Back Home Via Southport And Llangollen

Towards the end of our stay in Scotland, Sarah and Duncan kindly invited us round to their house for a special dinner that they cooked for us to celebrate our Ruby Wedding Anniversary which is coming up on Sunday. We had a delicious meal. Here's Marion with Rose and Melody making a toast.

We took the family shopping in Dundee before we left for home. A few years ago Liverpool was inundated by the famous Lambananas and more recently there have been scores of Pigs Gone Wild in Ipswich. Dundee is going through a similar statue celebration and this time it's the famous DC Thompson's Oor Wullie. 

Rose and Melody were impressed by the disco ball Wullie and the punk Wullie.

And enjoyed a drive together while their mum and Marion did some shopping. We left Scotland on Saturday and drove to Southport where we stayed with my mum for a night.

Mum's still going strong and despite having recently suffered attempted frauds by not one but two low life criminals, she's still lively and doing extremely well for a ninety-year-old. She kindly treated us to a very good meal at The Vincent hotel on Lord St. Thanks Mum. From Southport it was on to Llangollen to visit our friends David and Janet who hosted another excellent Eisteddfod lunch. We had some fabulous beef, ham and salmon (not forgetting the wine) before walking down the hill to the closing event of his year's festival.

Janet (centre) and Dave (right) with friends.

Marion with more friends enjoying David and Janet's hospitality.

The final show for this year's Eisteddfod was Jools Holland and his fabulous rhythm and blues orchestra.

We've seen Jools before at Llangollen and his shows are hugely enjoyable - no theme tune could ever be more appropriate for an artiste than Jool's Enjoy Yourself. My favourite part of the session was the fabulous ska duo Pauline Black and Arthur "Gaps" Hendrickson from The Selecter. Another brilliant event.

I'll close today on a sombre note. While we were in Scotland five men were killed in an industrial accident. I caught it briefly on the news and assumed that it was an accident overseas as it was given very little time in the bulletin. I noticed in a very small piece in The Times the next day that the accident happened in Birmingham. How is it that the accident was not a major news story? Okay there's been a lot of politics going on but two poor children who drowned in Scotland a day or so later were front page news on almost every newspaper. I can't remember an industrial accident on this scale that has merited less column inches and have to ask myself if it could be to do with the fact that the five men who died were from Africa. The few bits of information on the internet reported them as "foreign", "Senegalese", "Spanish" and "Ghanaian." Does the fact that they were black have anything to do with the lack of newsworthiness? We see the problems that America has with black people being murdered by the police. Isn't this failure to cover a story an example of the same sort of attitude to the value of black lives?