1966...

I listened to a celebration yesterday, on Radio 5, about England’s World Cup win. It was a bit overblown (“the greatest day in England’s sporting history”, the event was unblushingly proclaimed), and padded out with songs from 1966, reinterpreted by the singers and bands of today. Danny Baker went off-script, pointing out that if Germany decided to celebrate their World Cup wins, they’d be putting up the bunting about every eight years…

The pond at Nun Monkton, near York...

Fifty years of hurt...

Today, July 30th, is, gulp, the 50th anniversary of England winning the World Cup at Wembley (the only international tournament we’ve ever won). Aged fifteen in 1966, I was in the lakes with my dad, and we didn’t have a TV. So we walked up Ghyll Head Road and called in on elderly neighbours to watch the match. He was diabetic and, halfway through the game, complained of double vision (he could see 22 players on either side). His wife reacted quickly, gave him a couple of sugar lumps and he was soon back to normal. I can’t remember anything at all about the game itself: the hat-trick by Geoff Hurst, the famous commentary by Kenneth Wolstenholme, the toothless grin of Nobby Stiles, or the post-match celebrations. Good anecdote, eh?…

The high-maintenance gardens at Levens Hall..

More Olympic nonsense...

According to an article in the Guardian, athletes competing in Rio must “break ties with sponsors who are not official partners of the Olympics from today until three days after Rio 2016 - or face sanctions”. This is to avoid ‘ambush marketing’ and to ensure that official sponsors - such as McDonald’s and Coca Cola - get their money’s-worth. Nobody, apparently, is allowed to mention “Olympic-related terms” on social media: these include words such as 2016, Rio, gold, silver, bronze, medal, effort, performance, challenge, summer, games, sponsors, victory and, of course, Olympics. This has just taken my interest in the games down another notch. The IOC should spend more time trying to stop competitors cheating rather than trying to control the language. And ‘medal’ is a noun… not a verb…

Levens Hall...

Spent a few hours photographing Levens Hall, inside and out. The interior isn't very interesting - like a Harvester restaurant decorated with suits of armour - but the topiary gardens, laid out in 1690, are spectacular...

Floral and Hardy...

Shop names featuring puns don't often make me laugh... but this one does. It's in the Market Place, Ulverston, the birthplace of Stan Laurel...

Solar flight...

What a fantastic achievement! Having touched down in Abu Dhabi, Solar Impulse 2 has completed the first round-the-world flight by a solar-powered aeroplane. It’s a strange-looking craft, with a wingspan greater than a Boeing 747, and 17,000 solar cells mounted on the wings. A quarter of the plane’s weight is taken up with batteries, which store the solar energy during the daytime, and provide the motive power to turn the propellers at night. The plane could, in theory, stay airbourne almost indefinitely, but the pilot needs to recuperate after each leg of the flight. In the unheated and unpressurised cabin there’s only a single seat, which, I read, doubles up as a toilet.

The plane may be impractical in its present form, but year-on-year the technology will improve. Batteries, in particular, will get smaller and smaller. I’m cheered whenever I see power being generated by wind and wave and sunlight. It means we’re heading in the right direction…

Astley Hall...

Olympics...

So there’ll be no blanket ban on Russian athletes competing in Rio; the baton has been passed instead to individual federations to make decisions about their own sports. They’ll have to be quick, since the games start in just a few days.

My faith in the integrity of Olympic sports has been ebbing away for years. If you can’t take the results at face value, then it’s hard to maintain an interest in even the high-profile events. Years ago I wrote about splitting the games into two: ‘drugs-free’ and ‘drugs-enabled’. In the latter category the athletes would be able to take all the drugs they wanted... but to claim their medals they would have to be alive, well and able to climb the podium unaided. No posthumous medals would be awarded. My idea was only a joke, but I’ve heard something similar being suggested quite recently.

The Olympic Games are insanely expensive to stage, and all for less than three weeks of competition. Get it wrong - like Montreal in 1976 or Athens in 2004 - and the city may be paying off the debt for generations to come. And the talk of “legacy” is so much hot air. All over the world there are empty stadia, surplus to sporting requirements and rotting away. What a waste!

If I was king of the world I’d stop awarding the games to a different city every four years. It’s time for the Olympic caravan to come to a halt. I know the perfect venue for a scaled-down sporting festival. Olympia, in Greece (the clue’s in the name). We could get back to simple events: running, jumping and throwing things (so no golf or dressage or synchronised swimming), with the victors being crowned with a wreath of laurel leaves. Competing in the nude? I don’t know; I haven’t thought it through yet…

Labour...

