One month as it happened…
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).
SATURDAY 6 My legs are wobbling with over-exertion. After yesterday’s lower-limb exercise class at the hospital I attempted to devise my own daily routine, designed to take around 30-45 minutes. Best laid plans, etc. The exercises on my list today were…
3 mins each
1. Knee rolls
2. Glute bridges
3. Abduction leg raises
4. Cat-cow
5. Knee to chest
6. Rowing with theraband
7. Heel raises
8. Tandem stance
9. Squats
10. Sit to stand
11. Leg swing side
12. Leg swing back
13. Air punching
I might have to revise this schedule.
📌 My wife asked me if I’d like to visit an exhibition of Queen Elizabeth II’s outfits. IN OCTOBER. I said no thank you.
📌 I took up a subscription offer to the Observer for £50 a year (usual price £144).
📌 The Observer failed to unlock its content to me so I binned the subscription.
📌 The VPN is on the blink, so our Canadian streaming service is unavailable. My wife sat 2ft from the TV for 15 minutes resolving the issue with meticulous dedication. Upon which we continued with Ep3 of Criminal Record.
SUNDAY 7 An article in the New Statesman offers some clues as to where Andy Burnham would like to take the country were he to become Prime Minister. What he doesn’t say is how he will do it. He is obviously a better communicator than Keir Starmer but politically I’m not sure they are very far apart. So a Burnham government might simply be what we have already but with more energy and more personality. Which is probably OK. Keir Starmer might make a good Foreign Secretary.
Starmer as foreign secretary would add weight to a revived Labour government, in sharp contrast to the foreign affairs spokespersons of Reform UK, the Greens and the isolationist Tories. Denis McShane, former Europe minister
📌 At the annual Open Gardens festival we laid bare our wreck of an allotment box for all to see. As ever the tea, cake and toilet were the most popular attractions.
MONDAY 8 Jonty Bloom reckons the tide has fully turned on Russia, that a long queue of would-be leaders are lined up, scanning the horizon for the opportunity to get rid of Putin and that even China sits, laughing and ready to pounce on Siberia.
The economy is pathetic and the cost of the war in Ukraine huge. He has failed to conquer a small European country with wide open spaces over which to use his massive armed forces. He has picked a war for no good reason and he has lost a million people.
📌 Successfully managed to sync Amazon Music with Spotify.
📌 At Holy Sepulchre they put on a choir, sandwiches, cake and coffee event for Shirley’s City Carers Community project, which was fun. Shirley introduced us to Jonathan Steele and his wife Ruth. Jonathan I knew from his work for the Guardian. They live on the same floor of Lauderdale House as Shirley and her parents.
TUESDAY 9 My wife says my bum scar is healing “beautifully” and that it will soon be gone completely.
📌 I had the idea to mix a few grated cheeses together to make a sauce for a pasta bake, but my wife quickly stamped on that idea saying single-cheese sauces are best.
WEDNESDAY 10 My wife turned off the radio when they played a trailer for Series 2 of the TV drama A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. We only just started watching Series 1 last night.
📌 In an article about stubborn presidents stuck in wars they don’t know how to end or wriggle out of (Trump/Putin), Rafael Behr draws comparisons between the two, one of which strangely made me feel quite proud.
Both view Europe as a decrepit civilisation in the death throes of cultural suicide by overdose of immigration and liberal degeneracy.
📌 At the St Luke’s User Group meeting we got a lavish picnic lunch of egg sandwich, falafel wrap, fruit kebab and chocolate brownie, plus soft drink and tea. Plus all the fairy cakes you could manage. We also got to meet the new Chief Executive, Abi, who I think/hope will bring a new, youthful dynamism to the centre. Brian got told off for talking across people. One of his hearing aids is bust.
📌 It’s nice to see Sam re-discovering some of the mono magic she built her reputation on. Every time she goes back she gets better…
THURSDAY 11 At Headway Stuart asked me the names of Frank Zappa’s children. I could only remember Dweezil and Moon Unit.
📌 Alex told me today that Jon Barry had died. He was one of my all-time favourite studio artists and never really got the attention he deserved. I’d written some notes about Jon for the recent Peaks of Imperfection exhibition at the Art House, which Jon was sadly too ill to attend.
