End of term. Nostalgia for Wakes Holidays. More sports commentary.

 Most schools have broken up for the summer holidays by now. Travelling into Oldham this morning  by bus to go to the dentist’s for a check-up I noticed a fair number of grandmothers with grandchildren in tow. This is what happens in the summer holidays. 

Here’s an ‘end of term’ cartoon:

Our youngest grandchildren don’t finish school for the summer until the day after tomorrow. This is because they had two weeks for the half term holiday which may have been to accommodate the Whit Friday band contest fun and games. Their mother, whose school closed for summer last Thursday, has been taking advantage of having free time while the children are in school to catch up with some of the household organising tasks that you never have time for under normal circumstances.

In the dentist’s waiting room a fellow patient was reminiscing about the days when Oldham used to have “Wakes” holidays. This was traditionally two weeks at the end of June when the cotton mills closed down for machine maintenance and all the workers had time off. Other cotton mill towns had different weeks. Seaside places like Blackpool and Southport knew when to expect holidaymakers from different towns. When I started working in Oldham the Wakes holiday tradition was still going, which was oddly inconvenient as my husband worked at a school neighbouring Chadderton which did NOT have Wakes Holidays. This was the case at least until reorganisation brought us all under one umbrella organisation.

The lady in then dentist’s waiting room remembered Wakes Holiday weather as always being fine and sunny but never too hot. That’s nostalgia working again!

A friend of mine in Galicia, NW Spain, posted this, reminding us that Spain has become world champion in men’s football and women’s football in the same year, the first country ever to do so.

When Spain was set to play France in the World Cup, Spanish politician Rajoy commented that the French team is not really French as so many players come from immigrant families. He was roundly criticised for racism. Spain’s young star, Lamine Yamal, child of Moroccan and Equatorial Guinean immigrants told him: “Francia y nosotros somos ejemplos de imtegración” - Framce and Spain, we are examples of integration! 

He went on: “El fútbol si sirve para algo es para integrar la sociedad y no hay mejor que Francia y nosotros, que somos ejemplo de la integración” - if football is useful for anything it is integrate society and there is no better example tha France and us. Well said, young man!

 

Here’s a link to an article by a Spaniard, commenting on the importance of Spain’s victory. Here’s some of what she had to say:

“The contrast between football’s power to promote integration, which this team seems to fully understand, with the constant partisan battles dominating public life in Spain couldn’t be sharper.

The message repeated most often by the coach, Luis de la Fuente, and his players is simple and powerful: “We are a team. We embrace diversity while working together towards a common goal.” Spain’s greatest strength on the pitch lies not in individual brilliance but in a cohesiveness that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Ironically, that sense of shared purpose and collective responsibility is perhaps what Spanish public life is missing the most.

Yet even if the impact of football seems fleeting and insignificant, especially in these challenging times, its extraordinary appeal can inspire a shared spirit. At its best, it fosters solidarity and camaraderie. At its worst, it can fuel violence and disrespect, as Argentina’s team sadly showed before, during and after the match.”

They’ve been playing serious gold at the Royal Birkdale. There’s a suggestion that maybe Trump might become an arbiter for all sports. i don’t know much about golf but it seems that a player called Bryson DeChambreau trod down some long grass close to his ball , thus improving his swing, and was penalised for it. He got cross, returned to the tournament scoring area and reportedly threatened to call Trump. Here’s a link to an article about it. 

You couldn’t make it up!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

A bit of sports commentary!

 As a rule I don’t take much interest in football but last night, after we’d finally got around to watching the day’s activity in the Tour de France, and after a bit of channel-hopping, we found ourselves watching the last stages of the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina. 

As I said already, I don’t take a great deal of interest; when Phil watches Match of the Day on Saturdays and Sundays during the season I find something else to occupy, only noting what’s going on when he gets excited about something on the pitch. But this was the Cup Final: Spain versus Argentina, so far goalless and onto extra time. And it somehow became for Spain - disapproved of by Trump for supporting Palestine and for various other reasons - to defeat Argentina - a far-right country approved of by Trump. politics is not supposed to enter into it but the Argentinians had already used the football pitch as a platform to tell everyone watching that the Falkland Islands belong to Argentina and are really called Las Mallvinas.

