And now one of the greatest – if not the greatest outright – rugby players of my lifetime, Phil Bennett, has gone.

He was a magnificent fly-half for Llanelli, Wales and the British and Irish Lions. Anyone who has seen his contribution to that try for the Barbarians against New Zealand in 1973 will never forget it.

This is his own view of the try:-

Philip (Phil) Bennett: 24/10/1948 – 12/6/2022. So it goes.

The library parts of Gladstone’s Library are reminiscent of Walter Scott’s home at Abbotsford but a bit grander. The larger of the two is the Theology Room, which, as its name suggests, mainly houses Gladstone’s collection of books on theology and religion.

Book racks, windows and gallery:-

The ceiling is impressive but the photo is badly focused, I’m afraid:-

Gallery support, complete with carving:-

View to part of gallery:-

A selection of periodicals on display:-

Last September we made a trip down south, mainly for the good lady finally to see Rye in East Sussex.

However, our first stop was at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales. Yes, it was William Ewart Gladstone‘s Library (his second in fact, his first was a tin tabernacle on the same site) but it also now doubles as a hotel and meeting/conference site.

Stitch of main building frontage:-

Ground floor corridor to Gladstone Room:-

On the wall of the Gladstone Room was a photograph of the original tin tabernacle library:-

Gladstone Room:-

The other end of the corridor leads to the Theology Room where Gladstone’s books on Theology are kept:-

First destination on the Sunday after Oswestry was Powis Castle, a National Trust property lying not far from Welshpool in Powys, Wales.

Castle from car park:-

From approach path:-

Castle entrance:-

Courtyard and equestrian statue:-

Courtyard from wall:-

Courtyard wall, shrubbery beyond:-

Topiaried shrubbery and gardens:-

The castle houses peacocks, given the run of the place:-

Euro 2016, Final, Stade de France, 10/7/16.

So. It wasn’t to be Germanic hegemony after all.

Neither was it to be French triumph.

Like a lot of the knockout matches this was a spectacularly dull game but it suggested one thing to me. Portugal are a better team without Cristiano Ronaldo in it than with him. I felt much the same about Liverpool in the latter stages of Steven Gerrard’s time with them. It seemed to me the rest of the Liverpool players were looking too much to Gerrard, giving way to him or allowing him to have the ball when they were in better positions to do something with it. So too with Ronaldo and Portugal. Throughout the tournament (though perhaps not the 3-3 draw with Hungary which I missed as I was watching the Iceland-Austria game) there was something about the way they played with him on the pitch that rendered them less effective as an attacking force. His hogging of all the free kicks with no fruitful result whatsoever was almost laughable. Okay, he did score that header against Wales and scuffed the assist for Nani’s toe-poke in that game but otherwise there was little end product and he seemed to get in the way at times. With him not available others stepped up to the plate – particularly Eder who I doubt would have made it onto the pitch if Ronaldo hadn’t been injured.

Football. It’s a funny old game.

I see from the club website that the Challenge Cup has been given a revamp so that it will now include more Scottish clubs from outwith the SPFL, top division under 20 sides and even clubs from Wales and Northern Ireland. The format looks like a right dog’s dinner.

I note that Tier 2 clubs won’t be joining till Round 3. It won’t make any difference to us. We always lose in it anyway. (I doubt being seeded will alter that at all.)

What concerns me most is the inclusion of the top division under 20s sides. This feels like the thin end of a wedge that will eventually see them allowed to play in the lower leagues. I know similar provision happens in Spain etc with reserve teams but the Scottish scene has unique characteristics that make me uncomfortable at the thought.

Edited to add. I just took in the fact that the draw will be regionalised. Fat chance of me getting to a a game then. (But maybe we’ll be in the North for that too.)

There have also been changes to the laws of the game. We’ll need to see how those work out.

I’ve been in Holland.

Well, strictly speaking, since it was on the borders of the Friesland and Groningen provinces, make that The Netherlands.

The good lady’s eldest brother lives there. We had been supposed to visit for years but life got in the way.

We needed to renew our passports first. I sent the applications away late in July. Despite all the talk on the news about delays we got the new ones inside a week. (As I remember it was four days.) Maybe the Glasgow Passport office is more efficient than down south.

