I understand it has got quite hot in the last couple of weeks in Bahrain. It’s not where I am!
Back in the UK in Welsh Wales, the Vallies to be more precise, it is cold. It is June and the natives are wandering around in their short sleeve shirts and linen trousers but in my house the heating is on.
I have thin blood I am used to normal temperatures being in the 40s in June and its only 14º C here today. This is a bit strange because when I was here in February it was over 20º C. Proof indeed that the world’s weather is going topsy turvy.
The other thing that is topsy turvy at the moment are British politics, or to be more precise the Conservative party. Now that Teresa May has resigned as leader there are a whole host of candidates for the job, as whoever gets it will automatically become Prime Minister.
They are a motley crew with the two favourites being a serial breaker of promises and a self-confessed druggie. The rest are nothing to write home about either, but are all promising that if elected they will take Britain out of Europe even without a deal. I do not know how they are going to do that because without a general election they have to deal with the same parliament that refused to back any of Teresa’s deals.
Parliament has already ruled that the UK cannot leave the EU without a deal in place. So it’s all going to be pretty much of the same nonsense that has gone before. I was listening to a senior political journalist on the radio and when asked who he thought would make the best Prime Minister he said Teresa May!
You may find this hard to believe, but this is not the biggest topic of conversation amongst the people at the moment. The public are scandalised by the BBC’s decision to scrap free TV licenses for pensioners and will now make them pay £154.50 a year, a considerable sum when you are living on a bare bone pension.
The BBC is trying to distract the public by wall to wall coverage of the Woman’s World Cup on in France, but no matter how hard they try the public are just not interested in it. Football is a game played by men or more specifically the men in the 20 teams in the English premiership. That’s who the vast majority of football fans support.
The BBC are claiming that they are screening all the women’s games live. Yes, they are, but on BBC4, a channel that most people don’t even know exists or if they did how do you receive it. If the BBC were as supportive as they say they are then why are the games not on BBC1? Because if they were, then the viewing public would switch over to ITV in their millions.
A well-known football pundit explained it this way. In the premiership when a player receives the ball he has a nanosecond to decide what to do with it and pass it, such is the pace of the game. As you progress down the leagues reaction times are longer and the game is not so fast.
In the women’s game they could make a cup of tea before having to decide what to do with it. Maybe it will get better but American women have been playing ‘soccer’ for a long time now, and although they are probably the best team in the world they’d be lucky to get a turnout for a decent pub team.