It was all very tense. Then Spain scored but the goal was disallowed because the player was offside, only just offside but there it was. The ball went up and down the pitch. Both sides had unsuccessful shots at goal. Then Ferrán Torres scored a goal for Spain and we had to endure the tense remaining minutes until the final whistle blew and it could be acknowledged that Spain had won!

“Argentina’s reaction in defeat was shameful. They turned their backs on the Spain players as the trophy was presented, preferring to keep their eyes on the fans behind one of the goals. Donald Trump, who did not want to leave the stage as the Spain captain, Rodri, got his hands on those six kilograms of solid gold bliss, was not the only person to make a spectacle of himself.”

I’m quite surprised Mr Trump hasn’t claimed that he invented football!

Much praise rained down on Spain’s 19 year-old Lamine Yamal, just 19 a couple of weeks ago.and some tears were likely shed for Lionel Miessi with his team losing what will almost certainly be his last world cup match. He’ll have to change from football legend into football pundit!

We have been recording Channel Five’s daily summary of each day’s stage of the Tour de France. Yesterday it was the middle fo the evening when we got around to it as we had had a big family dinner and sat chatting for ages. And in that summary we saw Jonas Vingegaard, until now second behind Tadej Pga af, acrash out of this year’s competition. It seems he may have hit cobbles on a bend, came off his bike and broke his collarbone. Interviewed before the stage began he had said thatch had had a bad night, being woken by a knock at his door at 2.00 am - a random drugs test.

The wearer of the yellow jersey is tested at the end f every stage. Other riders are apparently tested at random. The middle of the night seems cruel. Tadej Pogacar suggested that being woken in the small hours may have been a factor in the crash. “If Jonas, if he was tested at 2am in the morning, he probably slept less than four hours, or his deep sleep was ruined. It ruined the night,” he said. Remco Evenepoel, now in second place, also commented, saying: “It's pretty disrespectful. To be honest, [if] I had it, I would send my team to wake them [doping control officials] up to feel how it is.

“It's something inhuman, it's something that we should not accept as athletes. Everyone knows sleep is the only recovery moment we have, and if that gets disturbed... This is the hardest and the biggest race in the world. This is a shame that this happened, and I hope it doesn't happen any more in the future.”

It’s a hard life being an athlete, but they must feel rather privileged to be able to make a living doing something they love.

Today is a rest day for the riders, but no doubt they’ll still be out there training in the heat.

Life goes n. Stay safe and well, everyone!

England wins! Approaching autumn? Things that don’t seem to change.

 So, England defeated France in the football last night. Small consolation for the football fans who really thought England might win the World Cup. So it goes!

And soon the whole thing will be over and done with. Will it be Spain or Argentina? And will Mr Trump give advice to one or other of the teams. After all, he us said to have found fault with Tuchel’s management of the England team. He must be an expert in everything.

Before we know it we’ll be back with the regular football season again. It may still only be July but we’ve passed the longest day and there are already signs of autumn, such as the rowan trees showing ripening berries a little earlier than I think they should be.

Summer seems to be continuing for the moment though, if a little cloudier than yesterday.

Other things around the world continue also. 

There are now reports of forest fires near Zaragoza in northern Spain: another bit of the world on fire.

ICE agents are still going about their nasty business in the USA. Here’s a link to an article about two recent occasions when ICE agents have shot people in their cars, only to discover later that they were not actually the illegal immigrants they suspected them of being.

“Many of the immigration arrests in recent months have been conducted by police, sheriffs and members of other state and local law enforcement agencies deputized by the federal government to conduct immigration sweeps. In many locales, it has become unclear to bystanders whether drivers are being pulled over due to a genuine traffic violation, or because an officer was interested in checking their immigration status.”

It must be reaching  point where those with the “wrong” kind of face and complexions are afraid to go out in their cars.

Are we handling it any better in the UK? Hmm! There’s this

“Labour has increased immigration raids to historic numbers since entering government two years ago as the party comes under pressure from voters and Reform UK to take a harder line on the issue.

The Home Office said in January there had been a 77% increase in the number of raids on businesses such as nail bars, car washes, barbers and takeaways since the 2024 election, with an 83% rise in arrests.”

That’s from an article about a London borough plNning to ban its officials from cooperating with immigration raids.

In the Middle East Israel is making plans to take control of ancient water reservoirs, making them part of Israeli-seized territory. The second Oslo accord placed these reservoirs, the Solomon Pools, under Palestinian civil and police control. Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, regards this as a “terrible mistake. “We are working hard to repair the terrible damage caused by the Oslo Accords disaster,” he said. I suppose it’s one way of looking at it. Here’s a link to an article about it.

