Scrapbook: Week 51

December 13-19, 2025

SATURDAY 13 We’ve already eaten the chimney of the gingerbread house.

📌 I think it’s a trend. Yes, Saturday’s Waffle is always the easiest of the week…

📌 One of our neighbours, who has a problem with drunken City workers and delinquent taxi drivers using her street as a toilet, posted an update on her quest to have them dealt with.

📌 My wife went off with her keep-fit classmates to an 80s disco night in deep south London, so I went with Marge to Luminous Night: A Candlelit Celebration Of Song, Community And Light at St Giles’ church. Anne’s choir, plus another from the Marylebone area, performed to a surprisingly large audience. Father Jack had somehow managed to project images of doves flying past the windows, and with the heating full on, and real candles all over the place, it was a genuinely cozy evening. The downside being that a glass of wine was not included in the ticket price. Nevertheless, Marge had two mince pies in her bag , so it all worked out nicely.

📌 Marge told me that “the kids” (they’re both in their 50s) have taken Derek’s death quite badly.

📌 Fesshole: when my wife is out I listen to Bob Dylan.

📌 Mick Herron’s early books can be quite slow. The Zoë Boehm books are no way near as action-packed as the TV adaptation of Down Cemetery Road suggests. A lot of the drama is in the minds of the characters. This can be infuriating for some people but intriguing for others. In Reconstruction I am very annoyed to find that Herron has spent 86 pages of my time telling me a “potential” terrorist has “accidentally” been kettling a number of innocent citizens into a confined space.

SUNDAY 14 There’s still a lot of speculation whether Mo Salah has played his last game for Liverpool. My guess is he probably has, because…

In a region where royalty is often dismissed, only footballing heroes deserve to be crowned, but supporters do not like it when someone thinks they are more important than the collective. 

📌 I started the morning by helping my wife decorate Santa’s Grotto at the community centre in readiness for today’s Festive Celebration. It wasn’t a task to which I’m suited. The start time was too early and we have the habit of getting on each other’s nerves when jointly engaged in logistical endeavours, especially technical ones. We end up bickering. If I had been asked to decorate Santa’s Grotto by myself I would have come to the task with gusto and flair. Every child that later entered MY grotto would have been filled instantly with joy and delight. But offering to ASSIST my wife was always likely to lead to a certain amount of tension. We have different ways of seeing things. So when the opportunity to remove myself from the situation came up, I grabbed it with both hands. “Do we need a sign saying SANTA’S GROTTO?” I asked. Five minutes later, after it was verified that a SANTA’S GROTTO sign did not already exist somewhere on the premises, I was assigned the task of creating one. I went home, Googled “Santa’s Grotto sign pdf” and hey presto, job done. Even Santa thought I did a great job.

📌 My wife accused me of overstuffing the laundry bag. She said all she ever puts in there is knickers. I said I would try from now on to do likewise.

MONDAY 15

📌 The doctor is arranging for my arthritic hips to be seen by an orthopedic surgeon and to be injected with steroids.

📌 Every few months an invitation arrives from our local council, the City of London Corporation, to attend a “City Question Time” event at which residents can grill those in power. Except the whole occasion is highly choreographed to minimise any trouble from residents not entirely convinced that the Corporation has their best interests at heart.

On arriving at the ceremonial Guildhall, an usher showed us to the lift that would take us to the main hall where the grilling was about to start, followed afterwards by mulled wine, canapes and mince pies in the impressively restored Crypt. On our way to the lift we were seized by a ghost from the past, 8ft tall in white alabaster…

At the main event one obviously disturbed Barbican resident stood up to ask the City Question Time panel of stooges why the Corporation wasn’t building nuclear bunkers for its residents given that the Russians are about to attack any day now. We sniggered, but mainly because this man made his plea in the manner of Captain Mainwaring. He is not alone in his concerns.

TUESDAY 16 I’ve noticed that Quora is carrying more and more pop-up ads, in my case with the presumption that I am seeking a partner.

📌 Jonty Bloom offers a great way to measure your life’s worth when you die. If Donald Trump applauds your death and reckons you died because you were stupid enough to hate him, you will be remembered as a citizen of great worth.

📌 The gingerbread house has been broken up into gingerbread biscuits, which are getting soggier by the day. Perhaps they need eating pronto.

📌 David Aaronovitch reckons even America has reached Peak Trump and the President’s influence will from now start to unwind. Two things spring to mind about this. First, Trump is a cultist disruptor, and he has given birth globally to a host of other cultist disruptors, all with popular appeal. Second, in America, the Democratic Party has no visible leader to challenge Trump’s cowboy approach to national and global politics. So if, as Aaronovitch predicts, Trump is defeated at the next Presidential election, it is hard to see how his legacy can so easily be defeated globally. And nationally, only if the Republican Party renews itself by rejecting Trump can America finally turn the page on this sad chapter in its history.

📌 Sarah says Headway East London is to become Headway London. I like it. Bring it on.

WEDNESDAY 17

📌 The government is reported to be launching an initiative in schools to teach boys the difference between pornography and real relationships. One that teaches the difference between fact and fake might also be useful.

THURSDAY 18 Modern warfare includes not only the capture of land but of money too.

📌 Another Christmas at Headway came with a pantomime (Aladdin) as entertainment…

📌 A Brighton friend had two tickets to an exclusive candlelit carol concert at St Mary le Strand church in London’s West End, but couldn’t go in the end because her boyfriend fell down the stairs. So she gifted the (very expensive) tickets to us. Genteel is what it was, something I’ve not much experience of or appetite for, so my time during the performance was mainly occupied studying the screechiness of sopranos, the unusual number of Christmas carols that reference the “virgin’s womb”, and the possibility that the scene in which I now sat would one day be recreated in an episode of Midsomer Murders. In my imaginary setting, the four choral singers, plus pianist, finish their performance, all bow in synch, but the pianist does not return to the perpendicular. The pianist is dead, stuck in a right-angle of rigor mortis. It is the horrified looks on the faces of singers and listeners, all inside this impressive chamber of holiness, that played over and over in my head.

FRIDAY 19 Narcissism is now said to be so prevalent that it has become a term of abuse – especially in schools.

📌 Things can only get better. That’s the message in, of all places, the Spectator. The economy is turning, progressive projects are underway and compared with similar countries, our fortunes look bright, at last.

Britain has got so much to be thankful for that it’s a mystery to me to hear people complaining so much and repeatedly insisting that it’s over.

The author then goes on to speculate that Britain’s collective mental health is depressed, that we are all far too miserable and need to cheer up.

📌 I got a mention in the Vital Arts end-of-year newsletter, which included some pictures I hadn’t seen.

📌 Appalled to find that Wetherspoons has raised the price of a pint of Greene King IPA from £1.99 to £2.24. That Wetherspoons owner is a spiteful git.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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