July 12-18, 2025
SATURDAY 12 Great line from a Mick Herron short story, All The Livelong Day: “This was the moment on which the day would turn, and the whole horrible event begin to be swallowed by the past.”
📌 We sat in the shade of the big fig tree for the Summer Picnic, eating egg sandwiches and cheese rolls from Greggs. Plus soft jazz played by musicians from the Guildhall School. The ants got to the slices of melon we contributed to the communal food table.
SUNDAY 13 Keir Starmer is using the words “not serious” an awful lot.
📌 For the Whitecross Street Party Artbox reopened their gallery, temporarily. One of the exhibits was a hat worthy of an outing to Ascot.
MONDAY 14
📌 When Dom finally declared his love for Jean and they snogged, we thought we’d finished Madame Blanc. But no, then we found a whole new undiscovered Series 4 on Channel 5. The saga continues for 7 more episodes. Yawn.
TUESDAY 15 Only 97 out of 650 UK MPs scored more than 50% of their constituency vote, states Peter Kellner in an article arguing for the Alternative Vote electoral system.
📌 At a stencilling workshop at the new London Museum Studios we made tote bags. I went for simplicity as the process can get quite messy.
It was fascinating to see the various efforts of the dozen people attending the workshop and to glimpse once again the imagination and creativity that surfaces simply by putting a group of people together in a shared space and giving them access to arts and craft materials. Amazing things happen.
WEDNESDAY 16 Worker’s Rights is now an issue in top-flight football, with world governing body FIFA accused of forcing players to play too many games in too short a space of time without proper rest periods or holidays. On BBC Radio 4 one player is quoted as saying the only time he gets a rest is when he’s injured. The accusation is that FIFA puts making more and more money before the wellbeing of the players who make them that money.
📌 Someone on the radio said that the only reason Donald Trump agreed to supply long-range missiles to Ukraine is because Volodymyr Zelenskyy wore a suit rather than his regulation combat gear to a NATO summit.
📌 Trump’s ultimatum to Putin to agree a peace deal with Ukraine has put the Russian president in a spot. Until now, he has been able to string Trump along, helped as always by Trump’s unpredictable behaviour and his impatience with Europe not spending enough to defend itself. Now Europe has agreed to pay more and Zelenskyy gives the impression of looking grateful, Trump has decided the roadblock to his treasured “deal” is “crazy” Putin. The supply of supersonic weapons to Ukraine might not be enough to weaken Putin, writes Rafael Behr, but if Trump makes good on his promise of tarrifs against Russia, Putin’s power will over time become diminished.
Stringing Trump along may prove to have been another grave error of judgment.
📌 Back to the London Museum Studios to hear Harshita and her fellow “Community Associates” talk about the new scheme to share power, money and resources. It was a rather smug and conceited love-in, and not the right time or place to ask hard questions about the dead hand of the City of London Corporation, so I slipped out as soon as I could.
THURSDAY 17
📌 At the Summer Open Studio my wife took a fancy to Errol’s Boobs.
📌 The Mick Herron short story The Last Dead Letter outlines the backstory of Slow Horses anti-hero Jackson Lamb as a young MI5 spy in Berlin. It reminds me of Endeavour, the prequel that came from the Inspector Morse stories.
FRIDAY 18 I woke up to read that the England women’s team beat Sweden on penalties in the Euro 25 quarter finals. They went 2-0 down early on and didn’t look like they had the magic to turn the game back to their advantage. So we switched over to the last two remaining episodes of The Madame Blanc Mysteries. We finished that with a sigh of relief but during the closure of Madame Blanc, the England players apparently pulled their socks up, stared their own closure in the face and said no. Now they will play Italy in the semi finals.
📌 An optimum score in Waffle is very rare these days. In fact, whenever it happens I let out a silent incredulous gasp. It’s almost as if all your good luck aligned in one deft movement. But of course it didn’t. I suspect those who play Waffle seriously get a maximum score every day. I just blunder a good score every so often. It is the story of my life.
📌 Oh I do relish a good quote. Mick Herron’s books are full of them. His descriptions are poetic in ways no poet would identify with. His characters are relatable in ways they never should be. And an undertone of small-p politics (let’s call it attitude) rides the wave throughout any of his stories. In one of the short stories in Dolphin Junction he describes the layout of a big out-of-town shopping mall section by section…
Its bookshops shelved volumes by every author its readers could imagine, from Bill Bryson to Jeremy Clarkson.
📌 RIP Sunny, the fat, cheeky cat. Yvonne is very upset.
📌 On the news that Donald Trump is threatening to “sue the ass off” Rupert Murdoch, Marina Hyde asks…
Oh please don’t, Mr President! His ass is 94 years old and incredibly wrinkled. Also, half of Britain’s political class still lives up it.
📌 The view from our living-room window is changing. A brand new skyline is in progress.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 