Now, Phil and I have been getting emails from Andy Burnham and Lucy Powell, Deputy Leader, urging us to join the Labour Party. That should read ‘rejoin’ as we left a good while ago, disillusioned with the party. I presume they have a database with names and email addresses of people like us who have defected. I wonder if they have also emailed Jeremy Corbyn! And of course, Diane Abbott.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Fires. Football. Facial recognition. Farage.

 Here are some pictures of the fires, and the firefighters, at our local beauty spot, Dovestone Reservoir.

Our milkman told me about a farmer he knows who had to evacuate the two hundred sheep he usually keeps on land up there. Another victim of the strange times we live in. 

According to this article, the situation with wildfires all over the world is only going to get worse. Surely this has been going on long enough for us to have worked out some kind of system of prevention. When we lived in Galicia in the 2010s it was a regular thing in the summer to see firefighter planes swoop down over the sea, scoop up water and then drop it on the affected area, similar to what’s going on in this photo. 

And of course, everywhere it remains true that not all the fires are truly wild: some have been deliberately set to clear an area of forest and thus make it possible for the classification of that piece of land to change so that developers can build houses there. The profit motive rules! But so does plain stupidity and carelessness! 

Today is significantly cooler and cloudy but no rain seems to be forecast. A good few days’ downpour is probably what is needed to properly extinguish the fires. What a strange situation: England hoping for rain! 

I naively thought England’s involvement in the World Cup was over and done with but it seems our squad has to play la sélection française to decide whether France or England gets third place. It must be quite dispiriting for both teams concerned to have to go through the motions for minor glory. But then, that’s what footballers are paid for. 

I hear that  Mr Trump is going to be present at the cup final, presumably to cheer on Argentina as he doesn’t really like Spain very much. And here is cartoonist Cold War Steve’s version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza coming to save the World Cup, the fifth in a special series of World Cup 2026-themed collages made for the Guardian.

As more and more places seem to have facial recognition systems, which incidentally are reported to misrecognise black faces more frequently than white faces, some clothing manufacturers are producing ‘adversarial clothing’, clothes with designs intended to confuse facial recognition systems - T-shirts featuring faces for example. Here’s a link to an article about it. 

I thought that the Clacton by-election was going to be fought between Nigel Farage and Count Binface but this article tells me that there are 34 candidates in total. The whole thing becomes a farce.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Open air entertainment on big screens. A cartoon. Are we running out of pub?

Thursday disappeared into a black hole of family activity. Well, not a black home in any negative sense, just a lot of family stuff - chatting about books with Granddaughter Number Two, aka The Bookworm, collecting Granddaughter Number Four and Grandson Number Two from school, feeding most of the family + Granddaughter Number One’s friend who is almost family, and chatting and setting the world to rights.

Today dawned cool and fresh but cloudy. By midday the cloud had gone but it was still not too hot. 

Some called Dan Hancox, writing in the Giardian suggests this: 

“A big screen in every postcode? How World Cup fan zones could inspire Andy Burnham”

He, Dan Hancox, was inspired by watching footballin the open air in the Elephant and Castle bit of London: Colombia v Switzerland. There are a lot of Colombians there.

“Little Bogotá was lit up by a sea of yellow shirts and flags, arrayed across the streets and pavements of “Latin Elphant”. It was, as it always is for Colombia games, a delightful scene: an unofficial, chaotic, self-organised fan zone. The cafes and bars were doing a roaring trade, and a guy with a cleaver standing atop a pickup truck was hacking the tops off coconuts and selling them to drink. Children ran around chasing each other, older couples danced together and hundreds of fans, passersby and neighbours milled happily around, sharing views of the tiny screens and lamentations about Colombia’s inability to score, making new friends and sort of half-watching the game.”

Other places had big screens too:

“For the World Cup, Brighton beach hosted a 5,000 capacity fan zone, in front of a 50-sq-metre screen, while Millennium Square in Leeds hosted 6,000. But why stop at football? On a smaller scale, London’s Canary Wharf and Coal Drops Yard now show Wimbledon and films on big screens every summer: outside, with no ticket or fee required. What if all the country’s best watercooler moments could be shared in the same way? The Traitors final in Hyde Park, anyone? Strictly in Princes Street Gardens? MasterChef: The Professionals in Centenary Square? There is an obvious incentive for privately owned public spaces to draw a crowd, to spend money in the shops and bars nearby, to give their project “life”, and office workers on their lunch breaks something to do. With some startup funding for the infrastructure and stewarding, why shouldn’t local authorities be encouraged to do the same? They’d make it back in food and drink sales in a heartbeat.”