The Labour party is being torn apart, with the pro-Corbeyn and anti-Corbeyn camps pointing their fingers at each other. The pro-Corbeyn folk seem happy for Labour to stay in opposition, as a party of principled protest. Their protestations that Corbeyn is electable as Prime Minister are just wishful thinking.

The anti-Corbeyn people want to be in government, and will do whatever it takes to get there, which reminds me of the sweeping changes Tony Blair made to what became New Labour. I can see both sides of the argument, which merely marks me as an unprincipled fence-sitter. While the argument rages, the Labour party just looks like a rabble… because it’s an argument that no-one can win…

Uniforms...

Still in Ulverston. The town is full of people in plum-coloured robes and tunics, many - women as well as men - with shaven heads. There’s a summer festival, I’m told, at the Buddhist Centre, at Conishead, just outside town. I’ve never understood why people with religious leanings should want to wear a uniform. If their particular belief system was so enriching, the rest of us would recognise it in their actions, speech and demeanour. Their good nature would be obvious; we wouldn’t need telling. The uniform may represent the outward expression of an inner spirituality, but I see it primarily as an attempt to distance themselves from other people: yet another way of differentiating 'us' from 'them'. Locals keep their distance too; the two worlds - spiritual and secular - don’t seem to collide.

It reminds me of my days at public school, where we lived in a small town without ever being part of it. The boys dressed like little merchant bankers, in pinstripe suits, which emphasised both our separateness and our ‘superior’ status. It was hardly surprising that there were regular ‘town & gown’ issues.. I wish I could have dressed like a normal teenager, but the formal uniform was mandatory. If I was seen in the town dressed in ‘civvies’, I was punished. The only uniform I’ve worn with pleasure, before or since, is my cricket flannels.  

I’m a fan of René Magritte, the surrealist painter, and not just for his enigmatic works of art. Despite his avant-garde views and radical politics, he looked and dressed like a petit-bourgeois, with suit, tie and bowler hat. He didn't want to stand out, preferring to blend in with his neighbours, who commuted each working day to their offices in town. Confounding expectations can be a subversive act: something the Buddhists might consider…

Fancy dress...

A very lazy day, still in Ulverston. Being unapologetically idle is actually a bit of a novelty since I went nomadic. I watched two sessions of cricket, as Joe Root reached 254, his highest score in test cricket. He seems to have more time than other players to play his shots, and looks effortlessly elegant. If he stays fit and motivated he will break a lot of batting records over the next ten years (and this evening he took his 50th catch in tests, as Pakistan made a stuttering start to their first innings, ending on 57 for 4).

The TV cameras panned around Old Trafford, to reveal how many people were in fancy dress - as nuns, crusaders, cartoon characters, superheroes, etc. A group of guys thought it was a good idea to come as Donald Trump. The commentators were trying to recall when this custom started; about twenty five years ago, they reckoned. I can’t see the point of dressing up to go and see the cricket; nevertheless it’s just possible that I unwittingly started the trend.

About twenty five years ago I went to see a day’s test cricket at Headingley. I don’t recall anyone coming in fancy dress back then. I’d taken my thick woolen poncho to sit on (the seats on the Western Terrace were hard wooden benches), but the day was so cold that I put it on instead. Whenever I went to get some beers from the bar, the crowd broke into a rendition of the theme tune to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The TV cameras caught my cameo as ‘the man with no name’ - sans cheroot - and I saw myself on the cricket highlights that same evening…

Houghton Tower, Lancashire...

Haircut...

A busy morning in Ulverston, for my seasonal haircut. The full procedure takes a while - shave, shower, haircut, another shower and a change of clothes - due to my hatred of having hair clippings down my collar, and it’ll all happen again in autumn...

Collision...

The Romahome was in the car park of Booth’s supermarket in Carnforth this morning, while I was having my breakfast. When I came back out, a car was parked so close to my door that I couldn’t even get in. Then a guy told me that the driver had banged into the Romahome as he drove into his space. I waited for a few minutes, hoping to engage the miscreant in a one-sided conversation, but he/she didn’t appear. I went into the back of the vehicle, to write a stroppy note to leave under his/her windscreen wiper… but when I got out the other car had gone. Aaaarrgh! 

There’s no real harm done to the Romahome, but, bloody hell, there are some crap drivers about…

Theresa May...

