June 4-10, 2026
SATURDAY 4 Interesting to read the thoughts of ex Conservative minister Justine Greening on Andy Burnham’s plan for “Rewiring Britain”. It sounds like she’s auditioning for a job.
📌 The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is always so vast and varied that getting anything from it in one visit is impossible. My wife thinks one ticket (£25) should entitle you to multiple visits. This year was notable for having more sculpture and ceramics.
📌 Somewhere along the lines I inherited a pin badge that I now discover makes me a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. I wore it to a community choir concert.
SUNDAY 5 I’m no fan of the Ayatollahs, and I am no royalist, but if King Charles were deliberately killed by a foreign power I think I’d be quite angry, in principle.
📌 When it comes to what to watch on TV my wife and I always end up performing a complex verbal dance. I suggest something, my wife suggests something too. We deflect and watch something short and benign until the climax of the verbal dance ends in my wife simply putting on what she wants to watch. When I complain that the decision was not agreed equally, I am told that what my wife wants to watch is what I REALLY want to watch but haven’t realised it yet. Tonight it was Season 2 of Murder Mindfully.
📌 In the World Cup America have started cheating already. If they end up losing a game I’m sure Trump will find a way to persuade FIFA to name them winners.
📌 If Erling Haaland didn’t play for Norway my wife would want them to win. As it is, she wants them to lose.
MONDAY 6 England finally look like they know how to dig out a win. Spontaneous movement fuelled by strong wide players such as Saka and Gordon. Anthony Gordon was born in Liverpool, joined Liverpool as a youth player then moved to play for Everton. He now plays for Barcelona.
📌 To Barbican Cinema 2 for The Invite, a film in which you find yourself laughing out loud even when you probably weren’t meant to be. As ever, Penelope Cruz takes one more step towards perfecting her funny/serious groove.
📌 If Cristiano Ronaldo didn’t play for Portugal my wife would want them to win. As it is, she wants them to lose.
📌 Message from Sam to say RIP Betty, peacefully in her sleep on Saturday.
TUESDAY 7 The cheats are out of the World Cup. Ha, ha, haaaaaaaa! Some accounts claim that Folarin Balogun openly admitted his bad tackle, did not think it was worth a red card and was embarrassed when Trump intervened to have it cancelled.
📌 Maybe I just like to see smug expectations upended but Egypt were robbed in tonight’s World Cup battle with Argentina.
WEDNESDAY 8 Vital Arts posted the film they made to go with the Royal London hospital dayroom makeover we did with patients on the brain-injury wards.
📌 On a St Luke’s trip to Windsor we got to see how the other 1% lives. An ancient castle and a small town that in many ways resembles every small town in England are surrounded by thousands of acres of undiluted protected privilege in the form of royal parks, farmland and an elite public school that has produced countless prime ministers. To even things up a bit, we went to Wetherspoons for breakfast and noted that even in Windsor the Wetherspoon trademark blue patterned plates are the same for everyone. Green King IPA is £2.20 a pint.
📌 The Windsor tour bus commentator told us that during World War 2 Hitler had intended, if victorious, to make Windsor Castle his home, so he issued orders not to bomb it. Knowing this, the Royal family swiftly decamped from London to Windsor.
📌 In the 2024 General Election, Nigel Farage won the Clacton seat with 21,225 votes. If he scores any less in the upcoming by-election he has triggered in a fit of indignation at the scrutiny of his personal finances, his plan will have failed miserably. It has anyway, but even 21,224 votes will not be enough for him to claim any kind of victory.
THURSDAY 9 In preparation for tonight’s final creative writing workshop at the Dickens Museum I have been working feverishly on my two ideas. One is a letter from Dickens’s daughter Kate to the future, laying out elements of her relationship with her father and more specifically what she thinks about the portraits of her that hang in the museum. The other is the story of a mouse that breaks into the Dickens kitchen below stairs, hides and secretly plots to kill Dickens.
📌 RIP Bonnie Tyler, 75.
FRIDAY 10 Eighty percent of Labour MPs nominated Andy Burnham for leader.
MPs were seen queuing outside the PLP office to sign the nomination forms.
📌 For the perennial question, “What is your favourite film?” I have settled (today) on Steven Spielberg’s first film Duel, an existential thriller starring Dennis Weaver.
📌 The Nigel Farage pile-on continues. I won’t be surprised if before long he is “Al Caponed” and revealed to be a tax dodger.
📌 At the Charles Dickens Museum writing workshop last night I got the confirmation I needed via audio transcripts that I had not over-exaggerated the moody voice of youngest daughter Kate Dickens in the piece I had written as an assignment. I was also able to build on the other story I started about a mouse who broke into the Dickens kitchen with the intention of plotting to kill Dickens. A Mouse Assassin Story…
So before long I became an invisible fixture in the Dickens kitchen, nipping out of my hidey hole when crumbs were within easy reach and slipping back to feast, then poo, then sleep.
📌 I said goodbye to two of my gym buddies in the physio rehabilitation class at UCLH. One of them said she would think about me living it up in Mexico next year. This was a reference to me earlier naming a trip to Mexico for a wedding in March 2027 as one of the goals in my exercise regime.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
I liked what your wife says 😀
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