October 11-17, 2025
SATURDAY 11 I do wish Sam would do more drawings from her imagination. She does them so rarely, and feels she’s crossing some kind of line when she does them.
📌 My wife was alarmed to hear me speaking in the middle of the night. “Help me, I’m dying!” I am reported to have said.
📌 The Rotunda garden is looking especially colourful.
SUNDAY 12 My wife’s support for the Arsenal women’s team was short-lived. Today, in their game against Brighton & Hove Albion, she started supporting Brighton, but then momentarily had second thoughts when it was revealed by the commentators that Brighton do not play their home games at the Amex Stadium in Brighton but at the Broadfield Stadium in Crawley, which is 35 miles from Brighton. Arsenal won 1-0.
📌 RIP Diane Keaton, aka Annie Hall, 79. We searched the streaming services for it but couldn’t find it. My wife theorised that it was because Woody Allen has been cancelled.
MONDAY 13 I’m much enjoying Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series in audiobooks from Borrowbox. I once tried reading a print version but became exasperated by its tedious prose style. In audio, however, the passivity of the “reading” experience renders the tedious prose into a charming “voice”. Which in the case of all the Thursday Murder Club books is supplied by Fiona Shaw.
📌 According to Jonty Bloom the government is squandering billions in national income by only charging small businesses 40% of the tax they should be paying. He also points out that the government saves vastly more money by not telling people which benefits they are entitled to than it does from chasing down benefit fraudsters.
TUESDAY 14 A news story on the radio said that some organisation had stated that Britain’s economy is the second-fastest growing in the world. My ears tingled with skepticism, but if the story were in fact true, how will we all ever get used to our country being a success rather than a failure? We’ve lived (comparatively) with the bad times for so long, I’m not sure I’d recognise the good times even if they were staring me in the face.
📌 Buried near the bottom of today’s Sensemaker is news of a quiet revolution that will not be finished for 30 years. Boomers are slowly dying off and bequeathing their money and property to their Millennial grandchildren. The result is that much of the new house-buying is by this new monied class, a trend estate agents have been quick to pick up on.
📌 Trump may be strutting the world stage demanding a Nobel Peace Prize, but…
Maintaining order in post-war Gaza carries risks, especially when Israel remains opposed to a two-state solution. If their aspirations are thwarted, Gazans may come to resent Arab peacekeepers as an occupying force which is doing Israel’s dirty work.
WEDNESDAY 15 Rafael Behr has some thoughtful reflections on the lessons Keir Starmer might learn from the desperate political plight of French president Emmanuel Macron.
📌 For the second time in recent history I cut my toenails in the bathroom but forgot to hoover up the clippings from the vinyl flooring.
THURSDAY 16 The physio says I probably have tennis elbow but will schedule an x-ray to make sure nothing “bony” has happened with my right elbow.
📌 To the V&A for a lunchtime lecture from Ekta Kaul and her life’s journey in stitch from India to London.
FRIDAY 17 There’s a “wall of worry” that a new financial crash is on the way.
📌 The Dickens Drama group at St Luke’s resumed with a full read-through and some conversation about each character’s motivation. James the tutor/director spent some time trying to persuade Mrs Cratchit to be more angry with Scrooge than merely disappointed. English, let alone Dickens English, is not a first language for most of the group, and literacy levels vary enormously, which makes the project all the more interesting. My role as Narrator is at the moment quite clumsy because the Narrator does not have another character to play off. I will work this week on creating an imaginary Listener to which I will offer my spoken links.
📌 Chris’s Kingsland High Street collage exhibition at the weird church in Hackney was awesome. It comes at the end of his artistic residency and it’s a pity the collection will now be dismantled. It deserves to be in a museum somewhere as a snapshot in history, a moment in time.
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Billy's Scrapbook 
Thank you for this post. My husband too talks in his sleep. Hope you do not get a tennis elbow. Take care both of you.
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