June 7-14, 2025
SATURDAY 7 My indifference to the beauty of the musical has been undone once again. At the Barbican last night we saw a deliciously charming and timely Fiddler On The Roof. The story may be stupidly sentimental and riddled with hackneyed tropes about Russian Jews, but the singing and dancing had a warm, funny, music-hall feel, and the sparse but clever set even managed to include a real fiddler on the roof. When we got outside, Marge said to me, “Oh, I do love your people”.
📌 The Bureau Of Investigative Journalism has been successful in exposing the local council that play fast and loose with taxpayers money. Its exposure of crooked dealings at Thurrock council, an investigation that started five years ago, has just been taken up by the Serious Fraud Office. That it took five years for the SFO to wake up is a shocker, but the real bad news is that the government voters elected last year on a promise of change has failed to tackle the issue.
There’s no discernable plan from the government to get the situation under control.
📌 Jonathan Freedland’s portrayal of the Trump/Musk drama makes it look like a Shakespearean parable about two powerful men who go into battle and both emerge as crippled and bloody losers.
📌 I wouldn’t normally pay much attention to an article saying Russia is waging war on Britain (cyber attacks, poisonings, etc), but the words of defence expert Fiona Hill are chilling and convincing enough to put me in a defensive frame of mind. Maybe I secretly knew about it all along and that’s why I read so many spy novels.
📌 Anna’s mum’s watercolours and embroidery artworks look fantastic at the Open Gardens café in the Sir Ralph Perring Centre.
📌 It looks like we have a come to an inflection point when the State must declare openly its relation to private enterprise. That private businesses feel so emboldened as to try to hold a government to ransom (Thames Water) is obscene. If the government caves in, it loses any credibility to holding power over its nation’s fortunes. I hope it has a plan.
📌 The Ballad Of Wallis Island is a knowing, funny and touching piece of cinematic confection. And it made us reflect on how drone cameras have made scenery the star of many a modern film or TV series.
SUNDAY 8 Remarkably, Day 2 of Open Gardens was another success for our local allotment group. My wife happily chatted with visitors about the exotic tomato and herb varieties we are growing in our tiny patch.
📌 The Spanish end of the Brink’s-Mat caper in the second series of The Gold is in Tenerife, which made me miss it.
MONDAY 9 Yesterday my wife mused on the possibility of Britain forging an economic and security alliance with Canada and the Nordic countries. I agreed and was happy to learn today that such an alliance is already taking shape.
📌 Today’s Sensemaker explains the background to Donald Trump’s fanatical drive to round up and deport illegal immigrants from the US, and the backlash that has driven him to escalate his mission.
📌 The City of London maxi tote bag in heavy canvas is finally finished. The question of whether to sell it (and at what price) or offer it as a gift is one I’ll sit on for a while.
TUESDAY 10 At Barbican Cinema 2 last night we saw a remastered Darling, the 1965 John Schlesinger film starring Julie Christie in what today looks like a very dated homage to Vanity Fair‘s Becky Sharp.
📌 Elon Musk has said sorry.
📌 Got a message from Carmel to say that the end of June is OK to submit the first visuals of the Dayroom designs. Last week I felt on top of this project, now I’m feeling stressed again, a long way outside my comfort zone. No more of these jobs come August when I officially retire.
WEDNESDAY 11
📌 Rafael Behr reckons the “new” government looks a bit too much like the old one.
The fatal flaw in Labour’s economic strategy was overestimating how much goodwill would be available to the party once it had fulfilled its electoral utility as a tool for ousting the Tories.
📌 Back to Liverpool on a trip with Sue, Jaq and Lynne we found the Mersey surprisingly low. I don’t think I ever saw mudflats that big in the city centre when I was young. Jaq asked me the significance of the twin Liver Birds and I didn’t know the answer. Shame on me. Luckily, AI did.
It represents the city and its connection to the sea, with the female Liver Bird believed to watch over the returning seamen, while the male watches over their families in the city.
THURSDAY 12 In March 2023 we were nearly killed at a bus stop in Liverpool, and in order to process the ongoing trauma we were advised to revisit the site of our near death. It was a cathartic experience in some ways, but I’m not sure we will ever forget it. We chatted with a local car mechanic called Joe who offered to send us CCTV footage of the fateful incident and soothed our souls later with a trip on the Mersey Ferry, which is now a slick tourist operation rather than the public-transport service of my youth.
FRIDAY 13 Jaq’s got sunburn of the eyelids. It looks quite painful, but she says it isn’t.
📌 The man who survived the Air India crash immediately phoned home to say he was OK.
📌 In today’s Sensemaker we learn that birthrates in the world’s richest countries are falling dramatically because having children costs too much.
📌 Out and about in Liverpool, including a Vivienne Westwood exhibition, the Roman Catholic cathedral, the Anglican cathedral and a meal in Chinatown…
📌 In the Old Post Office pub in School Lane we heard a singer change the words of a Beautiful South song from “This could be Rotterdam or anywhere, Liverpool or Rome” to “This could be Rotterdam or anywhere, Everton or Rome”. In the next chorus he changed “Liverpool” to “Tranmere”.
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