Today being a Sunday, it was a day when the alarm gets set a little early and I get up ready to make my progress down to the newspaper shop bright and early in the morning. There is always quite an interesting atmosphere around first thing on a Sunday morning. For a start, I am generally listening to my trust old I-Phone I utilise as an MP3 player and this morning was a Mozart morning. I particularly enjoyed the track of a tenor singing ‘Il mio Tesoro’ from Don Giovanni – I remember this because the melody is sufficiently simple to be played on an instrument. In this case, my son played it on his clarinet for some sort of examination (Grade 3 I wonder?) All if can remember of this is that the junior headmaster had asked my son how the examination had gone and received the answer of ‘Brill’ Later on he was to win the school prize for music in his year group playing the 2nd (slow ) movement of the Mozart Clarinet concerto. At some stage after this, a combination of three things entered my son’s life (photography, girls and classic locomotives but in which order I couldn’t say) Walking down to town at that time in the morning, one does not encounter many other souls but they tend to fall into the category of serious joggers (often in pairs) and dog walkers. To make life even more interesting this morning, there is evidently some cabling or other kind of activity gong on in the pavements in the town. All of the underground services are labelled in a variety of spray paints and I counted at least six colours of paint (white, yellow, cyan, blue, orange, red) as well as some white chalk marks. I suppose these represent water, sewage, gas, electricity and TV /communications and more besides) but evidently there are all sorts of codes and symbols represented by these symbols but with their meaning obscured to the general public. Also at this time, the owners of some classic vehicles take to the road and I spotted this morning one person on a Vespa scooter (the last one I saw must have been decades ago) and I think I noticed a classic sports car called a Triumph Stag but as it swept past me, I was having to rely upon memory as to whether my identification was correct or not. After breakfast and the Andrew Marr Show, Meg and I wandered down to the park where we met up with a couple of our park regulars before we departed fairly early in order to have our lunch before kick-off in the England-Croatia match in the Euro finals. Actual, as it turned out Meg and I thoroughly enjoyed the match although football is not really our game. The match was enjoyable to watch, not least cause England secured a (deserved) 1-0 victory but also because the young English team demonstrated some enterprise and initiative. The goal was well-deserved and the Croatians were lucky that an earlier excellent England shot had rebounded from the upright. Tomorrow’s matches are going to be Scotland vs. Czech Republic and Spain vs. Sweden so there is something in both of these matches that might well attract my attention tomorrow. Of course, as the matches are played in European time zones, then one doesn’t have to get up in the middle of the night or ridiculously early in the morning which can happen if it is the World rather than the European finals.
Although I did not really want to do it, I thought the it was so long since the car had a wash that it badly needed a wash down. We haven’t been on the kind of trips that generally makes cars dirty but a fine dust had descended upon it over the last week or so. So I gave it a rather cursory wash, compared with normal, as it is the hottest day of the year and not the best day to engage in car washing although I did wait until 5.0 before I started. Tomorrow is going to be the day when the government plans will be announced whether the lockdown is to continue or be lifted. Boris Johnson will, in all probability, announce that the lockdown shall continue for 4 weeks more.This does have the ‘advantage’ of any eventual end of a lockdown being in the middle of July ie. approximately when the schools finish. Also it appears that more than half of the population agree that the restrictions should be in place for another month.On a societal level, we are waiting for the rate of vaccinations (and particularly the second vaccination) to proceed at a faster pace than the virus can spread. However, this Delta variant seems to spread 60% more rapidly than its predecesors. It would appear on the surface that any government that did not extend the lockdown for a further month would be guilty of the most severe dereliction of duty.
© Mike Hart [2021]