Scrapbook: Week 24

13-19 June, 2026

SATURDAY 13 I had my second Shingles jab yesterday and today I can barely move with tiredness and fatigue. This is especially annoying for my wife as we were supposed to go to a friend’s place this evening for dinner. She finds it very hard to conceal her disappointment in me, but there is really nothing I can do about it. Were we even to get a cab the short distance to our friend’s house I would likely fall asleep at the dinner table. The web suggests these side effects last 2-3 days. In these situations my wife always has a look on her face that says she thinks I’m playacting.

📌 When recently I had considered writing something from the point of view of a female mouse in Charles Dickens’s kitchen, I started to investigate the gendering of mice. Males and females are often misgendered, especially by pet-shop owners. Females have nipples, males do not. But the most intriguing aspect of distinguishing the sex of a mouse is behavioural…

Males are generally larger, require solitary housing due to territorial aggression, and have a distinct, pungent odor. Females are smaller, highly social, and have stable, cyclical hormone profiles.

SUNDAY 14 Energy returning slowly after Shingles-jab thing.

📌 An article in the Guardian warns Europe to expect an intense wave of sneaky Russian attacks and provocations on infrastructure. This, says the author, is where the Russia-Ukraine conflict is heading now that Putin’s original battle plan has obviously failed.

📌 Finished two more stitchwork tote bags featuring my version of local buildings, in this case Shakespeare Tower on the Barbican Estate and Great Arthur House on the Golden Lane Estate.

📌 Starmer is now obviously being jostled into policy decisions, which isn’t an entirely bad thing if the policies are good ones. It will be a hard position to maintain if he can’t keep Chancellor Rachel Reeves on board. That crisis might have to wait until we see the outcome of next week’s by-election in Makerfield.

MONDAY 15 Jonty Bloom says increasing defence spending does not mean taking money from the poor in the form of reduced benefits. There are other ways to pay for it and the previous government should have started doing it a long, long time ago.

📌 As exciting, fascinating and fully entertaining as Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is, it’s hard not to suspect that some of  the props from 1977’s Close Encounters were dusted off and put on camera. Ditto the idea that the secret state is consorting with aliens behind our backs. It does have Emily Blunt wittering in what we are told is “8-bit binary” but might one (disclosure) day be revealed to be mere gibberish, so it does at least have a sense of humour.

TUESDAY 16 Might Keir Starmer show some courage soon and nationalise Thames Water? Even if Andy Burnham triumphs in Makerfield on Thursday Starmer could blunt his quest for the leadership of the party by making such a bold move. Ditto on the fairness agenda by copying New York mayor Zohran Mamdani tax on super-rich property hoarders and pied-à-terre billionaires.

📌 We are in Brighton watching our first full World Cup game. My wife is appalled at the high number of empty seats.

WEDNESDAY 17 At Pip and Andy’s lovely wedding in Brighton we sat for the meal next to Joanne, who we hadn’t seen for 20 years and whose life had changed dramatically. She is now a psychotherapist in Liverpool and has two grown-up children whose father died in mysterious circumstances in a swimming pool in Los Angeles. She told us she knew someone who in retirement took up “rehabilitating old race horses to become ordinary horses”.

One of the day’s highlights was the reading of a John Cooper-Clark poem.

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rust
If you like your coffee hot
let me be your coffee pot
You call the shots
I wanna be yours

I wanna be your raincoat
for those frequent rainy days
I wanna be your dreamboat
when you want to sail away
Let me be your teddy bear
take me with you anywhere
I don’t care
I wanna be yours

I wanna be your electric meter
I will not run out
I wanna be the electric heater
you’ll get cold without
I wanna be your setting lotion
hold your hair in deep devotion
Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean
that’s how deep is my devotion

📌 England ground out a win against Croatia in their first game in the World Cup, but only after what is said to have been an inspiring half-time team talk by coach Thomas Tuchel.

THURSDAY 18 My family are all on their way to Liverpool for a mass reunion and hopefully no arguments.

📌 The family reunion got off to a good start with food, drink and lots of laughter. The first day ended with us sitting outside a pub scrutinising ancient documents and photo albums trying to make sense of who is who from the past. A certain mystery still surrounds a character everyone but me knew as “one-eyed Bill”.

FRIDAY 19 Peter Kellner has crunched the numbers on Andy Burnham’s seismic win in the Makerfield by-election, and for once he sounds quite excited.

📌 Day 2 of the family eating, drinking and laughing down memory lane included a story by Carole in which on her 18th birthday I scrawled a happy birthday message to her in soy sauce on the tablecloth at a Chinese restaurant. And another one that revealed an old relative named Peter who was known in the family derogatorily as “The drip that forgot to drop.”

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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