May 23-29, 2026
SATURDAY 23 At the Golden Lane Rumble in the Jumble sale I got to see things both surprising and expected about my neighbours. Debs, unsurprisingly, has a big collection of caps and other hats; Mad Maria, surprisingly, has quite an exclusive collection of dolls. Her preference these days is for expensive vintage French dolls (“my girls”), so her crummy old English ones are up for sale.
📌 In a nail-biting finale to the Championship playoffs my wife’s team Middlesbrough were beaten 1-0 by Hull City.
SUNDAY 24 In an article about the declining fortunes of Vladimir Putin and what’s left of his ambition to conquer Ukraine, one source describes metaphorically Putin’s approach to waging war and claiming territory…
He is not a long-term strategist. His appetite grows as he eats.
📌 The dressing is off and the mutilation of my left buttock is out in the open air…
MONDAY 25 If ever I were asked which is the longest river in the world I would give the Amazon as my answer. That vast network of tributaries surely makes it the longest. My wife’s answer would be the Nile. And so begins an argument about how you measure the lengths of rivers. Luckily for us John Elledge has taken on the task with vigour, and even extends the question to which is the world’s shortest river, and just what is a river anyway. Where does it start? Where does it end? What happens when two rivers converge (Mississippi/Missouri)? Does a river stop being a river when it becomes tidal? Etc, etc.
📌 I never thought I’d miss Lily telling me off for my bad French…
📌 My wife got a mini jigsaw as a gift from a friend and decided to complete it during lunch in an Italian restaurant in Islington.
TUESDAY 26 An article in the New Statesman argues that politically Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer are the same thing, but that a Scouse accent and a relatable personality could turn failure into success…
Maybe things would go differently for a more compelling messenger: someone who doesn’t sound like his speeches were written by ChatGPT.
📌 At the jumble sale on Saturday our neighbour Anne sold something and regretted it immediately. As soon as she got home she bought a replacement on eBay.
📌 Shirley invited us to a tea-tasting session at a nearby specialist tea shop. Some teas, we were told, should be brewed at 80⁰ and not at 100⁰. Green tea being a case in point.
WEDNESDAY 27 The Establishment will not simply surrender to Andy Burnham’s winning personality should he replace Keir Starmer as Labour leader, writes Norwich MP Clive Lewis in the Guardian. It will resist his desire for big transformative projects such as Proportional Representation and public ownership by refusing to fund them by pushing up the cost of borrowing. So Burnham will need some even bigger ideas around public finances if he is to change Britain in the way he hopes he can.
📌 I think I might be deliberately avoiding one of our neighbours because she is boring, and utters her boring words in a whiny fake-frail voice. She may indeed be genuinely frail and a really interesting person under the boring exterior, but I will never find out.
THURSDAY 28 We finished Two Weeks In August last night and we’re still baffled by the insertion of Greek mythology into a drama about a group of old friends from university who thought going on holiday together in their 30s was a good idea.
📌 Not had a top score in Waffle for a while. I still think it’s a matter of pure luck, but I’m sure there are some people who spend hours trying to get the letters to fall in the right place…
📌 Alan Millburn says fair pay is a barrier to employers giving jobs to young people.
📌 It has taken a tedious old has-been politician (Tony Blair) to force a much younger one (Wes Streeting) to finally put his thoughts into a coherent statement.
FRIDAY 29 In an interview in the Guardian Paul McCartney says whenever his device asks him to accept cookies, he searches high and low for the “REJECT ALL” button. Problem is, Paul, not all cookie requests come with that option and you are left with the choice of accepting them or scrolling through the dozens of cookies listed, switching each one to “no”. I get a mild satisfaction from doing that. McCartney also revealed his favourite emojis…
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