Of course, for sports and cinema and concerts al fresco, you need the kind of summer we’ve been having so far, but maybe that’s not beyond the bounds of possibility if predictions about increased numbers of heatwaves come true.

Perhaps Andy Burnham can encourage big screens everywhere. Will we see drive-in cinemas such as we see in films about the USA. 

Meanwhile, here’s a Ben Jennings cartoon on Andy Burnham’s imminent arrival at No 10:

Getting back to watching football, here’s an interesting little item:

“Ahead of the England-Argentina semi-final, it was reported that England was “running out of pub“, in the words of Evan Davis on BBC Radio 4’s PM. The thesis went: 30,000 pubs, with 100 people in each, is a capacity of 3 million. There are about 46 million adults in England. An insufficiency of pub.”

Mind you, some of us very rarely go to the pub. Did he factor that into his calculation? 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Relatively cool. Climate crisis deniers. Leaving primary school rituals. Childhood then and now. Le Tour.

 It’s cooler here today. At least it was cooler when I went to the market this morning. There was even a chap at the bus stop when I was on my way home just after 9.30 who was complaining that he was freezing! Methinks the gentleman did protest too much! Perhaps he wasn’t well! Anyway, the cloud cover had begun to dissipate by 1.00pm and the temperature will undoubtedly rise again. Our predicted high is around 25°, however, rather than 29° or 30° which we have had lately. 

Here’s something interesting about reporting on the heat:

“Most of the UK media stories about the record-breaking heatwave that struck in June failed to mention the climate crisis, analysis has found.

Nearly 2,500 articles about the extreme heat – when temperatures topped 37C, a record for the time of year – appeared in the UK’s nine main national daily media publications. But nearly three-quarters of them – about 72% – left out any mention of global heating or the climate, according to the analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

Even fewer pieces drew a link between the heatwave and government policies destined to tackle the climate crisis – less than one in 20 heatwave stories mentioned “net zero”.

June’s heatwave was the second of the year, after a hot spell in May when temperatures reached 35C, smashing the previous record for the month. A third heatwave hit last week and is set to continue for at least some of this week.

Gareth Redmond-King, head of international at the ECIU thinktank, said: “The link between all three recent periods of extreme heat and climate change is indisputable.”

He added: “If recent heatwaves are the symptom, then climate change is the illness, and net zero is the medicine. When public understanding of this link is so low, it’s vital that the dots are joined between these three concepts to help make us all better.”:

Climate crisis deniers abound or so it seems.

The fish-man at the market informed me that he won’t be around next week. He’s not going away on holiday  this time. His daughter is leaving primary school to go on to secondary and next Wednesday is the leavers’ assembly. Our daughter has been teaching a year six class (formerly known as junior 4 or top juniors) and has worked hard to train her small charges to put on a splendid end of year show for the rest of the school and , of course, for proud  parents.

This is another thing that didn’t happen back in the 1960s. All we did was harass the teachers, and even the headteacher, collecting autographs.we also collected the autographs of all the members of the class, with messages of good luck and silly rhymes such as:

    i c u r              (I see you are)

    i c u b             (I see you be)

    i c u r              (I see you are)

    yy 4 me          (Too wise for me)

 

Such “witty” playing with language was all the rage.long before mobile phones and texting were invented. 

Life was simpler then. Nostalgia tells us we all roamed freely, “playing out’” unsupervised all summer long with no fears of anyone abducting is.

Here’s a link an article by Lenore Skenazy, advocating a return to that kind of freedom as a more serious way of helping our children to develop strong and healthy, rather than just banning mobile phone use.

And, here’s a link to a supporting article about how unhealthy the current generation is.

A fit and healthy man is Tadej Pogacar, still wearing the yellow jersey in the Tour de France. Apparently some of the spectators booed him as he won yesterday’s stage. They were seemingly disgruntled at his domination of the Tour. And yet I can remember Tours in years gone by where one rider led through all the stages, making the fight for second place more interesting! If there was booing then, well I have no memory of it!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!