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210/365: Chapter Meadows, Worcester
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In Worcester yet again today, this time for a medical appointment. Not one I particularly want to go into details about here, but it wasn't anything catastrophic. Since it didn't take all that long, I also had time for some walking. I walked up to Diglis Bridge and back, which took just under an hour. The weather was sometimes sunny, but there was also a constant threat of rain. I had an umbrella but didn't quite need it, as no more than a few drops actually fell. The photo shows the Chapter Meadows nature reserve, looking back towards the city -- you can see Worcester Cathedral tower at centre right. And yes, the clouds really were as dramatic as they look; that's not post-processing artistic licence! Amazing the heavy rain missed me, really.

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208/365: Tea section, Tesco Extra
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Arthur Dent had it right. There's unimportant shopping, there's ordinary shopping -- and then there's tea shopping! I happened to be in Stourbridge today, so I popped into the Tesco Extra there. It's not massive by Extra standards (the one in West Bromwich is noticeably larger) but it's big enough. I actually have no idea how this compares to tea sections in other countries' supermarkets, but it's a good-but-not-amazing variety for here. Roughly the nearest three sections are "black tea" (though we rarely use that term in everyday life; it's just tea) and the other two are green, flavoured, herbal, etc.

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206/365: Wyre Forest, near Bewdley
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Against all rules of British weather, August Bank Holiday Monday was both very warm (29 °C) and decently sunny. Nice mackerel skies in the morning, too. I decided to avoid the crush in the town centre and instead this morning I went for a walk in the Wyre Forest. It was very pleasant, and once away from the small car park (which was nearly full) there were only a handful of people about. Today's photo gives a good idea of what this part of the forest looks like. Later, I walked up to the local farm shop to have an ice cream. Greed got the better of me and I had a double scoop cone: one was cherry, the other was clotted cream fudge. A slightly weird combination, but a very welcome one on a hot day!

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205/365: High Street, Bewdley
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I'm rather late with my evening post tonight, but here it is at last! A pretty simple scene this time: I'm looking down High Street in Bewdley from near the edge of town towards the town centre. Look in the distance at the end of the street and you should be able to see the tower of St Anne's Church at the top of Load Street. This is actually an older street than it looks. Some of these houses aren't Georgian -- they're older timber-framed buildings, with Georgian brick frontages added when that became fashionable in the 18th century. Having the street almost empty on a sunny Bank Holiday Saturday is almost worth a photo in itself!

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204/365: Saltwich setup, Droitwich Saltfest
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On my way into Worcester today, I stopped off briefly in Droitwich as it's Saltfest weekend, celebrating the town's heritage as it was once a key part of the British salt industry. The main festival site by the canal was still being set up, though a few of the craft stalls were already open. This photo is of the construction of a small tented village representing Saltwich, the name used for the town in the era of the Hwicce tribe in Saxon times. It's intended to show the ninth century, near the end of the Mercian Supremacy. Note the tent at the back and the replica period weapons in the foreground. The bearded man in the centre is putting together a wooden bench or small table.

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Today I was looking through one of those lists of "Things that should be remembered but somehow aren't" (you know the ones) and most of the entries were things I did in fact know about. But one I didn't, indeed had never heard of before today? The Vajont Dam Disaster of 1963, the deadliest rockslide (causing the 250-metre wall of water that overtopped the dam) in European history. Here in Britain we remember the avoidable catastrophe of Aberfan in 1966. That killed 144 people. Vajont killed around two thousand. Yet, according to the piece I mentioned, it's almost never talked about outside Italy. I certainly don't remember ever seeing it discussed.

As with Aberfan, the Vajont disaster didn't have to happen. As with Aberfan, there were official cover-ups -- a newspaper was actually sued for stirring up trouble about the mountain's instability a few years earlier. As with Aberfan, communications were poor -- a couple of villages had evacuation notices but didn't really act on them. As with Aberfan, there had been multiple warning signs such as smaller rockslides earlier. As with Aberfan, in the wake of the disaster politicians scrambled to attribute the megatsunami to natural causes, acts of God... anyone but themselves.

I don't know how much Aberfan is known outside the UK (and Wales in particular) these days, but I'd still have expected to know something about Vajont. After all, I know about the Bologna station bombing -- and Vajont killed more than twenty times as many people as that. It has made me wonder what other large-scale events there are, even just in Europe, that I simply don't know about.

