The evening before last, I settled down to watch some football and viewed the Switzerland vs. Bosnia game. The first half was pretty tame and pedestrian and the score of 0:0 persisted until the now mandatory hydration (= drinks) break half way through the second half. Then the Swiss brought on a new young striker and the game was transformed as the young striker scored twice whivh is the first time an under 21 year old has done so in the history of the World Cup. The score finished up at 4:1 to Switzerland and a boring match was completely transformed into a really exciting spectacle. Earlier, after an afternoon that had proved pretty disastrous as I failed to make a rendez-vous for my Classical Musical Appreciation group, I had cut the back lawn and then had a terrible few moments as I thought I had mislaid the bunch of keys upon which is the garage key that I use to access the petrol mower. The keys were not in their mug which is their usual home in our kitchen and so I was distraught hunting out where they might be. After a frantic search which seemed to go on for ever, I discovered that I had put them into the second mug in which I keep keys and bits-and-bobs but they had sunk out of sight which is why I failed to see them in my initial search. Earlier in the evening, I had received a text from my very dear friend in Spain reminding me that I had promised to send her a long email detailing the life I was making for myself after Meg’s departure so I wrote a long, long email to my friend describing my U3A activities and my new American friend and expressing the hope that we might manage to come to Spain in February (as a break in the horrible British winter) and asking for the most convenient two weeks in which to make our trip. I also took the opportunity to send practically the same email to my equally dear Madrid friend who had come over to say her farewells to Meg and managed to arrive (via Paris) just an hour and half before Meg actually died. The political news was dominated by the news of Andy Burnham’s outstanding win in the Makerfield by-election which means that as now an MP. he is in a position to challenge Starmer for the leadership of the Labour Party. Burnham secured about 25,000 votes and his nearest challenger the Reform candidate got about 16,000 votes so the margin of victory was huge. What is sometimes ignored, or at least underplayed by the London-based media, is that traditional Labour voters will complain that they have not left the Labour Party as they vote for right wing alternatives such as Reform but that the Labour party has left them. It is extraordinary and mentioned in this blog before that the last ‘Northern’ leader of the Labour party was Harold Wilson half a century ago. In the meantime, the Labour party has been led either by Celts or by a London based metropolitan elite as it took its traditional base for granted (to its eventual cost) and pursued the more affluent middle-class voter in the South of England. So, the Burnham victory is a vindication of the theory that the traditional base of the Labour party had been ignored for decades but now traditional voters could ‘return to the fold’ as there was a very real possibility of a Labour party leader with Northern roots for the first time in living memory. Now the media is pre-occupied with the speculation of the exact time at which Starmer will make a strike for the leadership of the Labour party but this is bound to happen, either sooner or later. Most political commentators will argue that the Labour party could not hope to win the next election under Keir Starmer but with a newly elected leader they are now in with a fighting chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the morning, my American friend journeyed to Solihull and called in a very beautiful and well-heeled town called Knowle in order to find a wonderful coffee shop which Meg and used to patronise but some years ago. This had now gone and was replaced by an inferior establishment but we sauntered around some of the specialist shops and then finally had a coffee in what was dubbed a French bakery, which also served coffees. We then successfully navigated our way to the John Lewis carpark in the centre pf Solihull and once securely parked made for the TV department. There, my American friend and I received some very good specialist advice and are almost decided upon what model my friend would like to replace her 17 year old Panasonic Then we made our way to the restaurant where we both had a simple meal of quiche accompanied by salad and bottle elderflower press\u00e9 to wash it down After we had our lunch, we wandered down one of the main thoroughfares of Solihull which was now populated by a series of stalls selling a whole variety of ‘street food’ finally ending up in the hardware store of Robert Dyas. These stores are like an Aladdin’s cave of kitchen and hardware goods, and we both treated ourselves to a series of four coloured cutting boards (differently coloured to avoid cross contamination between meat, poultry, fish and vegetables) In addition, I could not resist buying. a heavily discounted bamboo cutting board to replace my nylon one which must be well over ten tears old by now. After another mocha coffee, we trekked back through the Touchwood centre (where my friend could not resist acquiring some samples from some of the perfume shops) and then we picked up the car and made out way back home. The journey back was very slow, dominated by end-of-the-week slow moving traffic and it took us well over an hour to get home. Once home, we treated ourselves to a pleasant sit in the back garden and cooled ourselves down with some ice-cream as the weather was pretty hot and humid. My friend and I then finalised some plans for the vegetables to accompany a joint Sunday lunch where I had already bought an unsmoked gammon joint. I promised her that I would not forget the Yorkshire puddings on this occasion as I did when we had a roast beef meal but the weather threatens to be very warm so the joint will probably get the slow cooker overnight treatment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The evening before last, I settled down to watch some football and viewed the Switzerland vs. Bosnia game. The first half was pretty tame and pedestrian and the score of 0:0 persisted until the now mandatory hydration (= drinks) break half way through the second half. Then the Swiss brought on a new young striker […]<\/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-8356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8356","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=8356"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8358,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8356\/revisions\/8358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}