Yesterday as my friend had called around from Droitwich and we seemed to have so much to talk about, I completely forgot about the play in the Test match against India. England posted a tremendously high total of 669 but the Indians replied with 174 for 2 in their reply. On a flat pitch almost perfect for batting and with the best English bowler and captain, Stokes, probably unable to bowl because of injury then the Indians may be able to play out the final fay for a draw although the odds must be on for an England win. In any case, the cricket is always interesting and absorbing and generally well worth the watch between 7.00-8.00 each evening. But the football final between England and Spain will no doubt absorb all of our attention and emotional energies this evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have started to think about holidays in a general sort of way but with September in mind. I have asked my best Spanish friend if she would indicate the times when it would not be convenient for me not to distract her attention from the start of a new academic term which is always a very busy time. I am starting to think again about visiting La Coru\u00f1a but I know that as well as flights, I will need to get a visa sorted for myself. To be honest, I am just waiting life to be on a nice even keel, not least financially, but we are slowly getting there now that the Teachers’ Pension Agency have seen fit to respond after some eleven weeks of waiting. I realise, too, that I need to renew my Senior’s rail card and as it had run out in the last few days, I rather thought that they could get in touch with me asking me to renew but that has not been the case. The day has turned out to be exceptionally overcast and rainy so that might mean that my weekend coffee plans get altered somewhat. I am about half way through reading the book by the well-known GMTV breakfast show presenter, Fiona Phillips, called ‘Remember when – my life with Alzheimers’ Apart from the early biographical material, she has detailed how first her mother died from Alzheimers and the middle section I am reading now is describing how the same affliction affected her father. The second half of the book is going to be an even harder read because Fiona Phillips went on herself to develop early onset dementia so the whole book is quite a hard emotional read. So, I am tackling it in little bits when the mood strikes and not am not anxious to see what is coming, although I can probably guess. The thing about Alzheimers is that afflicts people in very different ways with some people becoming abusive or aggressive. Fortunately, for both myself and for Meg, she just drifted away and although she did have periods of anxiety, we managed to find ways in which this could be assuaged by a combination of medication, music and hand holding. In the late afternoon, whilst I was awaiting my friend calling around, I started looking at a documentary on Franco broadcast by PBS (the United States version of a public broadcasting services) This revealed the quite shocking fact of the abduction of very young children, often taken at birth from their mothers and then brought up to be ‘good Franco-ists’ some even being sold with the connivance of the Catholic church. I knew of one or two instances of this scandal that had come to light recently but the program mentioned first 3,000 abductions and then 30,000 of children abducted during the 1950’s. In fact, this practice may have continued after the death of Franco into the 1990s. While the Franco regime ended in 1975, the practice continued for some time, with the amnesty law passed in 1977 hindering investigations into these practices. This was quite shocking and I will discuss it in depth with my intimate Spanish friends when next I see them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Often on a Sunday morning, my University of Birmingham calls around and we go for a coffee to the local water sports facility down the road but I got a text this morning indicating he had other commitments. So, I started out on a leisurely walk down to Waitrose<\/em> to collect my Sunday newspaper but as I did, I stopped for a few minutes char with a new set of neighbours who fairly recently have moved into a house quite near to us. \u00a0They were busy putting their young child into the back of the car but, nonetheless, I engaged in a few minutes of casual chit-chat with them. It transpired that the husband was a Manchester United fan and I told him about the deep impact that the 1958 Munich air disaster when most of the team were wiped out as they were on a ice-laden aircraft where the weight of the ice made the plane too heavy to achieve a lift off and hence the crash at the end of the runway. I explained to my neighbour as I had a slight personal connection with this disaster as the brother of the pilot, who was blamed for the crash, was the head barman at the Old Swan hotel in Harrogate where I worked in the early 1960’s. My neighbour told me that there was a huge memorial to the crash in the Manchester United ground and his wife told me that when she read all about it on being taken there by her husband, she burst into tears. Incidentally, it took the captain of the aircraft about ten years to clear his name when it emerged years later that he was ordered to take off by some of the Manchester United directors who were anxious that the team would be bag in the UK for another big match. So the cause of the rash was all about money, it transpired but the easiest thing in the world to do is to blame the pilot which is what initially happened. When I got home, I pottered about a little getting some photographs organised and then made myself a light lunch of quiche accompanied by some salad and coleslaw which I found absolutely satisfying enough. Of course, most of the day today the nation is waiting with eager anticipation of the football final of the England ‘Young Lionesses’ scheduled to start at 5.00pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday as my friend had called around from Droitwich and we seemed to have so much to talk about, I completely forgot about the play in the Test match against India. England posted a tremendously high total of 669 but the Indians replied with 174 for 2 in their reply. On a flat pitch almost […]<\/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-7555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7555","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=7555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7556,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7555\/revisions\/7556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}