It’s hot and sunny here Granddaughter Number Two was moaning yesterday about the prospect of high temperatures today. She doesn’t appreciate hot and sunny, preferring cold and crisp. She plans to spend today reading in her bedroom with the curtains drawn.
Apparently it’s also hot and sunny in Brittany where stage seven of the Tour de France is going from St Malo to Mûr de Bretagne. According to the live reports in the Guardian, three minutes ago they still had 74 kilometres to go. That’s still quite a lot of ground to cover. I can’t say that I would fancy riding 130+ kilometres in the hot sunshine.
We seem to be cosying up to the French. It seems that M. Macron is going to lend us the Bayeux Tapestry. Is that kind of rubbing our noses into poor old Harold’s defeat in 1066? But a bit of cooperation is good.
Some people get very worked up about this sort of thing. Tom Harwood, Deputy Political Editor of GB News, apparently posted this on X:
"The Bayeux tapestry was commissioned and woven in Britain 900 years ago. It was subsequently taken to France. In order to bring it back [sic] to Britain - temporarily - we are having [sic] to lend Sutton Hoo discoveries, also from Britain. Some 'exchange' when both sides [sic] are British [sic]!"
In response to this someone came out with all this stuff:
“The Tapestry was commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux in Normandy (now part of France). It was probably scaled to fit Odo's Bayeux residence. Odo was William of Normandy's half-brother. The artists were probably Normans and men born to mixed Norman and English parents. It was probably first displayed in Bayeux not in England. Bayeux was not then in France. It was in Normandy.
It is a fine piece of victors' propaganda art that relates the defeat of the English king at Hastings, following which England was subjugated by foreigners as William extended his control, which included the almost entire replacement of the native elite, the imposition of a foreign language, Church and governance, and what might now be called "genocide" in the north of England. Neither the Normans nor the English were British, who in those days were the mostly Celtic former inhabitants of most of the island of Britain before either arrived: the Brythonic-speakers of what are now Wales and Cornwall. The Welsh language was known as "the British Tongue" until relatively recently.
True, it is likely that the Tapestry was woven in England by English women, but to make it - and Sutton Hoo (which is evidence, by the way, of intense trading and other links with the European continent) - a medium for Harewood's bigoted, small-minded idiocy in this way would embarrass a pub bore, let alone the Deputy Political Editor of one of our great media institutions.
Or even of GB News.”
When I first went to France, more years ago than I care to remember, I spent some time in Normandy, where on of our hosts enjoyed reminding us from time to time that “l’Angleterre est une province normande”.
Here’s a more serious bit of cosying up:
“Britain expects the EU to approve its migration returns deal with France, the home secretary has said, after France said it needed to be legally ratified before being put into action.
Yvette Cooper said on Friday she thought the European Commission would sign off on the pilot scheme, which will involve some people who cross the Channel in small boats being returned to France, in return for some asylum seekers being moved from France to the UK.
The scheme, which was announced on Thursday by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, would mark the first time France has agreed to take back some of those who cross the Channel. But many details of the scheme remain unclear, such as how many will be returned and when it will start.”
Let’s hope that goes some way to alleviating the problem.
On the subject of what is British and what belongs to which country, there might once again be moves afoot to return the Parthenon marbles (aka the Elgin Marbles) to Greece. But it seems that a group called Great British Pac has sent a letter to Keir Starmer, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, and trustees of the British Museum, saying that we should do no such thing. The marbles should stay here. Liz Truss is one of the signatories. Great British PAC is a right wing group, not a political party, but rather an organisation that takes its inspiration from political action committees in the United States, which receive large amounts of money to fund campaigns for or against candidates and issues. A rather skewed idea pf patriotism!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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