The revolving doors in Whitehall have stopped spinning, with portfolios handed out and new teams in situ. The new government is in place and we are all waiting to see how their policies will play out.
I keep my politics to myself but as ever I am across the detail of the message like a rash.
To my rheumy eye, there are fairly few differences in dogma between the Conservatives and Labour, Rwanda apart. defence and foreign policy is much the same and Labour will try to get growth going and build houses for those who can afford them. There is a cigarette paper between the two parties, from a manifesto viewpoint.
The difference is a simple one. The reason Labour won such an astonishing majority had nothing whatever to do with what was on either side of that cigarette paper.
The Conservatives lost purely and simply because people had had enough of the scandal and the shame, from partygate to tractor porn, from mis-sold PPE to betting on the election date, from ducking out of D-Day to Barnard Castle. The SNP’s evisceration had nothing to do with independence, rather events in the back office and campervan.
I found it staggering that Rishi Sunak, who has more money than the Royal family, would want to be Prime Minister and lecture people about how to live when they can’t pay their gas bill. That was simply wrong and people the length and breadth of the land thought so too.
This season I have promised myself to pop down to watch Rhu Amateurs or zip along the road to take in a Dumbarton game.
Time was, I would be all across football, but even the European Championships are not giving me much cause for excitement.
A Rhu Amateurs game is on Mike Edwards' to-do list after he became disillusioned with the high level sporting action as seen on TV. (Image: Tom Watt)
And it has nothing to do with Scotland’s early exit, which was so predictable you could have set your watch by it. I have just lost interest in football in general, and this is down to my age and the realisation that it’s only a game and that money has destroyed it.
Never watching television, I noticed, more by accident than anything else, that Wimbledon is on. Again, I used to have a faint Murray-esque interest, but this too has waned.
I got fed up of TV cameras zooming off into the crowd to show what famous spectators were wearing while watching two people hammer a ball back and forth. My only relief is the knowledge that squash is even more repetitive.
Next comes the golf, and the dreariness is multiplied by the fact that this year’s Open is being hold at Troon. You get off the hook a bit when it’s at Sandwich or Hoylake. If people tell you they play golf, then that is all you really need to know about them. Then there’s golf clothing. Enough said.
And lo, the Olympics follows up to put the tin lid on a summer of sport I won’t be watching. I can’t think of anything more tedious than studying a group of people running around or throwing things.
That beach volleyball and skateboarding are Olympic sports says it all. I’ll always find something more entertaining to do.
So it’s Rhu Amateurs for me!
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