July 26-August 1, 2025
SATURDAY 26 John Elledge pulls out a great opening sentence for his latest New Statesman column.
The truly unnerving thing about the fall of Rome was that most Romans probably didn’t notice it had happened.
This opens a clinical analysis about the woeful decline of British society and the very strong possibility that it will never be reversed.
📌 Not only did I get a top score in Waffle I learned that the expression Callooh! Callay! is from the Lewis Carroll nonsense poem Jabberwocky and defined as an expression of “great joy and excitement”.
📌 “You were very handsome… when you were young,” my wife told me.
SUNDAY 27 Never in a million years did I expect to find Paul Mason agreeing with Donald Trump. But they both share the view that Europe needs to take its own security more seriously and start coughing up the cash on defence projects that can repel Putin’s ambitions to carve out a new Russian empire.
MONDAY 28
TUESDAY 29 It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely partnership, but in The Jealousy Man, the Jo Nesbø collection of short stories, there is a thrilling murder mystery, Cicadas, that uses class to illustrate parallel universes and the scientific proof of their existence.
📌 Another unlikely partnership to consider is Polly Toynbee lining up against the BMA and the striking resident doctors.
📌 When player Chloe Kelly spoke about “being English” after the England women’s team victory over Spain on Sunday, we winced. Yet the idea of “proper England” or “proper English” has apparently been circulating in sport for some time, and it has nothing to do with the nationalist thuggery you might at first imagine it has. It is about resilience, determination and the belief that if we stand together, anything is possible.
📌 My wife reckons Robbie Williams now sounds like a desperate pub singer.
📌 I do like the baggy suits the Lionesses are wearing.
📌 Much is being made about the courage of the England Women player who soldiered on through the tournament with a fractured tibia. I feel like a spoilsport for questioning her employers for allowing that to happen.
WEDNESDAY 30 Nigel Farage has now started to mimic Donald Trump in ways that go way beyond creepy. It could be his undoing. Trump is not very well regarded in Britain despite his skills in plain speaking.
📌 Our financial advisor Katie has a plan that ensures the lifestyle we have now will continue, with knobs on, after my retirement next month.
📌 The race is on to finish the big brain stitchwork for the Royal London hospital by September.
THURSDAY 31 Last night we watched the first story in the TV series of Bookish and were impressed by Mark Gatiss’s ability to play with established tropes and genres. His co-reinvention (with Steven Moffat) of Sherlock Holmes in the series Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman and Andrew Scott as Moriarty, showed a passion for period pieces coupled with well-drawn characters. In the Holmes stories the characters are off-the-shelf, but already in Bookish we see the team forming, all the players readying themselves for further adventures in postwar inner-city crime capery. I especially like the character Nora, who is like a postwar female Artful Dodger.
📌 Matthew’s family own 3 big farms in Zimbabwe, one of which might have gold beneath it.
📌 In a conversation with Alex about the Disrupt event I attended last week, I described Disrupt‘s mission as “power sharing”. Alex asked: “Do they have any power to share?” and that reminded me of one of the conversations I had during the event with a woman who had worked for the Gulbenkian Foundation, a privately owned Portuguese charitable organisation whose origins lay in deliberately surrendering power. Or at least that is how it was described to me.
FRIDAY 1 On Borrowbox I’m listening to an audio collection of Ruth Rendell stories, A Spot Of Folly, that are said to have not appeared previously. Most of them are about men being undone by their own vanity and conceit, or else undone by the women they’ve treated with contempt, but they do illustrate Rendell’s love of the final twist. I’ve found myself scouring the stories as I listen to them, trying to spot the detail on which the final twist will pivot.
📌 Bunhill Fields graveyard was as wild and spooky as ever when I passed through on my way to Margaret’s funeral service at Wesley’s Chapel. I sat next to Jacqueline, and we both disrespectfully started laughing when the man sat behind us bellowed all the hymns at a volume they could probably hear all the way up City Road. He also had the habit of extending every word by one syllable, so for example, “Heaven” got freighted with three syllables.
📌 I’m really quite glad to be doing some simple Sashiko stitchwork on coloured tote bags. Plain but pleasing, and finished in no time at all…
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