Kmflett's Blog

No Bank Holiday but does a Saint Monday beckon after the football?

Pub hours were extended until 1am on Sunday by the Home Secretary (who probably isn’t in Stoke Newington pub herself tonight) with the reasonable aim of allowing people to celebrate an England win in the Euros Final.

Of course there is a downside to that as racism and domestic violence are well known consequences of major England football games.

For the majority however the game will have been enjoyed, while noting Spain really were the better team.

There were calls for a Bank Holiday which won’t happen. However Saint Monday still could.

Until the 1871 Bank Holidays Act there was a tradition known as Saint Monday

The daily routines of working life are well-known and they date back to the imposition of industrial disciplines on what had been previously an agricultural workforce during the nineteenth century.

Labour was required to work machines and if it wasn’t available money was being lost.

There was a battle over hours and time (there still is of course) and artisanal and craft working practices were only slowly given up.

EP Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class records employers complaints about the working practices of weavers. They did not work on Sundays, or Mondays (Saint Monday) or often on Tuesdays either. Towards the end of the week and on to Saturday they worked ferociously hard.

Saint Monday was a day of leisure to rest and to drink.

Thompson speculates in his essay Time Work Discipline that bursts of hard work followed by periods of idleness and drinking, while not what employers want, may well conform to a much more natural working pattern than the daily grind of economic reality most now experience.

So perhaps its just human for many to enjoy a football related beer on Sunday evening and mark Saint Monday as a result

Anatomy of Gareth Southgate’s Beard: the road to Beard Power

Gareth Southgate grew a beard in 2015. He became England Men’s football manager in 2016 and since then he has become England’s most successful hirsute manager in history

2015 Southgate grows a beard

2016 Southgate appointed England manager

2018 World Cup semi-finals

2020 Euros Final

2022 World Cup quarter finals

2024 Euros Final

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, Gareth understands the importance of beards on the pitch. The presence they bring and the ability of follicles to subtly influence the direction of the ball. Footballing Beard Power is an art and one that Gareth is a master of

On 4th July Nigel Farage was elected, on his 8th attempt, as an MP, in this instance for Clacton. He stood for Reform UK, not a political party but a business of which Farage is the main shareholder.

On 8th July Farage visited Clacton, attended a meeting and posted shots of this on X.

What Farage did not post was any detail of when his Constituency Office will be set up or how his Clacton Constituents can contact him with issues.

Meanwhile Farage did announce that he is resuming his 3 times a week GB News show. So far he has managed one appearance in the UK and two from Milwaukee

On 14th July speaking not from Clacton but from a property in Westerham Kent, Farage announced that he was off to the US to attend this week’s Republican National Convention which has anointed Donald Trump as the Republican Presidential candidate. He flew to Milwaukee immediately after the King’s Speech on Wednesday, not bothering to remain for the start of the actual Parliamentary business-the debate on it. Other attenders at the RNC include Liz Truss, no longer an MP and trying to appear relevant and Boris Johnson who attracted a mass audience of 30 people to a fringe meeting.

Did Farage get to meet his friend Trump in Milwaukee? Er, no. Perhaps he would have been better off doing his actual job, attending the Commons and dealing with Clacton Constituency business

I’ve posted several times about Harold Wilson’s 1966 remark that England only win football championships under a Labour Government. Wilson’s remark was a joke, although less so in 1970 when England’s early exit from that year’s World Cup caused Wilson and Tony Benn concern about the impact on Labour’s vote in the 1970 Election (Labour lost).

Of course at this point similar competitions for women’s football did not exist. They do now and the Lionesses have a better record than England’s men.

The letter in the Guardian (13th July) makes the point

 I wish to point out that England have already won the Euros (Starmer raises hopes of extra bank holiday if England win Euros, 11 July), and have played in a World Cup final. Can the Guardian demand that we women have our public holiday now?
Jenny Stewart
Wroxall, Isle of Wight

14th July

Stella is right about Borsetshire Land: Nationalise it under workers control

Stella has been trying to convince the Board of Borsetshire Land to move with the agricultural times rather than just what makes them personally the most money. She had limited success despite socialising with the Board members after a meeting. She confessed to Stella that she felt she was selling her soul. She is right. Furthermore Dave Archer has agreed with her…

Starmer

When will Ambridge notice that Bufton Tufton is no longer their MP and that there is a Labour Government. Which Ambridge resident will opine on it??

George topless

George is topless this week having been involved in haymaking. Apparently he is trying to attract Tilly Button but still has an aversion to fruit cider. Archers chat streams focus a lot on George, nothing complimentary, but ultimately he is still a Grundy

Alistair, Denise & John too

John has finally appeared in Ambridge and drawn the conclusion that Alistair and Denise may be special friends. How long has this been going on as Ace used to sing.

Alice is in Rehab

Again see Archers chatboards….

For the few not the many. Tony Blair & Boris Johnson at the wedding of the son of Asia’s richest man

While Tony Blair has been making quite a few of his rare interventions recently advising the new Government on various issues including a re-run of his digital ID cards nostrum, he also has other matters in hand.

