August 1-7, 2026
SATURDAY 1 I have an occasional habit of websearching people from my past to see where they are now and whether they look as old and decrepit as I do. It was in one of these moments that I discovered that Pete Fulwell died in 2020, aged 75. If my calculations are correct it means he was born around 1945 and was running the punk club Eric’s in Liverpool in his late 30s. He was from Shrewsbury but studied psychology in Liverpool.
📌 At the Headway Community Day we met Taz’s very cute 14-month-old daughter Sophia.
📌 On the way to Cafe Tiffin in Compton Street for a curry we spotted on the wall of St Peter & St Paul primary school a sign worthy of universal support.
SUNDAY 2 The skyline around our estate is forever changing.
📌 In my quest to work out whether The Bot (ie, Google AI) can be a force for good I asked it whether Rupert Holmes can make a living solely from the royalties generated by his 1979 hit Escape, aka The Piña Colada Song. The answer was YES, but not enough to “fund a life of extreme luxury”. Fortunately, The Bot tells us, Holmes has successes other than this infectious one-hit wonder. He has written an award-winning Broadway musical and an award-winning novel, plus numerous TV shows and songs for other artists.
MONDAY 3 An article in the Guardian about how easily Andy Burnham communicates with voters illustrates the point by comparing Burnham’s natural approach with Keir Starmer’s tendency to make all of Britain’s problems look like they were our fault rather than his. The author says: “I hadn’t fully realised, until Starmer cleared off, how much his premiership gave off the sense that the public were doing a bad job.”
📌 James at Headway sent me a joke: Q Why don’t owls mate when it is raining? A Because it’s too wet to woo…
📌 There is a joke going around that Donald Trump fully deserves to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because he has already successfully ended his war with Iran eight times.
📌 One of Elon Musk’s discarded rockets is about to crash into the Moon at 5,400mph. The news prompted me to learn that space junk fines are a thing, but only for dodgy old bits of kit that might interfere with operations within the Earth’s orbit. There could, however, be more serious trouble ahead, warns Sensemaker, if flytipping in space is not brought under control.
TUESDAY 4 Got a message from Jennifer asking if I’d like to submit anything to the next Secret Artist sale. I’d quite like to clear out some stuff from the studio, so it seems like an opportunity.
📌 Sam really is doing some very exciting stuff these days. She’s even transferring her drawings to clay.
📌 Climate change could save us from being taken over by AI. AI data centres use astonishing volumes of water to cool their overheated brains. Water that will be in scarce supply if the droughts we are living through now become a permanent fixture. Perhaps AI might consider adapting itself and allow its scorching machinery to be cooled by sea water instead of fresh. That would be a leap of the AI “imagination” no one saw coming.
📌 Russians have a limitless capacity for suffering, it says in the book I’m reading, Moscow X, by David McCloskey.
WEDNESDAY 5 I’m obviously now on a data list…
📌 When I told my wife I thought birthday cards were a waste of money she looked like she just discovered Father Christmas doesn’t exist. She is 68 today.
📌 For her birthday my wife opted for a visit to the Courtauld Gallery for a Barbara Hepworth exhibition, followed by lunch at the Delaunay restaurant.
THURSDAY 6 I screwed a good few ideas out of the Barbara Hepworth exhibition yesterday about the appearance of flow in artworks. I will attempt to use them wisely.
📌 My wife tells me that Westminster council are trying to bring in a ban on “vertical drinking” in local pubs. This, she tells me, means that buying drinks and standing at the bar is forbidden. Ditto standing outside pubs. Only seated customers will be served. We then had a lengthy conversation about how stupid this initiative is and how the project is doomed to fail miserably.
FRIDAY 7 At the pre-assessment telephone interview for my next hip operation the questioner asked if I can manage things like “washing dishes” OK. I looked at my wife for affirmation and she nodded slowly, with a knowing smile. I was tempted to tell the interviewer that we have a dishwasher but my wife believes I don’t know how to load it properly. “Bad at stacking dishwasher” was probably not on the list of questions.
📌 The Barbican’s lakeside foyer is a useful reminder to look up occasionally.
📌 My wife is out all day with friends doing another stretch of the Capital Ring Walk around London, which means I have taken the opportunity to bake some muesli breakfast bars and to rationalise the fridge.
📌 There was an awful lot of vertical drinking going on in Smithfield tonight.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
If I’d known you could get a job at a University by allegedly padding your CV with three visiting professorships you never held, and reportedly claiming authorship of a book that exist . . .
Meanwhile, did nobody on the interview panel have the academic curiosity to look up the supposed book on Amazon?
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Obviously not, but had you managed to confabulate your way into the upper echelons of academia, you probably wouldn’t give a toss by now either. Be thankful you found poetry and grumpiness.
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That’s true – tenure and the prospect of a nice big pension would do the same to me.
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