January 10-16, 2026
SATURDAY 10 At the Headway AGM I asked CEO Sarah about the amount of money shown in the accounts that is owed to Headway by various clients, most of which are east London boroughs. She said local councils are notoriously poor at paying up on time.
SUNDAY 11 Whenever my wife comes to sit next to me, takes my hand and smiles into my eyes, I know there is a plan afoot. Today it is to extract an agreement from me to have a curry in Wetherspoons rather than cook a meal at home.
MONDAY 12 I planned to do a story for the Headway Writers Group this week since there is now a short book of our writings in the pipeline. I thought I’d better make an effort and hatched what I thought was a gem, about a guy who thinks of a celebrity as his friend but then learns from a BBC online story that his “friend” is a criminal fraudster. The guy falls into a funk of depression until his girlfriend ridicules him for not spotting that the “BBC story” was an AI fake made to discredit the outspoken celebrity. The longer I put off actually writing this story, the worse it gets, so I’ve abandoned the idea.
📌 A spurious article in the Telegraph headlined “David Bowie Was A Secret Tory” claims the musician, after a brief and self-harming drug-fuelled step into political matters in his early career (the fascist Thin White Duke), later settled into an uncomfortable sitting position on the fence. The article claims Bowie went to live in Switzerland to avoid UK taxes and that he was archetypally “small-c conservative”. A more credible look at the life of Bowie appears in the BBC’s Short History radio series, in which I learned that Bowie’s childhood was spent not in Brixton but in Bromley.
📌 It’s Week 2 of Junior Bake Off and my wife is once again outraged. In the new intake of contestants, the eldest is 15 and the youngest is 9.
TUESDAY 13
📌 James and Connor from The Art House came into Headway for a meeting to scope out a possible partnership event in May. I liked them and they seemed to immediately understand and empathise with Headway. I hope we can carve out a lasting relationship. Their studio is very close and they have a business model that both chimes with and complements Headway’s ambitions.
WEDNESDAY 14 My audio book at the moment is A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder by Holly Jackson, which ingeniously uses the secondary-school project as a means to investigate a murder. I play it at 75% speed, which gives the reader the languid whatevva tone of the bored teenager.
📌 John Elledge reckons that Trump’s insistence that the killing of Renee Nicole Good as she attempted to withdrawn from a gun-toting ICE officer is super ridiculous and totally unbelievable for a reason. It is a fig-leaf response that effectively tells the rest of America’s citizens, “We know you know we just murdered someone in cold blood, and we will do it to you too if you misbehave”.
THURSDAY 15 Just finished the best Mick Herron book yet, Standing By The Wall, one of the Slough House standalone novellas that offer so many tantalising background insights into the characters that appear in the Slow Horses series. Standing By The Wall is a cheeky take on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but of course Jackson Lamb would never surrender to the sentimental character transformation Ebenezer Scrooge did. Or would he? Christmas ghosts move in mysterious ways.
📌 In a storytelling moment I came up with…
He got on the bus, sat down, and as the bus pulled away he looked out of the window to see one of his gloves still at the bus stop.
FRIDAY 16 2026 is tipped to be the first year in which deaths outnumber births in the UK.
📌 I can’t believer I’m feeling a degree of sorrow for Kemi Badenoch.
📌 At a meeting with Vital Arts at Headway we all patted one another on the back for a job well done on the Day Room project at the Royal London Hospital. There weren’t any bad outcomes other than the arthritis flare-up in my hips as a result from me spending far too much time on my feet, so it was a proper cuddly love-in.
📌 During the Vital Arts meeting at Headway news came in that the partnership deal Michelle and Natalie had pitched to James and Connor at a The Art House is a YES. I now need to knuckle down to some proper writing for wall text and artist profiles. Luckily today I also got to speak to Graham, who is making a series of big mountain landscapes as a reflection on the experience of being buried alive by an avalanche while snowboarding in Switzerland.
Here is what I’ve written so far…
The story that sits quietly at the back of Graham’s landscapes is horrifying, but here he is, cautiously carving out a completely new landscape with his paintbrush. He does it with the same energy, exhilaration and diamond-hard concentration he once revelled in while navigating the snowscapes of Europe. Each excruciating drag of his brush is a kind of exorcism, each tentative push a moment of release. He is ridding his life of the Hell he met not with aggression or anger but with a type of gentle enlightenment that renders a truly ugly experience sublime.
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Billy's Scrapbook 