shannybasar

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will never get tired of watching this dream day

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Liverpool's social media team have knocked it out of the park with this and the announcement of Mo and Virgil's new contracts

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Dreams do come true

Arne Slot has really rocked my world - expected a transition season but he has surpassed every expectation

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Richard Flanagan's Question 7

A fabulous interview with Richard Flanagan in The Guardian after he won the Baillie Gifford Prize nonfiction for his book, Question 7:

“This book is about my father and my mother,” he says, “their love for each other and the way they used love to find meaning in a world they knew to otherwise be meaningless. I think everyone is confronted at a certain point with the knowledge that the universe is empty of meaning. So the question is: how do we go on? They found meaning through kindness and goodness to each other and to others. They practised that love and they fought for that love for decades. It ceased to be what I thought was an illusion, and became their hard-fought-for reality. It became a truth – it was really a form of magic, and they the magicians. I realised it was an immense achievement. They came from very poor backgrounds: they understood the hardness and harshness of this life, yet they found wonder within it everywhere.”

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Love Lucho's song

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RIP James Earl Jones

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Sven, the strange power of football and maybe even the meaning of life

Lovely piece by Max Rushden on why so many of us let football rule our lives:

And then you stop and realise it isn’t the game that brings meaning to it. It’s the friendships, the relationships, the memories. And whatever your involvement with football that is as true for you and me as it is for Sven or Tord Grip or David Beckham or whoever.

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Take care of yourself and take care of your life. And live it

Final message from Sven-Goran Eriksson, the former England manager, who died aged 76 after being diagnosed with cancer in January:

 "I had a good life. I think we are all scared of the day when we die, but life is about death as well. You have to learn to accept it for what it is. Hopefully at the end people will say, yeah, he was a good man, but everyone will not say that. I hope you will remember me as a positive guy trying to do everything he could do. Don’t be sorry, smile. Thank you for everything, coaches, players, the crowds, it’s been fantastic. Take care of yourself and take care of your life. And live it. Bye."

Really glad he got to achieve his dream of managing a Liverpool game this year:

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I wag, therefore I am

In an extract from his new book, philosopher Mark Rowlands seeks canine counsel in answer to these eternal questions:

Finding meaning in life is hard for us, but easy for dogs. Meaning in life exists wherever the love of life emanates from a nature that is whole and undivided. Being undivided by reflection, being whole and entire, a dog has only one life to live, whereas we – in whom reflection’s canyon is deepest – have two. For us, there is both the life that we live and the life that we think about, scrutinise, evaluate and judge. A dog will inevitably love its one life more than we love our two lives. Meaning in life is easy for dogs – and hard for us – because meaning is simply the joyful expression of a nature undivided against itself. I have been fortunate enough to spend my life with many dogs. I have loved them all, but, perhaps more importantly, in them I glimpse, obscurely but resonantly, what it is to love life.

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I am speaking

Piece by Erica Wagner in the Financial Times on the long fight for equality as the US contemplates electing its first female president:

In 1963, a young American woman might dream of becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a college professor — but dreaming was pretty much all she could do. She could not compete in a marathon or play varsity sports. If she was single, she couldn’t get a prescription for birth control, never mind have a legal abortion. She could not prosecute her rapist. If she wanted to come out as a lesbian, she would have had a mountain to climb.

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I promise, your day will be better if you spend a few minutes with this letter from Nick Cave to a fan who is feeling cynical. “Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.”

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Love and grief

From Daisy Buchanan in The Observer Magazine:

In a tribute to her partner and collaborator Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson wrote: “I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.” Love is a lot like grief. It’s rarely pure, sweet and easy. It can be heavy and painful. It can rush in like a tide, buoying us up, and knocking us down. It doesn’t have a sense of proportion. We don’t love in direct correlation to the amount we are loved. If I was more guarded with my love, maybe I’d have a more straightforward relationship with my grief. But I’m lucky in love – it fills my life. I have a lot of feelings for a lot of people and I’ve learned that there is as much wonder in loving as there is in being loved. Inevitably, this will lead to grief, concentric circles of it lapping my heart. And it will never be dignified or appropriate. It will be vast and wild, the same size as the cast of people who make my life brighter.

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When the 50-year-old Voyager probe stopped sending messages home, Nasa had a problem. No one remembered how to fix it

Another fantastic piece in the Financial Times on how Nasa fixed Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977 and is now the most distant human-made object from our planet, after they stopped receiving a signal from the spacecraft:

When Voyager broke, the team couldn’t fix it. They did not, for example, have any flight-software engineers. No one remembered the intricacies of its arcane source code. They could not decipher its whimpering messages. They didn’t know how to build a pyramid any more. They needed craftspeople and they needed archives. They call them the tiger team — an elite squadron of experts in software, systems, telecoms and other assorted wizardry plucked from every corner of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, charged with diagnosing and fixing the anomaly. It was led by Jeff Mellstrom, chief engineer of JPL’s astronomy and physics directorate. He’d also worked at JPL for decades and his own retirement was just a few months away. “I was anxious,” he told me. “I made commitments to people I love.” Along with Dodd, they began recruiting. One by one, the wizards’ phones rang. “You’re not going to believe this, but would you like to work on Voyager?” The lab became a Level 1 trauma ward for a geriatric spacecraft, staffed, in many cases, by greybeards. At least a couple of wizards were lured out of retirement, one of whom first started working on the project before it launched. They were the “freakin’ geniuses” of the lab, as Kareem Badaruddin, the acting Voyager mission manager, told me. JPL was getting the band back together.

