Scrapbook: Week 49

November 29-December 5, 2025

SATURDAY 29 It would be foolish to join the badmouthing choir over Rachel Reeves’s Budget, says Jonty Bloom. It was cunning, and sensibly cunning, and in the long run it could prove to be a genuine turning point for the nation’s fortunes. Even though Reeves (and by implication Starmer) might have been ousted from their jobs by the time the turn is complete.

📌 RIP Tom Stoppard, 88.

📌 We had our first meal from this year’s Wetherspoons Festive Menu. My wife was unhappy that the blue-cheese dip that came with her Big Cheese Burger last year has this year been replaced by a Emmenthal & Cheddar dip.

📌 Overheard in Wetherspoons: the odds against West Ham beating Liverpool tomorrow are 4-1.

SUNDAY 30 My sister sent me a message saying she had “just realised that you look like John Travolta”. I was concerned. Which version of Travolta did she mean? Was it this one, I wondered…

Or was it from another time, when John Travolta was good looking? Yes, she replied, it was more like Travolta circa Get Shorty, which I reckoned was OK. Then she narrowed down this dubious comparison to the fact that Travolta and I share similar “psycho blue eyes”.

📌 Had a good laugh with Tina Crawford at the Golden Lane Festive market. And discovered that Martha’s parents live in El Médano.

📌 My wife and I were deeply appalled to be stumped in Squaredle by the word “Lollygag“. Deeply, deeply appalled at the inclusion of such a non-word.

📌 Liverpool beat West Ham 2-0.

MONDAY 1

📌 To the cinema for the 2h17m second installment of Wicked, which completes this spectacular cinematic musical interpretation of the Wizard of Oz story. I never knew the story in the first place, so a lot of the references went over my head. There were some quite good jokes (most of them from Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard of Oz), and the Wicked Witch of the West finds happiness in the arms of the Straw Man. Dorothy is very downplayed, appearing mainly as a pair of feet to parade a pair of ornate shoes, previously owned by the Wicked Witch’s sister.

TUESDAY 2

📌 To Tate Britain for the Lee Miller exhibition, which I found underwhelming. Even the self portrait of Miller in Hitler’s bath tub looks as staged and posed as the huge volume of banal fashion photography in which she seemed to find inspiration. Some interesting moments (obvious stabs at feminist sisterhood, an image of Picasso resembling a serial killer) were undermined by a chronic, self-obsessed overstudy of the subjects and the attempts of caption writers to give very ordinary pictures an artistic weight they didn’t deserve. And with it all came the scent of a privileged artistic elite doing dodgy human experiments.

The bonus for me was accidentally exiting the gallery shop at the wrong end, whereupon I bumped into a small arcade of International Modern paintings and sculptures from the 1930-1940s.

In the cafe I demonstrated the versatility of ChatGPT by asking it to create a surrealist image of a toilet seat wearing a pair of glasses and a scarf.

WEDNESDAY 3

📌 Walking down Charterhouse Street I spotted a woman taking a photo of the railings outside the Charterhouse School. So once the woman had finished her photographic mission, I went to investigate what was so exciting about these railings…

📌 We caught up on the first two episodes of the new series of Shetland, which we missed while away on holiday, and it was reassuring to note that smiling is still prohibited.

THURSDAY 4 Stuart remembered my wife’s name. He has been practising for 10 years.

📌 At the end of World War II, Stuart’s dad bought up a load of surplus aircraft parts with the intention of inventing contraptions that would make him super-rich. After he died, Stuart found all the bits of old planes in the garage and a half-finished attempt to build an automated garage door.

📌 In search of ideas at the Headway writing group, Jason had an appetite for something to do with elves. Stuart suggested “Elfish Presley”, so I asked ChatGPT to create an image…

FRIDAY 5 Andrew Marr reckons both Starmer and Reeves could be gone by January. He is less sure about who will replace them, but does float the amusing idea of Starmer’s job as PM becoming a job share between Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner.

📌 Today’s Sensemaker has a story claiming that Donald Trump was “gifted” an original Tiffany football trophy by dodgy Fifa boss Gianni Infantino, and that the trophy awarded to the winning team in the Club World Cup final (Chelsea) was a fake.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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