I tuned in to hear a few minutes of Prime Minister’s Questions, to see how Theresa May would perform. Jeremy Corbeyn’s first question was about a public enquiry into the events at Orgreave, during the miners’ strike, which had the effect of anchoring him in what now seems a very distant past (a distance only increased by the rush of bizarre events over the past month). Theresa May came over pretty well, I thought. “I hope we’ll be having these exchanges for many years to come,” she said to Corbeyn over the dispatch box. Who says she hasn’t got a sense of humour? Of course, having a pop at Jeremy Corbyn is like shooting fish in a barrel…

Silage bags...

Astley Hall...

On the hottest day of the year - so far - I was taking pix at Astley Hall, Hoghton Tower and Samlesbury Hall, all in north Lancashire. This swan, at Astley Hall, was swimming round and round the fountain, enjoying a cooling water-splash (exactly what I would do if I were a swan).

Stayed the night in Ribchester, though it wasn’t a night when sleep came easily. I opened both side windows, to get a bit of breeze through, but it was still baking hot. Never mind: extremes of heat are only a problem for two or three days every year.

Still hot today, but not stifling, and storm clouds are massing over Carnforth…

Winners and losers...

So Russia is guilty of state-sponsored doping of its athletes: hardly the most surprising revelation of a startling summer. I hear two conflicting and mutually incompatible statements from pundits, commentators and the people who run our sports. Firstly, winning is all that matters. Secondly, that sports people should not take performance enhancing drugs. No one seems to see the exquisite irony inherent in the juxtaposition of these two points of view.

The idea of “taking an unfair advantage” can easily be stretched to taking nutritional supplements, training at altitude, having expert medical advice and access to top-quality facilities. As Maria Sharapova discovered, a harmless ‘supplement’ that was acceptable a year ago can suddenly be redefined as a performance enhancing drug.

It looks like the Olympics will take place without any Russian involvement. But as long as the motto of sports people is “show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser”, the search for unfair advantage will continue…

The canal basin at Buxworth (or Bugsworth, as it used to be known) on the Peak Forest Canal...

Heading north...

Heading north after a few days in South Wales and Derbyshire. The temperature is climbing: currently 25°C.

I heard, on the radio, that I was heading into motorway congestion, so I took the next turnoff and will kip in Urmston this evening. The temperature is pleasant for walking around in T-shirt and sandals... but a bit too warm for a comfortable night in the Romahome...

Camping in Derbyshire...

Max...

The last religion...

The Bible - especially the Old Testament - is every bit as blood-thirsty as the Koran. The difference between Christians and Muslims is that Christians treat their holy texts like a pick ’n’ mix: picking out tasty morsels while leaving the tough, indigestible bits on the side of the plate. Muslims - even ‘moderate’ Muslims - are more likely to believe every word in the Koran.

The problem, as exemplified by the deaths in Nice, isn’t one religion or another. It’s something more basic: belief without evidence. Blind faith can lead adherents into quaint customs and rituals, and the journey into intolerance, then violence, is only a matter of degree. The punishment for blasphemy and apostasy is the same - death - in both the Bible and the Koran, but, in 2016, only readers of the Koran would consider that these punishments truly fit the ‘crimes’.

Islam isn’t just another religion; to believers it’s the last religion. The justification is chilling. If there’s only one God, then we only need one religion. Of course, that’s a big ‘if’. From an Islamic website: Muslims don't think there's any other true religion now, after the coming of Islam. Islam will be the only true religion until the Day of Resurrection…

Son and grandsons...

Had a couple of enjoyable days in Wales with son Chas and grandkids Lenzo and Max. Everything went well until we were due to leave, when we found the car battery was flat. The cottage is remote, and our efforts to push the car came to naught. The local farmer, thankfully, was out and about; I collected my jump leads and the farmer’s daughter gave me a lift back to the cottage on a little two-seater off-road vehicle. We jump-started the car, and were on our way. I now need to find some appropriate present to say “thank you’; without her help Chas and I might still be at the cottage gazing at a flat battery (the kids slept through it all)…

Crickhowell...

Two out of three...

I don’t often have a bet… on anything. But on Friday I thought I’d have an accumulator bet on Serena Williams winning at Wimbledon, then Andy Murray lifting the cup, then France beating Portugal on Sunday evening. The odds wouldn’t have been very good; I just felt confident in the results. In the end I forgot to place the bet.

I got two out of three right, and the ‘bet’ was still on after 90 minutes of football. Then Portugal scored in extra time and broke French hearts. Right, that’s the tennis and the football out of the way. It’s time for cricket to fire our imaginations for, oh, about three weeks, until the football league begins again…

The Peoples Republic of Crickhowell...

