October 25-31, 2025
SATURDAY 25 There’s a cracking short essay in the Guardian from a history boffin about the politics of France and its apparent descent from a supposedly united nation to a supposedly divided one. Note the use of the word SUPPOSEDLY because the argument for all the gloomsters and doomsters is that France has been here before and came through stronger and fitter, etc. So buck up and remonte tes chaussettes is the message.
Diagnosing national decline and blaming it on a kind of pervasive moral rot is practically a French national sport.
📌 Our neighbour Sue was part of a panel discussion about Housing in the City of London at the prestigious London Centre. It is an impressive exhibition and conference space so we were surprised that the microphone they passed around for the audience to question panelists did not work. The one used by the Chair and panelists did, but even then when Sue came to speak her soft voice was too quiet.
📌 We always forget that the air conditioning in our local Nando’s next to the booth seats blows cold air down your neck. We asked this time to move and pledged to remember not to make the same mistake next time.
📌 Liverpool lost again.
SUNDAY 26 In the Observer the economics grandee Will Hutton describes something known in business circles as “creative destruction”. I like the sound of it. At a conference recently I advanced the idea of “quiet disruption” in the hope that a group conversation might follow. It didn’t. “Creative destruction”, says Hutton, is the supposed mechanism by which old, established businesses with their fixed practices are allowed to fail so that newer, brighter, more forward thinking enterprises can flourish. The problem, he says, is that as soon as bright, new, go-ahead enterprises get created (and Britain has plenty) they are sold to overseas investors, mainly American. That, claims Hutton, is why Britain is stuck in a productivity hell-hole.
MONDAY 27 I tried to video record myself doing the lines I’m meant to deliver for the St Luke’s performance of A Christmas Carol. It was excruciating and made me want to crawl under a rock and hide until it’s all over.
TUESDAY 28 My audiobook diet at the moment is plenty of helpings of cozy crime. Having finished the Richard Osman Thursday Murder Club series, I graduated to his new series, We Solve Murders, the first of which introduces the characters of Amy and her ex-cop father-in-law Steve, who likes nothing more than a pint and a pub quiz but somehow ends up sharing space with international hitmen and money smugglers.
📌 In an attempt to learn the lines I’ve been given for the St Luke’s version of A Christmas Carol (clue: most of the parts, including Scrooge, are played by women), for some reason I’ve been trying them in a bad Welsh accent.
Scrooge saw himself. A man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years, but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.
WEDNESDAY 29 Jonty Bloom reckons the clue to Britain’s poor economic performance is hidden in plain sight, but now it has been identified by the World Trade Association from the banks of Lake Geneva. It’s Brexit and the exports lost as a result. And until whichever political party is in power breaks with stubborn denial and finds a way to rejoin the Single Market, nothing will change and the depressing grind of economic stagnation will continue.
📌 It’s World Stroke Day reports the Stroke Association, adding that in the UK only 35% of stroke survivors get a medical review 6 months after leaving hospital. It seems the kind of aftercare I got, and continue to get 13 years later, is now history.
📌 At last the national media has caught on to the cowboy approach of our local council to the maintenance and repair of the architectural landmark Golden Lane Estate, a model of civilised high-density housing.
📌 Last night Dawn went on a harrowing patrol of the Fleet Street/Chancery Lane area as a volunteer to record the number of rough sleepers on the streets and to get information about their circumstances. She said some of them had their spots carefully organised and were happy to answer questions. Some even looked prepped to go to work the next day. Others had obviously bedded down for the night more randomly in a sheltered or hidden corner, defensive and resentful of any intrusion, regardless of its good intentions. Dawn got home at 3am with her eyes wide open and filled with tears.
THURSDAY 30 It’s always a pleasure to start the day with a “Beard of Zeus“…
📌 Headway members have been busy making ceramic angels for Christmas…
📌 To Barbican Cinema 3 for the documentary Kenny Dalglish. My dad used to say that the clue to King Kenny’s footballing genius was that “he stuck his arse out and backed into defenders”.
FRIDAY 31
📌 The New Statesman has an article by David Lammy cheerleading for the Starmer project and claiming to know how Nigel Farage’s popularity can be reversed. But what I liked most about the piece is the Ralph Steadman portrait used to illustrate it.
📌 The halls of the ancient guilds are always good places to remind yourself of the obscene wealth of the City of London and the cultural value it places on stuffy tradition, pomp and gold paint. At the Plaisterer’s Hall we saw an exhibition of wood turners.
📌 Harshita dropped off her Golden Lane pictorial composite stitchwork, which I might frame instead of turning into a tote bag. It made me want to start a collection of local pieces to exhibit. And it made me want to stitch some of my own.
📌 My wife tells me that the comedy duo Mitchell & Webb have done a TV parody of TV’s beloved The Repair Shop called The Weeping Shed.
📌 Ruth, the physio at my doctor’s surgery, sent me some exercises for my tennis elbow, a YouTube video made by the British Elbow & Shoulder Society. I’d like to think that every country in the world had an Elbow & Shoulder Society, but my guess is they don’t.
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