October 10-16, 2026
SATURDAY 10 My wife reminded me that yesterday was my strokeversary. Fourteen years. Every day I remember less and less what my life was like before that fateful moment, when we all thought the game was up.
📌 Some poor idiot at the council has been sending out threatening notices to residents saying they must relinquish the storage sheds they rent from the council that sit in the basement of each of the apartment blocks. The fiasco has been dubbed “Shedgate”. Thankfully, good sense has prevailed and letters of apology are in the post.
📌 The scandalous state of Premier League football, corrupted beyond recognition to most fans by the super-rich, is merely the product of the society in which it exists, writes Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian.
This is not just modern football; it is modern Britain.
SUNDAY 11 The Winter clothes are out of storage and in the wardrobe.
📌 My algo has now decided to feed me reels of a barrel of raw eggs being tipped into a volcano from a helicopter. Five seconds later a huge explosion sends hundreds of fried eggs skyward.
📌 Given that our trip to Mexico in March next year is firming up, I will probably quit Duolingo French and focus on Spanish.
📌 Liverpool suffered a silly red card and were duly punished by Manchester City. Until then the game has been quite dull.
MONDAY 12 Yes, I’ve ditched French and from hereon will devote all my efforts to Duolingo Spanish. I suggested to my wife that in preparation for our trip to Mexico in March next year we start cooking and eating Mexican food. This was met with rolling eyeballs and the expulsion of “enchiladas” as if it were a swear word.
📌 I shall contact the doctor this week to work out how best to describe the health conditions that could impact on the price of our travel insurance. I am all in favour of vague descriptions that might lower the cost but my wife is a stickler for being totally honest, just in case.
TUESDAY 13 Social care for the elderly and disabled has become the hot potato issue. The question of who pays for it has been overcomplicated over the years by government dogma and private profiteering. But, as Polly Toynbee argues, until those who can afford to pay do so, the system cannot be rebalanced. Of course the issue for those who can afford to pay is whether paying will bring them a genuinely better quality of life in old age. One of our friends paid £7,500 a month for a level of care that could be said to have caused the early death of her husband.
📌 Every time I visit the dentist I am relieved to still qualify as an NHS patient. Otherwise, the price for someone telling me I have small bits of plaque that could do with cleaning off would be astronomical.
📌 Kate Davey’s getting brave in her new improved blog. Workers’ Rights for Artists is the headline, but as ever the detail is sketchy and loaded with issues.
📌 I think my wife has spotted that my offer to make her a cup of tea in the afternoon is just a pretext for me to eat biscuits and cake.
WEDNESDAY 14 Met Rachael to discuss a new intergenerational project she’s working on with Lisa. It’s called Man & Boy and is basically a facilitated oral history featuring very old men (hopefully very, very old) in conversation with boys around 10 years old, the purpose being for both parties to describe in their own words the generational gap that has opened up since boys could no longer count on their biological fathers as role models. I agreed to try to find her some very old local men to take part.
📌 I do hope the Americans see sense soon and do something about their lunatic wrecking-ball president.
📌 At long last and to my wife’s relief I will get my hearing tested on November 3, though I’m still not sure I want to hear everything everybody else thinks I should hear.
THURSDAY 15 My wife is scathing about my attempts to learn Spanish before we visit Mexico next year. She thinks Duolingo is a poor method because it has a tendency to simplify and repeat, whereas I think simplification and repetition are good learning methods. I probably need to move from one lesson per day to at least three. Maybe then I will learn to say something other than “Hola! Bienvenido!”, something more useful for a trip to Mexico.
📌 At the Headway conference, Together We Can, I got to say a few things about the Royal London Hospital project in which I worked with brain-injury patients to create artworks to decorate their horrible clinical day rooms. One of the patients, Dan, was there and we talked about one of the images he made based on conversations with his 13-year-old son about how neatly football pitches appear to be mown.
📌 Prof Hannah Fry got banished from Celebrity Traitors. Most of those who voted for her just wanted to know one way or another whether she was a Traitor. She had run out of excuses and stories to spin trying to convince them she was a Faithful.
FRIDAY 16 The voice on the 205 bus that announces upcoming stops got into a twist and started saying any bus stop randomly. At one point on the journey I had arrived at Euston Station, Euston Square, Warren Street and Great Portland Street all at the same time.
📌 This year’s Frieze art fair is a game of two halves. It is split into London Frieze, which is like a commercial warehouse of graduate art-school creations tailored to a certain kind of performative art buyer, and Frieze Masters, which is just the opposite and brings together a healthy stash of quality pieces from collections and galleries worldwide.
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PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
