One month as it happened…
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.
SATURDAY 5 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”.
📌 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.
📌 Nearly 40% of people in England think social care is free at the point of use.
SUNDAY 6 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 7 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 8 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 9 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 10 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 11 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.
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 50th 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.
SATURDAY 19 The trauma that comes and goes around Donald Trump always seemed to blow over in the long term. But lately it has started to look like his second presidency is different, and in fact just the start of a sustained period in World history where chaos, disorder and turmoil are the natural order.
📌 Cue the annual return to TV of Strictly Come Dancing, which prompted the discovery that a male ballet dancer is a “ballerino”. Which doesn’t soften the blow on the fact that the new series is so bad that I will most likely schedule something else to do each Saturday evening for the next 13 weeks.
SUNDAY 20 Grand intentions for what to do during my recovery from hip surgery have been thrown into chaos by an overwhelming daily urge to finish word puzzles.
📌 I do so look forward to going to bed at night because I know that every morning brings a new step on my road to recovery. Each day I can physically sense the six-inch wound closing.
MONDAY 21 Managed to get an appointment in a week’s time for a nurse to remove the gruesome metal staples from the top of my right buttock.
📌 Very disappointed to learn that there will be no Series 2 of the Prime comedy action thriller Ride Or Die, starring Hannah Waddingham as a menopausal serial killer. Hope it’s fake news.
📌 My Fallopian Jesus stitchwork has made it to the poster of Jennifer’s Secret Artist sales project.
TUESDAY 22
📌 It was tempting to follow the live coverage of Andy Burnham’s meeting with Donald Trump, and I did check before finishing that last sentence that it had not included homicide. But when you are nursing a big surgery wound, only an assassination would stop you momentarily from thinking about yourself and wallowing in self-pity. That and a message from my wife saying she once again had a smelly person sitting next to her on the bus.
WEDNESDAY 23 A wound-related trauma in the middle of the night left us both scrabbling around trying to salvage the situation, a moment of disturbance in which we both failed to wish each other a happy 38th wedding anniversary.
📌 Had my first encounter with Prince, Yvonne’s new cat. He was sitting on the fanlight shelf above her kitchen window. He didn’t seem aloof or distant, as had been reported. I was doing my first post-surgery short walk and Prince miaowed gently as I walked past. I stopped to say hello and I will look out for him tomorrow. My relationship with Prince could become a metaphorical marker on the road to recovery.
📌 One of the great rewards of having my wife’s cousin Mike stay with us while appearing in A Month In The Country at the Donmar Warehouse is that he sometimes comes home with a bunch of fresh flowers he wields during the show. Tonight’s bunch is one he holds for the character Vera (Rachelle Diedericks) who he would like to marry.
THURSDAY 24 There’s a new poll out that predicts Labour as the majority party in a hung parliament. I suspect Andy Burnham would take that offer happily. He likes friction and would revel in the chance to seduce old-school Tories into following him into whichever lobby he’s going down at any particular moment. It would also usher in the kind of collaborative coalition style of governing that used to be practised in countries such as Sweden and Denmark, and which he has the potential to be good at.
📌 Reinventing what counts as exercise is rather enjoyable. The number of different ways you can rhythmically move your legs and ankles in a half-doze stupor while lying on a bed or sofa listening to music and doing word puzzles is endless.
FRIDAY 25 The liquid morphine I have been prescribed as pain relief for my surgery will run out in two days, so those dreamy doses that bring instant relief will stop. Theoretically, the timing should overlap with normal recovery and oral painkillers should suffice for the rest of my journey down the Highway of Pain. Notice the double use of the word should in that last sentence. A heightened state of paranoia, and a small dash of melodrama, means I can’t help but imagine a case in which the overlap, like a bungling relay runner, is not successful and I’m left writhing in agony with no medication to turn to.
SATURDAY 26 While it will be fun over the coming months, and probably years, to watch Manchester City wriggle and squirm, you can be sure they will wriggle and squirm the last penny out of any settlement. What they have done is a very sad story on how top-flight football has been corrupted and taken from the fans. Even if they held up their hands and said sorry it wouldn’t be enough to put back what the game has lost. The only good that has come out of it is the persistence of certain journalists, whose real love of the game has driven matters to a point where crime and punishment can at least be properly considered.
📌 Not sure why I never got round to reading any Agatha Christie stories. In my youth they were made into stiff television series or Technicolor film confections. That was my Agatha diet and it didn’t really suit my digestion. The thing TV and film never quite got right for me, I learn now, is how well drawn all her characters are. And only in print, with you the reader as the ultimate interpreter, does that talent find a proper home.
She was an agreeable woman of middle age, handsome in a rather untidy fashion with fine eyes, substantial shoulders and a large quantity of rebellious grey hair with which she was continually experimenting.
SUNDAY 27 The House of Lords has removed from its rulebook the requirement for men to wear a tie. Instead members should now opt for “business attire”, say the new rules, whereupon one Labour Peer noted that the only people wearing ties as business dress these days are estate agents and funeral directors.
📌 In The Great Celebrity Pottery Throwdown Lucy Beaumont screwed up badly and decapitated her dinosaur. The judges did their best to find nice things to say about her glazing and firing but everyone knew it was a disaster born of flippancy.
📌 Mike showed us the press photos for A Month In The Country. He looks like a tramp.
MONDAY 28 The staples in my right buttock were removed by an over-chatty nurse, observed closely by my wife as she dug in deep with her pliers. My face apparently contorted with pain on a number of occasions, but the relief afterwards was immense.
TUESDAY 29 The number of written complaints are rising because more and more people are using AI to make them. Someone on Fesshole whose job is to handle complaints, writes to say they are not bothered because they use AI to write the replies.
📌 It seems to have taken AI and awful long time to find the off switch. Can we be sure the I really stands for intelligence?
📌 I’ve seen it work in business before but never in politics. A leader/chief executive boldly lays out their plan for the project but says little about how to make it happen. It is based on the presumption that if the bold vision is powerful enough all else will follow it – the money to fund it and to implement it asap. This is Andy Burnham’s strategy and he might just have the energy to pull it off. Many others have failed.
📌 The issue of what colours to place next to each other has started to plague the latest Big Brain. I have even resorted to splitting and mixing the threads for what I believed would create nuance, but still I end up every day searching the thread basket for something that might pop out in a flat fill.
WEDNESDAY 30 In the weeks and months after Keir Starmer came to power with a landslide election victory in 2024, the electorate and commentariat were still not clear what he actually stood for. The same cannot be said about Andy Burnham. But if Burnham looks like a winner on home turf, the chaos of world events could still impact badly on his fortunes, writes Rafael Behr.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