So another country visited. Apart from the constituent parts of the UK (though I only just made it into Wales) I’ve been to Sweden (Stockholm,) the Soviet Union (Leningrad as was) and Denmark (Copenhagen) on a school cruise when I was at Primary School, Portugal (the Azores, Madeira, Lisbon) and Spain (Vigo) on a Secondary School cruise, and as an adult to Germany (near Stuttgart) and France twice (Normandy for the D-Day beaches and Picardy for World War I battlefields.)

Since the good lady didn’t fancy being on a RoRo ferry overnight we drove down to Harwich (with an overnight stop) and the same on the way back. I’m knackered.

I watched the first episode of The Stuarts on BBC 2 tonight.

It seemed, like on its first showing on BBC 2 Scotland earlier this year, an odd decision to start with James VI (or James I if you prefer.) There were no less than eight Stuart monarchs before him. In the year of the Scottish Independence Referendum that could be interpreted as a slight, another piece of English ignorance/dismissal of Scottish History.

That the first episode dwelt on James’s desire to unite the two kingdoms as Great Britain might also seem like a dark Better Together plot as the Guardian noted today.

Yet (some, though not all, of) James’s ancestors were spoken of in the programme so the ignorance/dismissal angle can on those grounds be discounted. And the differences between the two countries that then existed (of religion principally,) and in some respects still do, were not glossed over but I was left wondering who on Earth thought broadcasting this was a good idea now. It can only lead to accusations of bias

I had another such disjointed TV experience with the BBC recently. Janina Ramirez in her otherwise excellent Chivalry and Betrayal: The Hundred Years War – on BBC 4 last week, this (and next) but also a programme that has been screened before – kept on emphasising how the events she was describing played a large part in how the country “we” live in now came to be as it is. (Note also the “us” on Dr Ramirez’s web page about the programme.)

Yet that country was/is England. Ramirez seemed totally unaware that her programme was to be broadcast not on an England only channel but one which is UK-wide. Indeed that the country all the BBC’s principal audience lives in is not England, but the UK. [Except for powers devolved to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies legislation at Westminster is for the whole of the UK. No English elected body oversees the equivalent powers to those devolved elsewhere (arguably there ought to be one;) it is the UK Parliament that performs that function.]

Two parts of the UK share none of the history Dr Ramirez was outlining. Wales (having been incorporated earlier) was involved directly in the Hundred Years War but neither Scotland nor Ireland were. Yet she spoke as if that circumstance didn’t exist.

This sort of thing does contribute to a feeling among many Scots (and I suspect Welsh and Northern Irish viewers too) that the BBC is a broadcaster with a mind for England only and too often forgets the three other constituent parts of the UK.

FIFA World Cup Qualifier: Europe, Group A. Cardiff City Stadium, 12/10/12.

All I’ve seen of this are some brief highlights on the TV news.

It seems we had a perfectly good goal chalked off and Wales a dubious penalty, albeit I’ve read they might have had a better prior claim.

Still, Wales were due some comeback on us in a World Cup game.

It was all set up for this result what with them not yet having won under Chris Coleman.

We’re second bottom after three games and we’ve still to play the top two teams in the group. It should be a through-the-fingers viewing job on Tuesday night in Belgium.

That’s the sort of circumstance in which we just might scrape a 1-0 win.

Don’t bet on it, though.

Hay is seriously out of the way. It seemed to take ages to get there (passing through Hereford but not stopping) and there was still a deal of driving to do. There wasn’t much of a view along the way as the high hedges resticted the view. They reminded me of the bocage in Normandy.

Hay itself is a strange place. The good lady and I wanted to visit it (well; me, mainly) as it’s supposed to be England’s capital for second-hand bookshops. Well; it is – and it also has some antique shops and craft shops – but it’s a very unbalanced town. Relentless. Seemingly everywhere you turn there is a bookshop. The first one, more or less opposite the car park, was promising and the good lady noted down a couple of possibilities but after several hours doing nothing but look at books and antiques and walking to the next shop we were drained.

We might be the only bibliophile couple to go to Hay and not buy a book.

(There was one I thought about but I decided I could do without it. The author wasn’t one who had really impressed me before. The prices tended to be on the high side and there didn’t seem to be much in the way of hidden gems that you can light upon elsewhere. They’d probably been hoovered up by other book collectors.)

However, it is the first time I’ve been in Wales. Hay is just over the England/Wales border, in Powys.

I was too caught up with the book hunting to take any photos of the town itself and it was only after we’d left I realised that we’d not actually seen the Wye. I did catch Hay’s War Memorial, though. I think it’s Hay Castle in the background.