August 30-September 5, 2025
SATURDAY 30 In his latest Newsletter Of (Not Quite) Everything John Elledge claims that your fear of meeting your maker when the lift you’re in fails and plummets earthwards, is such a theoretically remote possibility that you really shouldn’t fret about it. You are, he says, more likely to be crushed to death by a failed lift shooting skywards and hitting the roof. Examples of both types of death are cited.
SUNDAY 31 I haven’t yet found a new audiobook on Borrowbox or Libby, so I’m back with Drama on 4 at BBC Sounds. Collapsing Orbits is an obvious but nevertheless intriguing dramatic take on the monster that is Elon Musk and his obsession with tech brotherhood and interplanetary travel. Intriguing because it has a whiff of romcom about it, something it’s hard to imagine the real Musk having a part in. After that came a harrowing piece of narrative journalism, Hershey’s Hiroshima, that details using interviews the hours and days following the 1945 Atomic bombing of Japan. Harrowing because it includes unflinching descriptions of melting faces and empty eye sockets.
📌 At the Barbican “garden” party in St Giles church, Myra told me all her artworks are about dreams. Her recent dreams, she said, were about Donald Trump and Angela Rayner.
MONDAY 1
📌 “Student” AI models have been found to pick up quirks and even bad habits from the supposedly older and wiser “teacher” models that are used to train them.
📌 As I read Peter Kellner’s latest essay on the fortunes of the Conservative Party and its possible return to power, I had the creeping nightmare vision of the return of Boris Johnson as leader, arguing, without irony, for a centre-right bluestocking utopia and a tough but fair return to good working relations with our European neighbours. Then Kellner woke me up with the news that Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper have already jumped on that (blue) bus.
📌 Zoe Williams offers a robust riposte to the media forces trained on persecuting Angela Rayner for the her crimes of owning a home, drinking wine and having a violinist for a friend.
It has never been clearer: this is a class war, mediated through one person.
📌 Today is the first day of my retirement and it feels like the first day of a new job. Today I’ve been checking and filing two years of pay slips, all digital. Soon I will be shredding 30 years of paper ones.
TUESDAY 2 At Jo Chard’s latest Disrupt Open Space (OST) event on arts funding, Harshita said I was the best disabled old person she knows: “And I know quite a few!” The “Provocation” today was “Can Community Power Survive The Funding Cycle?”. One cheeky participant decided to twist the question to create a secondary provocation: “Can The Funding Cycle Survive Community Power?”
There always hangs a big cloud of irony over these daring, question-probing events that their sponsor is the Guildhall School, whose students are among the most rich and privileged in all of London, if not all of Europe.
📌 Some young people have started to excuse their ignorance by declaring, “I’m a Millennial!”.
📌 The Premium Bonds must have decided I deserved a retirement gift.
WEDNESDAY 3 Another great sentence from Mick Herron in Down Cemetery Road.
These clichés didn’t get where they were by not being true.
📌 I’ve often wondered why Graham Linehan doesn’t just move on and leave the trans-baiting to someone else. I always imagined it to be a passing phase anyway, and that eventually society itself would gently close down the debate on whether women can have penises. But judging by the report he published following his arrest by armed police at Heathrow Airport, Linehan actually gets pleasure from it, enjoys a fight, and sees his latest encounter as a national tragi-comedy performance as performed by a state obedient to trans activists.
📌 Caught a seriously overweight spider dangling quietly behind the shed in our allotments.
📌 Coralie Turpin, a Sheffield artist, took over today’s Stitchers group and got everyone doing mini mosaics for a public project that will eventually be displayed at 1 Golden Lane.
THURSDAY 4 Someone at the Barbican has obviously done a deal with someone who has the rights to exhibit masses of Giacomettis. That’s the only way I can think to explain the existence of the Barbican’s new sculpture gallery, a prime space overlooking the lake formerly occupied by an expensive restaurant. Encounters: Giacometti has a stated purpose to…
…position historic sculptures by Alberto Giacometti with new works by contemporary artists…
In the latest installment Giacometti is nudged together thematically with Palestinian sculptor Mona Hatoum, the theme being a study of violence in all its forms. I couldn’t help but think that Hatoum’s work is poweful enough to stand alone, without the help of the partnered Giacomettis, but I guess the footfall at £7 a go is based on the name check.
📌 RIP Bobby Graham, 80. He lived at the top of our street in Liverpool. My cousin Helen had a schoolgirl crush on him.
📌 The Daily Mash has decided to pile in on the Raynergate fiasco..
📌 There’s a line in an article about Angela Rayner on the Tory CapX website that is uttered almost out of embarrassment…
For reasons perhaps best left to the comfortable quiet of the therapist’s office, there are many Conservatives who look at Rayner and wonder why she isn’t one of us… Her life story could be a triumph of Thatcherite aspiration. To go from leaving school at 16 while pregnant and without qualifications to becoming Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister is no mean feat.
📌 RIP Giorgio Armani, 91. Can’t say I ever had any interest in his work, but the Armani photo essay in the Guardian is a model of elegance.
FRIDAY 5 As Angela Rayner’s immediate political future hangs in the balance, Gaby Hinsliff sees black clouds circling the controversial Deputy Prime Minister.
Yet even if she is cleared, she has some difficult decisions to make. She will need to come to terms with the fact that this is essentially her life now: that her opponents in and out of the party will never stop pulling at any loose thread they find… Politics would be a smaller, sadder, duller thing without her. But only she can decide if the prize is worth it.
📌 Rayner is a goner (nb, corrective spelling tried to turn the word “goner” into “ginger”, which is also true).
📌 RIP Duchess of Kent, 92. You were a Wimbledon fixture; always there, smiling your fixed smile as you handed over the trophies to countless winners.
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