October 3-9, 2026
SATURDAY 3 I’m at a dangerous stage in Duolingo French where guessing the answer based on the words offered and my limited knowledge of sentence construction is the only way forward. It is progress of a tentative kind. I can’t be sure I’ll remember that word I guessed correctly next time it pops up in a sentence. Eg, Déjà means already and I repeatedly think it means before.
📌 It’s my wife’s cousin Mike’s final performance tonight in A Month In The Country at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden. Whenever he comes to stay we usually get some spicy gossip from the theatre world, but the most intriguing snippet from this visit came when one night one of the cast was too ill to perform. In theatre productions with biggish casts, understudies are normally employed, but in plays with small casts such as A Month In The Country, insurance policies cover the show to be cancelled. This, says Mike, is because the ticket money at the theatre does not actually cover the cost of production. The big money comes from sponsors and donors.
📌 We changed channels once England got to 4-0 up against Croatia. They do as a team seem to have found a coherence and strength of will that has eluded them in recent years. The final score was 7-0, we learned later.
SUNDAY 4 A psychologist’s analysis of Celebrity Traitors in the Conversation has some fascinating insights into how we, the viewers of this TV game show, perceive celebrities and their trustworthiness. Meanwhile, inside the castle and around the table of banishment, the celebrities are wrestling with a wholly different set of perceptions about each other. Upshot: being able to make people laugh is the Traitor’s most powerful weapon.
📌 Also in the Conversation is the assertion that the pension triple-lock was totally relevant and justifiable back in 2010 when it was introduced but has done its job and now needs to be retired.
📌 We attend a lot of musical events because we are wired into what’s free or very low cost. Recently at St Luke’s Music Education Centre we heard some classical music performed by students. It was the kind of music that left you baffled as to when the piece had ended. Luckily, there is always someone in the audience at such times who knows when to start the clapping.
MONDAY 5 It’s 45 years since Billy Shankly died. His grand-daughter Karen has a message about her “Grandy” that Manchester City could do with learning…
His legacy was about more than football. It was about people, community, believing something could be better – and having the courage to try to make it happen.
📌 Paul at Headway phoned to ask if I’d sit on a panel discussion at next week’s conference. Sitting, talking, that’s what I’m built for.
📌 My AI algo has decided I like seeing reels of huge quantities of uncooked popcorn being poured from a helicopter into volcanoes. Another favourite is of a stray lava flow tumbling off a cliff into the sea and instantly poaching any nearby fish. One variant shows a snooping shark go belly up, dead.
TUESDAY 6 The young pharmacist giving me my flu jab said I looked like I was around 50 years old and told me to eat eggs and drink lots of water in the 24 hours after my injection.
📌 I must be getting better. I’m starting to read emails I would have binned last week without hesitation.
📌 There is a Picasso drawing I am craving to stitch in to a tote bag as a special gift. That is probably illegal, but I will probably do it anyway.
WEDNESDAY 7 RIP Eva Marie Saint, 102. Impeccable in every scene with Cary Grant in North By Northwest.
📌 The first presenter of BBC Radio’s Woman’s Hour in 1946 was a man, Alan Ivimey.
📌 The death of Jeffrey Archer has prompted a lot of sycophantic gushing in the media, so Private Eye decided to publish from its archives some of Paul Foot’s dogged work showing what a crook he was.
📌 We’re finding The Marble Hall Murders every bit as good as its predecessors The Magpie Murders and The Moonflower Murders. I read somewhere that Anthony Horowitz only agreed to write the Marble Hall book if Lesley Manville agreed to appear in the TV adaptation.
THURSDAY 8 Back at Headway for the first time since my second hip operation and Michelle described my three-week absence as being on “sick leave”. Paul thinks Manchester City will be given such a massive year-on-year points deduction from the Premier League that it will take them 10 years to get back to the top flight.
📌 Richard E Grant’s mistake of naming himself a Traitor at the very beginning of Celebrity Traitors resulted in banishment. He was even shafted in the round-table vote by two of his fellow Traitors.
FRIDAY 9 According to the number-crunching guru Peter Kellner, the Greens failed miserably in the St Pancras & Holborn by-election. They really should have been able to claim Keir Starmer’s vacated seat, but didn’t. BBC Radio reported that on the doorsteps Labour voters were not ready to abandon the party and keen to “give Andy Burnham a chance”.
📌 My wife’s godmother departed after a 3-day visit and it was a relief to get back to being a slob.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
