‘I’m at a dangerous stage in Duolingo French‘
THURSDAY 1 RIP Steve Stevenson, former neighbour and local character. A big and noisy presence in community meetings, a soldier and citizen. He not long ago used his military past to secure a place as a Chelsea Pensioner but came back east regularly to visit us. We saw him twice recently at the Barbican because he insisted on keeping his library membership, claiming Barbican Library to be one of the best in London. He seemed very relaxed.
FRIDAY 2 The money saving expert Martin Lewis says Andy Burnham has replaced the pension triple lock with a 2.5 lock. Polly Toynbee applauds the cheeky way Burnham sold the idea of less money for pensioners and a national care service as one idea.
📌 In last night’s Celebrity Traitors I think Richard E Grant actually thought telling everyone he is a Traitor (he is) was a cunning move.
📌 All went well at my first post-op physio session with Michaela. Rhiannon popped in to say hello and give me a hug.
📌 When I cancelled an Uber because the wait was too long (15mins), the app asked if I’d like to pay Pierre anyway, for not driving me anywhere. The amount they were suggesting I pay Pierre for not driving me anywhere was £3 more than the amount he was asking to drive me somewhere.
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 Bill 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.
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.
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.
📌 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.
SATURDAY 17 During our Prêt picnic lunch break at Frieze in Regent’s Park yesterday the conversation turned to dreams and Alex admitted to killing an ex boyfriend with a fork. Others confessed to deliberately waking themselves up when faced with danger.
📌 Our VPN went on the blink so this afternoon my wife has been shopping for and attempting to install a new one on our TV. This has caused a lot of stress, though I’m pleased to say my wife took it all on singlehandedly. As I write I still don’t know whether we’ll be watching the next episode of Slow Horses series 6 tonight.
📌 The overuse of the words icon and iconic is starting to drive me mad.
📌 No Slow Horses tonight. Tomorrow is another day in the battle to get the VPN installed on our telly.
SUNDAY 18 You have to wonder if peaceful protest is even possible these days. My sister in Paris says the student demonstrations were initially peaceful, polite and full of joy. Then what she calls the yobs and violent troublemakers arrived to take over and turn the situation into a vicious war with the authorities. These people are obviously so well organised at spotting an opportunity for violence it is a mystery as to how peaceful protesters can stop them.
📌 The VPN situation is now hopefully resolved and Slow Horses series 6 can go back on the TV menu.
📌 Some time ago my wife bought me an Apple Airtag keyring so that I could locate my lost keys should the need arise. Or that’s what she said it was for. She more often uses it to keep track of where I am. But her sneaky spying has been interrupted because the Apple Airtag now needs a new battery and opening the device to fit a replacement is impossible given its ridiculous design. Continued surveillance will now be possible only by a visit to the Apple Store on Regent Street.
📌 In the book I’m reading at the moment the author describes an office pot plant as being in the process of “dying untidily”.
MONDAY 19 The printer is defaulting to black and white and I can’t remember what the solution was the last time this happened.
📌 My daily exercises are actually starting to feel like a pleasure rather than a task, which is a real surprise to me.
📌 The new series of The Diplomat was really quite boring until the US President got shot.
TUESDAY 20 For four days I have been delaying the start of a new stitchwork because I have a phobia of faces. Finally I bit the bullet, started, unpicked several times, overworked almost all of it and still ended up with a face that barely resembles a face. I think I need to devise a formula that suits my limited skills and at the moment that formula is eye+eye+nose+mouth=face. Trying to put character into a face early on is too dangerous. You run the risk of not only failing to find any character but of growing to dislike the face so much that the rest of the exercise becomes a chore.
📌 On the TV last night in an episode of The Diplomat we learned that the US military has successfully located and seized a Russian submarine in British waters, removed an “apocalyptic” weapon from it, stored the weapon safely somewhere and now intend, in partnership with the British military, to dig a sea-floor trench and bury the submarine in concrete. Today in the news we learn that the process to disarm a sunken WW2 warship, the SS Richard Montgomery, still sitting somewhere in the Thames Estuary, has begun with the removal of the ship’s masts. The deadly explosives it was carrying remain in place and a potentially devastating accident is still waiting to happen. If only they’d given the SS Richard Montgomery job to Netflix in the first place, the elimination of huge swathes of Kent and a tsunami all the way up to Wallingford could have been avoided. As it stands we must sit and wait in fear. To be continued…
WEDNESDAY 21 Made the mistake of opening the door to our boring neighbour “Concrete Dave”, who never fails to remind you that as a civil engineer his name was (and presumably still is) on the building safety certificate for Chernobyl. Dave is one of those people who can make even interesting subjects dull as ditchwater and I stood glazing over at all his medical predicaments for so long my wife arrived home from her lunchtime yoga session. Phew! I thought, but then my wife ducked out of sight as soon as she could and left me to pray for an exit strategy from Concrete Dave.