While Keir Starmer will be in Berlin for the football on Sunday, Blair is in Mumbai attending the wedding of the son of Asia’s richest man. Anant Ambani is the son of the chair of Reliance industries. He is marrying Radhika Merchant the daughter of pharma tycoons.

No doubt Blair is there on personal business and probably looked for contacts for the Blair Institute. That of course is fine (allowing for the rich v poor issue) but doesn’t fit too well with someone offering thoughts on how to improve life for ordinary people in the UK.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5x22w0xl0o

The BBC reports that the partying will go on all weekend. At the same time the Durham miners gala took place an event Blair never attended even when he was a local MP.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5x22w0xl0o

While Cherie & Tony Blair attended they were at least stylishly dressed. Boris Johnson was also there with Carrie Johnson (we must presume all expenses paid as usual) but managed to rock the ‘my old man’s a dustman’ look

A day at the Lords Test

I’ve been going to home Test Matches since I was a boy (in the 1960s since you ask). For many years I attended with my late father, in more recent times with my partner Megan.

Back in the day you just turned up on the day and paid on the gate. The only sell outs I recall were for Ashes games. The seats were uncomfortable and the facilities rudimentary.

Of course these days you have to apply for tickets on the web many months in advance and in the case of Lords show them on the Lords App to gain entry.

Megan and myself were at the second day of the Lords Test lastThursday. It was Jimmy Anderson’s last England Test and unusually there was decent weather. We had restricted view seats in the Mound Stand. Ticket prices at Lords are steepish but less for reduced view and tbh the view was hardly reduced. In fact we had an excellent view of the wicket.

It was my first Test since 2019. Obviously the pandemic intervened  but so did the whole issue of racism in cricket. Obviously I knew about it but it didn’t directly impact me (as a 67 year old white man with a beard) and so I avoided thinking about it too much. Once I did think about it I continued to avoid Tests.

Thursday at Lords was a sell out and while I was watching the cricket the conversations I could hear were ones not happy about Farage and perhaps rather too keen on Starmer..

We got to see Jimmy Anderson’s last bat for England (not that he did, he was nought not out without facing a ball) and saw him take wickets in the West Indies second innings. Ben Stokes achieved a record for Test runs and wickets combined and the new keeper Smith of Surrey looked decent with the bat and behind the stumps.

The match lasted only just to lunch on the third day where five were available and it was one sided. There is an issue with Test cricket and the West Indies side, decent at short form cricket, seem to be struggling with the longer form, perhaps in part from lack of games.

Finally it was a Test against the West Indies and the crowd was overwhelmingly white. Those of Caribbean provenance were mostly working not watching. This didn’t use to be the case. It wasn’t much commented on in media reports of the match but there is a huge amount to be done in sorting this. I’m not sure that its being done, well meaning efforts aside.

Still it was good to be back at Lords.

Mr Johnson is in Mumbai for a wedding (not his own)

The 75th anniversary of NATO was marked in 2024. Its worth keeping in mind that while there is a Labour tradition of support for Atlanticism and NATO, going back to the Attlee Government and including the 2024 Labour Government there has also been a left-wing tradition of opposition to it. That opposition is based perhaps primarily on the point that its existence makes war not less likely but more likely. It tries to define a Western perspective which as E P Thompson (Countermarching to Armageddon, New Left Review 1/4 July/August 1960) is exclusive not inclusive

There are two banners which I’m damned if we should let the Armageddon contingents carry off—“Europe”, and “the West”. Who gave them the right to speak in the name of a Europe from which Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Moscow and the majority of the French and Italian working-class have been exorcised? Or a “West” which has no place for the Western traditions of Marx and the Communards, Clydeside engineers and Hamburg dockers, Tom Mann and Jaurès, French maquis and Yugoslav partisans?

Of course since Thompson wrote these words 64 years ago NATO has expanded and ‘western’ now includes a good deal of ‘eastern’ Europe. His point about subsuming or ignoring genuine traditions of internationalism maintains

The Starmers & the Downing St cat issue. Update

Since Keir Starmer became PM we know he has been in Washington to see Biden and that he will be in Berlin on Sunday for the football. His partner Victoria has been horse racing.

Updates on the most important question of the Starmer’s move into Downing St have been harder to come by.

There have been media suggestions that 17 year old mouser Larry the Cat is set to be purged from Downing St.

Keir Starmer and family do have a female cat called JoJo. In an interview in April he noted that his children were more friendly to the cat than they were to him. A familiar syndrome hardly unique to the Labour leader and PM.

Tom Baldwin’s biography of Starmer makes reference to him extracting JoJo from a fight in the back garden and getting a scratch on his thumb as a result.

Some reports have suggested that the Starmers intend to move JoJo from Kentish Town to Downing St. However the Times (13^th July) reports that JoJo may stay put in NW5, presumably with a cat minder, and that if she does make to the move to No.10 she will have to behave.

Victoria Starmer is quoted in the Sunday Times (7th July) as being concerned how Larry and JoJo will get along.

Sorting this out is surely Keir Starmer’s key 100 day mission