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!

Fires. Pizza. Education.

I caught a bus to Oldham this morning. From the top road I could see smoke from the still smouldering fire at Dovestone Reservoir. 

Th usually very visible Manchester skyline was shrouded in smoke.

These photos are not my own by the way. I’ve “borrowed” them from other sources.

We have no hint of smoke in Delph. The wind is in the wrong direction for that. Our daughter says they can smell it strongly in nearby Ashton under Lyne where she lives. 

There’s another fierce fire burning at Tintwistle, near Glossop.

There are reports that a young woman has been arrested and charged with arson for the Dovestone fire. But the continued heatwave has the media warning us that we are in for a fire-wave! 

Oddly enough the wind makes today’s heat more bearable. And in Manchester, despite the hazy photos of the shrouded skyline, there was no small of smoke. There did seem to be a lot of police cars and fire engines zooming around though.

I had gone to Manchester to have lunch with my Italian class. Ever since the Covid lockdown we have not met in person for our conversation class but meet online and usually at the end of term head for an Italian restaurant somewhere in the Greater Manchester area to remind ourselves that we do exist as real people. We must combat AI!

Today we lunched at a restaurant on the corner of St Peter’s Square, a restaurant called Forbici, which means scissors. The door handle is a shiny pair of scissors and special scissors are provided for customers to cut up their pizzas. A novel idea for us English but apparently quite common in Italian households. The pizzas were very good.

Amongst the many things that our conversation rambled over was the provision of support for pupils with special educational needs in local schools. A friend of our Italian teacher has a problem in that her son, who had excellent support throughout his primary school is not getting anything like the same level of support in secondary school. I don’t have statistics but I sometimes get the impression that this is often the case. This might be a sweeping generalisation and I apologise to those secondary schools that do provide excellent support. 

One factor that strikes me as significant is the size of schools. One of my bugbears is the belief that our secondary schools are simply too big. Even large primary school are small compared to the huge establishments that are secondary schools. Children who are perhaps cosseted and protected all through primary school can get lost in the machinery of secondary education.

Another factor is the change to having a whole host of different teachers for different subjects. Even though primary schools do “buy in“ specialist teachers for PE and Music and sometimes Art, the children still spend most of their time with one teacher, who gets to know them well and recognises and adapts to their individual quirks. In the secondary school situation, it’s hard to get the same kind of overview. If a pupil is having provlems or being difficult individual teachers may think it8s just their own problem, not something t9 be addrssed by all. That’s a theory anyway! There it is.

Other countries have more serious problems. We have heard a lot about the education of girls in Afghanistan, or rather about the lack of education and the restrictions to their freedom. But this article points out all is not rosily enlightened in the area of boys’ education. A strong emphasis on religion limits the breadth of subjects studied, with university classes taught by recent graduates, often very little better informed than their students. Surely a rather shortsighted attitude to education.

We should be thankful for what we have.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Fires. Wild swimming. Keeping the Tour cool. Water company problems.

 So the heatwave continues. Here in Saddleworth it’s actually been quite pleasant the last few days, not outrageously hot and enough wind to keep things cool. My neighbour and I have been commenting that we’re getting used to hanging washing out with the guarantee that it will be dry by midafternoon.

Wildfires continue too. There are now reports of wildfires in Merseyside and near Llandudno. It seems there is a story behind our local fire. On Friday a young man, a teenager, decided to cool off by going for a swim in the reservoir. He got into difficulties and drowned. On Saturday some of his friends went up to Dovestone reservoir to set off fireworks as a tribute to their friend. And that’s how the tinder dry moorland caught fire! A sad but stupid story!

There are lots of warnings about wild swimming at the moment, advising against it. I’m very wary of wild swimming, probably because I am not a strong and confident swimmer. I enjoy swimming but I prefer to be in a situation where I know I can put my foot down if I feel the need. Unfortunately we don’t have enough open air swimming pools in this country, probably because we don’t usually have long, hot summers.

It’s been so hot in France that they even reduced to distance of yesterday’s stage of the Tour de France by 30 kilometres. They still had a very long way to ride in the heat though. The support teams are going through vast amounts of water. Riders are not just drinking it but tipping bottles of the stuff over their heads and on the back of their necks to keep them cool. I hope the clean-up team retrieves all the discarded bottles for recycling! One problem is cooling down the riders when they reach the finish. Not just the stage winners but the whole peloton. So many hot riders to cool down at more or less the same time! This is where they need an open air swimming pool for the riders to jump into as they get off their bikes. 

