May 24-30, 2025
SATURDAY 24 To my wife’s immense displeasure, Sunderland beat Sheffield United to win the Championship playoffs final. They will now play next season in the Premier League.
📌 Moderate commentators are all now falling into the view that Donald Trump is a bad thing and that China and Russia are laughing their heads off at his mood-swinging tariff antics. I feel like I might be ahead of the game because I’m currently reading Mick Herron’s brilliant This Is What Happened, in which a young office post-room worker is caught up in what she is told by someone who claims to be an MI5 spook is China’s attempt to take over London and turn it into a CCP dictatorship.
📌 My wife tells me that Boris Johnson has welcomed a “surprise new baby”. I’m still trying to work out how the arrival of a baby can be a surprise. We are watching the Australian TV drama Bump to find out.
📌 At brunch today, Shirley recalled a recent meal she described as “Instagramable but not edible”, which I thought was quite poetic.
📌 I think Rose Ayling-Ellis is being lined up as the new Sarah Lancashire-type everyman character. Lancashire made ordinary a superpower, Ayling-Ellis is pioneering a type of drama in which ordinary disability (hearing impairment ) is a superpower.
SUNDAY 25 In a Guardian editorial I found a great quote about, er, tax.
Good tax policy plucks the most feathers with the least hissing
It is attributed to Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
📌 For the first 20 minutes of the League 1 play-offs final at Wembley I thought Leyton Orient were playing in red. They were playing in grey.
MONDAY 26 A hankering for the music of Björk this morning eventually led me to the Wikipedia page for Iceland, where I learned that historically Iceland had family clans rather than tribes and that Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, who served as the fourth president of Iceland from 1980 to 1996, was the first woman to hold the position and the first in the world to be democratically elected president of a country.
📌 Sue’s artichokes are looking good.
📌 From The Chelsea Detective we learned that BSL has regional variations. One of the suspects signed the number 10 with a “Manchester accent”.
📌 The introduction to the BBC Radio version of Graham Greene’s The Third Man states that it was written as a screenplay treatment for the classic 1949 Carol Reed film starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime.
TUESDAY 27 According to a lengthy analysis on the Centre For European Reform website, Britain has lost its ability to trade. The global financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent pandemic crippled trade worldwide. But unlike other similar countries, Britain did not regain its appetite for competitive trade after those traumas and now lags behind as a basket case. Starmer’s reset with the EU could be a moment, the article argues, but only if the will is there, which at the moment it is not.
📌 Anna returned from visiting her elderly mother with a massive stash of watercolours we can use to put on an exhibition during Open Gardens weekend.
WEDNESDAY 28 Sue has returned from her sailing exams in the Med. She passed her Day Skipper exam and promptly went off sailing with friends. But the weather was often poor and one night during a storm, they were tied up in port playing Scrabble when someone noticed that the anchor had worked loose. They had drifted 2 miles out and had to motor back to safety.
THURSDAY 29 The reviews for Wes Anderson’s latest film Phoenician Scheme, swing quite comfortably from “best” to “worst ever”. It’s certainly bonkers, which goes with what we’ve come to expect from Anderson, but for me lacks a coherent story, leaving you to just gawp at the sets and costumes and count the number of top-drawer actors who troop in and out in a series of deadpan ironic cameos. Kate Winslet’s daughter Mia Threapleton steals the show, but so does Anderson in a way, for getting away with it once again and spinning his weirdo fantasies into a cinematic empire.
📌 At Headway Paul told me that the robin is symbolic of the departed soul, which is why he made several ceramic robins in the studio for people he knows to have lost a loved one.
FRIDAY 30 At the Barbican last night to see the glorious Americana harmony trio I’m With Her, we were reminded that sometimes it’s a good idea to make your support act talented musically but mildly underwhelming to an audience. So it was with Keenan O’Meara, who cut a precarious line between early Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen circa Nebraska, with a dash of irony thrown in. But as time wore on Keenan just sounded a bit too whiny.
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