James Proclaims!

As predicted in a recent post, writing this blog on my phone while supervising my children in the garden is becoming the norm.

As I sit here sipping my second beer of the afternoon, Little Proclaims is making some kind of concoction on the patio (or what passes for a patio in my ramshackle abode) which seems to be composed largely of soil but also contains grass and bubble mixture. It looks like mud to me but I’m hardly a connoisseur.

Mini Proclaims has just discarded the second of the bananas that I have given her since she awoke from her nap. The first was accidentally lost to the lawn. The second was lost to her sudden indifference to bananas. I console myself in the knowledge that they were both on the turn and would have been disposed of soon if not eaten. But I know I would happily have eaten both prior to their denouement and so my youngest child’s wasteful nature is a little irritating. But she is only two. So, I shouldn’t take it personally. Nonetheless sometimes it’s hard not to take it a bit personally.

Regular readers will be thrilled to know my rotary washing line is seeing some action. It is actually in the midst of its maiden voyage, because the weather and my laundry schedule have not synced up especially well since I bought the thing. Mainly because the weather has been awful. It seems to be adopting a ‘tower of Pisa’ vibe but it is standing firm so I’m optimistic there will be further opportunities to dry laundry ‘rotary-style’ in the coming weeks.

The ‘coming weeks’ for me will be mainly June-based, as I’m still some weeks ahead in my blogging schedule. In my present the UK general election is still almost a month away and the European football championship (known as the Euros to the aficionados) has yet to kick off. At the time of writing, I’m predicting that the Conservative Party will not win the election and the England football team will not win the Euros.

I would like to be proven wrong on the latter of these predictions.

England is not actually my team as such, having grown up in Wales but I do live in England at present and I was technically born in England, even if I moved to Wales at the tender age of six weeks old. The fact that Wales rarely qualify for major tournaments has meant England has oft been my default team over the years. On paper they should have a decent chance of bringing home the trophy but as I type these words into my handheld device, they have recently lost to relative minnows Iceland in a pre-tournament friendly, which doesn’t bode well. It’s not quite as ignominious as when they lost to the same opponents in the 2016 iteration of the Euros (a tournament that Wales not only managed to turn up for but also made the semi-finals in a run which defied all reasonable expectations) but it does suggest that Gareth Southgate’s team won’t be holding the trophy aloft on July 14^th. Nonetheless, on the day I’m composing this (whatever ‘this’ is), it remains possible that England will be the winners of Euro24.

It is also theoretically possible that Rishi Sunak will still be the UK prime minister. Sitting here on June 8^th , that does seem highly unlikely though. He does, at present, seem to be actively trying to lose the election, so if he is still prime minister when this hits the blogosphere then he probably deserves to be, because he will have run a hell of a campaign to turn around his current position. Obviously, I do hope he has lost. My natural cynicism makes me wary of believing any politician can really make a positive difference to the country and so I’m not overwhelmed with optimism at the prospect of a Keir Starmer government, but my political persuasions have always led me to view the Tories as the bad guys and over the last 14 years they’ve done nothing to dissuade me of this opinion.

I’m not sure what the point of any of what I have written actually is. Other than the realisation that writing blog posts in advance might well be a good way to ensure that the blog keeps ticking along, but it makes any attempt to remain topical with my output almost entirely redundant.

Fortunately, these days my blog mainly seems to be about being the dad of two small children. And whatever the reality is with regards politics or sport on the day this post is published, I am quietly confident that I will still be sitting in the garden fairly regularly, a garden in which my daughters, bubbles, mud and (if I’m lucky) a nice cold beer will all feature.