Mike's musings

On penalties

Not the way to go out, but we held it together quite well until then. I'm still not sure whether young Master Rooney actually meant to tread where he did, but if it _was_ his intention, then he deserved to be sent off. I thought we did pretty well to keep in it for as long as we did. Losing to Portugal on penalties brought back memories of a couple of years ago at Euro 2004, as it was then that we discovered that Moo was pregnant with little Josephine.

We discovered earlier in the week that Moo's Nana broke her wrist on Monday. Today we discovered that on the same day she broke her tibula and fibula. The original thought was that it was a broken ankle, but it's looking rather worse than that. Her right leg is now in plaster from her thigh to her toes. She's 90, and this is a pretty big deal. She spent quite a long time on a trolley in Nottingham hospital, and they tried to discharge her later on in the day, but she's finally been admitted, and we'll have to see how it goes. Prayers, please.

My parents have been with us today, and we've had a lovely time. Some very interesting discussions with Dad on women bishops and on homsexuality i the church, and also on judges and sentencing (their hands are pretty well tied, whatever the tabloids want to make out).

This morning, Mum, Moo, Jo and I went to Freeport (Dad needed to do some work), and had a lovely time. Jo was so busy pushing the pushchair around: the only problem being that she's about 2 foot too short to see where she's going, so has to be guided around. I was hoping to buy a shirt (failed), but Moo bought a number of things, and we also got some new outside chairs to replace the rather old ones which are there at the moment.

90 years on: the Battle of the Somme

One of the most bloody days of human conflict happened 90 years ago today: the first day of the battle of the Somme led to 60,000 allied casualties. There were over a million casualties over the five months of the battle (source here) across the opposing armies. It wasn't just British and German troops, but also French troops, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and Irishmen who were fighting with the British forces. I did a history project on the first day - 1st July 1916 - for O level, and have felt touched by it ever since. To give you an idea of the scale of the tragedy, you probably have around 100 people that you know fairly well. Think of all of them dying, and all of the people they know dying, doubled. That's the number of dead (20,000) on the Allied armies on this day, 90 years ago. And over five months, a million people. I personally find that unimaginable.