Beer...

In South Wales now. With Wales having been beaten by Portugal, Welsh flags no longer flutter from cars. It’s left to Portugal and France to slug it out this evening, to see who will lift the trophy. My money’s on France.

I must have looked undecided, as I stood at the bar. “I can recommend this one”, the barman said, rather too quickly, as he grabbed a beer pump. It was a beer brewed to celebrate the Welsh team’s footballing success, so, presumably, wasn’t selling so well any more. I helped him out by buying a pint. Who else was going to drink the stuff?…

A stake in the future...

Some politicians aren’t waiting to be stabbed in the back by a colleague; they’re too busy harming themselves. Andrea Leadsom must be biting her tongue and wishing she’s been more circumspect in her interview with the Times. She said “I am sure Theresa will be really sad she doesn’t have children so I don’t want this to be, ‘Andrea has children, Theresa hasn’t’ because I think that would be really horrible”. That “really sad” sticks in the craw straight away. But then she blundered on, to ensure that it really was an ‘Andrea has children, Theresa hasn’t’ issue. “Genuinely I feel that being a mum means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake”.

Though Leadsom complained she’d been mis-quoted, the recording on the interview reveals that she hadn’t. Her observations are so misguided - and so patronising - that I wonder if she’ll carry on…

And now I read that Angela Eagle will challenge Jeremy Corbyn after all, since he's said he's going nowhere. Pass the peanuts...

Another good place to stay...

Gove...

I read an article on the Guardian website by Marina Hyde. She's got a waspish sense of humour, and this is one of her best. "The Conservative party doesn’t do carriage clocks for people like Michael Gove. They just get a note reading ‘You have outlived your usefulness’ and a five minute head-start on the hounds"...

Blair...

Tony Blair insists that the world is safer now, after the war in Iraq, than it was before. What planet is he living on? Saddam Hussein was a vicious tyrant, who had no compunctions about killing his own people, but he never had ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The suggestion that he could have attacked London “within 45 minutes” was a fantasy, a fabrication. Weapons inspectors searched the country for WMD, and found none, yet Bush and Blair refused to listen and continued to mobilise the troops.

Bush’s call to arms was a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 (he either didn’t know the difference between militant Islamists and secular Ba’athists… or he knew but didn’t care). And Blair’s support for Bush was precipitate and unquestioning. In a letter to the president, in 2002, he promised “I will be with you, whatever". This wasn't just "my country right or wrong"; it was "our special relationship right or wrong". Blair hitched his wagon to the wrong star: a man who was proud of his ignorance...

The end of the road...

I drove down the M6 yesterday, to Llangollen, North Wales, thinking I’d watch the Wales v Portugal match in a place where it mattered. I’ve got a headache and stiff neck this morning. Not because Wales lost, but because the TV was mounted so high on the pub wall. It wasn’t a very good game, and for Wales it looked like one game too many. I heard a Welsh fan on the radio. “Don’t be sad that it’s over”, he rationalised.”Be glad that it happened”.

So Portugal are in the final and will face either Germany or the hosts, France, who play tonight. I hope France win tonight, and beat Portugal on Sunday too (if only to see the look on Christiano Ronaldo’s face)…

Cleaning up...

Is it a male characteristic to leave someone else to clear up after you’ve made a mess? And is this one of the reasons why the final choice for Tory party leader and - for a few months, at least, the next Prime Minister - will likely be between two female candidates (another reason being that no sane person would vote for that detestable shit, Gove)?

So many people who espoused the ‘Leave’ cause have left the field of play, to take no further part in proceedings. And these are the people who won! No whoops of joy from them, no fist-pumps of triumph... just a furrow of the brow, a wan smile, a shrug of the shoulders. They haven’t left trailing clouds of glory, they’ve slunk away with tail between their legs. It’s a strange kind of victory.

I’ll plump for Theresa May as the least worst candidate, and fervently hope that Boris Johnson’s withdrawal from the race isn’t just one more scheming plot aimed at winning him the top job in a year or two… 

Comfort zones...

We all need our personal space. If people (well, uninvited people…) come too close, we feel uncomfortable. The extent of this comfort zone depends on variables such as age, gender, ethnicity and our own personal preferences. In recent years we seem to have created another kind of personal space which extends a bit further. When a queue builds up behind a person using an cash machine, there’s an unspoken agreement that they should keep their distance. They want to give the person space, but without losing their place in the queue. This may mean standing six or seven feet away - maybe more - from the person getting cash out.

