Scrapbook: September 2025

One month as it happened…

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.

SATURDAY 6 The Socialist Worker is typically snide about Angela Rayner’s political plunge.

Rayner pledged to build 1.5 million houses. Her efforts to buy them has led to her downfall.

There is no question that she had to go. The timing was important. Only after an official judgement, and not squeezed out by the baying mob. If she stays loyal to the Starmer project, even as a critical friend on the back benches, she is tipped to return to Cabinet in 12-18 months. Her vanity always came in for a vicious mauling, but in mishandling her tax affairs she walked straight into a black hole. Which reminds me that I must read that letter I just got from HMRC.

📌 For reasons I’m still not quite sure about, Jo Chard, who does really complex academic research at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, invited me to another one of her zany talking-shop events. Titled “Disrupting and De-centring In the Arts Institution” , this one was a Long Table dinner party, “where conversation is the only course”. I felt way out of my depth surrounded by academics talking theory in jargon, but eventually I settled in and made some points about disability and co-production. It was fun and I left feeling not too humiliated, saying I was on a “date night”, to meet my wife and go see a talk about the Iranian Embassy Siege of 1980, courtesy of two quite expensive free tickets from Martine, who couldn’t attend due to illness. My Long Tablemates thought it hilarious that I considered the Iranian Embassy Siege a “date”.

📌 For logistical reason we weren’t able to attend the first game of the season for the Arsenal Ladies WSL (Women’s Super League) at the nearby Emirates stadium. But surprisingly the very well-attended game against the independent London City Lionesses was on the TV and it was a thriller. The thrill being in the anticipation of when Arsenal would score another goal. They won 4-1.

SUNDAY 7 Our internet is out of action and won’t be fixed before tomorrow at the earliest. The big idea was to weather the hiatus by bingeing on the Alfred Hitchcock complete DVD collection that has sat at the bottom of a cupboard for about 10 years. However, when the moment came, I’d forgotten how to work the DVD player. We were forced to watch episodes of Sister Boniface and Silent Witness.

📌 There is an unusual amount of sympathy and support for Angela Rayner. If for no other reason that she is a colourful character, large swathes of the commentariat want her back asap.

MONDAY 8 Two new stitchworks finished and ready to join the portfolio. Each was a challenge and an experiment in its own way. The portrait was a pure step into the unknown, putting iPad painting, printing, stitch and stupid mistakes into one piece. The fish skeleton is one of Sam’s drawings stitched in gold metallic thread, which is hard to work at the best of times, but infuriating when trying to get the kind of microscopic detail Sam puts into her work.

📌 My wife had a long conversation with a woman at Plusnet and we got our internet back. So while she was out at choir practice I took a sneaky 5-minute look at The Thursday Murder Club on Netflix and pronounced it essential viewing for sometime soon.

TUESDAY 9

📌 Paul Mason is squealing with delight that the UK government has just published a new defence strategy that basically puts warfare at the heart of its plans for economic growth.

Labour is signalling the MOD must clearly prioritise investment in UK production. It will aim at partnerships with global defence giants that bring a higher percentage of work here.

WEDNESDAY 10

📌 I carved up the morning suit my wife acquired through a contact in her sewing group. The tails and the trousers became single pieces of fabric I will use to stitch pictures. The jacket is now a bolero in waiting, onto which I will stitch fine metallic thread pinstripes in different colours. The waistcoat is still a waistcoat, awaiting a big idea for transformation. Dawn tried on the bolero at Stitchers and it looked great. Julie suggested doing the metalic pinstripes in a Sashiko running stitch.

📌 According to the capitalist CapX site, Britain is the new France.

📌 At St Luke’s, Alain, 76, told me that when his doctor asked him how he manages to stay so healthy, he told her that he works out in the gym every day and smokes neat marijuana.

📌 We finished I Fought The Law, starring Sheridan Smith, via our super new Plusnet router, which my wife installed in a trice while I was out in the afternoon.

THURSDAY 11

📌 Mandelson is toast.

FRIDAY 12 Today’s media topic is Keir Starmer’s poor judgement (first Rayner, now Mandelson, even though the two departures from government have nothing in common other than a door marked EXIT). On BBC Radio 4 a Labour-supporting pensioner interviewed said he was old enough to have seen all this chaos before when a new government arrives and screws up lots of decisions before settling into a groove. Still, we can expect the hectoring vibe to continue because that’s politics. In the Guardian Simon Jenkins makes an observation about what we expect from our leaders…

A lingering legacy of empire is that Britons expect of their rulers a running commentary on world affairs. I am not aware of Swedes or Italians expecting the same.