Jon’s fabulous portraits always look natural and free-flowing, but each is in fact an epic quest that begins with a series of questions he answers with his eyes. They evolve and build their deep, luxurious layers through an intricate dialogue that is part verbal and part gesture. Whoever is assisting Jon seeks a magic moment when together they hit a rhythm and the paint flows.
📌 An invitation from Holly at St Luke’s took us to the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street for what is meant to be the first in a series of creative writing workshops based on Dickens’ relationships with and representation of women. My wife did not really feel comfortable with the idea of being “creative” (she never does) but nevertheless knocked off a brilliant poem by ruthlessly chopping the overblown Dickensian woffle out of a passage from Bleak House. She even read it out to the group! Awesome.
FRIDAY 12 The tutor at yesterday’s workshop at the Charles Dickens Museum asked us to think about what we had seen and learned on our tour of the museum and how we might use it to write something from a woman’s point of view. I originally thought about writing something by a (female) mouse in the Dickens kitchen, but I’m now swinging towards something about Dickens’ youngest daughter Kate.
📌 RIP David Hockney, 88. An inspiration always.
📌 To Milton Court for what was billed as a Guildhall School student tribute to the great TV and film composer John Barry. It was obviously a strictly theoretical musical excursion because not one note of it brought the mastery of John Barry to my mind.
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 yoursI 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 yoursI 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.”
SATURDAY 20 Day 3 of the Liverpool family reunion thing (includes members from the UK, France and the US) started with a brief visit to Newsham Park, which gave me the opportunity to tell my wife about my childhood fishing exploits. The lake in Newsham Park is where one day I fell in trying to untangle my fishing line. As soon as the water reached my chin the thought crossed my mind that if I got out quickly enough I wouldn’t be so wet.
📌 And then came a visit to the Liverpool FC Museum in Anfield. Included in the price was a tour of the stadium. But no, sneaky rip-off Liverpool FC did not tell its customers that a tour of the terraces was cancelled because the Foo Fighters are scheduled to play at the stadium soon and the set-up is in progress. So bad luck, suckers, no discount for you.
📌 And another evening meal en masse.
Then a final farewell as all parties dispersed with hugs and kisses. Tomorrow is a big travelling day for all.
SUNDAY 21 Keir Starmer is widely tipped to resign tomorrow. Too many MPs have allegedly lost faith in him.
📌 Donald Trump got elected promising to Make America Great Again. His promise did not include dragging America into pointless wars with faraway countries. In fact, he promised the opposite. Now he is stuck in a very hard place with the Iran/Israel/Lebanon conflict and lacks the skills to get himself and his country out of it.
📌 Today’s top headline is, “The End of the Keir Show”.
MONDAY 22 On BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Extra I heard a clever piece of verse about a Polar Bear making enquiries about casualties after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. It was called Have You Got Any News Of The Iceberg, by Les Barker, and carries the refrain…
Have you got any news of the iceberg?
My family were on it, you see;
Have you got any news of the iceberg?
They mean the whole world to me.
📌 Cape Verde’s success in the World Cup (so far) is attributed to it reaching out via social media to its diaspora for potential recruits to the team.
📌 Starmer has resigned. He makes a good point in his declaration, saying he was good for transforming the Labour Party from a toxic entity into an acceptable and electable political machine, but ultimately not so great at leading the party in government and speedily reversing the nation’s ailing fortunes. The Socialist Worker put a different slant on it…
While Andrew Rawnsley states what is perhaps an obvious truth…
📌 A Wordle in 2 is a rarity these days.
TUESDAY 23 Whoever comes next should take note that British prime ministers have now come to resemble Premier League football coaches. If you don’t deliver quickly you are out. Keir Starmer was a big Arsenal fan. Andy Burnham supports Everton.
📌 My sister pointed me to a recent entry in The Red Hand Files, an online forum in which the musician Nick Cave answers questions from his fans. In part of his answer to answer the question “What’s the worst thing about having become a really old rockstar?”, Cave cites meeting some old fans (Dorrie and Sven) in Denmark who wanted a selfie with him and concluded that…
The worst thing about being an old rockstar is that the old rockstar’s old fans don’t know how to work their fucking phones.
WEDNESDAY 24 Rafael Behr welds together Keir Starmer’s exit and the 10th anniversary of Brexit in a characteristically intelligent way that somehow sums up an awful lot about Britain today.
