February 21-27, 2026
SATURDAY 21 Oh what a joy it is to see Donald Trump losing control like a petulant child throwing its toys out of the pram.
SUNDAY 22 Liverpool nicked a nail-biting last-minute win against Nottingham Forest.
📌 At His Majesty’s Theatre in the West End we saw our great niece Rosie in a junior theatre show of songs from musicals. For safeguarding and duty-of-care reasons photography was not permitted, but the vision of the poor child from Cambridge screeching a badly out-of-tune Don’t Rain On My Parade from Funny Girl will live in the memory for years to come.
📌 On The Weakest Link, Romesh asked Patsy Kensit which architect designed The Shard in London, Renzo Piano or Giuseppe Keyboard. Patsy answered, with confidence, “Giuseppe Keyboard”.
MONDAY 23 A staggering number of young people in the UK cannot get work, no matter how hard they try. An article in the New Statesman at last states the obvious: that the problem is not the “workers” but the employers. There are simply no jobs to offer the massed ranks of young unemployed people. Employers have lost the appetite for success and can no longer build businesses that need real human workers. They have written off a generation as a cost too far.
TUESDAY 24 I woke up from a dream last night in which I was dissecting a worm lengthways. I made multiple fine slices along the worm’s body until the worm was effectively a worm fringe tassel. I woke up when each of the worm tassel strands began to automatically curl until the worm became a tight curly worm perm.
📌 The application form to be granted the Freedom of the City of London asks for the names and occupations of your parents. We dutifully filled it in but wondered how the question could possibly be answered by one of our friends who was born by anonymous donor insemination.
WEDNESDAY 25 For many years I have only ever owned a shortened version of my birth certificate. But in applying to be granted the Freedom of the City of London, I had to supply a full version, which I duly obtained. Now I discover that it has an error. I was born in Arkles Road, Liverpool, but my full birth certificate states my place of birth as Arkles Lane, Liverpool.
📌 The Sensemaker News Matrix claims that, among other things, working at home increases your chances of starting a family.
📌 Did the final logo workshop at Headway and got some good feedback. I needed to get consent from Isabel to use one of her drawings as the basis for the final design. She gladly agreed. The pressure now is on Emily to deliver some finished artwork. Luckily, Rosie got on board, so I think it will go off OK. I hope senior management agree to the idea of using handwritten text rather than some expensive piece of typography.
FRIDAY 26 The New Green Party MP for Gorton & Denton is an early 30s woman who previously worked as a self-employed plumber and plasterer. Her name is Hannah. Jonty Bloom sees her convincing victory as a sign that Britain is now in the grip of an ABR (Anyone But Reform) mentality.
The combined votes of the centre left Labour and Greens was almost 25,000, Tories and Reform got 11,000.
Veteran pollster Peter Kellner headlines his analysis as a “humiliation for Labour”.
📌 On BBC Sounds there is a fabulous audio serialisation of James, a novel that re-imagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the story told not by Huck but by his pal Jim (a slave on the run).
📌 Paul Mason thinks Keir Starmer can still pull off a win for Labour at the next general election. But he needs to act quickly. He is a poor communicator and has appointed a Chancellor who seems intent on blocking any visionary progressive policies that might, just might, make the government more popular and better equipped to see off the rise of Reform UK. Mason hopes that the Gorton & Denton defeat will act as a catalyst for radical change. That is what this government promised when it won in 2024, but what it has delivered falls way short of the mark.
📌 Maybe we are lucky, but when I emailed our GP this morning to voice my concern at some recent blood tests that show mild anemia, by midday I was chatting on the phone with my doctor and was forced by my wife to admit to 16 units of alcohol per week. The doctor didn’t seem to think that was a massive health crime, but invited me to do some blood tests to verify. I will now follow in my wife’s footsteps and plan for a safe distance between alcohol consumption and blood tests.
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Billy's Scrapbook 