February 22-28, 2025
SATURDAY 22 At Waterloo station it felt like I was in an episode of The Capture, surrounded by a multitude of CCTV cameras, presumably being monitored constantly by MI5 in case I somehow fit the facial-recognition profile of an international terrorist.
📌 Our great niece Rosie appeared in the Basingstoke Gang Show, a song-and-dance sketch production heavily populated with Scouts and Guides. It had a level of professionalism, especially in sound, lighting and costumes, that seems to have become standard in small-scale revues.
SUNDAY 23 In the New Statesman Lawrence Freedman says not to get too worked up about Donald Trump’s threats against our way of life because he has a habit of blowing his trumpet but then backing off quietly when he realises his threats hold no weight.
📌 A draw would have been an acceptable result for me in the game between Manchester City and Liverpool. But a ruthless and composed Liverpool came away with a 2-0 win.
📌 Very pleased to learn there will be a Season 3 of The Capture. Maybe if it has been on terrestrial TV rather than Netflix, a change in the law would be forced to make CCTV footage inadmissible as police evidence.
MONDAY 24 My wife reports that Dina is still a nuisance at the Monday coffee afternoons, continually on the hunt for free cake and a bit too loose with her reactionary views.
TUESDAY 25 A House of Commons letter arrived asking if we’d like to have tea and biscuits with our MP.
📌 Annoyingly, our local library doesn’t tell you when your membership is up for renewal, and the first thing you know about it is when you can’t access their online services. Annoyingly 2, it is not possible to renew online.
📌 Peter Kellner has crunched the numbers on Donald Trump’s popularity in the US and found that contrary to Trump’s own claims, he is actually the worst ranking president of the post-1945 years.
📌 At St Bart’s we got to hear about Benjamin Franklin’s excursion to London to work as a printmaker. He was quite the big-head, apparently, describing himself as the fastest compositor in the world. Bart’s had a facsimile of the press he used and sample prints of his endeavours.
Franklin came to London as a callow, cocky youth aged 19. His self-assurance obviously irritated some of his fellow English print workers because they used to mess up his type tray to prolong the time it took Franklin to compose a page (compositors were paid by the page, not the hour).
WEDNESDAY 26 The Complete George Smiley Radio Collection is now available for me to download from the library, and The Londoner is fast becoming my favourite new read.
📌 In one of those dark moments when I imagined no longer being able to afford a Spotify subscription, I decided to test YouTube Music. Surprisingly, if you know what you want to listen to (me = “neoclassical”) the ads algorithmically tailor themselves to fit in with the groove, and you don’t get that horrible transition from peaceful piano to the piercing shriek of the in-your-face ad pitch.
📌 Oh what fun it is to watch Donald Trump pulling strings while behind his back someone is tying his shoelaces together.
📌 Rafael Behr in one paragraph hits the nail on the head…
Britain is transitioning to a wartime economy. If there was a lingering question about what this Labour government was for – what Starmer’s ministry would ultimately be about – this is the answer. It is a gruelling mission of rearmament and renewed national focus on security, in a dangerous world where the US is an unreliable source of protection and its president can’t be counted as a friend.
All Starmer needs now is for the voting population of the UK to eat another helping of the Dunkirk Spirit without being sick.
📌 John Elledge’s Newsletter Of (Not Quite) Everything starts off with a detailed scrutiny of the German elections (young men are fascists, young women are hard lefties) then shifts towards an analysis of the media and its message that far-right politics is at your front door, when in truth it’s not, it’s just the story that suits the media best.
📌 Liverpool’s solid 2-0 defeat of Newcastle United proved that what was thought to be a blip in performance was no such thing.
THURSDAY 27 In a dream last night I visited the disabled toilet in a hotel restaurant to find that one of the hotel’s guests had marked it out as a personal (male) bathroom, with deodorant, toothbrush and shaving gear, etc, littering the surfaces. On the toilet’s cistern lay a pair of boxer shorts. When they accidentally fell into the toilet pan I hesitated, briefly, then flushed twice.
📌 RIP Gene Hackman, 95. His death at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, coincides with that of his wife Betsy, 63, and their pet dog. Investigations continue, but speculation abounds. Was it a suicide pact? If so, I’d like to know what input the dog had on the agreement. I consulted Wikipedia for clues…
There are yet to be definitive, unanimously agreed upon, instances of non-human animal suicide.
📌 The prompt for this week’s task at the Headway Writing Group was “Desert Island”, which I very unsuccessfully tried to twist into a joke by changing the title to “Dessert Island”…
Île Flottante is where French chefs go on holiday
Typographers prefer Sans Serif
Crème Anglaise is another word for custard
Meringue is 80 percent air
Americans call it the “floating island”
They add stale cake, fruit and booze
Benjamin Franklin had one in 1771
The English call that Trifle
Soft peaks in an ocean of custard, then
Is where you want to be
Drifting with your taste buds
Reciting je pense donc je suis
FRIDAY 28 Our neighbour Yvonne took us out to dinner last night as a thank you for helping her sell her bungalow in Clacton (my wife did all the helping). Yvonne is a notorious moaner and one of tonight’s moans was the time she got stuck overnight in a hospital waiting room with “one of The Kinks”. She mentioned this as breezily as she had when she told us some time ago that she once, aged 27, enjoyed a transatlantic ocean crossing with David Bowie.
📌 A tea-and-biscuits meeting with our MP Rachel Blake was taken over by a vocal group of residents from Crescent House to the exclusion of everyone else. Only when the meeting was brought to a close and people dispersed did any meaningful conversation take place.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 