One month as it happened…
SUNDAY 1 If you watch a lot of spy series on the TV you know that you can scarcely whisper into someone’s ear in a train station without it being detected by the hundreds of snooping devices installed therein. Which is great news for the pursuit of terrorists but not for some poor drunk called Brian, who according to The Londoner accidentally fell onto the track at Stratford tube station when the line was clear, was unable to haul himself back onto the platform and was therefore run over by SEVEN successive incoming trains. Only after the fourth train had mashed his dead body into the track did anyone twig that something wasn’t right.
📌 In his excellent Warming Up blog Richard Herring rarely gets political. I always presumed it was a tactical measure for comedians to be either politically agnostic or of the lunatic fringe. Herring today digests Keir Starmer’s shaky predicament with gentle humour but a forceful point of view.
MONDAY 2 On Saturday we re-watched the 1995 David Fincher neo-noir film Seven. Yesterday at lunch we wondered about the significance of all the very heavy rain featured in the film as Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman go after serial killer Kevin Spacey. All that rain certainly added to the claustrophobic atmosphere, and maybe, we thought, there was a religious significance in the mix. I decided to investigate and my phone’s AI Assistant came up with an answer that is as surprising as the film’s ending. Apparently, Brad Pitt was only available to work on it for 55 days, which meant all his scenes needed to be shot in that timeframe. To avoid any potential loss of shooting time due to bad weather, director Fincher decided to make it rain constantly, thus maximising the use of Brad Pitt’s available time. And, says Fincher, heavy rain is easier than fine rain to recreate on film.
📌 The last thing Britain needs right now is to be dragged into another one of America’s wars in the Middle East. Yet Keir Starmer thinks it’s a good idea. No wonder his popularity rating is -49.
TUESDAY 3 Rafael Behr rationalises Starmer’s decision to fall in behind Trump on his war in Iran by claiming the PM’s “limited” support sits somewhere between a rock and a hard place. It was a bad decision, says Behr, but there weren’t any good ones available. The only positive is that it signals a slow, protracted closure of the so-called Special Relationship and a reliance on US strategic protection.
The US president doesn’t see alliances as long-term relationships based on mutual advantage, but as rolling transactions on a mafia model.
📌 Shirley got hold of some cheap tickets to see a flamboyant Lebanese violinist and storyteller called Ara Malikian at the Barbican. This is rock-n-roll violin, with a full repertoire of backing band, flashy stage lights, prancing, body popping and string-driven riffery that cleverly owes more to the Rolling Stones than to Nigel Kennedy. They even did a Jimi Hendrix number (alongside some well-known classics and sublime melancholic Armenian folk meanderings).
WEDNESDAY 4 I always thought that when Labour got elected to power in 2024, they needed to score a quick political win to make voters feel that change was on the way. Instead it has made a lot of rookie errors, which given their past experience in government looks too much like gross incompetence. Now they are mired in the idea that they haven’t got a clue, with a leader who personifies cluelessness. But according to critical friend LabourList, the slow but steady approach (ie, boring) is starting to get traction and a steely reserve is finding favour even among Labour radicals. All they need to do now is convince voters, something they have a solid track record of failing to do.
If Labour’s first two years have been about firefighting and repair, the challenge now is ensuring that the stabilisation phase translates into tangible improvements that voters can feel. The direction and desire to deliver on this is visible.
📌 Karen says there’s a proper rumpus going down at Tudor Rose Court in which one of the residents has been the victim of dirty gossip claiming she is subletting her property, which is against the rules. She has sent a letter to all residents saying shut up or I will set my lawyers on you.
THURSDAY 5 George came back to tell us that on July 22 at 11.30am we will be granted the Freedom of the City of London. We hope afterwards to dine lavishly at the Guildhall with our proposers, Dawn and Liz.
📌 My wife tells me that Poundland in Hoxton Street has closed down.
📌 Sam gave me some stickers that commemorate 120 years of the Kop.
FRIDAY 6 Last night at the Guildhall School we watched a bunch of over privileged classical guitar students attempt to impress their classmates. Technically, I’m sure they did a great job reciting what must have been some of the most boring music ever known to the guitar. Not a flamenco note or flourish in sight, or even a happy tune. Just a lot of dreary 17th Century European salon plucking and some ridiculous English folk. Good job it was free.
