Scrapbook: Week 3

January 17-23, 2026

SATURDAY 17 This week’s Boardroom Sensemaker from Tortoise reveals that multilingualism can boost your prospects of higher pay. Having French on your CV can add around £5,000 to your annual salary in jobs such as accounting and finance. Japanese could land you a £14,000 uplift.

📌 I think Greenland is starting to look like the divorce papers Europe will be forced to serve on the US. And I think Donald Trump will be happy to accept them.

It is time for Europe to tell the US to leave its European military bases.

📌 The miniature flatfish is finished, revealing an unhealthy attachment to micro seed stitch.

📌 David Baddiel has a cat called Chairman Miaow.

SUNDAY 18 Forensic psychology is not a subject I imagine I’d ever fall in love with, especially when it involves scrabbling around the minds of serial killers and other behavioural deviants. But the BBC radio series Thing of Darkness, draws you in, presumably in the same way serial killers do, until you feel almost complicit in the evil deeds.

📌 At the Royal Academy we saw the massive, often overwhelming cultural and historical paintings of Kerry James Marshall, which somehow draw together fantasy and reality in a captivating dialogue that invites deep thought. Black is the colour that jumps out of all the colours, and the black people in these paintings are not just black but jet black. Herein lies the message.

MONDAY 19 Every morning I wake and ask my wife if Donald Trump has invaded Greenland yet. Some news reports predict a retreat when faced with a defiant Europe, but what form that will take is not considered. CapX has no doubt about Donald Trump, and once you realise a central truth about him you will know that only a scenario in which he can declare himself the winner of a battle will satisfy him.

Trump sees the world as a succession of zero-sum games, underpinned by a fundamental binary of the strong and the weak. In any interaction, he believes someone has the upper hand, and the other party is by definition the loser. There is no place in the Trumpian thought-world for Adam Smith’s concept of mutual benefit.

TUESDAY 20 I sit in wait for Donald Trump to be involved in what I call a “Robert Maxwell Moment“. Please let it be soon. Meanwhile, a new MAGA movement has sprung up in Denmark, whose mission is to Make America Go Away.

WEDNESDAY 21 More evidence of Starmer’s slow-and-steady approach to governing Britain emerges in the often critical LabourList. They call it his “retro-fit revolution” and list the number of bills announced in the Kings Speech that have already passed into legislation (minimum wage rise, public ownership of railways, Warm Homes Plan, etc) and the ones in the pipeline as evidence that Things Can Only Get Better.

📌 British spies are said to be quite happy that Starmer has given permission for a new Chinese Embassy to be built in the City of London. There were initial concerns about the possibility of data hacking, but now our spooks are said to be pleased to have all the Chinese spooks in one place rather than spread over many different sites as is currently the situation.

THURSDAY 22  Babbling something about a “framework for a future deal”, Trump bottled it over Greenland, just like he did with his threats on Canada. That’s the headline, though some still think it’s a clever cover and an invasion is still possible.

📌 Three jobs came up at Headway today. First, a SewBros stitchwork workshop at The Art House with Sean. Second, the offer to partner with Emily to redesign the Headway logo. Third, the opportunity to present a Burns Night Balderdash quiz at the next Headway Eats supper club.

📌 Jason struggled to find the two words he wanted to use when talking about Donald Trump. He found the first one, narcissist, quite quickly, but it wasn’t till he’d finished his lunch (baked potato, home-made baked beans, green salad) that he unearthed the second one, sociopath.

📌 We are two of the four people in the world who have not seen Peaky Blinders. We’ve also not seen The West Wing or The Sopranos, though we have seen a lot of other American TV. But over Christmas we started the first of the six series of Peaky Blinders, and now we are at the climax of a fascinating if sometimes disturbing gangster story, just in time for the imminent release of the much-anticipated Peaky Blinders movie. Aunt Polly is dead and Tommy Shelby has discovered that he is NOT the Devil. He is toying with the idea of death as salvation, but still seems to have a dark urge to singlehandedly keep toxic masculinity alive.

FRIDAY 23 Those who go with the idea that there is method in Donald Trump’s madness should read (for free) a long article in Foreign Affairs, which looks closely at the type of anarchy Trump is busily using to infect the world…

If unpredictability has any value as a geopolitical tactic, it must be used strategically and sparingly. Trump’s mercurial impulses represent a new level of chaos.

📌 For reasons only a psychiatrist might be able to explain, I am trying to plot my life by songs that contain words in foreign languages. I believe my first exposure to be The Beatles song Michelle in the 1960s, which contains the French “Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble, très bien ensemble” (trans: “These are words that go together well, very well”). Then in the 1970s came Cuba by The Gibson Brothers, whose chorus is the rousing Spanish proclamation, “Cuba, Quiero bailar La Salsa” (trans: “Cuba, I like to dance The Salsa”). There were probably a lot in the 1980s and I will continue to work on this linguistic project, but the one that sticks out most prominently is from Blondie’s Denis Denis, which has two verses in French: “Denis, Denis / Avec tes yeux si bleus / Denis, Denis
Quand j’ai peche’ pour deux / Denis, Denis / Pour un baiser d’eternité” (trans: “Denis Denis, with your eyes so blue / Denis Denis, I think of the two of us / Denis Denis, a big kiss for eternity”). And Denis, Denis / Je suis folle de toi / Denis, Denis / Embrasse moi ce soir / Denis, Denis / Pour un baiser d’eternité” (trans: “Denis Denis, I’m so crazy about you / Denis Denis, oh kiss me tonight / Denis Denis, a big kiss for eternity”). In all cases, the lyrics sound far better when not sung in English.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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