Not so much from the pool as from the changing room. A very English discussion about the weather. It has been very hot. And the talk went on from the temperature to the brown grass in the parks.

“Burgess Park is even more brown than Kennington Park.”

“Kennington Park is really brown. I’ve never seen it like this before.”

“It’s the same everywhere. It’s really brown.”

“Clapham Common is brown.”

And then, “It’s a total disgrace. The government has done nothing about it. The government’s a disgrace!”

There was a pause. Then, from the corner, a voice, quite quietly, “I don’t think even Boris doing a rain dance could make it rain.” And from another, “Or Jeremy Corbyn.”

It used to be an ‘Act of God’ and God could take it. It’s a bit tricky if you don’t have God to blame.

“Wasn’t it great,” one of my fellow swimmers said as we waited in the changing room for our 11.00am Public Swimming session to begin.
“What?” I said.
“You mean you didn’t watch it!” he said in disbelief.
“Watch what?” I asked, realising that any credibility I might have had as a fellow human being was rapidly disappearing.
“The football! Last night! At Wembley! The women’s football! We won!”
And I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could, “Yes of course,” and “It was great.”
I don’t think he was convinced.

And that win by a team of women included him and me, two elderly men who have never played football in our lives, and the whole nation. It included me even though I hadn’t watched it on television. Over 17 million people had watched it on television. That ‘We won!’ was repeated across the country and brought smiles to people’s faces and lifted their spirits. It was a fact. The Lionesses won and we all won and we all rejoiced.

Of course the win was covered repeatedly by the media and the aftermath is still being covered and people are still buoyed up by it.

So why do the editors of the news choose, on the hour every hour, to present us, almost exclusively, with the negatives, with news of murder, death, distress and disaster? And what does that news do to us as people?

THANK YOU

I have tried to send this email to Sainsbury’s.

‘Please pass on this information to the appropriate management.
Near me where I live in Kennington is a ‘Payless’ and a Tesco Express. Over the years I have used both. Recently I discovered, at Elephant and Castle, a Sainsbury’s Local. It is much further away. The shop is well designed and uncrowded and it seems to have much of what I need. I have now shopped there frequently not least because all the staff, the security guard, the check out staff and other staff have been unfailingly pleasant, polite and helpful. For an older person such as myself this makes all the difference.
Thank you.
Simon Acland’

I sent it to customer.service@sainsburys.co.uk. It was returned with the information that this mailbox is no longer in use and referred me to the ‘Help Centre’. Nowhere on the Help Centre website is there a contact by email. There’s Twitter and Facebook and there’s a phone number with recorded options none of which remotely fit what I was trying to do. Even the option for Instore shopping gives a list, not in any order I could see, of every London Sainsbury’s store – and there are a lot – and I couldn’t find Elephant and Castle. All this investigating and tapping on the iPad and even telephoning Sainsbury’s Head Office – another recording giving phone numbers I’d already tried, that had more recorded options – took three quarters of an hour
Eventually, by pretending I had an issue with an order, I had a person on the end of the line. For the first time a real human being not a recording. He was in India and was most helpful. He gave me an email address. It was customer.service@sainsburys.co.uk.

I’m still trying to say thank you.

P.S. I succeeded. Well, partly. I was able to send it as a complaint to the complaints department. I had an acknowledgement – an automatic reply telling me that my ‘complaint’ had been received and that I would receive a response within five working days. I await the response.

The concert at the Royal Albert Hall on the evening of Friday 22^nd July as part of the BBC Proms was wonderful. Well, I enjoyed it, and it had excellent reviews. It was ‘Music For Royal Occasions’, and included a fanfare by Sir Arthur Bliss, onetime Master of the Queen’s Music as well as ‘I love all beauteous things’, by Judith Weir, the current Master of the Queen’s Music.

There was also Parry’s Coronation Anthem ‘I was glad’ as well as Benjamin Britten’s  Courtly Dances from ‘Gloriana’ and even Pastime with good companie by Henry VIII. And there was much more given to us by the BBC Singers and the BBC Concert Orchestra.

In the programme notes for Handel’s Coronation Anthem ‘Zadok the Priest’ I was intrigued to read:

‘It says everything about the essentially cosmopolitan nature of Britishness that our best-known patriotic anthem – a work performed at every coronation since its composition in 1727, and synonymous with the British monarchy – should have been written by a foreigner.’

Elsewhere in the same entry in that programme I read that Handel lived in England for nearly half a century and was officially naturalised by George I.

I have dual nationality and hold a British passport as well as a New Zealand passport. I’ve lived in London less than forty years. There are very many other naturalised Brits who’ve lived here an even shorter time.

Who or what makes someone a foreigner? And why?

The Sunday of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Weekend, Is shaping up to be a busy one for me . I have been invited to a neighbourhood party in Cleaver Square to celebrate the Jubilee. There’s going to be a hog roast.