He goes on to concoct a thoughtful essay about defence but concludes that Starmer’s new strategy (war as an economic driver) is a big exercise in global showboating…

Britain’s home soil has not been under serious military threat since the second world war. All else is a staggering waste of money.

📌 It’s hard to avoid the glee with which sections of the media are unearthing details of a friendship between a known homosexual (Peter Mandelson) and a convicted peadophile (Jeffrey Epstein).

📌 The stitchwork of Sam‘s wonky platform shoe (which existed previously at the end of her wonky legs image) is well underway. I am tempted to do the ankle cuff in metallic silver, but worried it might end up looking like the kind of police tag criminals released on curfew are required to wear.

📌 At the Barbican, the beautiful music of the seven Kanneh-Mason siblings was ruined by the children’s author Michael Morpurgo standing up occasionally to read some dreary stories he’d written for the occasion about trees and animals behaving as if they were humans. Good job we were able to get discount tickets. My favourite was the Shostakovich, but all the Kanneh-Mason popular classicals were full of feeling.

SATURDAY 13 One of the remarkable aspects of last night’s performance by the Kanneh-Mason family at the Barbican was the educational content of the music. The Handel was noticeably a Handel, the Schubert likewise. It was as if they were offering an easy-to-grasp starter pack for young people to get into classical music in all its different ways. Yet this wasn’t to boil down the music to its simplest. The Shostakovich and Liszt were as full of angst and mood as they need to be. In fact the Shostakovich was borderline psycho.

📌 Blimey, you learn something every day. And today we learned that beneath the Barbican, a sprawling brutalist complex comprising housing and an arts centre, lies an ancient Jewish cemetery dating back to 1070. Father Jack of St Giles Cripplegate unearthed some dusty old documents, handed them over to the Jewish Square Mile group, who then put together an exhibition of Jewish religion and culture in the City of London in bygone centuries. All in an Anglican church, with organist playing in the background.

📌 I learned a new word. I was thinking about Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy) and disability in film, when I discovered from AI that Ratso was a “deuteragonist”, which is… “the person second in importance to the protagonist in a drama”. I then started to wonder whether deuteragonists get paid a special rate.

SUNDAY 14 A new Banksy on a wall at the Royal Courts of Justice in London is said to be a striking departure for the infamous street artist because rather than making a general small-p political comment about trends in society it refers directly to the persecution of protesters by the law of the land. And as usual, the radical right (including Elon Musk) has managed to grab hold of the wrong end of the stick completely, seeing the image as a declaration that protesters get what they deserve.

📌 There’s a disturbing right-wing  intellectual spin being put on the death of Charlie Kirk.

It is a bitter irony that violence claimed the life of someone who dedicated himself to conversation.

📌 In the New World Matthew D’Ancona reports on the opening of the new David Bowie Centre at the V&A East Storehouse. In it D’Ancona reflects on Bowie’s determination to hoard just about everything he did, owned and thought about…

The man whose persona was based upon the distance between rock icon and devout audience has turned his comprehensive archive into a carnival of intimacy and human connection

And…

He intuited that, as digital media became more dominant, contact with physical artefacts – triggers of memory, inspiration of new ideas – would become even more important. 

📌 For those of us who grew up determined to be skeptical and fearful, if not cynical, about the capitalist marketing monster, the antics of Taylor Swift are living proof that we wasted our time.

MONDAY 15 World politics might appear to be stumbling along in its old ways, but in fact nations across the globe are looking at subtle ways to swerve around the lunatic unpredictability of Trump’s America and form new power alliances.

The choice now for many US allies is between handing their sovereignty over to Trump, or finding ways to shore it up by other means, while not making an enemy of the US president.

📌 Our neighbour Yvonne’s cat died. She was heartbroken but decided to go to the cat dating agency to get another one. In due course, she adopted Prince, a pure breed, and looked forward to many years of cat-lady bliss. But Prince wasn’t a happy kitty. He hid in cupboards and wailed endlessly and loudly throughout the night. He was obviously unhappy and Yvonne was starting to wonder if he’d be better off with someone else. Reports today say he has started to settle and is roaming around playfully. Fingers crossed this is the start of a beautiful friendship.

📌 Just imagine… Downing Street announces that at 12.30pm, the Prime Minister will address the nation on the subject of his appointing Peter Mandelson to the job of UK ambassador to the US. At 12.32, Keir Starmer steps forward to a wooden lecturn outside 10 Downing Street. It is raining, but he goes for it nevertheless and says something along the lines of… “I took a risk and it blew up in my face. I didn’t realise at the time what a total scumbag he was. I took a risk because the previous government had played Risk with this country’s fortunes for 14 years. They also lost. So now all the cards are on the table, let’s start over, a new deal and see if we can’t at least break even.” Then he stupidly tries to paraphrase Glen Campbell in reference to his sacking of Peter Mandelson by saying, “You gotta know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.”