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Photobombing de Gaulle: how a forgotten picture rewrites the history of WWII

Fantastic piece by Gary Younge in the Financial Times on how black soldiers were kept out of sight during the liberation of Paris in August 1944:

De Gaulle met Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower in Algiers in December 1943 to work on the details. A few weeks later, a memo stamped confidential from Eisenhower’s chief of staff detailing plans for the liberation read: “It is more desirable that the division mentioned above consist of white personnel . . . This would indicate the Second Armoured Division, which with only one fourth native personnel, is the only French division operationally available that could be made one hundred per cent white.” The British were on board. General Frederick Morgan wrote to Allied Supreme Command: “It is unfortunate that the only French formation that is 100% white is an armoured division in Morocco. Every other French division is only about 40% white. I have told Colonel de Chevene [sic] that his chances of getting what he wants will be vastly improved if he can produce a white infantry division.” De Gaulle acquiesced. He was in no position to put up much of a fight, and there is no suggestion that he even tried. So it was that on August 25 many of those who fought for Europe’s liberation were denied the right to participate in it. At the eleventh hour, it became patently clear that the freedom for which they were fighting did not apply to them. They call it the blanchiment or “whitening”

As he asks:

How might Europeans think about ourselves differently if the second world war were understood as a multiracial endeavour to which Black people were integral, as opposed to a conflict in which, if their presence is acknowledged at all, is seen as peripheral? How would conversations about responsibility, obligation, entitlement, sacrifice, patriotism, immigration, integration, welfare, equality and justice, as they relate to Black people and migrants, be discussed if their contributions to this crucial moment were fully recognised?

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Gareth Southgate's Dear England letter

As Gareth Southgate has announced he is leaving England, seems the right to read his letter from the 2021 Euros:

However, there are things I will never understand. Why would you tag someone in on a conversation that is abusive?  Why would you choose to insult somebody for something as ridiculous as the colour of their skin? Why? Unfortunately for those people that engage in that kind of behaviour, I have some bad news. You’re on the losing side. It’s clear to me that we are heading for a much more tolerant and understanding society, and I know our lads will be a big part of that. It might not feel like it at times, but it’s true. The awareness around inequality and the discussions on race have gone to a different level in the last 12 months alone.  I am confident that young kids of today will grow up baffled by old attitudes and ways of thinking. For many of that younger generation, your notion of Englishness is quite different from my own. I understand that, too.  I understand that on this island, we have a desire to protect our values and traditions — as we should — but that shouldn’t come at the expense of introspection and progress.

The men of the England football team seem similarly relaxed with their own diversity, just like most of their generation. These days, no more than one in 10 white people in England feel that “only people who are white count as truly English”, according to a survey analysis from the British Future thinktank. The same study found that it was the team of Bukayo Saka and Harry Kane that served as the symbol of England most capable of unifying people of all ethnic backgrounds, in a way that other symbols – the flag or St George’s Day – struggle to do. But if Southgate’s England have modelled a more enlightened stance on race, they have offered a different version of maleness, too. The Graham play focuses on how Southgate worked to fix the fear that haunted previous England teams: fear of penalties, fear of failure, fear of disappointing fans, fear of not matching up to England’s much-mythologised past. Part of the remedy was to bring in psychological help, to get the players to talk about their feelings, to encourage them to be kinder to themselves and each other. The macho football old guard mocked him, of course – “woke Mr Southgate is a soft lad in a hard world” says the stage version of Matt Le Tissier – but he persisted.

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C.S. Lewis on love

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Euro 2024 stories - the final

Am gutted that England lost the final. But Spain deserved to win as the best team in the tournament and the team that played the most attacking and attractive football.

But defeat had been coming. There had been moments of euphoria as England stumbled through the knockout stage, but in some ways, it was the least convincing of their four major tournaments under Gareth Southgate. They spent more time teetering on the edge of calamity than glory.

And though chances are few, in hindsight there are glimpses of what comes later. Kyle Walker could scarcely be doing a less effective job of stopping Nico Williams than if he had been armed with a clipboard and a sheaf of Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets. Foden – who is very much not on fire, and is really at best quietly smouldering – takes a corner that moves with all the speed and fluency of the passport queue at Stansted airport.

Spain had a good day at both Wimbledon and the Euros:

One of my favourite things about the tournament has been the emergence of young stars - especially Lamine Yamal, who turned 17 the day before the final:

Yamal made the team of the tournament:

In El Mundo, Abraham P Romero said – as did others – that England had been comprehensively outplayed. “Eternal glory” was Spain’s reward, while England’s was yet another bitter dollop of “eternal tragedy”. The last 45 minutes, said Romero, had revealed the gulf between the sides. “The start of the second half was a Shakespearean tragedy,” he wrote. “England, incapable of anything, yielded before a superior Spain and only some unwise Spanish decisions avoided a hammering. The injury suffered by Spain’s helmsman, Rodri, made little difference: the Premier stars found themselves kneeling before a Spanish generation that is afraid of nothing.”

And I also loved the fans:

Dutch dancing: Our grooving days ended with the cossack but even we have been inspired to get our bright orange disco boots back on by the Netherlands. It’s no Will Griggs’s on Fire but Links Rechts by Snollebollekes has become the sound of the streets in Germany. When the orange army arrived in any city, a party followed thanks to the simple words of “left”, “right” and “jump”. Seeing a wave of tens of thousands (of all ages) hop side to side in unison is quite impressive. A nice reminder that fandom is about enjoyment and not chucking chairs at one another.