Canada Day and the Fourth of July have made me jealous.
We need a special holiday to do English things. Like drinking tea, talking about the weather, overcooking vegetables and being casually rude about the Welsh for no obvious reason.
» In tatters, posted to Flickr by geraintwn and used under a Creative Commons attribution licence.
Full, slightly overblown title: Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory. This is a book about the relationship between England and Holland in the C17th. It’s an interesting period, of course: the C17th was Holland’s ‘Golden Age’, when the country was not only a wealthy global power but at the intellectual and especially artistic forefront of Europe. For [...]
The full title is The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714; i.e. the century in question is the longish C17th from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Queen Anne. I guess most centuries are centuries of revolution somewhere, and in one way or another, but the C17th was the only time the English have had an actual [...]
Well, today the Capello era really gets started. After two months of blissfully fact-free speculation, conjecture, analysis and day-dreaming, we have to get down to the sordid reality of playing actual football.
Even after the match, it’ll be too soon to tell much really. Not that that’ll stop the pundits. Obviously they have to offer some [...]
Wales beat England at rugby this afternoon, which (don’t tell my father) I quite enjoyed. I keenly support England when they’re playing South Africa, Australia, New Zealand or France, but against other teams I often find myself rooting for the opposition.
I guess it’s largely support for the underdog (today was Wales’s first win at Twickenham [...]
I had a bad feeling before the match, but I wasn’t expecting it to go quite the way it did. I was worried that playing a 4-5-1 and only needing a draw, England would defend deeper and deeper, as they so often have recently, only to be caught out by a goal too late to [...]
There’s serious flooding in Yorkshire at the moment. I found this brilliant photo on Flickr:
Surfer on Chants Ave!, originally uploaded by Dave Foy.
The Daily Mail asks an unusually reasonable question on their front page today—why do we keep building new houses on flood plains? The trouble is that Britain is a small, rainy island; there [...]
Two Lives is a biography of Seth’s great-uncle and aunt. They met in the 30s in Berlin when Shanti Seth was studying dentistry and took lodgings with the (Jewish) Caro family. Henny Caro was one of the daughters of the house and at the time was engaged to someone else; but after the war they [...]
Flickr set of the week is 163 Beach Huts by psymon1962.
Hut 41.
Hut 40.
Hut 39.
If Peter Crouch didn’t spend the first half hour of a game treating defenders to his best imitation of a mountaineer trying to swarm up the north face of the Eiger, he might be more likely to get decisions going in his favour later.
Shaun Wright-Phillips and Kieron Dyer have both still got the qualities that [...]
All the coverage about the position of soccer in the US, and whether Beckham moving there will have any impact, had me thinking. If his new home ground is only half-full, he’ll still be playing in front of about 13,000 fans. It’s true, that’s not very many compared to the Bernabéu or Old Trafford, but [...]
Via bookofjoe; the OED and BBC are repeating their exercise of inviting the public to try and find earlier citations for various words. It’s a somewhat interesting idea but, having seen some of the last series: the results don’t make for riveting television.
What I found interesting was a couple of things from the Washington Post [...]
I was watching Antiques Roadshow at the weekend and some chap brought in an C18th* English silver sauce boat. The expert got excited because it was a rare early example; apparently before that point English food rarely had sauces but it was about then that some people started employing French cooks.
So far, reasonable enough and [...]
From Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That:
24 June, 1915, Versailles. This afternoon we had a cricket match, officers v. sergeants, in an enclosure between some houses out of observation from the enemy. Our front line is three-quarters of a mile away. I made top score, 24; the bat was a bit of a rafter, the [...]
Well I’ve still been thinking, on and off, about that list of ten books to explain the UK. Which is an interesting exercise.
I quickly decided to eliminate Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Not that I have anything against the Celtic Fringe, but it was complicated enough dealing with Englishness. There’s no difficulty in finding ten [...]
What a complete farce. I just hope the England players and management have the sense to keep their heads down and stay out of the argument as much as possible. Let Pakistan and the ICC sort it out between themselves.
EDIT: Simon Barnes is good on this.
Talking about cricket and politics yesterday, one thing I didn’t mention was Norman Tebbit’s famous ‘cricket test’. Tebbit is a Conservative politician, and in an interview in 1990, he said
A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you [...]
The lark’s on the wing,
The snail’s on the thorn,
Harmison is on fire,
Panesar is taking key wickets,
Pietersen is holding his catches,
God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
As I’m sure Browning meant to say.
Well, it’s been a dreadful World Cup for England. Normally, despite the disappointment of going out, there’s some glorious memory – beating Argentina in 2002, Owen’s wondergoal in 98, Gazza and Platt and Lineker in 90 – but this has been grim. No classic matches, no great new players, no win against a good team. Joe [...]
Sorry, I know it’s been all football all the time here recently. I promise I’ll resume the normal diet of half-baked arts commentary soon.
I seem to be the only person who was vaguely cheered by the Ecuador game and was left with an impression that England are getting better, even if only in teeny increments. [...]