Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I reviewed Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, the new adaptation of her second novel set at Chimneys. Tina shared two books. Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin is set in several places, including London. Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty about a retired British couple’s visit to Amsterdam.

The Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics is today. I’ll be watching at 1pm on Peacock. The American coverage will, naturally, cover things from an American perspective.

One way for me to deepen and broaden my perspective is to also experience some of the Olympics from the British perspective.

Team GB hopes to earn the most medals they have ever earned in the Winter Olympics, according to this article on the BBC website that begins with this question:

Could it be that Great Britain – a land of no ice track, Eddie the Eagle and an average of 13 days of snow per year – is becoming a winter sports nation?

I had to look up the Eddie the Eagle reference. Michael David Edwards was the first British Olympic ski jumper. He came in last in two Olympic ski jumps in 1988 — and that was enough for him to hold the British ski jumping record until 2001. He was underfunded, near-sighted, and overweight (at least compared to his competitors). There was a rumor that he was afraid of heights, but he calls that ridiculous. No one does 60 jumps a day in practice if they are afraid of heights.

Although many applauded his truly amateur efforts, the Olympic committee instituted more strict entry requirements. Now, athletes qualify by being among the top competitors in the world, not just the best in their own country. That requirement is known as the “Eddie the Eagle” rule.

There’s a biopic from 2015 called Eddie the Eagle. I just requested the DVD from the library. Hugh Jackman plays his American trainer.

See, I’m learning things already!

Back to Team GB’s hopes. The most Winter Olympic medals that the UK has ever earned was five. They did that twice, in 2014 and 2018. In 2026, they hope for as many as eight medals. Their best chances are in men’s skeleton (Matt Weston, Marcus Wyatt), women’s snowboarding (Mia Brookes, Charlotte Banks), women’s freestyle skiing (Kirsty Muir, Zoe Atkin), ice dancing (Lewis Gibson and Lilah Fear), and among any of the ten athletes qualified for the various curling events. However, the 2022 team did not live up to expectations, earning only two medals, both in curling, so the team is attempting to avoid overconfidence ahead of the 2026 Olympics.

It will be fun to watch how the British athletes line up with expectations in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I loved this video about skier Zoe Atkin, not the least because it was shot in one of my favorite places in London, the Science Museum. We spent two days there during our visit to London — Day 1 and Day 2.

The parts of the video that are about the sport of ski half-pipe are interesting. I’m less impressed by the “fun” uses of AI since I’m seeing more and more concern about the damage that data centers due to the environment both in local communities and globally. Also, I have lots of questions about what AI really is (a large language model) and what we’re led to believe it is (intelligent).

This video feels a bit like an advertisement for trying out AI in fun ways, which is a great way for us all to learn a new technology, but also a nefarious way to build dependence on a technology before we, as a society, have determined its appropriate role. I appreciate how AI is helping some of my friends navigate the world while dealing with neurodivergencies and brain fog from diseases or medicines. At the same time, I’m resisting the urge to play with it myself.

Are you looking forward to the Olympics? I plan to bring the best British stories I can find to British Isles Friday for the next few weeks.