December 20-26, 2025
SATURDAY 20 We really enjoyed the gripping TV series A Thousand Blows, a story superficially about the point at which street fighting (east-London poor people) became boxing (west-London rich people), made by the creators of Peaky Blinders. Its seemingly chaotic bundling together of Victorian East End squalor, class, race, immigration and power is sometimes overwhelming. But it is all nailed down hard by three remarkable characters competing in a vicious world of violence and exploitation. It feels as “authentic” as any TV drama can, carrying with it an irresistible Dickensian noir vibe that makes it a sure thing for a second series.
📌 A bit of Christmas fun with ChatGPT resulted in what would make a lovely greetings card. For someone.
📌 Mick Herron’s Slough House standalone novels offer some telling insights into the characters that will later figure more prominently in the Slow Horses series. In Nobody Walks we meet JK Coe as a rookie spook. In Reconstruction, Bad Sam Chapman is outlined…
There were people you didn’t need to know well to know you didn’t want to know better.
📌 Spurs 1, Liverpool 2. It wasn’t pretty, but 3 points is 3 points.
SUNDAY 21 To Barbican Cinema 2 for a members’ screening of Cover-Up, a documentary about the anti-corruption investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and his dogged, pig-headed methods of exposing such scandals as the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and the torturing at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War. The film was said to have been 20 years in the making, but nevertheless to me felt slightly thin and lacking real insight into a character who obviously holds dear the notion of America as a land of the free, not least because he was the son of Lithuanian immigrants fleeing tyranny.
MONDAY 22 In the Barbican’s lakeside Foyer, the life-drawing class had an impromptu exhibition of portraits.
📌 In his daily rant Jonty Bloom claims that photos from the Epstein Files showing Bill Clinton have been planted by Republicans to discredit the Democrats. One of the people commenting on the blog is amazed that in the 21st Century anyone believes any photograph is not potentially an AI fake. To test this proposition I asked ChatGPT to make me one…
📌 Christmas is a time for eating mixed nuts, so I loaded up a small dish and settled down with a word puzzle, only to be reminded very quickly by my wife that nuts are “very fattening … more fattening than crisps”.
📌 The Conversation‘s Christmas message comes in the form of a short essay describing Britain’s Christmas in 1945, the first peacetime Christmas for six years.
📌 On the BBC’s Celebrity Mastermind, the comedian Desirée Burch’s nominated charity was Medical Aid for Palestinians.
TUESDAY 23 On the eve of Christmas Eve Positive News went into an overdrive of optimism with its Top 25 good-news stories for 2025. It’s a cheering read, obviously, and revealing. China, the world’s biggest global polluter, has finally grabbed the steering wheel of renewables, and the rest of the world rushed to follow in its giddy path. And from a personal point of view, scientists have announced that 70 really is the new 60.
📌 The Knowledge suggests you fill any Christmas downtime you might run into with an absurdly addictive online game in which the goal is to line up three chickens in a row. Once you do, they disappear, presumably to the abattoir, and your task starts over until you have exhausted your supply of 368 chickens.
📌 A few days ago someone sent me some “findings” from ChatGPT about football scorelines. The information sounded convincing. I verified it, but I couldn’t bring myself to “believe” it. And so long as AI continues to fail to bridge that credibility gap, I will continue to find anecdotal information derived from human instinct and intuition infinitely more interesting, if only because I like it more and even though the dangers of doing so is potentially dangerous. I like it because it is human, rich, folkloric and deeply dubious. It plays with my imagination. I play with ChatGPT a lot, but I know I’m playing, and I know ChatGPT can cheat and play a fair game in exactly the same moment.
WEDNESDAY 24 At the Stitchers’ Festive celebration last night my jaw dropped ever so slightly when Sue requested Michael Bublé’s Christmas to be pumped through the Bluetooth speaker. Never saw that coming.
📌 Christmas Eve in London is turning into a habit of first a visit to the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House followed by a glass of Champagne at The Savoy. At the Courtauld we saw Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life, an early Pop Art excursion that makes everything that came after it look a bit fake. These are beautiful oil paintings, rich with intense colour and textured strokes that feel their way around their subject, leaving shadows deep and complex.
As a bonus we saw in the Project Room a selection of works by schoolchildren based on Van Gogh’s 1889 Self Portrait With Bandaged Ear, a piece that can be viewed upstairs in the Courtauld’s permanent collection. My favourite interpretation/reflection on this famous artwork was titled Spun Out from Agnes-Joanie, age 17, who adds a comment to her digital photograph.
Vincent van Gogh did not title Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear. Though he describes it in letters to his brother Theo, he never named it; it was titled later by the art world.
Bandaged ear. Not mutilated.
Art historians often describe this as an optimistic piece, saturated with determination and hope. But is that reading superficial? Was Van Gogh duping himself – and everyone else – into believing everything was fine? He had an aversion to photography: paintings can spin stories; photographs tend not to.
You can’t spin your way out of this one, Vincent.
My second favourite Van Gogh homage in the Project Room was, inevitably, a stitchwork in wool…
Later in the Savoy, we drank champagne, ate olives and rice crackers, played Quordle and bumped into a neighbour taking tea. Small world.
THURSDAY 25 Last night we watched Home Alone again on TV. It gets better with every viewing. This morning I am reading a New Statesman essay that compares it, with dubious finesse, to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park…
Kevin has a touch of the Fanny Price about him.
📌 I never listened to Junior Choice on the radio when I was a junior. I think maybe my parents considered it too twee, shallow and a bit BBC middle class. At 66, however, when the BBC repeated music from the shows this morning we jigged and sang along to a host of ridiculous songs that had somehow lodged themselves in our memories. Included were Little White Bull, A Windmill In Old Amsterdam and Puff The Magic Dragon.
📌 At Smiths of Smithfield for Christmas Lunch we ate far too much and emerged feeling overly freighted with fine food and plenty of Champagne. So stuffed that we brought the mince pies home with us. It was an orgy of people-watching and bitching. My wife complained that far too many of the young diners looked miserable; I remarked that maybe it was because they had been marched there by their coercive parents. The service was outstanding and the view over the roofs of old Smithfield Market priceless given that the area is due to be redeveloped next year and the meat market closed.
FRIDAY 26 The New Statesman‘s end-of-year round up includes a letter applauding a diary article from November that is a effectively a love story from Ukraine about a pet dog called Quicky.
📌 Another New Statesman article puts starkly into focus Starmer’s “Project” as one not of the radicalism it once promised but of lame issue-managing conservastism.
Starmer’s government is less posh and more white than recent Tory ones. But it is just as stultifyingly complacent.
📌 The latest addition to our extended family arrived just before midnight on Christmas Day. A boy, as yet unnamed, though one waggish member of the family has already suggested Herod, which was not well received by parents Hattie and James.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 