concludes by reminding us that even Margaret Thatcher knew that.

📌 My wife has been experiencing mild bronchial difficulties since Christmas. Today she contacted the GP and was whizzed in straightaway for an x-ray and the results studied promptly. She was then told politely that her chest is “unremarkable”. She didn’t take it as an insult.

TUESDAY 11 At a meeting with the Chair of our allotments group to discuss accessibility, cluttering and priorities for the coming season, I learned that J hates A and A hates J, that another A hates J and J hates the other A, that D fancies J and that J knows it, that S hates L and L hates S, that I has been kidnapped by her son and that the whereabouts of M is still unknown. Otherwise we both agreed that our allotments project has turned into an episode of Amandaland.

WEDNESDAY 12 I had a dream in which the UK government did a sly, behind-the-scenes deal with the Netherlands on freedom of movement. The result was an influx of Dutch labour. Around the same time Waitrose started selling wraps of “healthy” weed, which, if requested, could be rolled into a joint by a skilled Dutch checkout worker. The surplus weed from your joint was then handed to you like it was small change.

📌 At an online meeting with Jo and Michelle I agreed to carry on working with the mark-making we get each week from patients. Shapewise, stars seem appropriate for ward 12E and I’m thinking of introducing spirals as a vibe for 12F. Next week we will work in strongly coloured paint and I will display some of the existing work I have myself coloured up for impact in the hope of inspiring some fab marks.

📌 At a St Luke’s User Group meeting in St Giles church in the Barbican, Father Jack not only turned on the underfloor heating, he made us hot drinks and dished out plates of walnut cake. He told us that St Giles was a woodsman who spread the word of the Lord in France and became a celebrity in the process. He was, Jack said, the patron saint of “cripples”, becoming disabled himself when he outstretched an arm to intercept an arrow destined to end the life of a deer. When I asked Jack who would win a beauty contest between Saint Giles and Saint Luke he conceded that St Luke was a bit of a looker, but added, wittily: “Whichever of us gets to Heaven first will find out.”

THURSDAY 13 There’s a fabulous simile describing Everton in the match report from last night’s drawn game against Liverpool.

like buying designer suits but renting your underwear.

📌 Last week at the Headway writers’ group Errol proposed the title Taxi Man Dreams, which is a painting he is working on in the studio. I decided to try a poem with an ABCB rhyme scheme. There was some debate as to whether the final rhyme actually works…

The taxi man sized time in dreams

Each fare a fantasy

He loaded pictures in his head

That only he could see

Sometimes he drove in Rotterdam 

Or Liverpool, or Rome

Then a voice from behind his head asked

Am I nearly home?

One day he was the getaway

For a daring jewellery heist

His passenger on that memorable day

Carried a black bag full of Russian ice

The cops always failed to add two plus two

They never felt no collars

They never even came within an inch

So the ice got swapped for dollars

Now the taxi man lives in two worlds 

In one he watches the road

In the other he is always elsewhere

Living like a Lord 

FRIDAY 14

📌 I just read an article written by someone who recently attended a big AI conference. The upshot of it was that autonomous intelligent AI is closer than we think, and soon AI will pretty much run the world in whatever way it sees fit. I think the article was meant to be a scare story, but I found myself weirdly up for the challenge of surviving and doing guerrilla warfare with such a regime, driven by a mission to make AI a force for good rather than bad. As I see it.

📌 February’s haircut went without a hitch, unlike last month when my wife coughed while operating the clippers, leaving the hair around my right ear noticeably shorter than on the left.

📌 Over a glass of pink champagne, my wife deduced that this is the 38th Valentine’s Day we have spent together.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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