When we’re paying by card in a shop, there may not be room for other people to maintain a similar distance. So what they do instead is turn slightly away - a quarter turn - and pretend to be fascinated, for a few seconds, by the point where the wall meets the ceiling, so the person can tap in their PIN number in relative privacy. There’s no rule telling us where to stand or where to look; no-one says "look away now". It’s behaviour we seem to have worked out for ourselves, to oil the wheels of these everyday transactions…

Reeds...

Having spent most of a day in the van, finishing off an article, I felt the need for some fresh air. So I had another wander round Leighton Moss, the RSPB reserve near Carnforth. Not too many birds, though the flock of black-tailed godwits had grown to about 140 birds since my last visit. I sat in a hide as a couple saw their first marsh harrier; they were suitably impressed.

I’ll watch the Wales v Portugal game this evening. I’ll be in Wales this coming Monday; if Wales win tonight I’ll go a day early, so I can enjoy the atmosphere of watching Saturday’s final in some Welsh pub. C’mon Wales…

Duckboards through the reedbeds at Leighton Moss...

Stock shot...

Saw this article on the Guardian website today, and liked the photo (by another Alamy photographer). I like the way the image is ‘framed’ by the nets and the prow of the trawler. The foggy background, filled with boats, matches the downbeat mood of the news item. The man, head down, is captured in mid-stride. It’s an effective stock picture, and I can see why the Guardian chose it to illustrate their story…

Redshank...

Some of the bird hides in the nature reserves I’ve visited looked cosy enough to live in. And here's a house in Essex, overlooking the saltmarshes, which takes its inspiration from bird hides… and some of the military ‘sea forts’ in the vicinity. The house - called ‘Redshank’ - is up on red-painted stilts, to keep it safe from even the highest tide.

I’ll no doubt catch the France v Iceland match this evening, as we reach the sharp end of the competition. It’s still just possible that Wales could face Iceland in the final: a prospect as unlikely as Leicester winning the Premier League…

Fear of failure...

Having never played any sport to a high level, I can only imagine what it must be like for England players to carry the weight of the fans’ expectations. But I’m pretty sure it can be counter-productive, if the fear of losing is stronger than the will to win.

I played cricket for maybe forty years. Nothing in life (and I mean nothing) has given me more guileless pleasure than the summer game. I wasn’t a duffer - I didn’t field third man at both ends - but I wasn’t a star either. I had my moments; hey, every dog has his day. What I loved was the competition: one team pitting itself against another, playing hard but fair. The pleasure, for me, lay in trying my best to win at every time of asking. I never liked friendly games, or ‘beer matches’, in which everyone gets a bat and everyone gets a bowl. That was boring. As long as everyone was trying their best to win, the result of the game would take care of itself. Some you win, some you lose.

If someone had told me that the next game was a “must win”, that “losing isn’t an option”, I doubt if I would have been able to play any better. More likely I would have been paralysed by the fear of failure. The England football team must have known how they would have been portrayed, on the back pages of the tabloid papers, if they failed to beat Iceland. And that just made losing ever more likely…

Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford...

Wales...

In Kendal last night, parked down by the river. For ninety minutes I paraded my paltry Welsh connections, and watched Wales play Belgium (currently ranked the second-best side in the world). The game pulsated with excitement from start to finish. Where England had been inert, against Iceland, Wales were vibrant. Their three goals were well worked, and they fully deserved the win. Hal Robson-Kanu’s shimmy in the penalty box wrong-footed three Belgian defenders simultaneously, before he turned and scored. At the final whistle the Belgians looked shell-shocked. They’d scored their own wonder goal - an unstoppable long-range strike into the top corner of the net - but it was all but forgotten amid Welsh euphoria.

Wales played as a team, England as a collection of individuals (contriving to be less than the sum of their expensive parts). Are the fans’ unrealistic expectation - and the force with which they are expressed, in the media and elsewhere - actually making it harder for the England team to play to their full potential? Is it possible that the fans are - albeit unwittingly - undermining their team’s chances of sporting success?…

The Somme...

On this day, 100 years ago, 19,240 British soldiers died. It was the start of the Battle of the Somme, a pivotal moment in the First World War. At the time, of course, it was known as the Great War, “the war to end all wars”. This sobriquet proved to be overly optimistic, since there probably hasn’t been a single year since 1916 when at least two countries, somewhere in the world, haven’t been at war. We’ve learned nothing in the meantime. We talk about peace, but there’s violence in our hearts…

Bradford...