Scrapbook: Week 6

February 7-13, 2026

SATURDAY 7 Breakfast at Magdalen House in Winchester wouldn’t be the same if we weren’t hoovering ladybirds off the kitchen window while spooning marmalade on to crumpets.

📌 Sarah’s new chap is a vinyl record nerd who likes orange juice in his dark rum. She seems quite happy.

SUNDAY 8 At last Morgan McSweeney has gone. What took him so long? Starmer has had a few positive comments today based on the idea that the entire House of Commons knew everything he knew about the Mandelson/Epstein connection and yet no one spoke up against his appointment as US Ambassador.

📌 It might or might not be the last time we view Winchester Cathedral from the top floor of Magdalen House, depending on whether the sale goes through.

📌 Another drawing of a fish arrived from Sam to add to our notional aquarium.

MONDAY 9 Politico reports that Labour’s leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, is calling for Keir Starmer to resign. Elections for the Scottish Parliament will be held in May, so is this another example of a desperate politician trying to save his skin?

📌 The workshop at Headway with Emily to create a new logo went better than I thought it would. The brain seems to be the most potent popular image, so I will work on that for now. Emily thought my coloured plan view of the brain hemispheres looked like profiles of two people gazing into each other’s eyes.

Community was another theme that came up in conversation, plus lots of colour. I’d not met many Monday members before, so it was a new experience. Jesús has painted his rucksack with tiny colourful images of Frida Kahlo.

📌 I haven’t had a top score in Waffle for some time. Yippee.

📌 Half way through and Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman have finally reappeared in the second series of The Night Manager, which feels a bit more Len Deighton than John Le Carré.

TUESDAY 10 I’m really enjoying messing about on my iPad knocking up some ideas for the new Headway logo. I enjoy it so much my cup of tea goes cold before I’ve barely started drinking it.

📌 We finished The Night Manager and it ended in such a way that another series is inevitable.

WEDNESDAY 11 Got lots of positive feedback from Emily on the logo roughs I sent over yesterday. I will try a few more today, but at the moment I’m struggling to see beyond the images of the brain and of the Thames river. Is there a trick I’m missing? Is there a symbol I haven’t yet found? The answer almost certainly is yes.

📌 Got an email from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism with a revealing story about a mysterious editor, who has been sneakily changing Peter Mandelson’s Wikipedia entry to deflect from all the scandal. I wasn’t surprised, but very interested to read about the editing safeguards that are in place at Wikipedia, which are more rigorous than I’d thought they were.

THURSDAY 12 My wife has long suspected that Alexa is spying on us, so it wasn’t such a surprise to her when I told her I just got an email from Amazon saying we need to replace the black ink cartridge in our printer.

📌 The second of the logo workshops at Headway with Emily started abruptly when Mike urged us to think of Headway as a bank or any other corporation. The best logos, he persisted, did not communicate anything. He cited the Deutsche Bank logo as one of his favourites.

It was nice to see other studio artists being themselves inside a brief.

📌 To the Barbican’s sculpture gallery to witness the latest forced marriage of a modern artist (Lynda Benglis) with Alberto Giacometti. They call the project Encounters, but I’m not sure what Alberto Giacometti would have made of the contrived partnerships had he still been alive (RIP 1966). This is the third and final installment and I think it’s the best by far and enhanced by the inclusion of a few superb paintings.

Then it was off to Smiths of Smithfield‘s third-floor restaurant for Marge’s belated birthday dinner and a view of The Shard in the distance looking as if it was about to take off for a mission to the Moon.

FRIDAY 13 Foreign Affairs has a depressingly doomy article predicting a new rise in German military might.

📌 At a Headway meeting yesterday with physio Catherine to explore ways in which the therapy team can improve its service, two members of the group confessed to heavy drinking. One of them was on a bottle of vodka a day. I was reluctant to quiz them about this, but I got the impression that they were using alcohol as pain management. When I asked about their relationship with their GP they said it was not a good one.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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