It is perhaps of no surprise the football dominated the evening before last. England were facing DR Congo and I, for one, was not surprised when DR Congo took the lead in the 7th minute after a lamentable defence which seems to be the England trademark these days. The England performance improved for the rest of the game, but it was difficult to break the opposition defence until a Harry Kane header in the last quarter of an hour. So it was a nervous match to watch but once England had equalised, the winner was scored by Harry Kane, only 4 minutes from the end of normal time. Kane scored a brilliant captain’s goal by rounding two or three defenders and then unleashing an unstoppable volley to secure the ultimate victory. However celebrations may be very short-lived as our next match will be against one of the co-hosts, Mexico who will be playing ‘at home’ as it were in the Azteca stadium in Mexico City and at an altitude of 2,200 metres and England has only 48 hours in which to acclimatise. This combination of circumstances massively complicates the probability of another England victory and I expect an early England exit. The match does not start until about 1.00am on Monday morning so I wonder how many will actually be watching it. The other football match was Senegal vs. Belgium in which Senegal undoubtedly playing the better football throughout the majority of the match, making the Belgians appear tired and disorganised. Senegal were two goals up and apparently cruising to victory when Belgium unexpectedly scored two goals in the last five minutes of normal time to level the scores. After two periods of extra time, Belgian was awarded a hotly disputed penalty after a VAR review of what appeared to be a foul on the goalkeeper. If there was contact, it was very slight but nonetheless the referee awarded the penalty from which Belgium scored with an impressive shot that secured a 3:2 victory. One could only sympathise with the Senegalese who had so completely outplayed Belgium for so much of the match only to see victory snatched away from them in the dying seconds of the game. I suppose the moral of all of this is not to relax, even when victory seems minutes away and to reflect that the better team does not always win matches, particularly in the World Cup. To make matters worse for the Senegalese, almost exactly the same thing had happened in the regional African cup when Morocco had secured a victory against them. But we can reflect on the fact that England will almost certiainly be knocked out in the Mexico match and we can look forward to a final which I predict will be Argentina vs France. The day promises to be quite a busy one as I have my Tai Chi class quite early in the morning and this will be followed by a Spanish conversation class early in the afternoon so I shall have to organise a lighter, high-speed lunch for myself in the middle of the day. I have looked at the longer range weather forecasts and it looks as though another spell of hot (but not intensely hot) weather is heading our way so in the next days we may seem temperatures of 28\u00b0 which seems quite tolerable after the experiences of the last week of June. The year seems to be racing away with us and I suppose we should enjoy the summer whilst it persists and reflect upon the fact that the nights will only start to get a bit longer from this point on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After my Tai Chi class, I had my normal coffee but forego the toasted teacake or the biscuits in which I used to indulge. Whilst I was in conversation with members of the charity table, one of the regulars gave another one a copy of the printed brochure advertising all o the concerts and events in the Bromsgrove festival which goes on for about a fortnight in late June and early July. Wondering where I might get hold of a concert programme, I decided to pay a visit to our local town library where I was directed to a stand with copies of the brochure. Whilst I was there, I availed myself of a couple of copies of the Bromsgrove Festival brochure and other leaflets advertising local events – when I got home, I made up two piles of leaflets, one for myself and the other for my American friend so that we cam peruse the leaflets at our leisure and decide what local events we wish to patronise. I did notice with particular pleasure that a concert is being provided free in our local Anglican church (which is sufficiently large and capacious to be a sort of mini-Cathedral for the town) by a father and daughter duo who are well known local musicians in the area, the father playing a keyboard whilst the daughter is a violinist. They are going to be playing the JS Bach Brandenberg concertos Nos. 3,4 and 5 and of course these will sound magnificent given the acoustics of the church. The whole is advertised as a ‘Coffee and Cakes’ concert and is provided free of charge including refreshments but voluntary contributions are invited and judged by past events, the audience are generous in their contributions. So this is certainly a ‘must’ for me this weekend and I remember attending a similar event last year which on that occasion felt particularly strange as I attended the concert on my own. I had to have a fairly quick and thrown together type of lunch because it was the afternoon of my U3A Conversational Spanish group. We have quite a loose format to these meetings because the convenor will put on a couple of short but instructional Spanish videos explaining the usage of some verbs or idioms and this forms the basis of subsequent discussions. But we often stray off the point and discuss whatever we want which occurs to use as one thought sparks of another and this format seems to suit us quite well as the point is to develop whatever facilities we have in the language. After the class I was over, I spent a long time in conversation outside the community hall with one of my fellow class members (mainly on political topics) and at the end of our extended conversation was amazed to discover that he attended the same church as I do and had actually spotted me and my American friend within the church when we attended the song concert given by schoolchildren on Tuesday last.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is perhaps of no surprise the football dominated the evening before last. England were facing DR Congo and I, for one, was not surprised when DR Congo took the lead in the 7th minute after a lamentable defence which seems to be the England trademark these days. The England performance improved for the rest of […]<\/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-8389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8389","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=8389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8390,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8389\/revisions\/8390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}