Having listened to the rain beating down on the skylight windows in the attic bedroom at various points in the night it was a pleasant surprise to see some blue sky and sunshine again this morning. There is still a fair bit of cloud around but it’s the fluffy white variety not the grey and lowering we had yesterday. It seemed to keep on raining on and off until quite late in the afternoon, when we finally took ourselves out for a walk.Here is ths morning's photo taken on the Donkey Line bridle path.
Today’s plan is to cycle along that bridle path and beyond to our granddaughter’s house and make her go for a walk with us.
What we are really missing in this time of isolation is family dinners, all the gang sitting down together round the table, setting the world to rights as we eat. It had become a Sunday tradition in the family and we hope to reinstate it.
On the subject of traditions, it is rumoured that the BBC is considering dropping Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory from the Last night if the proms. Having no audience to sing along this year makes it an ideal opportunity to make such a radical change. The reason for this potential decision is the anthems’ perceived links with colonialism and slavery. As if all the folk who have belted out the songs over the years were all racists and pro-colonialism! Most people just enjoy a good sing song. Yes, slavery is wrong and yes, colonialism had a lot of bad stuff going on but, as with the no-platforming question, if we are not careful we will have a very bland society.
If they do decide to ban these songs I wonder if prom-goers will do something similar to what happened at my girls’ grammar school when a new school song was introduced. We always finished the end of term and end of year assemblies with a rousing rendition of Jerusalem. Then the music teacher wrote a new song and her own tune, especially for our school, beginning with the supposedly inspiring lines:
Here may we hope and dream and dare,
Laughter and friendship know.
It went on in that vein. We all had to learn the words and the tune in our music lessons. The end of term came around. We sang the new song. And as we filed out of the school hall somebody sang out, “And did this feet in ancient time....” and every girl joined in. And so a new tradition was born. Will anyone do the same with Rule Britannia? I wonder!
Another thing we have missed this year has been the Tour de France. I hear that they plan to begin it at the weekend, Covid-19 willing. We shall see.
We have a long tradition in our family of watching it on the TV, or at least of watching the highlights in the early evening. One year we headed off for a family camping holiday in Brittany a few days before the end of the Tour and spent the first few days of our stay there trying to find someone who could tell us who had come second. It was already a done deal that Pedro Delgado - I think it was Pedro Delgado - would win but second place was up for grabs. A few years ago, when the Tour began in the North of England, I went with our son, his wife and their six-month-old daughter to sit on the hillside at Holmfirth and watch them all ride past at speed.
This year Team Ineos has apparently dropped Chris Froome and Geraint Evans from their squad because they are not performing as well as expected or required. What a shame! Loyalty is clearly not a two-way thing.
Before Chris Froome ever won a Tour we sat in a Spanish cafe watching a stage in which he was clearly about to defeat the then very successful Spanish rider Alberto Contador, who in later years had problems over tests for performance enhancing drugs - but that’s another story. A very drunken Spaniard was initially cheering his man Contador but gradually, grudgingly, began to praise “el inglés”. It feels a little as though we saw Froome’s rise to fame and now we see him cast aside. Such a shame! But hopefully there will be other years!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone?
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