TUESDAY 16 Woke up in the middle of the night midway through a beautiful radio drama, A Flame In Your Heart, written as poetry, delivered in the form of letters back and forth between a WW2 fighter pilot Len and Land Girl/nurse Katie, a young couple separated by war but whose love for one another deepens daily.

📌 RIP Robert Redford, 89. My mother used to say he was the most handsome man in the world.

WEDNESDAY 17 A report on the CapX site says that Britain could soon face the 20-hour blackouts that afflicted Spain and Portugal back in April.

📌 We finished Coldwater, at the same time checking Liverpool’s progress against Athletico Madrid in the Champions League. Liverpool managed to screw a 3-2 win out of that game and it looks as if ITV intends to screw another series of Coldwater’s occasionally laughable take on the modern psycho-killer drama set in a creepy corner of Scotland, where Ewen Bremner (Spud in Trainspotting) is the resident serial killer.

THURSDAY 18 Yesterday at Stitchers Karen asked me why my wife and I don’t have the same surname. I said we believed the convention of a woman taking her husband’s name seemed ridiculous to us, and anyway not a legal requirement of marriage. So we kept our own surnames. Sue then told us how when she got married she tried to hold on to her own surname “for professional purposes” (architect). Her surname then was Rogers, but her plan to stay a Rogers at work was scuppered when persistent phone calls came in asking for “Susan Pearson”. So she just gave in and used her husband’s surname.

📌 All of the billions in US investment in AI data centres allegedly promised to the UK in the trail of Donald Trump’s state visit will quickly fizzle to nothing, said an expert on the radio, when the investors realise Britain does not have the energy capacity to power the electricity-hungry AI.

📌 The finished version of Sam’s Shoe, complete with blingy metallic stitching on the ankle cuff and clasp, is now safely portfolioed, if that’s a word.

FRIDAY 19 The government is just over one year old. It came to office promising change. The only noticeable change is the speed with which it has entrenched real disappointment in the voting population. The previous government took more than 10 years to embed disillusionment into the public psyche. This one has done it in 15 months. It failed from the start to score a “quick win” that might have persuaded voters to give it the benefit of the doubt. And it has allowed its enemies to seize the initiative. In the Guardian today, a number of commentators describe what’s gone wrong and what needs to be done, the most eloquent and coherent coming from a former Tory minister, Rory Stewart.

📌 Bumped into Georgia on the gates of the Bartholomew Fayre on its first day of opening. She is this year’s event producer. So glad to see her again. Great music and lots of family activity in Smithfield Rotunda, and a guest collage workshop from the Marx Memorial Library.

SATURDAY 20 A visit to Brighton is always a prolonged moment of nostalgia. You want it to be the same but you know innately that it will always be different. As we arrived a noisy far-right gathering outside the railway station was preparing to march on a small gathering of Palestine Liberation campaigners. In a friend’s house for an old-pals reunion we made a merry dance like nothing had changed in the years since we last met, but under the surface we all knew everything had. It was both lovely and awkward at the same time.

SUNDAY 21 Reacquainting ourselves with Brighton included places we haven’t actually seen in many, many years. We even dared to visit the Marina, which had changed beyond recognition but still carried quite an upmarket grubby vibe. The old Chinese boat that doubled up as a restaurant is no more.

MONDAY 22

📌 I read an article arguing that Britain’s devolved mayoralties should be given more powers over education, health and transport. It argued also that Mayors should be allowed to generate their own income to spend on such public services. It chimed with a story in the local news here in Brighton that record £millions have been raised from parking fines. More powers for local governments is broadly a good idea, until that power is abused and the monies raised are siphoned off to the pals of corrupt council officials.

TUESDAY 23 Thirty-seven years ago.

📌 Our anniversary lunch was a massive portion of eggy bread to share. In the evening we dined on something more refined at the Barbican followed by a marathon screening (with old-fashioned “intermission”) of the 60th Anniversary remastered film of The Sound of Music. The theatre was rammed with young people, who clapped at the end as the Von Trapps made their escape from the Nazis in a long migrants’ walk through the mountains from Austria to Switzerland. 

WEDNESDAY 24 Many of Europe’s leaders, along with their populations, must be wondering whether more benignly constructive relations with Russia, China and India might be preferable to dealing with Trump’s America. If only the present leaders of Russia, China and India saw it that way.

