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!
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