Watching Thunderball and thinking (a) Bond has rather fallen behind on his DEI credits (b) luxurious hotel suites look like a Best Western in Margate, (d) the notion of any organisation being as competent as SPECTRE is hilarious, and (c) the dollar was 2.80 to the pound.

Do you know to whom I would entrust the UK economy and probably everything else (apart from appointing the next Archbishop of Canterbury)? The people who work in the pits in F1. Miracle on miracle!

I’m playing Glasgow this evening (7.30, you can tape Countryfile). Forty years ago I first played this beloved city, the Barras back then, the gorgeous King’s Theatre tonight!

The world is gripped by madness: it’s not REsearch noun and reSEARCH verb, IT’S JUST RESEARCH. EMPHASIS ON SECOND SYLLABLE FOR THE AVOIDANCE OF DOUBT.

When research is pronounced REsearch rather than reSEARCH be like…

Just found a very degraded French film of Mompou playing Ravel. Gorgeousness on gorgeousness. Never heard him play anything but his own pieces. Wonderful pianist, of course.

Sorry to hear of the death of Donald Gray. He was Speaker’s Chaplain back in the nineties when I was at King’s and later a friend and inspiration when I was starting out in ministry. Urbane, funny, faithful. RIP.

Ivan at my barber’s is a total unit. He tells me I must have number three back and sides because “you have nothing on top”them tugs the plugs of depilatory wax from my nostrils with such force my sinuses come out. I tip him handsomely.

It is the feast of St Ulrich, Prince-Bishop of Augsburg, patron of moles, happy deaths; and fainting. He is sometimes portrayed turning a goose leg into a fish so it could be eaten on a Friday. He was the first saint to be canonised by a Pope.

Would someone at @tfl have a word with driver of the 52 who just pretended not to see three of us waiting at bus stop KP Rutland Gardens at 2110 or thereabouts?. Thanks.

At Birmingham New St, today blessed with trains, and noticing there is an almost universal England cricket fan look: men, mid thirties and above, shorts, flowery shirts, trainers, Panama or flowerpotman hat, dark glasses, backpack.

At Butetown. In 1913 11m tons of coal went through here onto ships and thence to the world. Now it’s three dozen sourdough pizzas on the back of dodgy unlit bikes going round pedestrianised streets to CF24.

The centenary of the Civil Rights activist Medgar Edvers, assassinated by a Klansman in 1963, and Patrice Lumumba, first president of the independent Congo, assassinated by Mobutu Sese Seko in 1961.

Imagine being a leader fated to lead the unleadable in impossible tasks? Politics, the church, the BBC. Who would want the job?.

Wandering Cardiff and admiring the grandeur of its coal-funded civic quarter and thinking about earth’s proud empires and wondering how long before the Cupertino donut is bristling with buddleia.

Question: why did Oscar Wilde serve his sentence at Reading?

It is the centenary of the death of the composer Erik Satie (actually Eric Satie and baptised in the Church of England). He dabbled with Rosicrucianism, was a Communist who dressed like a banker, lived alone in a squalid flat, and died of cirrhosis of the liver.

There are hundreds of herring gulls (I think) in a holding pattern over East Dean. What’s going on?

Playing the Grand in Leeds tonight, one of my favourite venues, @operanorthnh’s HQ and where I saw one of the best things I’ve ever seen - Peter Grimes, 2005ish.

Just a note on Ferdinand I of Austria’s appearance: his parents were first cousins, not unusual in the dynastic circles of his day, and he was born with hydrocephalus and epilepsy.