July 19-25, 2025
SATURDAY 19 One neighbour is mourning the departure of her cat; another neighbour is mopping up after 4 months of rainfall fell in one morning, some of it through her roof.
📌 On the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral our friend Shirley took part in a mass drumming session that shook the cobblestones. I tried to record it but the outcome was 30 seconds of distant rumbling that sounded like the rain was about to make a comeback.
SUNDAY 20 Alongside the derogatory terms “Croydon Facelift” (super-tight ponytail or bun) and “Peckham Rolex” (electronic police tag) we can now add “Hackney Birdsong”, which is the persistent clicking sound made by commercial ebikes that are in use but have not been paid for.
📌 It is quite a pleasure to see Donald Trump tripping over his own lies. A piece in the New World (formerly the New European) offers a clear summary of the background to Trump’s association with Jeffrey Epstein. But in the comments at the foot of the piece is the idea that this affair is bigger for Trump than Watergate was for Nixon. In other words, we are just at the beginning of a very long-running story.
MONDAY 21 My wife says the local weather is like the round on the TV show House of Games in which you are provided the answer and you have to guess what the question is.
📌 The Steve Earle song Nowhere Road is a brilliant compound metaphor. Not just a line here and there, the whole song is a long string of metaphors, just like Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler.
TUESDAY 22 For reasons scientists don’t fully understand the Earth is slowing down and days are becoming shorter. Today will be 1.34 milliseconds shorter than yesterday. If the trend continues, in 2029 a “leap second” will be added to compensate.
📌 News comes from Farming Today that Britain has finally learned how to cultivate blueberries. The optimum weather and soil, apparently, are in Scotland, from where a bumper harvest of the Highland Charm blueberry will soon be available to buy.
📌 My old art class, which I left in protest a couple of years ago, has a fantastic exhibition in Barbican Library. It was such a pleasure to see the work of my old colleagues in all its glory.
Someone even made a video of the exhibition, which creeps around the space in a scarily voyeuristic way, but nevertheless shows the depth and range of the works on show.
WEDNESDAY 23 RIP Ozzy Osbourne, 76. I have flesh-crawling memories of trying to impress a supply teacher with my heavy metal dance to Paranoid at a school disco. I still think of War Pigs as an anthem.
📌 I finally finished the Sashiko stitchwork tote bag I started in a workshop a few months ago. It was a proper botched job at the end but it left me with an appetite for more formulaic geometric stitchwork, so I’ve already started on a second one in which I will mix the colours purple, lime green and pink.
THURSDAY 24 An article in the Conversation reckons the much touted 10,000 daily steps to good health is a Japanese marketing myth. You actually only need to do 7,000.
📌 Jo Chard’s Are We Building Community Power Or Just Co-opting It? was my fourth OST (Open Space Technology) event and I’m more and more impressed by the soft power dynamics and the generosity of ideas that these meetings throw up.
FRIDAY 25 I’ve often wondered what a Ukraine led by Volodymyr Zelenskyy would look like had it not been at war with Russia. Would he have been a strong peacetime leader? Some clues are offered in the anti-corruption protests he now faces and his response to them.
📌 Yesterday was a day of trauma. I accidentally boarded the wrong bus and was forced to improvise an alternative route home, only to then discover that I dropped my travel pass on the wrongly-boarded bus, which I’d hastily disembarked from when I realised my mistake. Thankfully I’m married to an angel and today everything was put back on track. A replacement travel pass is on its way, but feeling less like a fool might take a bit longer.
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Billy's Scrapbook 