December 27-January 2, 2025/26
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 in earnest 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 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…
THURSDAY 1 We started the New Year project to declutter and rationalise our storage spaces by emptying a cupboard then putting almost everything taken out back into the same cupboard. I did, however, salvage four mobile phones that can be donated to the tech recycling team, and a novelty pin badge that I presumably meant to give to someone with a certain sense of humour.
📌 In an episode of the radio show Strong Message Here the comedians Stewart Lee and Armando Iannucci made fun of the Reform UK party excusing one of its corrupt politicians by calling him “just one bad apple”. Lee explained that the “bad apple” expression is misused by politicians especially because the original point of discovering a “bad apple” in your basket was the knowledge that it had already infected the entire basket of apples, not that the bad apple is an outlier that can be removed easily no problem. The implication being that one bad apple equals a whole basket of bad apples (ie, the entire Reform party is corrupt). But bad apples are, we learned incidentally from Stewart Lee, perfectly OK to make apple pies with.
📌 A score of 15 in Quordle on New Year’s Day was a treat.
FRIDAY 2 The New Year decluttering project continued with gusto but inevitably we started bickering over which old boxes and tins should be kept, thrown out or recycled. The problem is that recycling an old decorative biscuit tin, or other similarly useless items is a long shot, so we end up keeping this stuff, for what reason I cannot get my wife to explain. The old wooden cigar box in which we kept our assorted tubes of glue is NOT apparently surplus to requirements, despite the tubes of glue having already been evacuated to the Swiss chocolate biscuit tin with that picturesque view of the Matterhorn on its lid.
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Billy's Scrapbook 