April 18-24, 2026
SATURDAY 18 That word “outage” again! Please stop it!
📌 It’s starting to look like Starmer’s days are numbered, in single figures. The Mandelson vetting fiasco, says the New Statesman, is for Starmer what Partygate was for Boris. He’d be best advised to walk the plank now, while no individual (ie, Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting) can be accused of fomenting a coup.
📌 A woman just came into Costa Coffee on London Road in Brighton and asked the two young staff if there were any jobs available. The staff told her no, not right now, but if she’s still looking later in the Summer, come back then. The staff then wished her good luck in her hunt.
📌 Last night we joined Pip at the Bonsai Plant Kitchen. The food was beautifully flavoured but the scheduling of the various shared dishes was too random for our liking. The last dish we were served was two bowls of rice.
📌 Brighton remains the same but different. It makes me feel old.
📌 Tonight we had an early drink with Sue, then visited a secret shady bar called Alphabet my wife found just around the corner from our apartment.
SUNDAY 19
📌 On Sue’s recommendation we started watching The Other Bennet Sister on TV and noticed a lot of hairy armpits, which prompted a web search asking when women started shaving their armpits.
📌 I’m re-reading Mick Herron’s Dolphin Junction short-story collection. One of them, The Last Dead Letter is about Jackson Lamb’s time as a field agent in Berlin, before the wall came down, and contains the following reflection…
Even if the Wall were to disappear overnight, its stones picked apart by the youngsters who’d grown up in its shadow, where would that leave everyone? Berlin was a city twinned with itself: it had two zoos, two operas, two everything. Even if it healed, its divisions would remain; it would be a pair of mirrored images, neither side trusting the other.
I wonder if this has proved to be true. It made me want to visit Berlin to find out. Or maybe Berlin has always held so many “truths” about itself that it would be impossible to know which one to believe.
MONDAY 20 Today’s Sensemaker reveals that a Chinese humanoid robot has broken the human half-marathon world record by more than six minutes. The old newspaper test of what makes a good story is “man bites dog” because a dog biting a man would constitute a non-event, whereas a man biting a dog would be sufficiently rare to be exceptional, and therefore “news”. I think the Chinese robot story (“machine does something faster than a human”) is a non-story because that’s what machines have been doing for centuries.
📌 In Liverpool classical music is being used to disperse unruly crowds of people. Classical musicians are unhappy about it.
📌 Harshita just finished a fantastic version of my three hens on a night out image.
📌 My expectations took a tumble at the Barbican tonight. I expected soaring Fado but got plodding, overly stage-managed Europop melodrama instead. At least what looked like the entire Portuguese population of London enjoyed themselves.
TUESDAY 21 In his 1947 essay The English Class System George Orwell defines a type of “classlessness” that emerged in England after the Second World War: “People like radio engineers and industrial chemists… middle class in income, but not much interested in social status, whose education has not been of a kind to give them any reverence for the past, and who tend to live in blocks of flats or housing estates where the old social pattern has broken down.” Orwell calls this the “technical middle class”, people “necessarily” elevated by war from the working class to the middle class. This class, said Orwell in 1947, was England’s fastest growing social stratum.
📌 I keep getting notifications from the hospital about my upcoming hip replacement operation. Every time one arrives I presume it is to tell me that the operation has been cancelled. But it never is. The messages are just unfinished admin that needs to be completed before I go under the knife.
WEDNESDAY 22 I’ve stopped looking at news about Donald Trump. I think maybe someone has finally managed to put a leash on him.
📌 After reading George Orwell’s views on class and classlessness yesterday, I found a bargain book online, A Class Act: The Myth of Britain’s Classless Society, which brings the analysis up to date. And from the book’s description its ideas differ greatly from George Orwell’s. I shall read it while recovering from my hip replacement, along with Clown Town, the latest in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series.
📌 The Knowledge reckons America has now taken a significant turn against Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. It also says the propagandist equation Anti-Israel = anti-Semitic has finally been broken.
THURSDAY 23 I sometimes do a web search of people I worked with 30-odd years ago and stupidly expect them to look like they did back then. Very few of them are recognisable, the one exception being the writer and broadcaster Jon Ronson.
📌 Michelle says there has been a lot of interest in my stitchwork of the deceased centenarian style icon Iris Apfel, so I’m thinking I might follow it with one of risque 1930s Hollywood film character Gold Dust Gertie.
📌 I think I might be expected to make some kind of speech at tonight’s opening of the new exhibition. Buggered if I know what I can say.
📌 I got through it with some jibber-jabber about art exhibitions being about starting conversations.
FRIDAY 24 There’s a lot of speculation that Keir Starmer will be forced to resign after the May local elections. Exactly how anyone will force him to do it is unclear. I know someone who used to play football with Starmer and he says the PM was a tough and often dirty opponent.
📌 My wife has spotted a new trend in toilet signage. Instead of “Men” and “Women”, or variations thereof, the gender compromise solution is to label toilet doors with “Stand Up Wee” and “Sit Down Wee”.
📌 They gave John Tomlinson the full works for his memorial at St Giles: organ, choir, homilies, prayers, standing up, hymns, sitting down, food and drink, Father Jack in all the ceremonial garments.
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Billy's Scrapbook 
Good morning 😊I have read about Oolong tea but not tasted it. It is 6.45 here, our days start with hot filter coffee. Jobs are scarce here too. And now LPG and othere shortages.
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