Scrapbook: Week 43

October 18-24, 2025

SATURDAY 18 Prince Andrew is the media gift that just keeps on giving.

📌 In the Conversation there’s a fascinating essay on the psychology at work on the TV game show The Traitors, arguing that what happens with 20 people and a film crew in and around a remote Scottish castle is a mirror of the lies, deceit and petty rivalries that take place in all of our everyday lives.

📌 A UBI (Universal Basic Income) scheme in Ireland started during Lockdown to protect those working in the creative industries is to be made permanent. It is said that for every €1 of state subsidy to artists, the payback was €1.39.

📌 Mick Herron’s Zoë Boehm books are full of curious little phrases that could mean something or nothing depending on your state of mind. And yet the mind that really matters is Zoë’s, and she is the one pondering phrases such as…

Survival was a lifetime project, and bound to fail in the long run.

…Which almost amounts to a philosophy.

SUNDAY 19 More and more often the conversation among local friends and neighbours eventually comes round to the doctors in our GP surgery. We all have our favourites and we all dread being sent to the miserable phlebotomist for a blood test. Bad blood-test puncture bruises are each a story waiting to be told about the casual brutality inflicted.

MONDAY 20 The Socialist Worker commonly refers to Prince Andrew as the lowercase “paedophile prince”.

Prince Andrew once claimed to be too “honourable for his own good”. But he represents the sense of entitlement of the “Droit de Seigneur” – the right of feudal lords to rape peasant women on their wedding night. 

Fascinating also is Socialist Worker‘s unflinching description of the Royal Family as a “grooming gang”.

📌 Waffle announces that it is World Statistics Day with the claim that 92% of all statistics are made up. If they were all made up of verifiable data, I’m not sure that is a problem. If the remaining 8% are totally fictitious and get a disproportionate amount of attention, then that could be/is a problem.

📌 Doing stitchworks of Sam’s drawings always involves a surprise discovery embedded in the complex detail she excels at.

TUESDAY 21 I don’t have very many lines as the Narrator in the St Luke’s potted version of A Christmas Carol. First I say something confirming that Scrooge is a cold, heartless and perpetually miserable old duffer. Then I have lines relating to his youthful courtship with Belle and how he squandered his chances of real love. At the end I announce his total transformation into a regular human being. Not many lines at all, but learning them off by heart is starting to feel like an uphill struggle. I don’t know how actors do it.

Oh he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, was Scrooge. A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner, to be sure! Secret, self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.

📌 The “wall of worry” that a new financial crisis is on the way just got a bit higher.

📌 Carmel sent over pictures of the Royal London Hospital day-room makeovers, which are nearly finished. All of the display elements were made in workshops with brain-injury patients.

WEDNESDAY 22 Andrew Marr is stepping down as political editor of the New Statesman. His articles are one of the reasons I recently revived my subscription. His final piece is a “we are where we are” story about Keir Starmer, the hope he claimed to be offering the nation when elected and the claggy political bog he has become mired in. There is a sadness about Marr’s final reckoning, that all of the hope of a progressive future is evaporating too quickly. But there’s also a sense of foreboding, that things might be on the cusp of going badly wrong.

📌 Another stitchwork of a Sam drawing is finished. I never tire of stitching her crazy work.

THURSDAY 23 The German company that made the removals lift used by the Louvre robbers is using the daring heist in adverts illustrating the brilliance of their product.

📌 Islington Museum is doing trials of late-night opening for community groups to enjoy the museum’s rich content after work. We went with St Luke’s to see the permanent collection plus a new exhibition of community art projects. My favourite was an archive video about Islington’s Victorian music halls.

FRIDAY 24 Interesting to see two examples of counter-spin on recent political events. The win for Plaid Cymru in a Welsh by-election is being parlayed as a defeat for Labour but an even bigger defeat for Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK, who came second. And in the controversy around the inquiry into grooming gangs, the resignation of four survivors from the panel and their demand for safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to resign is countered by the announcement that five survivors will only stay on the panel if Phillips continues in post.

📌 I really don’t like the word “outage”. I don’t much like the word “droughtflation” either, but can live with it for the time being, what with things the way they are, etc.

📌 At the Dickens Drama workshop at St Luke’s the director James started rewriting Dickens, which came as a relief because I was itching to rewrite my own lines to make them easier to deliver.

📌 Wendy & Peter Pan at the Barbican was quite hammy, a bit pyrotechnic panto and annoyingly graced with an audience overpopulated by privileged children and their smug parents. When my wife asked me earlier this week if I’d ever read Peter Pan I told her no, it was too middle class and I was more of a Treasure Island kind of child. There was a curious moment in the second half of the play in which I suspected Peter became a special-needs case, possibly autistic with signs of ADHD.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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