📌 In a razor-sharp essay disguised as an open letter to whoever succeeds Keir Starmer, Peter Kellner slashes at any benefit-of-the-doubt inclinations you might have for the Prime Minister by carefully measuring his performance so far against all his Labour predecessors. The conclusion is that before his 2024 victory Starmer was well prepared on how to get elected, but made no plans beforehand on how to run a country.
When Starmer does go, you will need to reconnect with Labour’s past and its core values.
📌 One of our friends is to visit Zurich in Switzerland to check out the assisted dying facilities at Dignitas.
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.
SATURDAY 14 Rich Britons living in the United Arab Emirates to avoid paying UK tax are squatting in tax-friendly countries like Ireland until the end of the tax year.
📌 The word DROP is now used to describe the release of something – a record, a TV show, a film. But some writers use it so badly you get the impression it means the opposite. A case in point is the recent headline, “ITVX drops new six-part thriller”. This does not mean ITVX has cancelled or scrapped the TV thriller, it means it has released all six episodes at once so viewers can binge watch it.
📌 I’ve underglazed the ceramic pendants in sweetshop colours. Next comes the top glaze, the vitreous sheen. It’s all been an experiment so I’ll be happy if any of them survive.
SUNDAY 15 America’s newest war in the Gulf has an impact way beyond the price of oil. According to a New Statesman article, Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz gives it the power to screw up your life. If Trump’s war continues indefinitely, products you treasure (eg, shampoo, shower gel, chewing gum and even salt & vinegar crisps) will soon either disappear from the market or become so expensive you won’t be able to afford them. I always preferred cheese & onion anyway.
📌 I can feel a Land & Sea phase coming into my stitchwork. Yesterday I saw a fantastically artistic satellite photo of the Strait of Hormuz that made me want to pick up my needle threader, and the latest flatfish is tempting me with some intriguing colours in the brown/pink/purple/red spectrum.
MONDAY 16 Sometimes only a few words will be able to tell a complete story.
📌 I’ve just remembered why I don’t use YouTube very much. It’s because it doesn’t let you do more than one thing at a time. You can’t read your book on Kindle and listen to music on YouTube at the same time. As soon as you open a second app, YouTube stops working.
📌 Jo emailed to say that the Royal London Hospital project will feature at this year’s European Healthcare Design Conference. The theme is Agile not Fragile: Designing for Resilience, Renewal and Regeneration.
TUESDAY 17 At a meeting with the Senior Management Team at Headway, the logo design was awarded an all-round thumbs up. All that remains is to tweak the typography and slim down the colour palette.
📌 I’m nearly at the end of the 84-episode drama Cold Tapes, a crime podcast series currently available on BBC Sounds. The premise is a murder at an Antarctic scientific research base that gets investigated by police on the phone at a distance of 9,000 miles. Brilliantly acted and so gripping it’s guaranteed to cost you precious sleep.
📌 The last word I get in Squardle is often one I’ve never even heard of.
WEDNESDAY 18 The preliminary hearing test with Kate revealed that I am hearing impaired and first need to visit the doctor because it could simply be I need my ears cleaned. After that it is a proper audiology test to determine the real extent of the impairment. And then maybe a hearing aid.
📌 At the St Luke’s User Group meeting one of our neighbours pledged to start a choir. When I told my wife who it was she said she’d not be signing up. There’s also trouble in the Men’s Shed centring on a conflict between two Shedders who hate each other’s guts. Peaceful members are starting to drift away as the war intensifies over the snooker table.
📌 At tonight’s wardmote the Beadle, sensing that he and his tricorn hat were among the irreverent, laughed after his “God Save The King” proclamation was met by silence.
THURSDAY 19 When I bought myself The George Orwell Complete Collection audiobook for Christmas I imagined it as part of a reference library I would dip into whenever the need arose. Something subliminal must have happened last night when we returned from the wardmote because I started listening to 1984 and by the time I got to Winston secretly reading The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism during Hate Week, the identity of Big Brother and our local council, The City of London Corporation, had completely merged.
📌 It looks like Donald Trump has been properly kippered by Iran, but there is no face-saving exit for him to take. His power is starting to fade and I don’t know why but I have a feeling we might be in for a Maxwell Moment. Fingers crossed.
FRIDAY 20 Simon Jenkins has a stark warning for Keir Starmer. Stay out of Trump’s war and don’t be fooled, as was Tony Blair, by the “strategic seduction” of the US.
Starmer must not stumble down the same path as led more than 400 British soldiers to their deaths in Helmand.
