January 31 – February 6, 2026
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 restored 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”.
SUNDAY 1 I resigned from the committee of our local allotment group. I’d much rather be a freewheeling cheerleader than a faceless bureaucrat. Now I’m canvasing members for their top tips for a fertilizer. One member, Tim, swears by “dried blood” fertilizer. He seems quite bashful about his recommendation, as if he knows he is soon to be trolled by the animal-rights enthusiasts.
📌 Another word discovered while slogging through an especially difficult Squardle…
MONDAY 2 St Luke’s has a new CEO, and it’s a woman called Abi. I don’t know whether Michael jumped or was pushed, but he must have been close to retirement age. Carol-Anne seems happy with the New Broom. Abi has a history working in sport, so maybe that will become a theme for St Luke’s.
TUESDAY 3 I’m nearing the end of Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours, one of the standalone novels that prefigure the Slow Horses series. Only by reading these books can you properly see inside characters such as Jackson Lamb, Diana Taverner, David Cartwright (River’s grandfather, aka The Old Bastard) and Molly Doran, the wheelchair using archivist who presides over the bottom floor of The Park. The Secret Hours is by far the most detailed of these character studies and centres on Jackson Lamb’s post-Wall residency as a spy in Berlin, but I’m torn about what to do when I’ve finished. I will probably re-read the Slow Horses series to see the characters in a different light. And re-watch the TV series to marvel at what a great job the actors have done with these flawed spooks.
WEDNESDAY 4 The Peter Mandelson scandal is just the opportunity for Keir Starmer to throw up his hands and declare: “fair cop, mea culpa, bad judgement, I’m off to spend more time with my family”. Or at least it is a chance for him to sack the Machiavellian Morgan McSweeeney (a Mandelson fanboy), who everyone seems to dislike.
📌 Sam sent a fish picture and I suggested we got together to create an aquarium. I can’t work out which way up Sam’s fish is meant to be.
THURSDAY 5 RIP Cecil, nudging 90. We shared some great times in the studio and even got to do an exhibition together. He arrived in Liverpool as a stowaway on a boat from British Guyana in the year I was born.
📌 I am continually checking the news feeds to see if Morgan McSweeney has been sacked. I expect it to happen any minute now. Meanwhile, the drip-feed of revelations about Peter Mandelson only serves to perpetuate the widely held view that all politicians are scumbags. Or prone to embrace scumbaggery.
📌 Richard Herring sure has a talent for rounding off paragraphs in a way that makes not reading on impossible.
I had to do the worst thing for a middle-class person in 21st Century Britain. I had to look after my own child.
FRIDAY 6 Of all the things to wake up to on a Friday morning, Polly Toynbee’s earnest prose isn’t quite the one I’d have put at number one.
This local scandal on our little island lifts the edge of the global carpet that hides the cockroaches of power.
She does go on to point out that it is a pity that a decent man is very likely to be brought down by an immoral chancer, good principles defeated by bad judgement, etc.
📌 I’ve given the prancing stag image I stole from an ancient vase in the British Museum some cute red toenails. The stitching is moving along quite fast so I will now think a bit harder whether I’d like to paint in some kind of background. It might be a good chance to experiment with the old set of oil paints I’ve had lying around for ages. Or maybe they’ve dried up by now, in which case I will ransack the vast collection of Farrow & Ball tester pots my wife has collected.
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Billy's Scrapbook 