Beating the Hun...

England fans will long remember last night’s game - England v Germany - even though for 75 minutes it was cautious, careful, tippy-tappy football. with both teams more frightened of losing than motivated to win. The result has apparently cauterised the nation’s psychic wounds and made us proud to be English again. Football, as the fans at Wembley sang, is coming home. Nevertheless, I won’t allow the fluctuating fortunes of eleven footballing millionaires to dictate my mood. Football is just a game… and, on last night’s evidence, a rather dull game.

Licenced today: houses in the Cumbrian village of Caldbeck... 

Losing on penalties...

France, the favourites to win Euro 2020, were knocked out last night when Kylian Mbappé missed a penalty. After 90 minutes playing as a team - plus 30 minutes of ‘extra time’ - it seems like an unsatisfactory way to decide a sporting contest. And, for the player concerned, that penalty miss will remain on his footballing CV for ever.

The France captain, Hugo Lloris, tried to share the load. “We win together, we lose together”, he said. “We are all responsible for being eliminated at this stage of the competition”. In a short statement on Twitter, Mbappé was perhaps more realistic. “It is very difficult to turn the page. I am sorry for this penalty. I wanted to help the team but I failed. Finding sleep will be difficult, but unfortunately those are the risks of the sport that I love so much”.

His misgivings are not without foundation. During a game in the 1994 World Cup, a Colombian player, Andres Escobar, inadvertently scored an own goal, which ended Colombia’s run in the competition. A few weeks later, as he left a nightclub in his home town of Medellin, Escobar was mocked by two men about the own goal, who then shot and killed him. And there are probably more trigger-happy nutters around in 2021 than there were back in 1994. 

Licenced today: a Land Rover dealership in Shrewsbury...

Country life...

According to today’s Guardian, Rafael Benítez will soon be confirmed as Everton’s “sixth permanent manager in five years”… which suggests that we may have to revise our definition of the word ‘permanent’. 

A regular seller, licenced again today. Maybe it sums up the idea of moving to the country...

Indiscretions...

Matt Hancock’s indiscretions, caught on CCTV camera and splashed across the front page of the Sun, have been characterised as breaking the rules about social distancing, and breaching the ministerial code by not declaring the relationship when he hired Gina Coladangelo as a non-executive director at the Department of Health and Social Care. There’s a wife and a husband, waiting in the wings, who might be viewing the events in a rather different light. 

The health secretary was telling the country to "follow the rules", even as he was breaking them himself. Boris Johnson should be accepting Hancock’s resignation… not his apology.

Licenced yesterday: the summer game being played in the village of Hartley Wintney, Hants...

Ally's Army...

Scotland have been eliminated from Euro 2020 without winning a game, though, for a country with a population of just five million, it was quite an achievement simply to qualify for the competition. Back in 1978, Ally MacLeod took the national team to the World Cup in Argentina, cheered on by a ‘Tartan Army’ of expectant fans. Their hopes were already sky high when MacLeod announced that “You can mark down 25 June 1978 as the day Scottish football conquers the world”. The mood was captured in a catchy song:

We're on the march with Ally's Army
We're going to the Argentine
And we'll really shake them up
When we win the World Cup
'Cause Scotland are the greatest football team

It all ended badly, of course, in a hailstorm of hubris and recrimination.

Licenced today: deer grazing in front of Belton House, near Grantham... 

North Pennines...

 Licenced today: an abandoned house in the North Pennines...

Gorilla Glue...

A young woman, Tessica Brown, is launching a range of haircare products. The day-care worker from Louisiana had gone viral on TikTok after posting a video confessing that she had sprayed her hair with Gorilla Glue instead of her usual hairspray. The glue, predictably, made her hair stick to her head, and required four hours of surgery to remove. “As a result of that”, she said, “I ended losing some hair and having scalp damage”. And now she’s trying to flog a hairspray called ‘Forever Hold’.

St Mary's Church in the village of East Bergholt, Suffolk…