📌 In the studio yesterday I noticed that Ken has finished his monoprint of me and the stitched brain I did for the Royal London Hospital.
📌 Writing is a bit like exercise. It’s a nice idea, but if the motivation/inspiration isn’t there, it’s easy to put off. But once you get going, it is enjoyable and I love playing with adjectives, cheekily verbifying nouns and wallowing in poetic devices such as simile, alliteration, bounce and metaphor. Yesterday Michelle asked me to write an introduction for the upcoming Peaks of Imperfection exhibition at The Art House. I planned to spend all today working on it, but once I’d nailed the first sentence, the rest flew and I’d finished it before I got out of bed.
SATURDAY 21 Why is Britain always so willing to play poodle to the US, asks a Guardian article, “behaving for all the world like someone stuck in an abusive personal relationship”. Fortunately, the article doesn’t just ask the question, it gives a very clear answer.
📌 Trump is starting to chicken out of his war with Iran. But it won’t be easy, says Foreign Affairs. To properly end the conflict he will need to find a way to neutralise Israel. Maybe he can rig the upcoming Israeli elections and leave Netanyahu hanging.
📌 My wife charmingly said my homemade chicken-avocado paté looked like it had already been eaten.
📌 The best word we could come up with to describe the film Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, is SILLY. Fun, clever and entertaining were close contenders. It was nice to learn that it was made with minimal special effects or CGI.
SUNDAY 22 At the cinema last night we saw a trailer for an upcoming documentary about George Orwell (2+2=5), linking his writings of the early 20th Century to the state of the world in the early 21st Century. Coincidentally, I have just finished the audiobook of The Road To Wigan Pier, which ends with words that could usefully become part of Keir Starmer’s next attempt to revive his dwindling fortunes…
In the next few years we shall either get that effective Socialist party that we need, or we shall not get it. If we do not get it, then Fascism is coming; probably a slimy Anglicized form of Fascism, with cultured policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead of the swastika.
📌 From an article that offers some advice to Keir Starmer about the beauty of multiparty coalitions as seen in other European countries, I learned that Green Party leader Zack Polanski is up for a partnership with Labour, but only if Andy Burnham is leader and Starmer out. That kind of attempted political blackmail is low, but at least it puts out a signal that Starmer should pay attention to about being a bit more broad church.
MONDAY 23 Harshita says she went to school with George Michael, but fancied not George but his cousin. Stephanie, who runs our local community centre, went to school with TV’s Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) but fell out with him when he sneaked upstairs at her 13th birthday party and read her diary, which revealed that she was in love with Mr Jones, one of her teachers.
📌 The latest in the stitchwork fish collection is finished. I think I will proceed now with actual species such as cod and mackerel, ones people eat rather than imaginary fishtank fish.
TUESDAY 24 To the Royal College of Surgeons‘ first-floor library for a presentation of Stroke Association research and afternoon tea. All because when we die the Stroke Association are in The Will. The event included access to the newly revamped Hunterian Museum, where we saw lots of diseased body parts and assorted specimens in jars and got a sneak preview of what my new hip will look like (surgery scheduled for April 27).
📌 To the Guildhall School for a student production of a Russian play from 1836 called The Government Inspector, which pokes fun at small-town corruption as being symbolic of a grossly smug wider society that has unwittingly bought into a culture of universal debasement. It didn’t put me in mind of Putin’s Russia so much as Trump’s America.
WEDNESDAY 25 Dovetailing nicely with last night’s play is my latest audiobook, The F*ck-It List, in which terminally ill retired newspaper editor Frank Brill decides not to make a bucket list of exciting things to do before he dies but to kill the people who have done him wrong. His task becomes an odyssey through Trump’s America, and on more than one occasion Frank’s experience is so negative that he starts to wish his imminent death could be brought forward.
📌 At Cecil’s burial at Hanwell Cemetery with Michelle and Alex we met three of his children and two of his grandchildren. At the graveside service Michelle and Alex cried. I threw some soil onto his coffin, ran lovely memories of Cecil through my head and whispered the Lord’s Prayer when the minister spoke it clearly. When Alex showed his family a book of Cecil’s drawings they were astounded: “It’s like he had a secret life,” said one. Maybe he did, the old devil.
📌 I’m still in awe of the friendships that grow between the contestants on TV’s House of Games. All of them are hard-wired successes in their own way, but the format of the show, and the facilitation of host Richard Osman, allows them to show a depth of warmth and fellowship they might struggle to reveal alone. Only in TV’s Junior Bake-Off does this spirit of togetherness shine so brightly.
