Scrapbook: Week 50

December 6-12, 2025

SATURDAY 6 One of our friends says she will shortly embark on a project to pass herself off as suffering from dyspraxia. She needs an excuse for instantly forgetting the names of people she is introduced to, and dyspraxia is her choice. I fear for the prospects of her ruse if she actually runs into anyone who knows what dyspraxia is.

📌 A New Statesman article opens clearly:

A new trial looking at the impact of puberty-suppressing hormones on children with gender incongruence will begin in the new year. The research aims to determine whether these drugs are of benefit to often vulnerable and distressed gender-questioning children, or if they could be harmful. Or, perhaps, both. But will the way the trial has been set up allow it to achieve that?

The author then, over the course of 6,000 words, arrives at a conclusion somewhere on a scale between “probably not” and “no”. Why so many words are required to bring us that answer is as bewildering as to why so much public money (£10.7m) has already been spent searching for it.

📌 My wife is deeply annoyed with the BBC for allowing people who already have careers performing in musical theatre to compete in Strictly Come Dancing. She believes they have an unfair in-built advantage over other contestants from a variety of jobs including comedians, wildlife photographers and footballers.

SUNDAY 7 Spotify‘s snooping algorithms sometimes throw songs at you, based on what you already listen to. Disturbingly, today it gave me Alone Again (Naturally), by Gilbert O’Sullivan. I’d never actually paid much attention to the song’s dark lyrics about death and abandonment. On Reddit, one summarising contributor was likewise upended by the song’s brutal melancholia…

Dude loses the people in his life and decides to reward himself with a plunge off a building.

📌 RIP Martin Parr, 73. I thought I recognised him once on Whitecross Street, sitting outside Molly Bloom’s pub with his daughter and a very small dog. But I wasn’t sure, so when he left, I asked his daughter what her father’s name was. She answered not “Martin” but “Martin Parr”, which I thought was a strange way for a daughter to refer to her father.

MONDAY 8 Number-cruncher Peter Kellner reckons that the very slim majority of Leave voters that swung the 2016 Brexit vote has now died and that the majority has been reversed.

📌 RIP Derek. It was a merciful release. We went to see Marge’s mosaics class exhibition but she wasn’t there. Then we found out why.

TUESDAY 9 There’s a small but very potent article in the New Statesman about student protest and the different ways it impacts on the lives of those who take part and the ramifications for the future of traditional universities. And for governments who play risky political games with higher education.

📌 I left the St Luke’s volunteers’ Christmas party as soon as Barbara had finished leading a group of tipsy women in a karaoke rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.

WEDNESDAY 10 On my way to the GP surgery for my Shingles jab, I ran into our neighbour Dave, who told me he’d bought a second-hand stair lift for £1 and installed it himself to enable his wife (two hip replacements, one knee replacement, second pending) to get up and down the stairs. He has yet to figure out how to disable the five sensors that detect when the chair is not safe to use, but assured me he will figure it out.

📌 Shetland finished on a characteristically miserable note, the “happy ending” being a healthy baby born after a car crash. Into a chronically dysfunctional family. The poor child will grow up watching his grandparents spitting at each other.

THURSDAY 11 Starting the day with a piece of Margie’s banana bread always seems like such a civilised thing to do.

📌 The first three pendants in my upcoming geometric jewellery collection for the studio are glazed and fired. This is a learning process for me, but it’s something I’d quite like to improve on. At the moment, what I have learned is to take as much care as you can perfecting the original clay pieces, otherwise you will spend hours meticulously sanding off rough edges after the first firing and before glazing.

FRIDAY 12

📌 My wife did a gingerbread workshop and came home with an artwork that had me humming the theme tune to Little House On The Prairie.

📌 To the Barbican for Twelfth Night, featuring Sam West as Malvolio and the superb Gwyneth Keyworth as Viola/Cesario. When you reach for the word “interesting” to describe a play it probably means it fell short of expectations. I didn’t laugh a lot and laughing a lot is what I expect from Twelfth Night. It was “different” in that the rom was earnest and the com slapstick. Too tricksy and gimmicky, also.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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