May 9-15, 2026
SATURDAY 9 Today’s new word is “Starmageddon”.
📌 Shirley visited with watermelon juice, which she says is good for healing wounds. She wanted to bring gojiberries too, but couldn’t find any. They are apparently the thing for muscle healing. My wife came home from a concert with Marge with a box of chocolates and a card for me.
SUNDAY 10 My wife has been disapproving of my reluctance to leave our apartment and walk gently outdoors to exercise my new hip. My reluctance is based solely on the fact that as soon as you exit the apartment you bump into someone you have to talk to, which is not good exercise for my new hip.
MONDAY 11 I dropped off with Duolingo about a year ago when I realised my wife wasn’t as keen on touring France by train as I was. But recently Paula invited me to be one of her Super Duolingo family members, so I’m back arguing with the app when it tells me my answer is wrong.
📌 My wife has gone into a frenzy of decluttering in anticipation of a visit on Wednesday from our estate agent’s photographer. Even if they arrived with the worst of intentions, they would still find it impossible to make this apartment look ugly. But we do not anticipate any sale to proceed quickly or smoothly, so if in the end we are forced to stay here at least we will have been able to consider a looser style of living.
TUESDAY 12 The media intensity around Keir Starmer makes you wonder whether he is about to stage a desperate headline event to reverse his poor fortunes. Rejoining the EU would be one of them, as would a vote on the Unification of Ireland.
📌 The redressing of my surgery wound went all to plan. My wife saw the mutilated left buttock, watched the nurse remove the staples and declared the cleaned wound a beauty.
WEDNESDAY 13 Wes Streeting is said to be on the verge of resignation as health secretary so he can launch a leadership bid against Keir Starmer. This could be Starmer’s ace card. Streeting’s conceit is minboggling, his ego and his arrogance both the size of Antarctica.
📌 Magnus the walrus has finished his holiday in Scotland and has now been spotted living it up in Norway.
📌 A new government bill offers discounts to households that use more energy when it is sunny or windy, when the National Grid is generating excess electricity.
📌 Keir Starmer walked into Downing Street more than two years ago knowing the nation was hungry for the change he had promised during his election campaign. But it now looks like he never had a single, winning Big Plan around which voters could gather. Instead he proceeded with a set of bit-by-bit policies that did little more than point in another misty direction. The knock-out punch (a reverse Brexit referendum, proportional representation, wholesale state ownership of public utilities and essential industries) never existed, so now Starmer is wriggling: “Caveat-laden half-pledges proving that increments are the only currency he holds,” writes Rafael Behr in today’s Guardian.
THURSDAY 14 Really hope Angela Rayner stands in any Labour leadership contest.
📌 Polly Toynbee is convinced the end is nigh for Starmer…
He is in that bourn from which no traveller returns: political death. No one ever came back from such public rejection. Ignoring it is not an option, just wishful thinking.
FRIDAY 15 Today’s Sensemaker notes that “cruise ships are among the most efficient disease incubators on Earth”.
📌 Reports say Starmer is determined to stay on as PM, and according to one new survey, he would likely beat most of his possible contenders in a face-to-face contest.
There is the sense that if only he could somehow find a way to make himself a bigger personality and deliver a rousing national message, the majority of MPs would in fact stick with him, but maybe that would only delay the inevitable. The seat his chief rival Andy Burnham will contest (Makerfield) is not an easy win. But if Burnham can win it he will be able to stand victorious and claim to have beaten back the advancing forces of Reform UK. Starmer is such a poor communicator it’s hard to see how he can now miraculously restart what must be one of the most stuttering premierships in British political history.
📌 Headway East London is now Headway London and the logo I helped design is in use on letterheads…
There was always some discussion about the inclusion of the River Thames as a symbol of “London”. I argued strongly that it was universally understood as such, but I could never quite explain its essence. Then recently I spotted a quote in the Mick Herron book Clown Town that did the job…
It was the essence of the capital; always London, but always passing through. As if the whole could be captured by a single moving part, the entire story held within a verb.
📌 The momentum is with Andy Burnham. I won’t in any way be surprised if a host of senior Labour figures (maybe even Starmer too) pile into Makerfield to support his bid for the vacant seat.
📌 On an episode of the TV show Would I Lie To You, the comedian Bob Mortimer claimed to have been doing his own dentistry for the past 15 years, using a product called Fuji 9. While Bob unravelled his hilarious stories of DIY fillings and crowns, I googled Fuji 9 and found it to be a real product, available on Amazon.
📌 Puns often don’t work very well when more than one word is changed, but in this case, “crypto” and “Christo” are close enough in sound to pull it off.
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Billy's Scrapbook 