{"id":2641,"date":"2021-06-26T20:19:20","date_gmt":"2021-06-26T20:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2641"},"modified":"2021-06-26T20:19:20","modified_gmt":"2021-06-26T20:19:20","slug":"saturday-26th-june-2021-day-467","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/06\/26\/saturday-26th-june-2021-day-467\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday, 26th June, 2021 [Day 467]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, I have to\u00a0say that today has turned out to be a really curious day. Last night, we noticed\u00a0the the WC in the ensuite bathroom in\u00a0our B&B room had started to malfunction – specifically, the ball cock was evidently not functioning and so the loo was burbling away, loudly, right throughout the night. This meant that Meg and myself had a rather disturbed night’s sleep as the burbling kept us semi-conscious for most of the night. So when 6.00am came, it was as a kind of blessed release as we could get then up and start to pack our suitcases ready for our return journey. The total packing did not take us too long – just over an hour actually – and, of course, it so much easier to pack to come home\u00a0because you basically pack everything that you have within the room. So we got down to breakfast some time after 7.00 and were on our way at about 8.15 which is quite early for us. The roads were\u00a0relatively uncluttered at that time of the morning so we retraced our steps along the A55 Express Way towards Chester and cut south down the A483 to eventually link up with the A5. We know that\u00a0places where we can stop for a coffee break and a loo visit are relatively\u00a0scarce along this particular\u00a0<\/span>route but I half remembered that there was some sort of\u00a0ceramics centre and tea shop just north of Shrewsbury. What we landed up in was some kind of strange ‘adventure park’ full of animals both\u00a0familiar and\u00a0unfamiliar all quite realistically made, some with\u00a0natural materials and some in steel. After we followed the winding path, we had to wait for the establishment to open (as it did at 10.00am a few minutes later) and we followed the path to a point that indicated the coffee shop. Then we came to the entrance and we could only be let in after paying an admission fee of \u00a33.00 each. So we\u00a0abandoned all of\u00a0the and went on our merry way, looking for the place that I had confused it with. So we resumed our journey and eventually found a strange place that advertised itself as ‘services’ This turned out what looked to be an old railway carriage with a queue of about 20 bikers outside it and a rather\u00a0obscure toilet block,\u00a0adorned with warnings that the whole block was\u00a0under constant police\u00a0surveillance and any illegal activities (such as what!) should be reported to them immediately. So Meg and I\u00a0spent the\u00a0proverbial penny \u00a0and decided to look for a third place to actually have a coffee break. Eventually, we did find a place which was Telford\u00a0Services area and by stage already we have travelled about 90 miles we reckoned that we were only about 45 minutes from home by fast\u00a0motorway, so we decided to press on. Eventually, we did get home a little frazzled by\u00a0the events of the morning and made\u00a0ourselves an earlyish lunch. After lunch, I went down into town and picked up our newspapers for the\u00a0last few days and also popped into Waitrose<\/em> to\u00a0pick up a few fresh vegetables to keep us going for the next few days. In reality, we were just waiting for the Wales-Denmark match which is one of the first matches in\u00a0the knockout\u00a0stages, which starts today. Apart from about the first 10\u00a0minutes when Wales made quite a bright start to the match, the rest of the game became more and more dominated by Denmark. A stunning goal from beyond the penalty area put the Denmark team ahead and after that, it started to turn into a defeat and then a rout (with a\u00a0score of 4-0). Of course, Denmark had a lot of support from the neutrals because in their opening match one of their players had a heart attack on the pitch. Also they had a lot of supporters who managed to get into Holland where the match was being played but this is not to detract from an excellent performance by the Danes where every single player performed excellently.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Whilst the football was on, the news came\u00a0through of the\u00a0resignation\u00a0off the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock. To many commentators, this was only a question of time since the ‘still’ of a videoclip was widely circulated showing him in a passionate embrace with an\u00a0erstwhile Oxford fellow student who had, quite\u00a0<\/span>mysteriously, managed to land a plum job in\u00a0the\u00a0Department of\u00a0Health where she seemed, by all accounts, to be as heavily involved in policy decisions as Hancock himself. The whole point here is the rank\u00a0hypocrisy of a Government\u00a0minister enforcing isolation and distancing rules upon the rest of the\u00a0populations whilst fragrantly breaking the regulations himself.\u00a0Also Hancock was not well regarded in the Tory party – was he too\u00a0cautious (i.e. not reckless) in relaxing the lockdown regulations for the liking of the modern Tory party? By all accounts, members of the public were expressing their fury with his actions throughout the day and there is the promise of even more juicy revelations in the Sunday newspapers, so his resignation (which should have been demanded by Boris Johnson yesterday) is of no surprise.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, I have to\u00a0say that today has turned out to be a really curious day. Last night, we noticed\u00a0the the WC in the ensuite bathroom in\u00a0our B&B room had started to malfunction – specifically, the ball cock was evidently not functioning and so the loo was burbling away, loudly, right throughout the night. This meant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2642,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641\/revisions\/2642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}