THURSDAY 22 Someone said that Lidl now has little labels on its citrus fruit saying “peel unfit for consumption”.
📌 In a stroke of political genius, Florida governor and climate denier Ron de Santis has been commemorated in a statue that melts at 30C to reveal a skeleton.
📌 Headway’s new chair, Sir Tim, came to the Coproduction Committee meeting to introduce himself and talk about the plans to make November’s AGM a memorable event.
📌 Michelle got me making more ceramic pendants. Very soon I can picture myself watching YouTube videos on how to make your clay less sticky and easier to cut.
📌 At the Headway event celebrating black music, Roots, Routes And Resonance, I did a short interview with James about my “route” to black music, which was through my relationships with women.
FRIDAY 23 Even before I woke up my wife had been working out what emergency food and water supplies we needed and where they would be stored in line with the government’s scary new Be Ready initiative. Her biggest concern was that without any gas or electricity, even tinned food has a limited use.
SATURDAY 24 Not long ago the term “Boomer” became a casual insult used by young people against elderly people. Even though I never really thought of myself as a Boomer (maybe a “Late Boomer”), I admit to taking offence at the term and even once tried to come up with a retaliatory name for stupid young people. Now I learn I am not in fact a Boomer at all. I am a member of Generation Jones, and I feel quite good about it. Everything about being a “Joneser” seems to fit comfortably.
📌 Disaster planning in response to the government’s Be Ready initiative is proving to be quite enjoyable. My wife has already ordered two wind-up torches, we have established that the vintage wind-up radio we had at the back of a cupboard no longer works, and a very useful list of non-perishable food is making shape.
📌 Series 4 of The Diplomat ended with a gripping “I am Spartacus” moment during a G7 conference in Italy.
SUNDAY 25 I’ve always been secretly glad that the House of Lords exists. It has been able to act as a Checkpoint Charlie for some of the most slovenly legislation produced by the House of Commons and to send it back with the message “think a bit harder”. In other words it plays its part in the democratic process. In the past its membership was dominated by the Aristocracy, but slowly that has changed to be more representative of modern society. The problem with it now, says a professor in the Conversation, is that it is overstuffed with what he calls the “Assetocracy”, a super wealthy, land and property owning class who see their seats on the red benches as a symbol of status and entitlement. Their interest in a functioning parliamentary democracy is minimal and many of them only turn up to collect the £371 daily allowance.
📌 My wife has spotted a new FIVE cheese pizza in Waitrose. Is that a Cinque Formaggio, I wonder?
📌 My cousin Kate always says a 2-0 lead in a football match is dangerous for the team on top. A one-goal comeback can suddenly turn into a tidal wave of pressure. Her husband Pete has always contended that this is nonsense. At half time today Liverpool were 2-0 up against Brighton and the TV commentators coincidentally chose to remind us that of the 126 games in recent history when Liverpool were leading 2-0 at half time, they eventually won 123 of them. The final score today was Liverpool 2, Brighton 0.
📌 It looks like the Student List has beaten Vučić in the Serbian elections. It could have an anti-authoitarian knock-on effect around Europe, and that would be exciting
MONDAY 26 We finally got to see the Bayeux Tapestry (it’s actually an embroidery) and all the hype is justified. I’m surprised we never went to see it at its home in Bayeux before now. It is impressive in every way, mainly in scale and ambition, and I got plenty of ideas for my Bits Of The Bayeux ongoing stitch project.
TUESDAY 27 We’re watching the new series of This City Is Ours, which follows the fortunes of a violent Liverpool drug gang as they continue to buy and sell vast quantities of “Lemo”. Lemo is a contraction of lemonade but also a code word for cocaine. A story in today’s First Edition about cocaine use in the UK suggests that this is a series that could come to run as long as Peaky Blinders (six series).
