After a one-hundred-day absence, the Premier League returned on Wednesday evening, with the jaw-dropping spectacle that was Aston Villa vs Sheffield United. Inevitably it ended 0-0! Whilst the principal difference is that matches are being played behind closed doors, thankfully some things haven’t changed. Technology in sport remains unreliable, David Luiz remains a complete footballing liability, Arsenal remain rubbish and Mourinho still loves a whinge. The Premier League is well and truly back. And, it appears that irrespective of who is playing, we are going to be tuning in on mass to watch it. Manchester City's game against Arsenal was the most-watched Premier League fixture in almost three-and-a-half years, whilst last night’s game between Crystal Palace and lowly Bournemouth is expected to have smashed the record (4m) for the biggest-ever Premier League TV audience. Hardly surprising though, given it was the first-ever Premier League game on free-to-air TV (BBC) in the league’s thirty-year history. Sport on terrestrial TV or subscription has been a long-running debate that will inevitably rumble on well beyond the end of this pandemic. Subscription services attract lower audiences than free-to-air channels. They always have and always will. But let’s just hope the partial return to terrestrial airwaves of top-flight football is the start of a longer-term trend and the current fiesta of domestic sporting action helps to lift the national spirits. We need something to cheer us up a bit, don’t we?

‘Can you think of anyone who has actually benefited from Covid-19?’ is a question The Weekly has been asked frequently over the last few months. This week, our planning and highway consultant friends at Iceni Projects put forward cycling retailers and manufacturers as possible candidates. If you have tried to buy a bike since March, you’ll have discovered that getting hold of one is nearly as tough as finding a bag of self-raising flour. After cycling (for exercise) became one of the few permitted freedoms of lockdown and a viable transport option for our socially-distanced future, the month of May saw the highest ever number of hires in a single week in London’s cycle hire scheme’s ten-year history. It appears we Brits have been buying or hiring anything with two wheels, from the cheapest, clunkiest hybrid to the cutting-edge time trial machine. Shares in Halfords are up from £0.52p on 19 March to £1.68 on Friday! With the UK Government’s promised half a million £50 bike vouchers set to be released by the end of the month, bike retailers should continue to be one of the few economic successes during this time of instability. A potential partial saviour to the high street, you might ask. Possibly, in the immediate term anyway. Re-purposing some of the (growing) surplus retail space into secure bike storage with changing and drying facilities to accommodate the expected increase in demand for cycle parking feels like a no-brainer, doesn't it? No-one ever wants to see a MAMMAL sat at their desk head to toe in Lycra waiting for the shower queues to die down, let alone have to deal with the ‘aromas’ of wet towels and jackets hung on the back of spare desk chairs. Folding bikes are, of course, a solution, but as workers turn their minds to commuting to the office, the need for landlords to ensure their on-site cycling and welfare provision are top of the range has never been greater. Sounds like a timely moment to mention that St Bride’s Managers were recently awarded Gold Certification by CyclingScore for new cycling and welfare facilities at their newly refurbished 25 King Street office in Bristol!

As long as there has been homework, there have been excuses for not handing it in. ‘It was in my bag and my water bottle exploded’. ‘I left my book at home as I forgot I had that lesson today’. ‘My mum was tidying my room and accidentally chucked it out’. With home schooling still the norm for the majority of children, new excuses have emerged. ‘The printer ran out of ink’. ‘Our WI-FI has been down all day’. ‘Mum and Dad have just had enough and said I didn't need to do it’. But perhaps the best ever excuse has emerged - that 'a wild boar ate it'. A load of ‘hogwash’ you might think, but luckily for one Israeli boy recently, he had video evidence to prove it. Wild boars have been spotted far more frequently on Haifa’s quiet streets during the lockdown period. They have no natural predators in the area and since last year, the municipality has forbidden hunters culling them. As a result, the population has soared and wild hogs have begun showing up in the city during daylight hours, rummaging through rubbish bins, ripping up plants and gardens and blocking traffic. Not ideal, but perhaps the boars were just greedy to learn something new during this difficult time?