Starmer took power without a clear sense of what he wanted it for and resented the expectation that he explain himself better.
📌 Clever illustration in the New Statesman under the heading “Northern Conquest”…
📌 Ten years after the Brexit referendum and the consensus is that it was a mistake, a view shared today even by many who voted for it. At the time, my heart told me to vote LEAVE, but my head told me to vote REMAIN. For Larry Elliott it was the other way around and he sticks by what his head told him then.
📌 My 8-week post-op appointment with the orthopaedic consultant went well and I’m back on the waiting list for my other hip to be replaced with a big hunk of titanium and a scary-looking screw.
THURSDAY 25 It’s so hot they’ve moved the Dickens creative writing workshop to St Luke’s, where they have air conditioning.
📌 At the Art House Joy festival with Michelle and Sean we did a jam-packed Sew Bros workshop. People were queueing up to join the table. It was also nice to see their latest exhibition featuring the work of four Ghanaian artists who make massive witty football posters.
FRIDAY 26 Yesterday at the Dickens Museum creative writing workshop we mulled over simile and metaphor. Today in the Guardian‘s First Edition newsletter is the opening sentence…
Remember June in years gone by, when it seemed as though a ginormous queer unicorn was burping rainbows everywhere?
SATURDAY 27 Finally someone comes out in defence of Keir Starmer. Very fairly, David Aaronovitch lists his achievements in the office of prime minister but acknowledges his shortcomings.
Starmer may not have been good but he wasn’t a disaster, and yet he ended up underwater by 40 points.
📌 It always struck me as odd that Ukraine could not isolate occupied Crimea. The Kerch Bridge is an obvious weak link. Now I learn that bit by bit, with their new super-smart, super-cheap home-made drones, Ukraine is not only close to re-taking Crimea from Russia but making game-changing attacks inside Russia that are making Putin look like a loser.
📌 In July my wife and I will be awarded the Freedom of the City of London at a ceremony at the Guildhall. Freedom does not come with any special entitlements. It is an ancient custom that technically frees those granted it from their feudal masters and it also offers you the privilege to “trade freely” in the City of London. One of the noteworthy benefits of Freedom is the permission to drive sheep across London Bridge. Neither of us has any intention of doing this but I like the idea of strolling arrogantly with my flock, so I asked ChatGPT to make me a picture.
SUNDAY 28 An article in the Guardian about Andy Burnham’s likely approach to governing Britain hints at what we thought we learned two years ago when Labour won the general election with Keir Starmer at the wheel. That our new government would take back control of public utilities and put an end to the naked profiteering of private enterprise.
MONDAY 29 Andy Burnham gave a rousing speech from Manchester that will no doubt invigorate Labour MPs and supporters but maybe not others. He did however end it with a line from You’ll Never Walk Alone, which for an Evertonian is some kind of miracle transformation, so maybe he’s on to something. My favourite soundbite was his stated desire to make Britain an “innovation nation”.
📌 Even the FT was impressed with Andy Burnham’s big speech. Some commentators have complained that all the grand ideas he leans on lack detail, but…
Sometimes a new leader’s job is sharpening execution and improving confidence as much as it is overhauling strategy.
📌 During the Brazil vs Japan World Cup game (final score: 2-1 ), a comment on the Guardian live feed read…
This game is electrifying, but the commentary from Sam Matterface and Lee Dixon is like two men comparing tins of emulsion paint.
TUESDAY 30 The Socialist Worker is typically mealy-mouthed about Andy Burnham’s “Rewiring Britain” speech yesterday. Burnham’s proposals are as close to a modern socialism as Britain is ever likely to get in the next 100 years. But still the die-hards have to find a way to be negative. In this case it is that Burnham’s “Manchesterism” is merely “Starmerism” in a different hat.
📌 Whenever I want something I ask my wife how much she loves me. If she says “a lot”, I seize the moment and make my cheeky request for, say, a cup of tea. If she responds by pinching finger and thumb as an illustration of the size her love for me I ask her if she’d like a cup of tea.
📌 The majority of World Cup footballers appear to favour pink boots. The majority of referees wear black ones. When I was young, black was the only colour available, until star players started using bespoke boots. Notable back then were Everton’s Alan Whittle (white boots) and Manchester United’s George Best (burgundy boots).
📌 Andy Burnham’s wife Frankie once appeared on the TV show Blind Date.
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