Scrapbook: Week 36

September 6-12, 2026

SATURDAY 6 An article in the Conversation says William The Conqueror’s success at the Battle of Hastings owes much to the hidden power of his posh wife Matilda, who even bought him a brand new ship, the Mora, to go teach Harold a lesson in keeping his promises.

📌 We are off to see the Bayeux Tapestry tomorrow and I have challenged my wife to count the number of penises contained therein. According to the Telegraph, there are 88, and all owned by horses.

📌 Business leaders are the “least pessimistic” they’ve been for two years, claims the CBI. It’s hard to work out what that means exactly, especially as it comes from an organisation that not long ago was said to be the owner of a “toxic workplace culture, widespread sexual misconduct, and institutional failures”.

📌 Nearly 40% of people in England think social care is free at the point of use.

SUNDAY 7 The whole day had been set up to pivot on our visit to the British Museum to see the Bayeux Tapestry but turned out to be one of the biggest disappointments of the year. The 2pm viewing, on which we were booked, was cancelled because, claimed the British Museum staff, visitors were moving too slowly along the 70m viewing path. Marge and Harshita had both visited the exhibition earlier in the day and said there was no such congestion during their time slot. Marge said the problem was caused by the earlier arrival of a private coach party, who were admitted by British Museum staff, thus throwing the whole community viewing schedule out, displacing disabled ticket holders such as ourselves, for whom the whole day had been supposedly set aside for a preview prior to the official opening of the exhibition on Wednesday. Marge said she lost count of the number of penises but said some of them were definitely human.

MONDAY 8 A second Falklands War between Argentina and Britain is now only a remote possibility because Argentina is not equipped militarily to start a fight. Neither is Britain, come to that.

📌 A week before my second hip replacement and the pain management (paracetamol and codeine) finally clicks into place.

📌 The likelihood of the Greens taking over Keir Starmer’s vacated parliamentary seat is dwindling after a local Camden councillor announced his intention to challenge Green Party leader Zack Polanski for the nomination, claiming the area needed an MP who lived there rather than one who “arrives during an election campaign, puts out a few leaflets, makes a few promises and disappears once the votes are counted. We need an MP who is present, accessible and visibly part of the community all year round.”

TUESDAY 9 Just as my routine is about to be disrupted by a second hip replacement I have finally found a happy balance between creating stitch patterns and transferring them to fabric and the actual business of stitching. The secret for me is to work in batches. Today, for example, I have made a batch of patterns featuring retro fashion models, which will likely form part of a small collection of stitchworks.

📌 My new stitchwork icon is Sarah Homfray, whose video tutorials are simple, easy to follow, full of top tips and occasionally funny, especially when her ginger cat walks into shot, sits there and waits until it gets some attention from Sarah, who simply smiles knowingly and stops stitching until the ginger cat decides to move on.

WEDNESDAY 10 I beat Oscar again (third time) at Duolingo Chess, but I don’t feel good about it. I ended up with two queens on the board. When Oscar walked me through a review of the game afterwards, he pointed up so many mistakes I didn’t even notice. All I did was run my pieces around the board, dodging trouble and threatening a few of Oscar’s pieces every now and then. Mainly I was hiding and looking for the chance to dash to a safer place. I guess I am not a chess warrior. Or any kind of warrior for that matter.

📌 To the Donmar Warehouse to see my wife’s cousin Mike in A Month In The Country, an old Russian play that is not a love story so much as a story about love. It was a play I will think about for some time afterwards, which is probably a good sign.

THURSDAY 11 Sean wants to partner up to start a Sew Bros roadshow. I like the idea but I’m not sure about the flakiness of it, so I’ve asked Michelle to interrogate him while I am away on sick leave.

📌 The story that Donald Trump claims that America owns the Moon is said to be a hoax. It is more likely to be a piece of satire that has taken hold as truth on social media. If so, it is very good satire, the best of which is always so close to the truth that it’s hard to tell the difference.

📌 Local leaders given permission to charge a Tourist Tax? Bring it on.

📌 The opening paragraph in today’s Sensemaker reads: “A safety researcher at Anthropic has warned that there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could ‘kill all humans’ within the next decade. I was prevented from reading the rest of the story by the idea that someone would choose to highlight such a bizarre statistic. I started to imagine what other phenomena at odds of greater than 10% might threaten the existence of humanity. Methane from cows springs to mind.

📌 At our Residents Association meeting the senior officer from the housing department said that the problem with the poor communication from her office is that it needs to be “overlaid” with plain English.

FRIDAY 12 Twenty-five years after 9/11 and the Guardian has a compelling argument that the attack on the World Trade Centre was the beginning of 25 years of disastrous US policy making that has in fact played into the hands of the country’s enemies and reduced it to a pariah state. The message is that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are probably laughing in their graves.

📌 The new season of free lunchtime concerts at St Luke’s Music Education Centre was rammed. It’s nice to see Rachel Leach still presenting. Her manner is both charming and accessible. Today we got some Shostakovich and some weird works for double bass. Next time is piano.

Read all of my scrapbook diaries…

PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.

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