October 4-10, 2025
SATURDAY 4 Simple running stitch using basic Sashiko patterns is a very comforting way to explore colour combinations.
📌 The Benugo cafe at Waterloo station is infested with pigeons that crawl around your feet while you sip your hot beverage.
📌 Trains to Salisbury have been cancelled because a tree has fallen somewhere on the line. It reminded me of a time in the past when the removal of this kind of obstacle might have been a one-off employment opportunity for local muscle with time on their hands.
📌 Cliff, one of the guys in the Dickens Drama group at St Luke’s, told me that his real name is Heathcliff. He got really annoyed and went into a huff when Bridge(t) insisted on telling him exactly how to bid a jovial happy Christmas to his uncle, Scrooge.
SUNDAY 5 In Magdelan House, Winchester, possibly for the last time (a sale is in progress), Liz and Bill told us that they always read the bad reviews of holidays before the good ones. In one of them, a man had requested a balcony facing the sea then later complained that the sound of the ocean waves kept him awake.
📌 On a quiz trail around Southsea we got the idea that Nelson and Charles I are a pretty big deal around here…
MONDAY 6 A day trip to Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard included a boat trip around the harbour to check out several warships, an exhibition of noteworthy women mariners and a close look at the ancient vessels HMS Victory and the Mary Rose.
TUESDAY 7 I must be getting properly old because the first thing I now do after waking up in the morning is not to check the news headlines but to finish the word game I started before falling asleep.
WEDNESDAY 8 Jonty Bloom reckons the Conservative Party is about to be made extinct by our discredited First Past The Post voting system. One poll estimates that in a snap general election the Tories would win just 25 seats. At the weekend in Portsmouth Sue told how Tory grand dame Penny Mordaunt was surprisingly unseated from her Portsmouth North constituency at the June 2024 election by Labour opponent Amanda Martin.
📌 As I sat in Prêt having a cup of tea after my flu jab, either side of me sat two muscular young building workers, both speaking in English with European accents into their phones while eating and drinking. One of them was even offering instructions to someone on how to install a toilet by midday (it is 10.30am).
THURSDAY 9
📌 The third series of Blue Lights really is an exceptionally good blend of cop show and intelligence thriller. I might be writing that because we recently visited Belfast and got a palpable sense of the menace ordinary people live with. The acting in Blue Lights is superlative.
FRIDAY 10 It’s always nice to listen to political opponents bicker over the details of a particular policy. The size and role of the state in everyday lives is a favourite, as is the fight between the responsibilities of the individual versus the responsibilities of “society”. At the recent Conservative Party conference, leader Kemi Badenoch (aka, Bad Enoch) claimed that if the Tories win the next election, among a whole series of potty policies they will introduce is the abolition of Stamp Duty. Jonty Bloom hits back first with a deceptive jab…
Lots of economists and other experts dislike Stamp Duty on property sales because it is a tax on moving house, and we should be encouraging people to move house.
…then with the sucker punch that cuts through every detail of why the abolition of Stamp Duty would be economic suicide…
The policy will do nothing but push up house prices and give huge tax cuts to the wealthy.
📌 It’s the time of the year when I start to stress out on what to buy my wife for Christmas. I thought we’d nailed this problem a while ago with the agreement that we will buy each other “experiences”. The experience I bought for my wife’s birthday in August (a voucher for a cheese feast on a canal boat) has still not been used. Nor has the one I bought her last Christmas (a guided walk). Small items that demonstrate thoughtfulness are still expected, so I will start today. In the past these have included 48 bags of Hula Hoops and a jar of Marmite-flavoured peanut butter.
📌 At the Dickens Drama rehearsal I tried in vain to wriggle out of my assigned role of Narrator (basically Charles Dickens himself) in A Christmas Carol. I was however relieved to find that all I have to do is read one short paragraph in all of the five ultra-redacted scenes. I have permission to do this in a hardened version of my own accent, so I guess the world should probably get ready for its first taste of Dickens doing “deez, dem and doze”. I think also that Hayley from the Dickens Museum has embraced my theory that Scrooge and Marley were more than business “partners”.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 