📌 Rafael Behr reckons the Lib Dems can become the Conservative Party minus the Faragist swivel-eyed loons and Ed Davey the saviour of the suburban soft-right cake-baking classes.

Davey’s speech outlined the contest between a “silent majority” of moderate, compassionate patriots who actually like their home country, and Faragist fanatics who hate modern Britain and would twist and fold it into Trump’s America.

A Guardian Editorial resists the temptation to join that view but does express the view that Davey is the only party leader currently courageous enough to call out Tramp, Farage, Musk, et al, and wave the flag for being nice and sensible.

📌 I get the sense that Morgan McSweeney is becoming Keir Starmer’s Dominic Cummings, so getting rid of him asap may be the magic “reset” button the Prime Minister has been searching for.

THURSDAY 25 My wife used our Costco membership to buy jumbo tubs of Marmite for friends as gifts.

📌 If you arrive at Headway before 10am, Wednesday’s menu is still up on the board. Yesterday it included “pimped-up peas”, flavoured with ginger and spring greens.

📌 We joined the St Luke’s Thursday Murder Meetup Club at the Barbican Library for a photo exhibition of Blondie, which took pains to remind us that “BLONDIE IS A GROUP”, though millions of adolescent boys (self included) never quite saw it that way.

FRIDAY 26

📌 Once again Rene (aka, Count Dracula), the phlebotomist at our local GP surgery, struggled to find a suitable access point in the crook of my right elbow to extract the necessary blood sample.

📌 I’m very pleased so far with the reverse side of my latest stitchwork. It is meant to show the moment in the 2006 World Cup final when the French player Zinedine Zidane headbutted the Italian player Marco Materazzi. It is an image that has fascinated me for a long time as a split-second expression of animal violence that transcends thuggery. I remember at the time thinking of it as poetry in motion.

📌 At the St Luke’s Performing Dickens workshop it was decided that since I will not be available for the grand performance of A Christmas Carol on 14 November, I will be “assistant director” and help the rest of the “actors” deliver their lines as if they mean it. Hayley from the Dickens Museum, who joined us for the first workshop, squirmed when I suggested Scrooge might be so uptight, cold and godawful mean is because he lost the one thing he ever loved (Jacob Marley).

📌 Another bonus Reveal in Squaredle.

SATURDAY 27 There’s a picture of Bruce Springsteen in the current issue of Time magazine in which to me he looks very like John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten).

📌 The New Statesman has a big, long interview with Andy Burnham, the premise being that Burnham thinks he’d make a better prime minister than Keir Starmer and that what Starmer lacks is the fluency of being “one of the lads”,  something Burnham seems to handle so well. That may be so, but what the article also hints at is that the politics of the two is not very far apart at all and that they are not really opponents at all, just two people who have a different view about how to do the same thing.

In his demeanour and language Burnham embodies what Labour, in its heart, would most like to be – the party’s sense of its best self.

SUNDAY 28 Listening to the audiobook of A Christmas Carol, I discovered where The Icicle Works, a band I knew back in 1980s Liverpool, got their name from. It refers to Scrooge reflecting that on a cold Winter’s night his mechanical clock might have an “icicle in the works”.

📌 All the news reports depict Andy Burnham revving up to make leadership manoeuvres in the light of Keir Starmer’s Donkeygate predicament.

MONDAY 29 I wonder if in a few years time we will be able to ask Americans “What took out so long?” when the penny finally drops at the failings of Donald Trump.

📌 It doesn’t look like golf is a sedate sport anymore.

📌 A writer on the Open Democracy site says that the #donkeygate revelations about Keir Starmer have backfired because the truth of his involvement with his mother’s donkey field in Kent is that it shows the real Keir Starmer as a man and a politician, something he has so far been unable to pull off in public.

TUESDAY 30 Hours before Keir Starmer’s make-or-break speech to conference, Labourlist has an interview with Neil Kinnock about his own make-or break speech to conference in 1985. It starts by Kinnock reflecting that he became Labour leader more than 40 years ago almost by accident.

If Tony Crosland hadn’t died, if Shirley Williams hadn’t deserted, if Tony Benn had not become messianic, I wouldn’t have even had to think about ruining my forties.

📌 Meanwhile, a lot of commentators say Andy Burnham has already overplayed his hand.

📌 An item buried at the bottom of today’s Sensemaker claims that the government intends to bring back support grants for students from low-income families. The standout revelation for me is that it will be funded by a tax on overseas students.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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