Bits and pieces

Clean Steve woke me when he came to bed at 3am, telling me Labour had won in Stroud. I went back to sleep, waking briefly at 4.30 and hoping to catch Keir Starmer's winning speech, but he took so long shaking everyone's hand that I couldn't stay awake.

When we woke hours later, we looked at all the results, including Stroud and our neighbouribg constituencies, and had coffee and breakfast while.i watched Sunak's farewell speech. I wish I could feel excited about the result. I'm pleased that Labour has taken Stroud from the Conservatives, as it did in 1997 and in 2017 , but we have a new candidate, who has  yet to  prove himself. Apparently he invented the social prescribing model for the NHS! 

I thought I might do something to celebrate the sunshine, so I took a jigsaw outside and listened to an audiobook whilst swapping election stories on WhatSApp with one of my sister in Scotland. Rain started, so I took the jigsaw inside, and hung up the washing inside. Went to bed again for a while, then got up and made supper. Served it up just as Spain scored the winning goal against Germany in the last two minutes of the quarter-final!

I've hardly moved at all today, but my eye is still sore. I want to finish my book but I think audio is easier and, to be fair, it's not as good as I'd hoped it would be. It's the Postscript Murders by Ellie Griffiths. The only character I like is Benedict, a former monk who runs a coffee stall in Shoreham-on-Sea. Speaking of.coffee, I also descaled our machine today. That was surprisingly satisfying. 

I've just realised that the political map of the UK, post election, now resembles a jigsaw, with the smaller parties making bigger gains. Plaid Cymru won four seats in Wales, the Greens won four seats, the Lib Dems won seventy one. The map is no longer mainly red and blue. P.S. it was still a landslide victory for Labour. They won 412 seats. Conservatives lost more than 200.