Last night, I watched (or rather dozed through) the closing ceremonies of the Olympic games in Paris. This was conducted with traditional French flair and at the end of the ceremonies there was the traditional hand over of the Olympic flag to the next host city which is going to be Los Angeles in the USA in 2028. All of the American razzmatazz was in evidence in the hand over ceremony and I don’t think I will enjoy the excess of Americana to which we will be exposed in four years time. The commentators are saying this morning that the Olympic games will not return to Europe for at least sixteen years (the next two games to be held in USA and then Australia in 2028 and 2032) and in 2036 it will probably be the turn of the Asian continent to host the games. I would imagine that after years of striving and then succeeding in their various disciplines, many of the athletes may experience a massive ‘post-Olympic’ blues. I remember the feeling after I had working hard for my finals in 1968 and suddenly, all you have been working for has realised. There is some concern that whilst Team GB have exceeded the last Olympic medals haul by 1, the number of gold medals gained is markedly down. But there have been several instances in both athletics and swimming where the margins between success and victory have been incredibly small. Just as a small end note to the Paris Olympics, one of Meg’s carers told me with a certain amount of glee that some 300,000 condoms have supplied for the use of approx 5,000 male athletes which works out at 60 per athlete. If it was a female planner ordering these supplied, I wonder if she was suffering from an excess of caution – on the other hand, if it was a male planner, it might have been an excess of optimism. I wonder if we will ever know what proportion were actually used?
Today being a Monday, Meg and I are to make a trip to ‘The Lemon Tree‘ which is now a part of our Monday morning routines. The care workers are due to call half an hour earlier today in their late morning comfort call so I am advancing our normal timetable by half an hour. It looks as though two tremendously hot days are in prospect for us followed (hopefully!) by some thunderstorms. So thunder was rolling across the sky when Meg and I were preparing our venture out but the thunderclouds had rolled on once we actually got underway. The weather, though, was incredibly humid and after our tea and toasted teacake in our newfound cafe, we got home to the relative cool of the house. The push up and down the hill had proved to be so humid that when we got home, I needed to change into a tee shirt and shorts, putting my other clothes straight into the wash. On the way home, I acquired a wonderful little (red) Squirrel Nutkin badged for the Rothsay Manor hotel in Ambleside, which is a little toy/plaything that may help to divert Meg on occasions. We could not really fancy a conventional cooked meal so I took the cold beef which was cooked yesterday and made a salad of it using grated carrots, tomato and choose. To the grated carrots I add a few walnuts and soma sultanas to make it all a little more interesting and appetising.
I have come across an American website called ‘Alternet’ and on this website there is an article asking the question why the media is not calling out the evident and growing signs of dementia exhibited by Donald Trump. His behaviour, outbursts, speech patterns and grasp on reality are now leading to a slew of commentators asking questions about Trump’s hold on reality but the same concern has not made it yet to this side of the Atlantic. One commentator has observed that his description of his departure from the White House as a ‘peaceful’ transfer of power, his insistence that the group that mounted the assault on the Capitol was relatively small, and his boast that attendance at his January 6 rally preceding the assault was larger than the crowd Martin Luther King Jr. drew on the National Mall for his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech all point to a presidential candidate who is seriously unhinged. Amongst various claims are that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, is ‘very smart.’ That whales are being killed by windmills. That he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. That the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed. We could go on but the Democrats are certainly tapping into this growing feeling by using the term ‘weird’ to describe both Trump and his coterie. Even Republican strategists are concerned that Trump does not seem to be campaigning in the crucial ‘swing’ states where the latest polls put Kamala Harris some 4% ahead. It is also being said that Trump cannot cope with the fact that he is being outgunned not just by a woman but by a black woman (and Trump in characteristic stye has attacked her racial origins rather than her policies) Kamala Harris does not come with the same baggage as did Hillary Clinton at the time of the last presidential elections and now that Biden has departed from the race there is only one old (and increasingly senile) candidate left in the race.
I was a little distressed to learn today, that Graham Thorpe who died recently had suffered from a major anxiety and depression two years ago and attempted to take his own life. His recent demise may have been related to this but the full facts have just been released by his widow. For some reason, perhaps unexplored, cricketers are particularly prone to depression but I cannot be sure of the causal factors or triggers in this case. As a more general point, whereas sportsmen and women by definition are in a good physical shape when they are in their prime, I wonder whether their pursuit of their sport pushes their bodies to the limit and whether they consequently die younger than the rest of the population? I have read of some respectable research that indicates that famous sports stars, singers, dancers and actors all tend to show that the price for making it big in performance terms may be a shorter life.
© Mike Hart [2024]