The support teams have been providing ice packs which riders put down their cycling tops, these packs are kept chilled in refrigeration units in the tour buses. Surely all the tour buses, support cars, motor cycle teams, not to mention camera crews, must all be contributing to global warming. And Pogacar has been suggesting that they should have stage departures at 8.00 am, although they would still be finishing stages in the heat of the day. He bas also said that maybe the whole timing of the Tour needs examining in view of changing weather conditions. Food for thought!

Water companies pop up in the news for various reasons: imposing hosepipe bans, running out of water, supply problems and so on. Here’s an odd story from today’s news: 

“In May, our supplier, Yorkshire Water, made a surprise payment of more than £3,500 into my partner’s bank account.

We assumed that it was an error and we would be told to repay it.

Exactly a month later, she received another payment, this time of £3,300. Yorkshire Water told us it did not recognise the payment reference and did not think it had made the payment.

My partner’s bank said there was nothing it could do to stop, or return, the payments. Both companies took the issue quite lightly and told us to enjoy the money.

We have transferred it into our savings account so it is not touched, but don’t know what else to do. We are concerned it might be some sort of money laundering scam.”

The Guardian’s team investigated and discovered that one of the water companies employees and given them the wrong bank details. Their salary was being pid into the writer’s partner’s account. Had they not written to the newspaper they might have continued to receive regular payments. But the whole thing was sorted, the money was refunded. It was a good job they didn’t follow the advice to “enjoy money” as some people,might well have done. The water company gave them £100 by way of a thank you!

Moral: Always check those bank details! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Football. Fires. Beach rules in Italy - the panino police! Celebrating ancient victories.

 When I went to bed last night, Norway had just scored a goal against England in the World Cup. There goes the chance of an extra bank holiday, I thought! But there was still an hour to play. I did not stay up to watch. In the wee small hours I heard cheering and reflected that maybe a lot had happened in that hour. England had indeed defeated Norway! There you go!

Fires are raging in the south of Spain and we have fires on the peat moors at our local beauty spot Dovestone. Apparently it was fireworks that started it. What kind of idiots go and set fireworks off in a place where everything is tinder dry? The same kind who leave portable barbecues in places where they can cause fires, or who leave them on beaches under a light covering of sand (intended to extinguish them!!) which unsuspecting people tread on with their bare feet! 

Years ago we discovered the Italian system of private beaches. It was hard to believe that you could privatise beaches. Charging for sun loungers and sun umbrellas and pedalos is one thing but preventing people from quietly strolling along the tideline without having to go out of town to do so is something else altogether. 

Well, here’s a new twist to that tale: forbidding people, who have already paid to go on the beach and to hire a sun umbrella, etc, from taking a pranzo al sacco (packed lunch) to eat on the beach. Here’s a link to an article about someone who was caught by the panino police.

“While there is no national rule prohibiting customers at private clubs from bringing in food and drink, concession holders sometimes set their own policies, as was the case in Vieste.

Luca Pernice, a journalist with Corriere della Sera, who happened to be at the same beach, explained that the woman, named Rosaria, had concealed the sandwiches at the bottom of her bag.

When lunchtime arrived, she advised her hungry son to eat his close to the sea, away from the prying eyes of the resort’s staff. But alas, he got caught and Rosaria was reminded that the resort forbids packed lunches.

“It’s a common occurrence on the beaches here,” said Pernice. “People don’t want to be forced to spend at the restaurant every day, they can’t afford it, and so this is what they do, they strategise.””

Here’s an interesting headline I saw this morning: Man dies after falling from Eleventh Night bonfire in east Belfast. What, I asked myself, was “Eleventh Night”? So I took a look on the internet. It’s the night before the 12th of July, the day Northern Ireland protestants celebrate the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when the Protestant King William of Orange defeated the Catholic King James. So it’s to celebrate the victory of Protestantism over Catholicism in Northern Ireland. It’s come to be referred to as “bonfire night” and the lighting of such a community bonfire, made up of wooden pallets, is usually accompanied by a street party and marching bands.

Then I recalled Orangemen’s Day from my childhood when Liverpool Orangemen had a parade through the centre of Southport with military style marching bands and troops of girls in short skirts danced along waving orange shakers in time to the music. That must have been on or close to July 12th. My father would  not let us go into town on that day: too many drunken celebrators. Does it still happen? i wondered. Well, it seems that last year it rook place on the 6th of July with record numbers of spectators.

This is information relating to last year: 

“The main 12th July parade

Saturday 12th July 2025 will see the Traditional Orange Lodge Parades taking place in Liverpool and Southport. This will be to commemorate the 335th Anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne that took place in 1690.   

The Provincial Grand Master Steve Kingston says that he “anticipates the largest attendance for a number of years, as this year’s parade falls on a Saturday, which enables more of our members and supporters to attend and take part”.  “

It’s going to be repeated this year; 336 years since the Battle of the Boyne it’s still being celebrated. Memories are long!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!