April 4-10, 2026
SATURDAY 4 The Guardian has a story about the most scandalous photographs to “shock the world”. Among them is one of Rolling Stone Bill Wyman marrying child-bride Mandy Smith in 1989. The marriage lasted less than two years. The article carried the additional information that in 1993 Wyman’s 30-year-old son from a previous marriage married Smith’s mother, then 46, at the time making Mandy Smith her own step-grandfather’s ex-wife.
📌 Another crushing defeat for Liverpool leaves me wondering how long the owners will stay loyal to Arne Slot. An exit from the Champions League would be a good excuse for them to act.
📌 My new audiobook on Libby is a superb reimagining of George Orwell’s 1984 from the point of view of Winston’s conspirator and lover Julia. 1984 Julia allows us to see Orwell’s 1984 in a very different light, and oppressive totalitarianism in a way that more accurately resembles its modern incarnation.
SUNDAY 5 On Easter Sunday the New Statesman has a report claiming that young people are (sort of) flocking to Christianity like never before.
There is a desire for a framework that offers moral clarity and places limits on the self.
MONDAY 6 The first of this season’s crops have gone into the allotment box. They are garlic chives, regular chives, spring onion and radishes. The tomatoes need a few more days indoors to harden, and the experimental broccoli will stay in pots until I can be sure it won’t be a waste of space. We already have rosemary and thyme from last year, and the box next to ours has plenty of sage, which we have permission to use.
📌 Earlier in the week we started watching a Jo Nesbø Harry Hole series on Netflix. It was in Norwegian with English subtitles. The plot was twisty and I got subtitle fatigue. Then we discovered a button on Netflix that gave us a version dubbed into American-English. Thankfully there is very little lag in speech patterns between Norwegian and English.
TUESDAY 7 The political number-cruncher Peter Kellner advises any voters in Scotland who desperately want independence to vote not for the SNP but for the Greens.
📌 A bunch of local residents gathered outside the estate’s leisure centre to protest at its closure by the company that runs it, Fusion, who have gone bankrupt. I can’t say I will be sad to see the back of Fusion (they were beyond hopeless), but many residents fear that the closure will be permanent and the gym, swimming pool, tennis and badminton courts, etc, will fall into dereliction and abandonment.
WEDNESDAY 8 Don’t expect whoever eventually replaces Donald Trump as US president to turn the clock back, says Rafael Behr. The European democracies need to stand together, without American security. Trump’s reign of tyranny has in any case left America with its own identity crisis. It can’t even claim to be a democracy any longer.
There is now deadlock in the struggle between a president who would be king and a constitution drafted in repudiation of monarchy.
📌 The Apollo lunar missions of my youth captured my imagination in so many amazing ways. So it is I suppose a reflection of age that the Artemis II mission has captured my attention mainly for its busted toilet.
📌 Very embarrassingly I have been made the centrepiece of the video to promote the studio’s upcoming exhibition at The Art House with Acrylicize.
📌 We’ve started watching The Pitt on TV, which looks like a resurrection of ER, which is quite a medical feat. It is shot in what resembles real time (“8am-9am, 10am-11am”, etc), so we still have several hours of hospital stuff (terminally-ill patients, health politics, stolen ambulances, amputations, scalpels opening flesh, blood, guts, urine, etc) before we see the staff of The Pitt at home or out on the streets doing everyday things. That’s presuming life outside their place of work eventually features in this tight drama. If it doesn’t, these people will become very irritating very soon.
THURSDAY 9 Alex, a new recruit to the comms department at Headway, filmed an interview with me talking about the Royal London Hospital project. I told her I’m happy not to see the final edit.
📌 The last item in the above list looks like a non-story, but is based on a claim by the New York Times that computer scientist Adam Back is the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the alleged inventor of cryptocurrency who has been able so far to remain anonymous à la Banksy.
📌 The ceramic pendants are out of the kiln. Some are a bit dodgy, but as an experiment I’m quite pleased.
📌 Cecil’s memorial at Headway was delayed slightly by birthday cake with both Sam and Kim. It was sombre, as expected, but Michelle teased out some nice memories and we got to see some nice pictures in a slideshow.
📌 Netanyahu is really publicly screwing Trump now. He may come to regret that.
📌 To Barbican Cinema 2 for The Drama, a dark rom-com so dark it borders on horror. My wife and our friend Marge didn’t rate it much, but I controversially liked it a lot. I could sense our fellow other cinemagoers squirming as what was meant to be a happy courtship and golden wedding day descends into hell, and I even laughed out loud while it was happening.
📌 Father Jack at St Giles has started using his church for free small-scale intimate jazz and folk recitals, with a few vocal numbers from musicals thrown in. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.
FRIDAY 9 The BBC have been repeatedly stating this morning that “only a handful” of oil tankers are passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
📌 The day of my hip replacement operation gets ever closer, so we’ve now turned to thoughts on practical matters such as getting up and down stairs, showers, etc. My wife even suggested that I could get a taxi to Marge’s, use her walk-in waterfall shower and then we could go to a concert, film or play at the Barbican.
📌 I’m intrigued as to why Melania Trump needed to make a televised address to the nation saying she wasn’t friends with Jeffrey Epstein.
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Billy's Scrapbook 