You can say this re my two published books (the latter of which I spoke about today) but also in my upcoming one re the Island Games: what does this event tell us re the recent history *of these places & people*? I'm not saying the sport is secondary... but it's the lens more than anything else.
Interviewed for a radio interview today. (I'll let you know when it's out). It's re my new book on surfing in the n of Scotland. The point I made to the interviewer: my choices re projects quite often revolve not around *sports*, but in *places & the people who live there*.
Indeed, I would say that there is a spectrum of awareness (not necessarily universal awareness) of that fact.
(I can't necessarily point to academic research that discusses Falkland Islanders' relationship with the Chagos cause, but there is a great deal of discussion about it in the pages of the Penguin News from the 1990s onwards. "We got to choose our relationship with the UK, and so should they.")
I also think it's probably meaningless re other UK territories (& that's right & natural). The Chagos Islands were the rare point of agreement between most Falkland Islanders & Jeremy Corbyn, so this final decision represents a much broader swathe of opinion than just "left" opinion.
*When* this happens will be interesting. Not just when Starmer says it's going to happen, but when Biden (or Harris, or Trump -- and he totally cares about international agreements!) says it will happen. I can see a real "international exigencies" clause being written into the final agreement.
Bees -- not just wasps and spiders -- are now coming into the house to die. Winter happened fast.
Spam is the appropriate use for AI-written emails.