Scrapbook: Week 20

May 10-16, 2025

SATURDAY 10 A Russian🚀space ship launched in 1972 with the intention of snooping around Venus is about to come back to Earth with a bump. Shortly after its launch Kosmos 482‘s engines failed and it has been spiralling in Earth’s orbit for over 50 years. Now the spiral is reaching its endpoint and the intact craft will hit Earth, location as yet unknown. It was fascinating to listen to a space scientist on the radio describe the wild elliptical motions of the orbit’s ever-narrowing path.

SUNDAY 11 While my wife was elsewhere I revived my quest to make my own fish paste using low-cost tinned fish and assorted other ingredients. This one is sardines and hard-boiled egg, with chopped cornichons, spicy tomato chutney and tartare sauce.

📌 I’m dealing with my newly diagnosed arthritis in my hips in the same way Winston Smith came to terms with Big Brother. It’s a three-step process: LEARN, UNDERSTAND, ACCEPT. That and the prospect of hungry rats chewing his face off.

📌 Catherine Bennett was somewhere in the audience at the Boy Blue ensemble performance tonight at the Barbican. I saw her milling around before we took our seats. The show was truly amazing, inspiring, beautiful and funny, though I imagine Cathy Bennett could find something sour to say about it (too much of a crowd-pleaser is my guess). Because that is her thing. The show was memorable also for the appearance on stage of Boy Blue co-founder and choreographer Kenrick Sandy, now a bulky 40something, who performed a cameo with young dancers to signal his intention to start dancing again after establishing a world-famous hip-hop dance phenomenon and nurturing new generations of talent. Generation Blue.

MONDAY 12

📌 Today’s Sensemaker says Donald Trump has lost interest in the defence of Europe and the Middle East because he is preoccupied with starting a big hi-tech fight with China.

In a memo from 30 April, the defence secretary outlined plans for:

• each division of the US army to field as many as 1,000 drones;
• troops to be able to cheaply 3D print spare parts in their dugouts;
• AI to be integrated into battlefield strategy;
• ammunition to be stockpiled at scale; and…
• advanced long-range missiles to be developed for sea and land.

TUESDAY 13 The prime minister is cutting an increasingly desperate figure. His attempts to look tough on immigration fool nobody. Most people are in favour of legal migration if it means more doctors, nurses, care workers and other specialist workers. Reducing those numbers will impress no one. What the voting public gets angry about is the titchy-tiny number (comparatively) of illegal immigrants arriving in small boats. It’s that number Starmer needs to bring down if he wants voters to believe he is in control of our borders.

WEDNESDAY 14 Keir Starmer’s uncomfortable posturing is a sign, says the ever-trustworthy Rafael Behr, that he lacks the skills to communicate his purpose, the WHY of his policies.

It should be possible to recognise that there are perverse incentives that need ironing out of the benefits system, while also striving not to drive vulnerable people into destitution.

In other words it is the messaging rather than the policy that is defective. The article is useful in that it shows exactly how unpopular cost-cutting decisions around issues such as benefits could have been recast to point up the positives of the long-haul national overhaul Starmer and his government have embarked upon. The underlying point Behr seems to be making is that the real party of reform is the Labour Party, and not Reform UK.

📌 Dolphins 🐬 have been spotted in the Mersey.

📌 Alison returned from Australia to find that Jacqueline had done a great job watering her plants. What she didn’t notice was that Jacqueline had also watered the plastic flowers.

📌 Our financial adviser Katie once again urged us to spend lots of money and not worry about the future.

📌 The odds on Kemi Badenoch losing the leadership of the Conservatives party this year are 13/8.

THURSDAY 15 Today’s Sensemaker is all about Syria and Trump’s visit. I don’t know how I missed it but I am ashamed to say I hadn’t even clocked that Bashar al-Assad had been deposed and replaced by an ultra Islamist, who Trump is now sucking up to, for some reason. The takeover took place in December last year, but the only reference to Syria I can find in my scrapbook for that time is a note saying that the Syrian cobbler in Hoxton Street said my favourite shoes could be mended, but at a very high price.

📌 At Headway Stuart asked me if I’d nicked any decent hubcaps recently.

📌 We’re now on the second series of Gangs of London and my wife is still remarkably undisturbed by the gross levels of graphic violence.

FRIDAY 16 Another great line from Mick Herron in This Is What Happened.

Every passing stranger is a beacon in a sea of static

📌 The sun is shining on the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, just round the corner from our hotel.

📌 At a loose end in Cardiff, we went to the pictures to see the lame but borderline charming Steve Coogan film The Penguin Lessons. My wife had read the book from which the film was adapted, which is where the word “charming” crept into the description. I’m not sure pathos is Steve Coogan’s thing, despite his determination to work at it.

📌 The city centre of Cardiff on a Friday night is right up there in the hierarchy of drunk and debauched, especially down a narrow but brightly lit thoroughfare known as “Chippy Lane”. I got to the end to find Greggs unfortunately closed.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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