Scrapbook: Week 13

March 28-April 3, 2026

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 re-elected. 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.

He says it has now become part of Britain’s economic DNA that the markets can’t be messed with, whereas in countries such as 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 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 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 the bathroom in our apartment in London.

📌 Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral always offers something new to discover (this time a vast embroidered woollen landscape). The Everyman Bistro, where I interviewed many Liverpool bands in the past, has sadly gone. Not so the Everyman Theatre, which is now conjoined with 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 for me about hope, and what happens when it runs out or you can’t see it anymore.

WEDNESDAY 1 You need to be careful that anything you report on April 1 is not an elaborate joke. But a New Statesman report that the revived London Routemaster buses introduced by Boris Johnson when he was Mayor are to be phased out sounds plausible enough. The report lists all the faults and shortcomings of these expensive and inefficient vehicles, but also hides a neat idea. That Britain could revive its economic fortunes by inventing, designing and manufacturing the world’s best electric buses.

📌 After breakfast in The Quarter we strolled the area around the University and took in a couple of recommended Knowledge Quarter museums. First was the Garstang Museum of Archaeology, then on to the truly fabulous Victoria Gallery & Museum.

📌 Every week Sam comes up with a drawing of a new creepy-crawly.

📌 We got to shake hands with the actor Matthew Kelly (Estragon) after tonight’s performance of Waiting For Godot at the Liverpool Everyman. He wasn’t a happy man because his co-star in the play George Costigan (Vladimir) had been taken ill and he’d struggled through the show with an inexperienced understudy.

THURSDAY 2 There’s a story in the Guardian saying that some women are using vaginal oestrogen cream on their faces in the belief that it banishes wrinkles. I didn’t read the full story because I was distracted by the idea of how this discovery came about. Was it an accident? Did someone use the wrong cream by mistake one night and woke up with the complexion of a child? I’d like to think so. One of our friends once confessed on Facebook to accidentally brushing her teeth with depilatory cream and spraying her armpits with hairspray.

📌 The ugly word “outage” really gets on my nerves.

📌 We got a message from Mike saying George hopes to be back on stage as Vladimir for the final night of Godot in Liverpool tomorrow. We were beginning to speculate that we’d seen his last ever stage performance.

FRIDAY 3 Of all the disability writers I have sampled in my years of disability, Lucy Webster is one I rarely find tiresome.

📌 There is a narrative mood around Trump’s war with Iran that says he is lost for an answer as to how he can accept that he has been outwitted by Iran. He might get mad about it, but Simon Jenkins in the Guardian suggests that meanwhile the rest of the world should just try to buckle up, step back and cautiously sit out his storm of disruption. His destructive tendencies are anyway about to be choked at the November midterm elections, at which even his great allies will start to desert him. So let the baby have his tantrum in the secure knowledge that the damage is limited. Not a great theory if you have been one of his hissy-fit victims, be you in Minneapolis or Tehran.

📌 The new stitchwork is a real fish, on which I have painted red lips and fingernails. So I guess it is an imaginary fish.

📌 Saw a fabulous clip of David Byrne leading a gospel congregation in a version of David Bowie’s Heroes.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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