August 29 – September 4, 2026
SATURDAY 29 It started raining almost as soon as we arrived at Liz and Bill’s new place in the village of Otterbourne. It didn’t stop me exploring, and the best find was at the bottom of their garden. Through a wooden gate is a dark and chilly dell with a dry creek running through it and tall, haunting trees standing bolt upright in an obvious attempt to intimidate, like a scene from The Blair Witch Project. I instantly named this dark, wild zone of their new property The Satanic Garden.
SUNDAY 30 Otterbourne is really not well served by a good mobile phone network signal. Which means, diddums, that our normal daily word-game playing activity is disrupted. Yesterday I even agreed to go, by car, to a shopping complex just to get a decent signal. I’m surprised how much this irritates me.
📌 We still haven’t seen any otters in Otterbourne. Maybe tomorrow.
MONDAY 31 Still no otter sightings, but magpies have taken up residence in the Satanic Garden, despite the presence of Jill’s slobbering dog Myrtle.
📌 I just read somewhere that Dolly Parton once secretly entered a Dolly Parton lookalike competition and came last.
TUESDAY 1 Duolingo tells me I have now been studying French for 118 days. I have studied French with Duolingo before but gave up because it got too hard too fast. This time, under the stewardship of Paula’s Super Duolingo membership, the pace of learning seems to have fallen more into sync with my limited abilities and I feel I’m actually getting somewhere. Maybe the algo is more refined in Super Duolingo than in the free version. If the same thing happens with Duolingo Chess, which I have recently started to learn, I might have a theory.
📌 The window cleaner accidentally put his ladder through one of our tiny rectangular wooden floor tiles, which blew the starting whistle on hours of stress trying to repair the smashed tile and a succession of bad experiences with Gorilla Glue.
📌 I used to be mildly interested in Andy Burnham’s choice of footwear. Now I am intrigued at his choice of which tie to match with which M&S suit.
📌 Keir Starmer has announced his retirement from British politics. His seat (Holborn & St Pancras) is a prime target for the Greens. He timed his statement to coincide with Andy Burnham’s first big speech in the House of Commons. It is being reported as a massive bunch of sour grapes.
WEDNESDAY 2 An article by Rafael Behr in the Guardian hints at the possibility of Andy Burnham calling a general election soon. He’s experienced an early popularity bounce and his chief opponents are flagging. His governing options are constrained by commitments made by his predecessor Keir Starmer. He needs to get some wind in his sails, and only a proper voter mandate will do it.
THURSDAY 3 On Martine’s recommendation we went to the Old Vic last night to see Alan Ayckbourn’s hilarious 1969 farce How The Other Half Loves. I was struck by the sense that one day in the far future, plays such as this will be viewed with the same reverence as works by ancient playwrights such as William Shakespeare. Actors, directors and producers will yearn to get the chance to put it on, in much the same way as, say, Twelfth Night. As we walked to the bus stop afterwards I overheard two young American or Canadian women talking about the play’s “retro” gender roles as if it was a newly written play attempting to re-evaluate the past.
📌 I beat Oscar for the third time in Duolingo Chess. I think he’s faking it, but he still moves his pieces so quickly it’s hard to keep track of his game. Towards the end of this one we were both down to bishops and pawns, but he left the centre of the board wide open, which allowed me to advance two pawns right across the board, at which point I converted them both to queens. Game over in four moves.
FRIDAY 4 Climate change is playing havoc with the UK’s wasp population, claims The Ecologist. 2025 was a boom year, the warm Spring bringing a huge rise in numbers and a similar rise in headaches for pest controllers. But this year’s warm weather has not seen a repeat performance and the answer turns out to be quite complex and related to the fertility “windows” of queen wasps.
📌 There was an eerie run-up to the Falklands War in 1982 and an awful lot of international brinkmanship gaining traction day by day. The same vibe has returned and I won’t be surprised if Andy Burnham wins the next election because he went to war with Argentina.
📌 Three contestants on Pointless could not name a single play by William Shakespeare.
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Billy's Scrapbook 