September 12-18, 2026
SATURDAY 12 Rich & Ally’s Craven News Round yesterday offered an alternative to the glut of 9/11 stories with messages from tinned fish aficionados and quotes from the Tinned Fish Appreciation Society about tinned mackerel no longer being required to contain mackerel. All this from an ageing comedian and a 134-year-old ventriloquist’s dummy that once belonged to his grandfather.
📌 If Father Jack hadn’t thrown open the doors of St Giles to allcomers the Barbican Summer Party would have been very disappointing.
SUNDAY 13 Our friend Sandra broke her arm slipping over on wet leaves on Golden Lane. My wife is now paranoid that I will suffer a similar fate and messages me whenever there is an accumulation of wet leaves at the spot where Sandra went for a Burton.
📌 At Barbican Cinema 1 the presentational banner for the 59th Anniversary screening of a 4K version of All The President’s Men was an insult to fans of the apostrophe.
The film was a walk down Memory Lane, when people smoked cigarettes in open-plan offices and journalists, bless, were forced to use telephone directories and phone boxes.
MONDAY 14 At 6am, as we prepared to leave for the hospital, my wife made that crucial final check: “You have got clean knickers in your bag, haven’t you?” She calls my underpants knickers.
📌 My hip surgeon is the same one I had back in April. She projects an infinite, terrifying self confidence coupled with a reassuring sense of certainty.
📌 One of the most beautiful things about the NHS is that by some kind of magic, every patient feels that they are the only ones who deserve attention in any given moment. I’m sure all hospitals run on the same equipment and by the same fabulous assembly of staff from every corner of the world, but lying in my bed post-surgery I am flabbergasted that such an efficient and friendly system of healthcare still exists. And, of course, grateful that it does.
📌 So now I have a big hole in my right buttock to match the one from April in my left buttock that has healed nicely already. The pain management so far has been good and I hope that continues over the coming days, but I’m sure it won’t, and pretty soon I will be screaming in agony.
📌 The nurse in the recovery room said I have a very high pain threshold.
📌 Oli my physio, who walked me from Bed 24 to the toilet and back this afternoon, used to be a financial and business journalist. His dad was an old-school hot-metal typesetter. Oli retrained to be a physio.
TUESDAY 15 An article in the Guardian has reminded me to keep away from emojis. Using the simple heart emoji, for example, is fraught with danger…
Red means love. Purple horny. Yellow ‘I’m interested, are you interested?’. Pink ‘I’m interested but not in sex’. Orange ‘You’re going to be fine’.
WEDNESDAY 16 Sleeping on your back is exhausting. So all the plans to be productive in the weeks after my second hip replacement have been shelved.
THURSDAY 17 I’ve replaced Chess with Spanish on my Duolingo curriculum.
📌 Finally got to the end of the Bleak House audiobook and I think it’s safe to say the audio makes a better “read” than the written text.
📌 It’s hard to survive more than two hours in my armchair watching TV before fatigue grips and I need to be supine. I did manage one episode of the ultra dull and cripplingly convoluted third series of Vigil.
FRIDAY 18 Wednesday’s mystery phone caller turned out to be someone from hospital appointments trying to arrange my first post-op physio session.
📌 An archive item on the radio flew back in history to the 1960s when colour TVs became available in Britain. We didn’t get one in our house in Liverpool until 1970. My mother was determined to watch that year’s World Cup from Mexico in colour.
📌 When we last saw her Jill had become a big fan of comedian Bob Mortimer’s cosy crime books. I got The Satsuma Complex from the library and instantly found it a joy. But as the story has progressed. Mortimer has become too clever by half, bundling bad attempts at romance into his VERY cosy crime stories.
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Billy's Scrapbook 