It will also be Father Paul’s last Sunday as Vicar of St Agnes as he is retiring. No doubt there will be a presentation of some sort during or after the Solemn Mass.

And, also on that Sunday, I’ve been invited to a book launch by my good friend and neighbour Ginny Burdon. It’s of her book ‘Stalker – a Wall of Silence’ which is based on a real life event,
‘A hysterical woman explodes onto the stage at the end of a performance of a famous composer’s opera in the belief that she is his wife. This story tracks her progression from stalker to full-blown delusion, and her journey into madness. Trapped in the drama is a 12-year-old girl, the woman’s piano student, who as an adult tries to solve the mystery of what became of her. Who was this mystery woman, why did she seemingly disappear without trace, and why the wall of silence.’*

Three very different events on the same day and each will be celebrated with Bread and Wine. It’s the way of earth and of heaven.

*The book is being publishes by SilverWood Books and will be available at book shops from June 1st.

Last Thursday I gave a talk to the Fitzroy Society at Harrow School. I went by Uber as I’d strained my Achilles’ tendon – walking and stairs were a bit of a problem. For the same reason I took a walking stick, one I’d inherited. It has, near the top, a gold band in which is engraved T. D. ACLAND from R.W. 1909. I have no idea who R.W. was. The T.D. was Cousin Theodore the husband of Cousin Mary.

After the talk I was taken to see the Harrow schoolroom, 1571. It is the schoolroom of John Lyon’s foundation, and still contains the original furniture including the forms on which the first generation of Harrow boys sat. Carved on almost every surface including the black oak panelling which surrounds the room are the names, some cut rather crudely by their own hands, of Byron, Sir Robert Peel, Sir William Jones, Lord Palmerston, Sheridan, and of many other Harrovians.

As we went into the room one of my hosts exclaimed, “I’ve just spotted something!”. He had seen a name carved into the doorpost of the doorway in which I was standing. It was, T. D. ACLAND 1799. That was Thomas Dyke Acland, my great great grandfather and the great grandfather of the T. D. ACLAND of my walking stick.

And the talk? I called it ‘The New Zealander’. It included stories about my great grandfather Barton Acland, son of the above 1799 and another Old Harrovian. My talk began,

‘Anthony Trollope, author of The Warden, Barchester Towers and in all sixty-five books, wrote one that was never published in his lifetime. Its title? ‘The New Zealander’. And it wasn’t about New Zealand or a New Zealander at all. So why the title?

In mid nineteenth century Britain there was a great debate about the inevitable collapse of empires and therefore the inevitable collapse of the British Empire. In 1840 the historian and social commentator Thomas Babington Macaulay prophesied that one day soon a visitor from New Zealand would stand on the ruins of London Bridge, with a sketch book and would view ‘the time-worn columns and shattered through dome’ of St Paul’s Cathedral.’

This was before I thought the British Empire had really got going. Trollope entered the debate and wrote ‘The New Zealander’. Chapter one begins:

‘Is the time quickly coming when the New Zealander shall supplant the Englishman in the history of the civilization of the world? Have the glories of Great Britain reached their climax, culminated, begun to pale? Is England in her decadence?’

Trollope continues: ‘Come, alas, he will. As surely as we stand gazing at the Parthenon thinking now the glory of Greece as it was, and then of the glory of England as it is; so surely will strangers from the broad shores of the Atlantic and Pacific wander through the half peopled labyrinth of our desolate streets (he’s writing about Regent Street and Piccadilly, hardly ‘half peopled’ a week ago) and tell to each other with self-satisfied pride how great were formerly these people, but now fallen.’

Trollope presented the manuscript to his publisher in 1855. His publisher turned it down. On January 4 1855 my great grandfather, John Barton Arundel Acland and his friend Charles George Tripp, disembarked from the 837 ton clipper, Mary Stuart, in Lyttleton, New Zealand.’

Incidentally Trollope was another Old Harrovian and he hated his time at Harrow.

In my talk I told some family stories and painted a picture of the early European settlement in Canterbury. My audience included a member of staff and current Harrovians among whom were aa South Korean who had had much of his primary education in Christchurch New Zealand, the descendant of a Chinese New Zealander from Wanganui, and another the descendant of an Irish Catholic New Zealander whose grave is in Temuka, my father’s political constituency. I finished my talk quoting again from Trollope who visited New Zealand in 1873. Trollope wrote,

‘I must specially observe one point as to which the New Zealand colonist imitates his brethren and his ancestors at home, and far surpasses his Australian rival. He is very fond of getting drunk. And I would observe to the New Zealander generally, that if he blew his trumpet somewhat less loudly, the music would gain in its effect upon the world at large.’

And I added that I hoped my trumpet blowing had not been too loud and thanked my audience for listening.

‘