March 7-13, 2026
SATURDAY 7 Whenever I get the urge to listen to the voice of resistance I go straight to the Socialist Worker, which today has a cautionary reflection on past attempts by America to take over other countries by war. The bottom line is that Trump has been pulled into this war with Iran by Israel and it will likely be his undoing.
In the summer of 2011, US forces withdrew from Iraq in the greatest defeat for US imperialism since Vietnam.
📌 The Londoner has a story about the collapse into drunken chaos of Bermondsey’s infamous Beer Mile. Among the complaints by one of the sanctimonious craft-beer entrepreneurs was the arrival of two stag-partygoers in costume, one as Donald Trump, the other as a Mexican migrant… “tied together by the border wall, who kept forgetting about the cord tying them together and drunkenly walking off in opposite directions, only to be cartoonishly pulled back into each other.” Which I thought was quite clever.
📌 I only ever met Will Self two or three times, while in the company of his ex wife Deborah (RIP), who was a work colleague. Self struck me on all of those occasions as an obnoxious drunk and a bully, in perpetual conflict with his internal deficits. He had an obsessive need to always be the cleverest person in the room. Now, as he nears death, he seems as obnoxious and needy as ever. And a giant hypocrite. Such a contrast to his fellow enfant terrible Tracey Emin. His surname says everything you need to know about him.
SUNDAY 8 In his excellent Warming Up daily blog comedian Richard Herring gets his knickers in a twist about Hell and the “justice” of capital punishment.
I am a woolly liberal and thus opposed to the death penalty, and yet when certain particularly heinous criminals are brutally beaten or slaughtered in prison it’s hard not to feel some sense of delight.
📌 I jammed the printer by attempting to print onto tissue paper. Tomorrow I will dismantle it and assess the damage.
📌 Marge came round to watch the third Knives Out film, Wake Up Dead Man, starring Daniel Craig as the eccentric consultant detective Benoit Blanc. We all found the Catholic Guilt thing overplayed in the first half, and I wasn’t impressed with the latest sartorial makeover given to Daniel Craig. He had some great lines, but he also looked at times to be sending himself up a bit too much.
MONDAY 9 A Guardian editorial says Britain’s privatised electricity network is so broken that it will never be able to compete with China’s state-directed system and its new super-fast EV charging stations that signal the future. Britain simply does not have the capacity to compete.
📌 Which raises a comment made by a fellow blogger on an item in last week’s Scrapbook. In reference to the so-called US-UK “Special Relationship”, the exasperated blogger asked, “I don’t know why we don’t just sign up with China.”
📌 I’m still not entirely sure why I liked the Brazilian film The Secret Agent so much. It is convoluted, difficult to follow and has subtitles timed at the same speed as the rapid-fire Portuguese they are translating. So you spend half the movie asking yourself if you read that last line correctly. And yet the performances are so warm that it becomes easy to overlook the glitches. A bit like a good relationship in fact.
📌 The printer survived.
TUESDAY 10
📌 We’re half way through the TV thriller Gone, starring David Morrissey and Eve Myles and my detective instincts have started to perk up as to who is the killer. If I am right, a spectacular switch will soon emerge.
📌 It looks like Liverpool are back in the doldrums of inconsistency (just lost 1-0 to Galatasaray, beaten by lowly Wolves last week), unable to salvage even a draw to save points. In the past this might be chalked up as a “transition season”, but the ruthless business instincts at work in football today mean that the benefit of the doubt comes with a deadline.
WEDNESDAY 11 In discussing how the government might haul itself out of its trough of unpopularity Sam Freedman notes that the cost of living is now the nation’s declared metric on competence. The irony, he goes on to say, is that even if Keir Starmer could somehow magic up lower prices for food, electricity, water, transport, etc, it might not make any difference to Labour’s fate.
There now seems to be little correlation between improvements in living standards and willingness to give the government any credit, both here and in other countries.
📌 Rob Ford’s Swingometer tells him that the Gorton & Denton by-election victory for the Greens really is a national game-changer. If it forces the Labour command to edge more towards the idea of political partnership that alone would be a good thing. If the Greens supplant Reform UK as the party of protest (one shared by children and parents alike) the long-term outcome would look even better.
📌 At the Art House I joined some of the studio’s artists to promote the upcoming exhibition, Peaks of Imperfection, with a series of interviews with their comms people. I did my usual cheerleading for the studio and its nurturing environment and I look forward to seeing the finished film and how the featured artists answered the set questions…
THURSDAY 12 A meeting at Headway to work though the latest refinements of the logo project started to feel a lot like being back at work and having to look interested in detail at tiny differences. It made me realise more than ever that I’m a “Big Picture” person and that the attention to detail I have inherited through work is tiresome.
📌 Sam’s back after her eye operation. The scar is barely visible.
📌 It must be a sign of madness when someone stands in front of the TV mimicking the hand gestures of weather forecasters.
📌 At dinner in Farringdon with Tom and Martina I was very tempted by the leg of rabbit on the menu but decided at the last minute to go for the chicken instead, fearing rabbit flesh full of shotgun pellets. I regret that decision (Marti had the rabbit, no pellets) and now I want to go back to that restaurant asap. Martina said she understands my English better than Tommy’s.
FRIDAY 13 Two jokes I heard on Instagram…
1. A woman asks a passer-by, “What is the difference between yoghurt and the United States?” The passer-by surrenders and the woman replies, “After 200 years yoghurt will have developed a culture.”
2. In a British restaurant a woman says to a waitress, “Excuse me, can I ask you something about the menu, please?” The waitress leans towards her with an angry look in her eye: “The men I please is none of your business.”
📌 I made two stupid finger slips at the start of this grid, so I never imagined a top score would appear, as if by magic.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 