April 5-11, 2025
SATURDAY 5 I’ve started to learn Chinese on Duolingo, encouraged by an article in The Knowledge describing just how far China has moved ahead of the US.
Many in Washington still labour under the illusion that China can’t innovate. Up close, it’s downright scary to watch.
SUNDAY 6 Will Hutton believes Britain is at the front of the grid alongside Canada and Germany to build a new global trading order that excludes Trump’s America.
Trump’s America has forfeited global trust. The world has other choices…
And the Socialist Worker reckons Trump has probably shot himself in the foot.
It is an irony that Trump’s attempts to use US economic power to boost US industry may result only in the further strengthening of the Chinese economy and government.
📌 It turns out that I’m as bad at learning Chinese as I am at learning anything else. Structural learning is obviously not my thing. “I think that bird has flown,” my wife said.
MONDAY 7 Greenland might overwhelmingly not want to be a client state of the US, but it does want independence from Denmark. According to a BBC article, an economic alliance with Canada and Iceland is the preferred status.
📌 We’ve been photographing some of the old stuff we want to sell to the man who deals in second-hand goods. Only when you unearth items from the corner of a basement shed, wipe them down and position them for the camera do you notice all the little faults you will inevitably be forced to declare in advance of any sale.
📌 Tortoise Sensemaker reports that Britain is at the centre of proposals to form a European “Bomb Bank” to finance rearmament after the flouncing off of the USA. Other countries involved include Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland and the Netherlands. Southern European countries are reticent and seem to prefer a rival proposal from the EU. A northern European alliance based on defence sounds like a great idea. But without Germany it surely runs the risk of looking like a side hustle in weaponry rather than a serious defence project.
TUESDAY 8 The Letters of Note newsletter today has a letter written by Salvador Dalí to his friend, the poet Federico García Lorca. Surreal isn’t the word…
I feel a great love for grass, thorns in the palm of the hand, ears red against the sun, and the little feathers of bottles. Not only does all this delight me, but also the grapevines and the donkeys that crowd the sky.
📌 More stuff unearthed to tempt the man who deals in old junk.
📌 Theatre snobs look away. Six The Musical was never likely to make it on to my to-do list, and the idea of a Spice Girls-inspired sextet telling the stories of Henry 8’s six wives seemed ludicrous. But the show was more of a revelation than I could ever have imagined, great entertainment, and not just for the neat wordplay built into cheesy pop songs (eg, history becomes herstory). Another pop-cultural leap forward for feminism, I hope.
📌 Got sent an amazing photograph of my cousin and my sister, which I put through an AI app to make it look a bit like a painting, because that’s the kind of image it is. Look at those hands.
📌 Bumped into a long-lost friend tonight. He looked old, overweight and seedy. I wonder if he thought the same about me. I don’t really care if he did.
WEDNESDAY 9 Just as I was about to quit learning Chinese on Duolingo out of frustration at my inability, the daily lesson got exciting, with lessons in drawing the “hanzi” characters for simple things such as water and coffee.
THURSDAY 10 How annoying it is when the “manage your preferences” cookie button does not offer the “reject all” option and you are forced to scroll through a long list unclicking all the cookies that have already been automatically clicked.
📌 Another properly sage comment piece from a retired Larry Elliott clarifying the multiple ways in which Donald Trump has lost his biggest bet.
📌 There are moments when I simply stare in wonder at the Chinese hanzi I am learning. This is the hanzi for “this is…”
📌 I unearthed another item to sell from our vast and dusty collection, only to be told moments after photographing it that my wife wants to keep it.
📌 Frankie was in the Guardian‘s Dining Across The Divide feature. We thought she was older than 28.
📌 I’d suggested the Ed Cross Gallery for our Thursday cultural excursion with the St Luke’s mob, so here we were. Ed did a fascinating if overlong presentation about how he got into being a dealer in African art, but I suspect it’s just because he’s filthy rich.
FRIDAY 11 A very long article in Foreign Affairs on the dangers of underestimating China argued that the US should be making friends rather than shedding them.
As Washington turns away from its coalition, China is constructing its own. Driven together by anti-Western grievance and their own parochial interests, China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are creating substantial authoritarian scale.
📌 In This City Is Ours, a horrible little tea leaf called Billy made off with 50 keys of Jamie’s lemo in the back of his girlfriend’s blue mini.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 