Midsummer. Weather reporting. Rainbows and other equality matters.

It’s June 24th, the feast of Saint John. In other years we would have been watching the clean up of beaches in the north of Spain where bonfires were lit on St John’s Eve. And towns would still smell of smoke and sardines, the traditional food of the occasion, the next morning. Crazy people jump over the bonfires to bring them luck for the coming year. It’s all that midsummer madness, the perfect setting for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It must be the extra hours of daylight, those long, long days inspiring silliness.

What with the summer solstice on Monday and St John’s day today, it’s no wonder that BBC Radio 3 seems to have been playing a lot of midsummer-related music all this week.

I don’t know how many fires were lit on Galician beaches last night. It probably depended on how local municipalities interpreted the rules about movement and gathering at the moment. Perhaps next year will be back to normal. 

Anyone wanting to light a bonfire and stay up all night around here last night would have had a soggy time of it. The promised rain came late in the evening. I woke up a couple of times in the night to hear it raining quite heavily. By the time I got up this morning, however, it had stopped, and the rain that fell hasn’t made much difference to the footpaths and bridle paths in the area. It’ll take a bit more rain before the mud-puddles reestablish themselves, which is fine by me. 

As I listened to the weather forecast on the radio yesterday evening it struck me that the weather reporting is very London-centric. The reports and forecasts always start with the South East of England and gradually work their way round the other regions. It’s long been the case that when they talk about some extreme of weather - a heatwave, heavy rain, a big snowfall expected - they almost always mean in the South East. I hadn’t really thought about routine weather forecasting though. But there it is: “England” really seems to mean London and the South East. Even Evan Davis on the Today programme talks that way about the weather. The other regions are just add-ons. It’s time they began to vary the order of things, rotating which part of the country they start with. We might feel a little more included, all regions equal in the eyes of the weatherman!

Which brings me to OBON - One Britain One Nation. I’m pretty sure that Kash Singh, the retired policeman at the centre of the whole business, had only the best intentions when he set up his organisation 2013. But the Department for Education endorsement of the proposal for One Britain Day tomorrow has opened up a moderately-sized can of worms. 

The children of St John’s CE Primary School, Bradford, have written an “anthem” titled ‘We are Britain and we have one dream to unite all people in one Great Team” and it is being suggested that all schoolchildren should sing it on Friday, tomorrow! Nobody seems to have consulted actual teachers and their unions about this. Scotland is feeling it’s a dig at their perhaps wanting to leave United Kingdom. And underneath it all is the feeling that starting the day with schoolchildren singing a patriotic song is not really a very British thing to do. We just don’t do that! And if we did, might we not actually just sing God Save the Queen? Oh dear!

Last night saw another international football game end in a draw, this time 2-2 for Germany and Hungary. Because of Hungary’s recent laws forbidding anything that might allow under-18s to learn anything about being gay or transgender, as if the mere power of suggestion would somehow infect all young people, the Germans wanted to light up the stadium where the game was being played in rainbow colours. UEFA said it was inappropriate. Consequently other football and sports stadiums around Germany lit up in rainbow colours in solidarity. Here is a link to some pictures.

And, thinking of equality in football, here’s a link to an article about young women in France demanding the right to play football wearing the hijab.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!