Metal Ox

 Here we are in 2021 locked down once more. The vaccination programme is due to reach a significant level by the 13th February. It is interesting that as far as the Western world was concerned the virus started in China during its year of the rat, and in February we enter the Chinese year of the Ox.  Not sure what the significance is but just thought I would throw it out there!!

The time between Christmas and now has been somewhat low key as I suspect it has been for everybody. Lockdown has made it a tad more challenging as I can't use the golf course now so will have to embrace Joe Wicks  and the online spinning classes. Why was he not even nominated for SPOTY?

There are interesting anomalies within the regional lockdown guidelines. I can play golf in Scotland but cannot go to church. The opposite is true  in England of both. There is talk of Wales relaxing the golfing rules shortly leaving England and Northern Ireland still excluded.

I have just been to Tesco as we re-introduce our ten day shopping windows. The store had more staff picking home delivery than it did have normal punters which was a big change from last year when the queue stretched half way across the car park. There was plenty of stock although  few  gaps existed for toilet roles, porridge strangely and bird seed!!

Still it's done now so hopefully I can just stay close to home now. It is a pity that the new car can't have a run out but it is bedding in well and I am working out all the bells and whistles. I now have some admin to sort out then the lockdown list will e as follows:

• scan all old photo's in and make a few photo books
• move Atmosphere from VHS to DVD
  
• put the decorations in the loft when the new loft lights arrive
• floodlight the garden
• find useful tradesmen for routine home maintenance
• repair the holes in the garden golf net
  

So that should get me to February when my new golf trolley arrives and I can get back to hitting balls in the net. The vaccine in late February would be the icing on the cake. Fore!

 

Pimples

On Sunday, Lewis Hamilton, a racing driver supported by a team of over 1000 people, who races maybe twenty times a year and has only one serious rival, won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award for 2014.

He beat Rory McIlory, a golfer, into second place. McIlroy has probably fifty rivals, all capable of beating him on their day. He plays probably 30 times a year, and is supported by a small team which includes his caddy, coach,  management team and various suppliers and sponsors.

Whether it was the right decision is taking up a lot of column inches in the newspapers at the moment. Hamilton won the F1 World Championship, which he has won previously. McIlroy won the Open Championship and the US PGA championship. No European has ever done that before in the same year. He also won the Bridgestone Invitational and the PGA championship at Wentworth. He was also part of the European Ryder Cup team who defeated the USA.

McIlroy has a personality, Hamilton is a bit dull. So it would seem that petrolhead's took the trouble to vote, whereas golfers didn't.

Sadly it's another sign of the fading star which SPOTY has become. SPOTY has always been a must watch in our family, and I can remember the sixties programmes when the BBC had most of the sporting coverage in the World to use to produce their programme. Henry Cooper won the title twice, and he never really won anything of significance in his sport. David Steel was sent out to face the barrage of West Indian fast bowling and almost single-handedly saved England from ignominy. He won it for true British spunk.

More recently, however, the BBC have struggled to find any sporting coverage to populate the programme with as Sky and now BT, hoover up all the best events. The 2014 show reached new depths with repeated voiceovers by Eddie 'the idiot' Butler, listing the names of great British sports personalities, but showing almost no action at all.

The BBC must have know the writing was on the wall when in 2009, a year with no Olympics, World Cup or Commonwealth Games, the winner was Ryan Giggs, an aging Welsh footballer who is best know outside football for bedding his own brother's wife. Jenson Button came second that year so even the petrolhead's must have been bored with the whole thing.

Aging pop band Simple Minds opened the show on Sunday, and that, sadly,  is a suitable  phrase to refer to the BBC blazers who masterminded the whole thing.