January 24-30, 2026
SATURDAY 24 Liverpool lost again and a slide into mid-table mediocrity looks likely from hereon.
📌 At Sarah’s birthday gathering in Walthamstow we played a frenetic card game called Werewolf (aka, Mafia), which is very like the TV programme Traitors. The object is for the “Villagers” to identify and eliminate the “Werewolves”. I got to be a Werewolf twice and found it very stressful being a baddy. The game was invented by a Moscow State University psychology student.
📌 Andy Burnham has pulled the trigger on his leadership challenge to Keir Starmer.
SUNDAY 25 Labour has possibly signed its own death certificate by stopping Andy Burnham from standing for Parliament. Its structure and inflexible thinking is still too 20th Century.
📌 It struck me suddenly that I couldn’t remember the year of my deceased mother’s birth. I knew she was born on January 24, but I wasn’t sure if it was in 1925 or 1926. I messaged my sister, who replied saying that she was sure it was 1926, but then checked the archives to find it was actually 1925. Which means I missed my mother’s centenary by a year and a day. Shame on me.
📌 Sam’s message had just one word and an image. The word was “weird” and I have to agree…
MONDAY 26
Strategic autonomy may begin not with grand strategy, but with how we shop.
So concludes a leading article in the Guardian that assumes Donald Trump is about to throw a fit of nastiness and switch off MasterCard and Visa in Europe, thus leaving us all unable to buy stuff by card. No worries, says the article – and Up Yours Trump! – because all that is required is for Europe (inc UK) to use India’s whizzy new state-owned Unified Payments System, which ditches cards in favour of QR codes.
📌 Blocking Andy Burnham’s aggressive move to nick his job has left Keir Starmer with the bigger problem of convincing his party and the country that he is not a dead duck. Only by Labour winning the Gorton & Denton by-election convincingly will Burnham be forced to skulk back to his job in Manchester and Labour at last look like a party that can beat the odds. And all that with Wes Streeting stood behind Starmer with a knife up his sleeve.
📌 I decided to ask AI a really important question and the answer was definitive: women’s farts are smellier than men’s “due to a higher concentration of hydrogen sulphide gas”. The good news is that men’s farts are bigger and louder.
📌 It’s hard not to imagine that the guy who climbed a big building in Taipei will one day fall off one.
📌 All the lunatic Tories are joining Reform UK, which yields a couple of interesting questions. 1. What will Kemi Badenoch (or whoever supplants her) do with the Conservative party? 2. How will the defected Tories deal with Nigel Farage? His portrayal of Reform as an anti-establishment party is starting to look shaky.
Reform’s central claim is now colliding with the reality of who it is recruiting from that class.
TUESDAY 27 I think I’ve found a way to do Blanket Stitch with one good hand. It’s not easy, especially when going round corners, so I don’t suppose I’ll be using it much.
WEDNESDAY 28 RIP JR. I had a dream about him last night. He was in his USAF uniform.
📌 Rosie has asked me to present a fun word game to the guests at the Burns supper club on Thursday. Now James has added me reading some stuff by the Headway Writing Group, which thankfully includes some of Stuart’s weird meanderings. I really need to find the habit of saying NO. At least we will get a free 3-course meal.
📌 Owen Jones seems quite content with Labour’s catastrophic decline, and claims to know its cause. It is the Starmer goon-squad headed by Morgan McSweeeney…
The party has been overrun by soulless hacks who have decided that it would be better for the party to burn than lose control.
📌 Orwell Daily has an absorbing short piece about Ezra Pound, his reputation as a poet, his allegiance to Mussolini, and whether fine writers can be abhorrent politically.
📌 Peter Kellner has crunched the numbers on Donald Trump’s popularity rating in the US and found that…
Most Americans now regard their president as a reverse Midas, who turns all he touches into dross.
THURSDAY 29 Did a Teams meeting with Emily to talk about doing some logo design workshops in the studio with Headway members. It sounds like a lot of fun.
📌 The dessert at Headway was Berry Cobbler, which sounds like a porn-star name.
📌 We have met the new Archbishop of Canterbury’s husband. His name is Eamonn. Dawn introduced at a community event.
📌 Because I was performing at the event (reading out stories from the Writing Group) we got a free Burns Night supper at Headway. The “butter tablet” was a cube of fudge.
FRIDAY 30 Andy Beckett uses far too many words to tell us what we already know. Namely that Keir Starmer is not a natural communicator, that others in his party are far better at it, and that his attempts at sounding like he can shoot from the hip are embarrassing: “After years of self-control and careful language, it’s probably too late for him to loosen up in public now.”
📌 I haven’t read Richard Herring’s daily Warming Up blog for years, not because it bored me or was badly written, but because it’s, er, Richard Herring doing it, and he can be quite irritating in his sly self-promoting. But today I tried it again, hoping I might read some funny stories about his children. No, but I did get a sense that within the world of stand-up comedy bullying is rife, and that the worst offenders are those who try to pass off their bullying as comedy.
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