One month as it happened…
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.
SATURDAY 3 Online pop-up ads are becoming more and more intrusive, but I don’t get worked up about them too much. They are just the way things are these days. Annoying, but not enough to get stressed about. Only if they reveal an obvious symptom of a declining civilisation do I become saddened.
📌 Another win on the Premium Bonds…
SUNDAY 4 Another scrape for Liverpool. They managed to go 2-1 up in extra time but Fulham came back with a scintillating goal to draw the game 2-2. It was a fair result in the end.
📌 Two articles, one in the Guardian, the other in the New Statesman, attempt to work out what Donald Trump is up to kidnapping the president of Venezuela and declaring his intention to steal the nation’s entire supply of crude oil. Basically, it comes down to Trump not wanting to protect America and Americans from drug smugglers but to take over, occupy and control all western continental land masses. It is the US equivalent of the Iron Curtain. It is the “Putinisation” of US foreign policy. In short, Trump wants an empire to call his own. He wants all of South America, Greenland and probably Canada too. I am not sure his desires stop there. Antarctica? This puts the question of his “friendship” to any nation outside that imaginary western bloc in doubt. Europe’s place in this new global order is precarious. Ukraine’s Vlodomyr Zelenskyy suggested that Trump use his dictatorship-removal skills on “other” tyrants. Jonty Bloom sees China as the real victor in Trump’s Venezuelan excursion…
MONDAY 5 It’s Give & Take Day at St Giles on Saturday, so we’re sorting through our cupboards for items that can be passed on to someone else. Most of the items I have selected so far are what I would term “junk”, but to others they will have value. “How many hole punches do we need?” I asked my wife while clearing out my desk drawer. One was the answer, so the spare one went into the St Giles box. I learn from Orwell Daily that Orwell himself had a fascination for “junk”, from what he called “Junk Shops”, which were not to be confused with antique shops.
A junk shop has a fine film of dust over the window, its stock may include literally anything that is not perishable, and its proprietor, who is usually asleep in a small room at the back, displays no eagerness to make a sale.
📌 Spotify’s algorithm repeatedly sends me a divine cover version of David Bowie’s Heroes.
📌 Russia doesn’t seem that bothered about Trump’s planned “takeover” of Venezuela. There is even some jealousy in the Kremlin that Trump did in one day what Putin was meant to have done in Ukraine four years ago. The Knowledge strikes a cautionary note…
As Obama found in Libya, however, and George Bush in Iraq, “it is the afterparty that causes the biggest headaches”.
And…
American commandos have ended the rule of Maduro, though not necessarily that of his regime.
📌 I’ve changed my funeral music from Crazy by Seal to Particles by the Icelandic neoclassical maestro Ólafur Arnalds.
TUESDAY 6 Jonty Bloom got me worried in his rant about Keir Starmer refusing to criticise Trump’s tyrannical takeover of Venezuela. He claims that Britain effectively rents its nuclear weapons from the US, implying that its defence status is that of a tenant. This is only partially true. The US is responsible only for the technical maintenance of Trident missiles that deliver the deadly warheads and can play no part in the deployment of British nuclear weapons. Moreover, Britain aims in future to maintain its nuclear arsenal without any technical support from the US.
📌 On two days running I’ve noticed news items that offer a small glimmer of hope both for the citizens of the UK and its government. The first was a quiet mention that immigration figures in the past year have fallen by more than 50%, which is good news from a propaganda point of view but possibly equals bad news elsewhere. The second was a radio story this morning in which a financial expert compared the economies of the US and the UK to the fortunes of The Hare And The Tortoise in the famous fable attributed to Aesop. The prediction was that Britain’s economy over the next year will reveal its government to be operating a “slow and steady wins the race” approach. Whether that washes with the voting public, or even anxious members of its own party, is a different question.
📌 My wife is outraged that one of contestants on Junior Bake Off is said to be 14 years old but looks older. She believes this is grossly unfair to her 11-year-old competitors.
WEDNESDAY 7 Venezuela has turned me into a geopolitical voyeur. Yesterday I read an article claiming that vice (now acting) president Delcy Rodríguez knew all about the Maduro kidnapping and had in fact been secretly conspiring with Washington to depose him. Today an article in LabourList clearly defines the legality of Trump’s audacious kidnapping and, more importantly, explains Keir Starmer’s muted reaction to it. It boils down to the fact that officially the UK has never recognised Maduro as the leader of Venezuela. In fact, it recognises the opposition as being the legitimate governing authority. The article also has some fascinating details of the “vast quantities” of Venezuelan gold bars that sit in the Bank of England. Maduro wanted to take them, the Opposition party wanted them to stay put in the Bank of England.
📌 “Titration” isn’t a word I’ve heard since studying chemistry 50 years ago. Now my doctor has used it to describe the gentle increase in pain medication he is prescribing for my dodgy hips.
📌 And Squaredle‘s Bonus Word of the Day is…
THURSDAY 8 The woman sitting behind me on the bus was shouting into her phone, seemingly oblivious, or maybe just not bothered, that she was in that moment living proof that public and private spaces no longer have boundaries. Is it some hidden “English Reserve” inside of me that cherishes those boundaries? Or is it default behaviour nowadays to be rude and selfish? The same thing happens in the cinema and at concerts: noisy snacks and drinks gang up with idle chat and the right to turn up late, waving mobile-phone torches in search of the seat you should have been sat in 10 minutes ago.
📌 Three stitchwork miniatures completed over the festive period.
FRIDAY 9 Nine days into January and the early consensus on finding better ways to store things we don’t use very often is in tatters. The outbreak of bickering and snarling will continue until one of us (ie, me) backs down. Surrender, though, is no long-term solution and until we can find common agreement on what we WANT and what we NEED to keep and store, a state of war will continue to bubble beneath the surface. I will suggest we start with one item and move on from there. We only need ONE small hammer. All the other small hammers (3) can go. That sounds like a way forward, but don’t rule out a major skirmish on WHICH of the four small hammers we keep, and a minor skirmish on who is the household’s principal hammer user. I can’t honestly imagine how perilous this conflict will get when we move into the kitchen.
📌 Nigel’s Welsh cottage is buried in snow so he’s been forced to slum it here in London.
📌 Jessie Buckley is mesmerising as William Shakespeare’s wife in the film Hamnet, which my wife thought was slow in parts and I thought corny in others. The biggest revelation was that the name of Shakespeare’s wife wasn’t Anne but Agnes.
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 believe 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 France.
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.
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.
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.
📌 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.
SATURDAY 31 Chris sent a message saying the Community Collaboration Manifesto we did with the Barbican had not arrived as promised. I then realised I’d accidentally deleted it in the belief that I had multiple copies. I didn’t have multiple copies, so a fevered hour began in which I tried to work out how to recover deleted Dropbox files. Google’s AI Assistant came good and the manifesto was eventually recovered and sent to Chris.
📌 At the Barbican we saw The Unthanks take another giant leap forward on their quest to upscale simple folk music with a 20th anniversary orchestral partnership. It was certainly impressive, but Marge had a more skeptical view: “That’s not folk music”.
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