📌 Jürgen Klopp talks fluently about Liverpool in a way that perfectly illustrates what fans instinctively think but can never exactly put into words…
Even from a distance, it’s impossible not to feel it. It’s hard to watch from the outside when you’ve spent so many years in the heart of that fire. People ask me, ‘Jurgen, what’s happening?’ and I tell them: football is like life, you have seasons of rain before the sun comes back. This club, these fans… they are built from a different kind of metal. They don’t just ‘get by,’ they overcome. I see the struggles, yes, but I also see the soul of Liverpool. It’s still there. It just needs that one spark, that one moment where the ‘Doubters’ remember they are ‘Believers’. My heart is no longer in the dugout, but it’s still in the stands. I know they will rise, not because it’s easy, but because they are Liverpool. And Liverpool always finds its way back to the top.
📌 The comedian Graham Norton is doing weird horseback TV ads for a company called Revolut, an online bank. Revolut is owned and run jointly by a British-Russian and a British-Ukrainian, a young fintech (financial technology) partnership that seemingly transcends global politics. Or does it define it?
📌 The gossip says that Thomas Tuchel has been cavorting with Trent Alexander-Arnold’s former girlfriend, which is why TAA has not been selected to play for England. Nothing, of course, to do with since he left Liverpool TAA has been injured and/or performing badly.
THURSDAY 26 During an online meeting with Jo and Carmel from Vital Arts, Natalie deftly seized control of the short video they want to submit to a health design conference in June. Kit will film me talking and Natalie will attend the conference. We hope to demonstrate that the co-produced workshops we did with the Royal London Hospital offer clues to a better, more collaborative way of working in institutional settings.
📌 A top score in Waffle has been a distant memory for some time.
FRIDAY 27 Donald Trump really is in a bad place. Saudi Arabia and Israel want him to destroy Iran. The rest of the world wants him to stop his stupid war and let global trade start flowing freely again.
SATURDAY 28 Andy Beckett can always be relied upon to read the runes of progressive politics. Often it looks like a dressed-up statement of the obvious. Today it is that governments who curb cowboy capitalism by capping prices and the cost of living get reelected. And those that let the market run riot are forever vulnerable.
Many voters across the world still believe that protecting living standards is the first duty of government: maintaining national security in an everyday, economic sense rather than the rarer, military one.
It is, he says, now in Britain’s economic DNA is to cling to the idea that the markets can’t be messed with. Whereas in Mexico and Spain, the opposite is true.
From the Thatcher government onwards, Britain has been a leading laboratory for the experiment by modern capitalism and its political enablers in maximising profits and prices, regardless of the wider social and economic consequences.
SUNDAY 29 We are booked to see the documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 later, and coincidentally Lawrence Freedman has translated Donald Trump’s worldview into what sounds like the tyrannical orders of Big Brother…
America is very strong.
It is independent and does not need help from anyone.
The president’s strategic judgement is masterful.
Because of this adversaries invariably bend to his will.
If they fail to do so retribution will be unprecedented.
Any critics are either malign or misled.
This is an all-purpose narrative.
Freedman then goes on to say that this kind of tyranny is now not even popular among Republicans and Trump will suffer badly for it in the mid-term elections on November 3.
MONDAY 30 Much was made in Orwell: 2+2=5, the documentary we saw yesterday, of Orwell’s declining health. It’s tempting to speculate that the tuberculosis he suffered from was partly self-inflicted. Even when holding his baby son Orwell had a cigarette in his mouth.
📌 Our taxi driver from home to Euston station was a Londoner (born in Glasgow) who had a low opinion of Donald Trump. The one taking us from Liverpool Lime Street station to the Hope Street Hotel in Liverpool held fond memories of the actor Matthew Kelly from when he presented the TV show Stars In Their Eyes.
TUESDAY 31 My wife insists that the bed in our hotel in Liverpool is bigger than our bathroom in London.
📌 Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral always has something new to discover. The Everyman Bistro, where I interviewed many Liverpool bands in the past, has sadly gone. Not so the Everyman Theatre, which is now conjoined to the Playhouse Theatre and the venue for tonight’s performance of Waiting For Godot, featuring my wife’s cousin Mike as Lucky.
The play has been studied and interpreted endlessly, but tonight’s performance was about hope, and what happens when it runs out.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 