It’s Tuesday evening and I’m watching a group of excitable young people in colourful clothing dance on a patch of sand in Birmingham city centre. Heather Knight, the England cricket captain, is sat to my right and we’re part of a crowd who have gathered for some beach volleyball action at the Commonwealth Games. The dancers – also known as, the Brum Beach Crew – are an added bonus, as are the flashes of “MONSTER BLOCK” and “MEGA RALLY” on the venue’s two large screens during both pool games: Gambia v Sri Lanka (men) and England v Scotland (women). All in all it’s a surreal experience, but also part of an unexpectedly fun family holiday.
This was meant to be the year when my wife, daughter and I did our usual thing of going abroad for our summer break having not been able to do so in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic. But it was not to be and again Covid was to blame, with my daughter’s new passport caught up in the backlog caused by the Passport Office’s struggles to deal with a surge of applications as, like us, thousands of Britons made plans to get back on a plane. So we were going to have our summer holiday on home soil and decided to do so in Birmingham given it was a hosting a major sporting event and, well, was easy to get to from our house in south London. Competition and convenience swayed it but, with all due respect to the fine people of England’s second city, there was not a huge deal of excitement about the trip as we headed north last Monday.