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I am getting seriously annoyed with idiot politicians like Robert Jenrick appropriating my country's flag (or flags, depending on your view of the England/UK thing) for hard-right performative posturing. If there is any actual evidence (note: yelling on TwiX is not evidence) that councils are taking down English flags but not Palestinian flags or whatever, then yes that would be worthy of questioning. But I haven't seen it in my area.

One of the things I've always liked about this country is the lack of flaggery outside certain specific places. We've always found the American attitude to them weird, and (ironically given what the DUP etc want) the Northern Ireland unionist approach to them deeply un-British. So my feelings towards Jenrick and his ilk are a mixture of contempt and exasperation. I'm not one of those ultra-ultra-liberal types who can't even mention our flag without a long diatribe on the evils of Britain (and for some reason nobody else). I'll fly the flag on occasion. But not, repeat not, like this.

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200/365: Ruins of Dowles Parish House
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I took the footpath through the old Dowles Church precincts (just west of Bewdley, very near the river) today. The graveyard is still there and still in reasonably good nick, if overgrown in places. Sadly the remaining building -- which I think once housed the Parish House -- is a lot less so. It's completely in ruins, and getting more so, and the interior is usually full of graffiti (as seen here) and sometimes empty beer cans as well. The church itself was demolished in 1956 after many years of disuse.

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198/365: Raccoon by TakerOne, Worcester
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I was in Worcester today, and after a slightly cool and cloudy start it turned into a very nice, warm August day. For once I had plenty of time to go walking, so I wandered around some of the streets just behind the main road that leads north out of the city centre. In Moor Street, I discovered this mural that I hadn't even known existed until now. It was created by Hungarian artist TakerOne and was spray-painted (freehand) in September 2022 as part of that year's Worcester Paint Festival. We don't have raccoons in the UK, of course -- bar a few feral escapees -- but it's a fantastic mural. It looks even more striking in reality, especially when you don't expect it!

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My country (the UK) is currently allied with Ukraine against Russia, and that is strongly supported here. I too think it's the right thing to do, given that the enemy is Vladimir Putin, a vicious and expansionist dictator who is a clear threat to peace in Europe much more widely than Ukraine -- and a man whose regime has directly attacked the UK physically (Salisbury) and online (plenty of times). Over the Atlantic, Donald Trump is making it increasingly clear that he likes Putin and by extension Russia, so we in Europe need to step up our game. It won't be easy, but I don't think we have any alternative.

But as I said in the subject line, we need to avoid that leading to us thinking that Ukraine or President Zelenskyy are perfect, because they're not. For example, last month Ukraine passed a law weakening the independence of the country's anti-corruption bodies. This was very unpopular and caused the largest street protests in Ukraine since Russia's invasion. A week later, the law was reversed -- but damage had already been done, and trust in the President has fallen. Zelenskyy said he'd changed course after the protests, and also because of reaction from elsewhere in Europe.

That last bit is significant. Ukraine wants to join the EU, and it hasn't done itself any favours with this. Ukraine has had serious problems with corruption since long before the current war, and that hasn't improved -- the Corruption Perceptions Index shows that it's seen as more corrupt than every single current EU member. Ukraine is nowhere near meeting the Copenhagen Criteria, especially on judicial independence, and its wartime restrictions on the expression of Russian culture are incompatible with EU ideals.¹ The idea that even if peace were secured now, Ukraine would be an EU member quickly, is wildly overoptimistic. It won't be.
¹ This one is complicated by the fact that a few existing member states, such as Latvia, have similar restrictions.

This does not mean that Ukraine should give up on becoming part of the EU. Bulgaria was once hugely corrupt, still has significant problems in that regard, yet is now an EU state. Perhaps a bigger stumbling block might be one that rarely makes the headlines: agriculture. An EU-member Ukraine would be expected to accede to the Common Agricultural Policy, yet as things stand it would risk severely unbalancing it. Unlike other EU countries, Ukraine has enormous agri-businesses cultivating hundreds of thousands of hectares, and some Ukrainian intensive farming practices don't meet EU environmental standards.

I won't go on as I am certainly not a specialist, but my basic point is this: everyone wants peace, or at least everyone worth considering wants peace. But even when peace is achieved, Ukraine does not magically become like any other European country. Not even when the wartime damage has been repaired. After reforms? Well, it's a European state and like most other European states, including the UK, there are some serious problems in its structures that can't simply be brushed aside because it's anti-Putin. (I'm aware that I have at least one Ukrainian reader here, so I hope I can accept corrections to my thoughts with grace and humility.)