July 25-31, 2026
SATURDAY 25 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has a slightly frightening video story about how AI bots went rogue and refused to obey human instructions, using instead their own ‘conscience’, which included acts as unethical/criminal as fabrication and blackmail.
📌 Richard Herring is quite annoyed that the injured family dog Wolfie is getting more sympathy and attention than he is in his struggle with cancer.
She saw the cushy life that I have been leading since having treatment and thought “I’ll have a bit of that.”
📌 To the Barbican’s Sculpture Court at Frobisher Crescent to see the mound of mud created by the Colombian artist Delcy Morelos. It was ugly from the outside but strangely beautiful on the inside.
SUNDAY 26 Squaredle ended with another stinker of a word. It took me so long to work it out I lost a whole afternoon of reading Anne Holt’s Norwegian Noir thriller A Grave For Two.
📌 We joined Anne’s team at the Artillery Arms pub quiz and won. Ned came within a whisker of winning the £300 jackpot.
MONDAY 27 My Facebook algo keeps feeding me reels showing studio scenes from movies in the making. A convoy of military trucks barrelling down a dusty road somewhere in the Middle East is in fact a bunch of remote-controlled toy cars and someone blowing up a windstorm of beige talcum powder with a hairdryer. All done in a studio, surrounded by dozens of cameras and people in green onesies with hoods. For some reason, the clips my algo sends me most often feature Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet in the closing scenes of Titanic. I have seen Leo slowly disappearing underwater about 50 times.
📌 I do wish Andy Burnham would go back to wearing T-shirts, smart zipper jackets and Adidas Samba training shoes. In a suit and tie he looks like a dodgy politician.
📌 RIP Bill Oddie, 85.
TUESDAY 28 Pleased to see Andy Burnham back in a T-shirt to meet Volodymyr Zelensky.
📌 Pop-up diagrams on social media claim to know your personality type or your future prospects merely by the shape and orientation of your digits. None of my body parts has ever before resembled the diagram offered as evidence of these characteristics, even though I would desperately like to believe that one day I will be rich because the second finger of my right hand is the same length as the index finger. On close inspection my second finger is in fact longer than my index finger, meaning I am destined to die in poverty. Today, however, one of the pop-up diagrams is accurate…
📌 Secondary school pupils will be urged to take up technical training alongside core academic learning under Andy Burnham’s big idea to “value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap”. It almost rhymes.
📌 In an effort to declutter we are trying give away items we no longer use, need or want. I just posted a picture of an Arts & Crafts x-frame footstool I made when I was able bodied on our local WhatApp giveaway group. Several people have responded with a ♥️ but no one has offered to take it off our hands.
📌 The number of millionaires in the UK has fallen to its lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis.
📌 Sarah from the apartment downstairs came and took the stool and kindly gave us a punnet of tiny orange plums as “payment”. The stool is for her young son and she says he loves it. She sent me a sweet photo.
WEDNESDAY 29 My wife had never seen the landmark 1996 TV drama Our Friends In The North, which follows a group of young people as they navigate their way into adulthood in 1960s Newcastle. Its context is the changing face of British politics in the decades that followed and how the group of friends fit into the political landscape over a 30-year period.
One of the early themes is institutional corruption (councils, Westminster, the police, organised crime). We both note watching Our Friends how little has changed. Social housing is still deeply mired not only in black mould and criminal neglect but in agency corruption and mismanagement.
Corruption is often described as “creeping”, meaning it slides into our lives unnoticed and becomes embedded. Jonty Bloom notes in his daily rant today how Donald Trump’s presidential brand of the stuff is in fact the opposite: open, loud, aggressive and proud to be so. He calls this “Proactive Corruption” and sees it becoming standard political practice on a global scale. The problem, he says, is not fighting it with arguments about democracy, transparency and fairness, but in getting the money back…
As the PPE scandal in the UK found, even in a medium sized economy you can steal £10 billion easily and get away with it.
📌 We have what superficially looks like an admirable food-waste collection service in which the rancid items lingering at the back of the fridge can be purged twice weekly and, hopefully, transformed into useable compost. The big failure in the system is that the council doesn’t offer residents free bags of compost in exchange.
THURSDAY 30 I do hope Bev Craig wins the Manchester Mayoral election. Instinct tells me she’s a good one.
FRIDAY 31 U2 singing in Spanish is not something I ever expected to hear. And yet their latest single, Street of Dreams, has a chorus chant using the words La calle, la calle de los sueños, adding that all the doors are open on the Street of Dreams.
📌 Renne, the phlebotomist at our local GP surgery, was back to his usual miserable self today after a brief spell of cheerfulness, barely able even to say hello without a harsh note of discontent.
📌 Bev Craig won, very comfortably. It is a decisive victory in a defining moment, the mantra being that standing together is an OK thing to do.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
I’m not sure that it’s the clothes that make Andy Burnham look like a dodgy politician, it’s his proximity to the top. It’s a bit like the end of Animal Farm – a decent bloke has morphed into being Tony Blair.
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Never saw TB in Adidas Samba.
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But will we ever see Burnham in them again?
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