Sheffield on a Wednesday

I’m sat on a train going to Sheffield at the moment. That was no mean feat. St Pancras resembled a greenhouse packed with sweaty and confused travellers due to long delays. This on the back of being delayed over two hours on my flight last night from Tampa into Gatwick.

Still, mustn’t grumble as I look out of the window at this fine and pleasant land. Just passing Loughborough at the moment.

A few days in Yorkshire to watch my daughter swim at the Swim England National Summer Meet.

The event has already began at the Ponds Forge, and she is back at the same venue, after swimming the week before last there at the Next Gen British Swimming Championships, where she did well in what was a great experience for her.

We are staying near Ponds Forge right by Victoria Quays. I haven’t been to the steel city other than for football for a very long time. In fact St Pancras earlier took me back to away days to the north not knowing when and from which platform the train is going from.

Good to see some things don’t change. I reckon the EMR bloke yelling at people to get back at the barrier is safe in his job from AI.

Swimming meets are early mornings and evenings, so a chance to stroll along the River Don and the Quays during the day of what used to be called the Sheffield Canal Basin. Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it.

The weather here has certainly mellowed, but still hot, hotter than Florida. I am already craving AC, it’s a wonderful invention, you know.

It will as the Americans say get us acclimated for our next stop where the heat has been a major problem.

On Sunday we drive to Heathrow for a holiday in Spain. We are moving around a bit, but end up in Madrid, which has seen awful wildfires in its vicinity.

I work in risk, and wildfires, whilst always being a natural phenomenon, have accelerated greatly since the mid-2000’s. Human-caused climate change has acted as a severe multiplier sadly.

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, heating up at twice the global average rate since the 1980s. Spain always seemed hot to us Brits, but they have had some crazy 40°C summers in recent years.

Currently Spain is experiencing one of the worst wildfire disasters in its modern history, forcing over 100,000 people to evacuate as major blazes tear through regions like Madrid, Ávila, Toledo, and Castellón.

Of course humans are also mostly to blame for ignition sources as well. So sadly depressing.

I remember being in San Francisco a few years back and the smoke was bad and the skies gruesome following really bad wildfires. Fingers crossed that the fire services start to control those fires blazing on the outskirts of Madrid, which we don’t actually arrive in for another 2 weeks.