July 5-11, 2025
SATURDAY 5 The anti-poverty charity ActionAid is moving its money out of HSBC because it believes the bank doesn’t take climate change seriously and even ritually flouts its own official green guidelines.
📌 The Ealing Beaver Project claims that after an absence of 400 years, beavers have moved back into London, and are here to stay.
📌 After lunch with Rachel in Hampstead we had another bad experience with the 46 bus, which left us stranded close to Kings Cross, but not close enough to pick up the numerous buses we could have boarded to get us home.
SUNDAY 6 My cousin Helen posted pictures of the tributes to Diogo Jota that have started to collect at Anfield.
📌 Paul Mason viciously dismantles the aspirations of the doomed new Jeremy Corbyn project in an Orwellian piece on the Stalinist left and its creepy suicidal tendency of destroying any good ideas it might ever come up with.
📌 The beef madras in Spoons (4 chillies) was not too hot for me.
📌 The Observer exposes the lies and criminal activities of the characters in The Salt Path, a bestselling book and film, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, in which they offer an object lesson in how not to pitch a tent.
MONDAY 7
📌 It was so cold and windy that I stood waiting in the phone box next to the bus stop.
📌 In all the evidence presented in the Mushroom Murders trial in Australia was the revelation that the killer host of the deadly lunch of Beef Wellington gave her guests different coloured plates to her own. The poisoned grub arrived on grey plates while the host ate from an orange one.
📌 TV detective Madame Blanc talks about fine art and antique jewellery like she’s reading the words straight off a Wikipedia page.
TUESDAY 8 One of the best pieces on the future of the world I have ever read appears today in The Conversation, the website that translates academic studies into readable reports. Here we learn that Britain has within its grasp the chance to become the first “post-growth” nation, in which standing still rather than trying to outdo your own and everyone else’s economic performance in a mad dash for growth is OK. It is a more fair and just world all round, with higher taxes, yes, but much better public services, education and personal development.
Making shared values visible – and naming them – can be key to unlocking political momentum.
Almost coincidentally, the New Statesman has on its front cover this week a message to the government that the idea of endlessly tweaking fiscal rules is a passport to nowhere.
📌 BBC Culture has an article arguing that Superman originated not as a wholesome all-American hero but as a head-banging, butt-kicking socialist.
📌 Got a message from Carmel to say that the Dayroom designs for the Royal London Hospital have been given the green light. So it’s full steam ahead from now until September. My role from now on is minimal, thankfully.
WEDNESDAY 9 While the inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal is still in progress, Politico reports that Fujitsu is part of a consortium bidding to take over the running of the border between Northern Ireland and Eire.
📌 The England women’s team scored an impressive 4-0 win over the Netherlands with a far superior performance to their opening game against France.
THURSDAY 10 David Attenborough has turned his hand to philosophy. On Facebook alongside a picture of a dead-looking bird, he writes…
If you ever see a swift lying on the ground, wings spread as if ready to fly… don’t be afraid. It doesn’t have to be injured. It’s not dying. It’s a creature of the sky that has accidentally found itself in a place where it’s very difficult for it to take off on its own. The swift is not made to take flight from the ground. Its short legs and long, slender wings make it extremely hard to lift off from a flat surface. All it needs is for you to gently lift it. Just a little, in an open palm… And it will fly. On its own. Just like some people.
📌 Madame Blanc is Coronation Street in the south of France.
FRIDAY 11 The saga of Gregg Wallace rolls on. He persists in trying to cast himself as a victim. His cheeky greengrocer behaviour might have been just about acceptable 10 years ago, but not any longer. Wallace has failed to notice that times change, and manners do too. I can’t be alone in wishing he’d just go away and allow us all to forget him.
📌 The hot tip for the next Archbishop of Canterbury is an outspoken Iranian woman. Fingers crossed.
📌 Last year’s Mayoral elections threw up some freaky results that did not represent the number of votes cast, so the government has at last seen sense and scrapped the discredited First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system for Mayoral elections. Let’s hope this is the start of a genuine move towards electoral reform in all elections.
📌 The setup for tomorrow’s global picnic, at which estate residents share their national dishes, is almost finished. It’s a celebration of diversity as much as an excuse to have fun and act foolish.
📌 The Guardian’s First Edition newsletter exposes the myth that the super rich will leave Britain if taxes go up. In fact, the super rich have a long habit of staying put.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 