November 1-7, 2025
SATURDAY 1 Good start to the day…
📌 To Tate Modern to meet our friend Brian, catch up on all the news and take a spin around the superb Nigerian Modernism exhibition, which chimed with the exhibition on Tropical modernism we saw last year at the V&A. The colours were the thing for me.
Later we chatted in the Corner Bar and I realised that “keeping in touch” via social media platforms such as Facebook is illusionary. Things had happened in our friend’s life that could only ever be shared face to face. I felt like I’d learned a life lesson or acquired a new skill in how to determine the truth.
SUNDAY 2 In the preamble to a piece on who might replace Keir Starmer in the event of a leadership challenge, Sam Freedman neatly sums up the PM’s failings: namely an inability to state a clear purpose, a detachment from the mood of wider party, and an inner circle at No10 that is riven with dysfunctionality and factionalism. Sounds a bit like every UK government that ever existed.
📌 Finally, someone has enlightened me on the difference between a command-and-control economy (postwar Britain) and a market-based regulatory economy (post-Thatcher Britain). It explains in a nutshell where everything took a turn for the worst.
What we are left with is a state that is both overwhelmed and overbearing. Governments appear too stretched and incompetent to formulate coherent strategies to address the big problems
📌 Meanwhile, the other Freedman, Lawrence, demolishes Donald Trump’s latest crazy concoction of falsehoods on his supposed intention to resume nuclear testing in the US. Every sentence of his recent statement turned out to be verifiably not true.
📌 We watched all three episodes of the Girl Bands Forever documentary on BBC iPlayer, which was a quiet eye opener about discrimination and the cruel exploitation of women in the music industry and its capacity for swallowing talent wholesale and spitting it out. This was an odd dislocation for two people who met in the 1980s music industry, courted, got married and have stayed married for 37 years. My wife was appalled by the non-inclusion of Girls Aloud in the documentary.
MONDAY 3
📌 The Chair of our local allotments project is an exhibitionist farter. He is not an extrovert exhibitionist farter, who proudly breaks wind with confidence. He deliberately farts then quickly offers an apology, as if the act were a mere mistake. I’d like to think that he expels his excess methane accidentally, but he doesn’t. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Something also suggests to me that farting so extrusively is an offer of friendship.
TUESDAY 4 Once again I have bitten down two of the fingernails on my right hand so severely that I fear infection. A frenzy of washing and daubing with antiseptic is in progress. Fingers crossed they don’t balloon and require antibiotics like last time.
📌 One of the contestants on Pointless admitted that he tells people he likes travelling when in fact what he really likes is going on holiday.
WEDNESDAY 5 Two radio reports this morning showed the government finally getting its message across. Changes to the national curriculum will tilt the system toward education as knowledge + citizenship. Primary and secondary programmes will be better aligned to reduce dislocation. The emphasis on boosting reading skills was the best example. Pupils who graduate from Primary to Secondary schools with poor reading skills do not thrive.
The second report was about the high numbers of young working-age people on long-term sick notes. The new intention, inspired by a report by Sir Charlie Mayfield, a former Chair of John Lewis, is to enable employers to make reasonable adjustments that will bring people experiencing health difficulties back into the workplace.
Employers must be in the lead. Some may resist that message amid tight margins and slow growth. But many already recognise they are carrying the cost of ill-health every day.
Both of these reports downplayed reference to the £cost of making these changes. The will to do it was the emergent theme, the will to change fixed ways not dramatically but with massive long-term potential benefits.
📌 What fun we have in store watching New York’s new Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, in shouting matches with Donald Trump. Mamdani’s success is said to be a triumph for young voters. I will be checking on his progress in meeting his promises to lower the cost of living and public transport, etc. In the moment it feels like Trump’s tide has turned. As in Britain, voters are no better off than they were a year ago. How fast can Mamdani change that for New Yorkers?
📌 Oh it’s a proper joy to witness Jonty Bloom in full rant. Today he attacks City bosses who pay slave wages.
THURSDAY 6 Whenever I make an idle suggestion in the studio and Michelle likes the sound of it, she springs into action and insists the job is done immediately. This isn’t my preferred method of working. Today I stupidly remarked that since buying jewellery for my wife is a nightmare, I will try to make her a ceramic geometric pendant for Christmas. Straight away Michelle had me cutting clay and building designs, when all I really wanted was a cup of tea and a Spotify playlist.
Michelle has now escalated this flurry of activity into a Billy Mann Collection. She has ordered some special waxed string and instructed Brian to create a velvet coated jewellery display unit for Open Studio on December 4.
📌 At a Culture Mile event to celebrate the reopening of the Great Hall at St Bartholemews Hospital I dared to comment to the Liverpudlian tour guide that a shady part of William Hogarth‘s Grand Staircase paint job appears to show someone who looks not a lot unlike William Hogarth, painting with a long stick because he was such a shortarse.
📌 Alan Carr won Celebrity Traitors and I’m still not sure why I bothered to make a note of that happening.
📌 I learned a new word today…
Broligarchy is a neologism and portmanteau combining oligarchy and broism, describing the rule of government by a coterie of extremely wealthy men who are perceived by the public as tech bros. It is also known as tech oligarchy.
FRIDAY 7 There’s a lot of speculation about the Chancellor raising the basic rate of income tax in her upcoming budget. Her opponents say tax the super-rich instead. But she will likely tax the ordinary worker rather than the cunning corporations simply because it is EASIER to do so. The super-rich are not on PAYE. They have highly-paid tax fiddlers to squirrel away their billions in places no one from HMRC can even see.
Labour needs to establish an infrastructure that will allow the government to track modern wealth, such as cracking down on tax havens and working with other countries to set a global minimum tax on the ultra-rich, so that future wealth taxes can be precisely designed without loopholes.
📌 The filming of my lines for the the St Luke’s production of A Christmas Carol (November 21, Garden Room) is done, phew! It was like being in an episode of It’ll Be Alright On The Night, with far more swearing. The director James was pleased and kindly said I performed better than most professional actors. I wore the Dickensian fancy-dress suit I got for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet (with flat cap), in the bleak hope that the audience will be more impressed by my outfit than by my fluffed lines. Kelly said I looked like the Scouser in Peaky Blinders.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 