One month as it happened…
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.
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.
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.
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, a self-portrait 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.
SATURDAY 27 Apparently, the fallow period between Christmas and New Year is popularly known as “Chrimbo-Limbo”. We spent the entire first day of it watching end-to-end episodes of Peaky Blinders, which we have never seen before. Cillian Murphy really has an aptitude for serene menace.
📌 The new addition to the family has been named Eric.
📌 Liverpool scraped another home win and went into 4th place in the Premier League.
📌 Ukraine continues to make sneaky guerilla bombings and killings inside Russia.
📌 A screw-up at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow resulted in the wrong body being cremated.
SUNDAY 28 Brigitte Bardot is a goner, aged 91. It prompted me to ask AI if more people than normal die during the Christmas/New Year period. AI says yes, “with spikes on December 25, 26, and January 1, mainly from natural causes like heart/respiratory issues due to holiday stress, disrupted routines, delayed care, and colder weather”.
📌 According to my wife, Marty Mauser gets into an implausible number of scrapes on the road to proving himself Marty Supreme in the world of post-war international table-tennis. It is a charming film, corny in a good way and jam-packed with cheeky, often hilarious, comedic performances and script lines any actor would kill for. The writer Howard Jacobsen is a fan, mainly because (he claims) it tells his own story as a one-time table-tennis supremo, as revealed in his early novel The Mighty Walzer.
MONDAY 29
📌 For Christmas my wife bought me the Royal School of Needlework’s mammoth Stitch Bank…
Today I started to learn hand stitchwork properly with Blanket Stitch, hoping to move on quickly to Buttonhole Stitch, which is a condensed form of Blanket Stitch. I nearly gave up straight away with the discovery that my disabled left arm makes even easy stitches such as Blanket Stitch infuriatingly difficult. But I won’t give up. I will simply find a way to do these stitches that suits my (dis)abilities. If they don’t look as good as the able-bodied versions, I don’t care. I will find a way to make them look good.
TUESDAY 30 Peter Kellner has an entrancing look back on the year in politics that invokes a telling tale about the optimum location for ice-cream vans but ultimately offers some stark advice to Britain’s two main political parties, who have lost ground massively in the last 12 months to the insurgent parties on the right and left.
📌 At the Barbican we saw the Glenn Miller Orchestra in what felt like a cheesy nostalgic throwback, during which it was hard not to think of Eric with his “trombonist’s lips” and his tales of all the popular dance bands he played in throughout the 1950s (eg, Syd Dean in Brighton, “Mrs Wilf Hamer” in Liverpool). It was also hard not to want to run home afterwards to watch Some Like It Hot for the big-band performances of Jack Lennon and Tony Curtis. Tonight’s show lacked any real stage direction. It would have been nice to see a few dancers included. The Barbican’s big Hall stage is plenty big enough.
WEDNESDAY 31 There’s a proper melancholy vibe around today. The streets are empty. Went shopping and bumped into two neighbours who both gave out the impression they’d be glad when today is over and tomorrow arrives.
📌 The TV was clearly the best way to watch the awesome fireworks display…
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 