📌 At the Royal Hospital Chelsea we said goodbye to our neighbour Steve at his funeral service. Two years ago, being an ex-serviceman he applied and was successful in becoming a Chelsea Pensioner and duly took advantage of wearing the distinctive red uniform. The biggest surprise today was to learn that Steve was not Steve at all. He was Francis Patrick, and born in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland and not in the north as we had always thought.
WEDNESDAY 28 Yesterday the Guardian commented that what happens next in Serbia is “an experiment in doing things differently”. Today in the Conversation is a more detailed analysis that doesn’t feel optimistic. The victorious Student List is riddled with competing factions. Forming a functioning government will be difficult.
📌 As the news arrives that Flavio Bolsonaro has fled from Brazil to Miami Jonty Bloom speculates as to where Trump and his cronies will flea when eventually they are ousted from government. The answer he gives is Argentina, because it has…
A populist far right regime, slash and burn economic policies, a corrupt elite, excellent beef and some good golf courses.
📌 Our friend Sue recently got her licence to sail small boats around the Mediterranean, and ever since she’s been making the most of it. She calls herself a SKI, which she says is an acronym for Spending the Kids’ Inheritance.
📌 My hip surgeon said I am now safe to travel overseas, so next week we will visit Trailfinders to firm up our trip to Mexico next year and maybe even eat some Mexican street food at the Market Place food hall at St Paul’s.
THURSDAY 29 We finished Series 2 of This City Is Ours last night and the final shot had Michael and Diana standing on separate corners of Hope Street, gazing at each other meaningfully. Roll on Series 3.
📌 In his Comment Is Freed substack Sam Freedman characterises Burnham’s first budget as a reduction in the volume of the message and devoid of drama. That, says Freedman, is the strategy. Burnham has gained a lead and kept ahead of his opponents by…
making lots of small cost-of-living gestures, while seeding the idea of bigger changes over the longer term. The aim is for a steady, measured and consistent story, in contrast to the confused and frantic mixed messages of the Starmer era.
FRIDAY 30 Today everyone in the world is 2026. Add your birth year to your current age and, bippetyboppetyboo, the answer is 2026.
📌 Melania Trump is now a diplomat. She is said to have negotiated a temporary ceasefire in Ukraine so that evacuations can proceed. Many of those offered evacuation are refusing because they aren’t allowed to take their pets.
📌 According to Popbitch the late Princess Margaret claimed that Champagne made your breath “smell like poo”.
📌 There’s a lot of talk about making the manosphere illegal and I wondered what was the opposite of a misogynist. Yes, there is a word for it. It is misandry and those who practise it are misandrists, which made me think of Miss Havisham and Estella in Great Expectations.
📌 The backside of the latest catwalk model stitchwork is looking rather special…
📌 At my final physio session today Mikhaila asked me if we had grandchildren. She said they are very useful for playing catchball with, which improves dynamic balance.
📌 I wanted Romesh to win Celebrity Traitors and he did.
📌 It’s been a long time coming but it looks as if Canada and Europe now have the foundations for a new special relationship.
📌 I offered (twice) to buy my wife her Shingles vaccination as a Christmas present and she refused (twice).
SATURDAY 31 A new weekly scrapbook is sometimes required to resurrect news from the previous week I forgot to include. Luckily, the BBC’s Farming Today repeated the one about eggs. Government rules forbid farmers from selling eggs laid by caged hens. Barns, free-range or organic are preferred, legally. And yet the government does not forbid the importing of caged-hen eggs, so UK farmers are understandably outraged at this piece of departmental double standardry and would prefer a level playing field with their egg-selling competitors. Banning the importation of caged-hen eggs would inevitably push up prices. Not banning imports would leave Britain’s egg producers in peril, say farmers.
📌 I got an early-evening text message from my wife (at her book group) saying, “
Don’t forget it is Halloween. Don’t open the door to any visitors.” This is how we deal with Trick or Treaters nowadays. I even turned out all the lights and put the TV volume on low.
📌 Today is my niece’s birthday and it made me reflect that of my sister’s two children, she was closer to us in childhood whereas my nephew has been closer to us in adulthood.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
