May 30-June 5, 2026
SATURDAY 30 Farewell Arne Slot. Football is a vicious game and you came up just a bit short.
📌 Back in Portsmouth for Mark’s party at Ye Spotted Dogge and all those ancient ships.
📌 Arsenal lost to PSG on penalties in the Champions League final.
SUNDAY 31 Last night during Mark’s birthday speech, we learned that his party’s venue, Ye Spotted Dogge, was where in 1628 George Villiers, lover of King James VI/I (Scotland) was stabbed to death by James Fenton, a disgruntled former army colleague.
📌 No one believes Nicola Sturgeon.
MONDAY 1 Wes Streeting is on manoeuvres and giving off the impression that he hopes Andy Burnham loses the June 18 Makerfield by-election.
📌 At Joelle’s taster session at the community centre I was reminded how simple chair exercises can be quite invigorating.
TUESDAY 2 Andy Beckett detects a movement away from the slavish courting of free-market economics UK governments have been hooked on since 2010. There is, he says, another way, that “the markets” are not a force of nature and that private greed is the cause of economic instability.
The UK has a sluggish economy and unhappy society because people are paying too much for essentials, often provided by privatised utilities that prioritise profits, shareholders and executive pay over delivering a functional or affordable service.
📌 My wife has discovered a cut-price version of a softer toilet paper that does not include the cardboard insert at the centre of each roll, this reducing the production cost.
📌 I never knew warfare drones had pilots. And Ukraine apparently has some good ones who, when teamed with a new type of cheap, easily made drone are on the verge of snatching Crimea back from Russia.
📌 The echocardiogram examination at the GP surgery revealed a very common “sticky” valve in my heart. Next step is to look at it with a bigger machine and decide what to do.
📌 China’s Apollo Go robot taxis are the new spies on London’s streets. It is claimed.
📌 Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu had a phone call in which Trump is said to have lost his temper…
“You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”
📌 My wife came home from afternoon tea at Crazy Ruth’s with a bag full of homemade sausage rolls and cake. All I was allowed was a small slice of apricot bread-and-butter pudding.
WEDNESDAY 3 Jonty Bloom makes an unlikely but very clever connection between riots and pensions. And the bottom line is it’s all about class. Badly educated people in low-paid insecure jobs do not save for the future. They are too busy trying to survive the present and end up looking for someone other than themselves to blame for their bad fortunes.
The chances of ordinary working people saving the kind of money necessary to retire comfortably died years ago.
📌 The Hula Hoops bag is full of empty blister packs so I will go to Boots to deposit then in the recycling bin.
📌 The Letters of Note site has a fascinating 1944 note from King George VI to then prime minister Winston Churchill urging the PM not to join the Allied troops for the D-Day Landings in France, because it would make him, the King, look like a wuss.
📌 It won’t surprise some to learn that one commentator has identified Kemi Badenoch as the second coming of Tony Blair. To many it is a statement of the obvious.
📌 To Barbican Cinema 2 for Tuner, a totally charming film about a young apprentice piano tuner who turns his ultra-sensitive pitch-perfect hearing into a talent for safe-cracking. With predictable consequences.
THURSDAY 4 Arrived at Headway to find Errol singing Baby Face to Eliza. Then came the question of who sang it. We got as far back as Bobby Darin and Little Richard but couldn’t find a definitive answer, so we asked AI…
Baby Face was originally recorded and made a number-one hit in 1926 by Jan Garber and His Orchestra, with co-writer Benny Davis performing the vocal chorus. The classic Tin Pan Alley jazz song was written by Harry Akst (music) and Benny Davis (lyrics).
📌 I knew that gangsters disposed of dead bodies by feeding them to pigs, because they will eat anything. What I didn’t know, and what Sean told me today, was that pigs cannot eat and digest human teeth. But you never see gangsters in movies extracting the teeth of their victims prior to dropping them in the pig pen.
FRIDAY 5 Nicola messaged to say she has another viewing of our property for Monday afternoon. The viewings so far have been positive, but no offers, not even silly ones, yet.
📌 My hip is healing nicely and later today I will attend the first of my post-op exercise classes at the hospital. I am looking forward to using equipment (eg, bike, leg press) that I don’t have access to since our local gym shut down following bankruptcy.
📌 Liverpool have a new manager, who used to work at Bournemouth FC.
📌 “That mother looked like Felicity Kendall,” I uttered as we walked home from a wafer-thin production of High Society at the Barbican. “That mother WAS Felicity Kendall,” replied my wife in horror. Other famous people I’d failed to recognise in this predictable, off-the-shelf touring musical included someone from Call The Midwife (Helen George) and Signora Volpe’s little brother (Freddie Fox).
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Billy's Scrapbook 