Musings on a Summer's Day

I'm afraid that we're at that time of year when my posting here becomes ever more erratic as the result of my being on holiday.  I know what you are thinking - that since I'm sort of semi-retired these days and pretty much a man of leisure most of the time, every day must be a holiday for me.  Well, not quite.  It's surprising how much time mundane things like home maintenance, household chores, paying bills and the like can take up.  Moreover, late summer is always the time of year when I have the urge to get in the car and go on trips to the coast, the New Forest, the South Downs and the like.  Today, for instance, I eventually found myself on the beach.  I say eventually, as, due to starting out later than I had intended and not realising that the New Forest Show was on this week and was causing traffic congestion on my route, (most bizarrely because, in Lyndhurst, a notorious bottle neck at the best of time, the regular traffic lights were replaced by 'event signalling' to 'ease the flow of traffic' - which turned out to be a man with a 'stop/go' sign, which actually made things worse), it took me hours to travel the sixty miles there.  Still, it was all very pleasant once I got there and my delayed arrival simply meant that got home this evening much later than I had planned.

But enough of my travel stories, what about those Olympics in Paris, eh?  I had to remind myself the other day that they've so far only been on for a few days - it already feels like an eternity.  God alone knows how much more of them we'll be forced to endure.  I've tried to avoid the TV coverage - which means watching BBC1 even less than I normally do - so was bemused to find the term 'Satanic' trending on social media with relation to the opening ceremony.  As usual, it turned out t be the usual right-wing crackpots getting their knickers in a twist over something they didn't understand so assumed must be offensive to them.  Apparently it all came down to what they claimed was some kind of LGBTQ 'parody' of the last supper.  According to the organisers, it was actually meant to be an interpretation of the feast of Dionysus - which is also blasphemous to those cry baby righties as it constitutes a celebration of a pagan god!  As I didn't see the ceremony, the first I actually saw of any of it were photos of some fat blue guy on what looked like a banqueting table.  Naively, before I became aware of all the 'satanic' furore, I assumed this to be some kind of tribute to those icons of French pop culture, the Smurfs.  For a moment, I thought that all the fuss might have been over some sort of representation of the last supper using French comic strip characters - perhaps, I thought, Asterix and Obelix, along with Lucky Luke, were amongst the apostles, with Papa Smurf as Jesus.  Maybe TinTin as Judas - he was Belgian, after all. But, of course, I was wrong.  I really don't understand why all those, mainly American, loonies got so het up about that ceremony - it was organised by the French, for God's sake.  I mean they're like that - have these weirdoes on social media never seen a French film?