Man About Town – August 2026

By Greg Hall

If the month of August represents the height of summer (for those countries nestled in the northern hemisphere, at least), then I’ll admit I’m slightly apprehensive of its impending arrival, since I’m penning this article at the start of July following our second heatwave of the year, which has left me with a neck and arms pinker than Peppa Pig’s irritating little face.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of sunshine, and I’ll no doubt be whining when it turns all cold and snowy again towards the end of the year, but when your place of work happens to be glass-fronted and bereft of any air conditioning, sunnier weather does become tiresome extremely quickly.

Thankfully, here in the UK we tend to experience our hotter spells throughout June and July, with August being an annual let down and, as far as town events are concerned, it seems organisers agree, with there being precious little in the Sandbach calendar for me to write about until September. That is, unless I can scrabble together a couple of hundred words about the Sandbach Ladies Probus meeting on Tuesday 25th August (and, I fear, even if I tried, the urge to write a distasteful pun around the word ‘probus’ would result in this being my final appearance in the magazine).

What we do have to look forward to is the sixth of our seven bank holidays for the year (side note: if you just wiggled your hands up and down upon reading the numbers six and seven in close proximity, before gleefully shouting “six seven!” in a high-pitched voice, please have a word with yourself), falling as it does on Monday 31st August.

Interestingly (and I use the term very loosely), while the concept of public or ‘bank’ holidays was first introduced by the appropriately named Bank Holidays Act 1871, the final Monday of August was only added to the list as recently as 1965, when it was switched from the start of the month in an attempt to extend the summer.

Also interestingly, in 2014 Conservative MP Peter Bone made a bid to rename the holiday as ‘Margaret Thatcher Day’ in honour of the late Prime Minister, but this move was rapidly quashed on account of it being the worst idea since the Captain of the Titanic announced, ‘full steam ahead’.

Whatever your plans for this penultimate public holiday of 2026, and the final one with any chance of nice weather (unless our current descent into climate change catastrophe really does take a steep turn before a scorching Boxing Day), please spend local, enjoy our wonderful town, and be kind to one another.