Octogenarian

 Wow, what a month October has been as it draws to an end 

I managed to acquire a ticket for the Everton v Tottenham Hotspurs fixture at the new Hill Dickinson stadium in Bramley Moor Dock in the Liverpool derelict water front regeneration zone. It is certainly an mpressive building witha fabulous viewing area and pitch, but I was underwhelmed by the concorses and facilities for the fans. It all seemed a bit sparse with a lack of the wow factor which the new Tottenham stadium has. It was a good 150 steps up the seats too but I know where the lifts are now for next time!!

Spurs won 3-0 so that made the day enjoyable.

I have had three formal dinners during the month too. One featured John Parrott as the speaker who was particularly good. He explianed in early days he was one week in Vegas at the Nevada open and the next week in Wigan for the North of England championships. it was there that he discovered the two places were twinned as they are the only places in the World you can pay for sex with chips....!!

SWMBO and I have also embarked on a look/see with regard to moving home. We have agreed we do need to although neither of us really do want to. We are rattling around in it and it is becoming more and more costly to do even minor repairs. The problem is that there is no stock on the market at the moment, and any decent stuff, or large bungalows are snapped up quickly. we think we probably have two or three years to find something so hopefully the Labour government will lay off home owners in the November budget and we can find something next year.

There was a sad ending to the month yesterday as we attended the funeral of my dear friend George. George was 93 and had had a terrrific life, almost signing for Liverpool as a16 year old, missed out on a boxing spot in the Olympic Games due to injury and played golf to a very high standard.

George and I played every week for over ten years and he was instrumental in my integration to Wallasey golf club, and he was  my proposer for Captain. He will be sadly missed, and the good turnout at the funeral showed how much people thought of him as a person.

Tonight we are off to a friends 60th birthday with a Halloween theme. I am going as a skeleton and SWMBO will be Cruella Deville. Should be a blast  

Georgia on my mind

In 1996 SWMBO and I were fortunate enough to be volunteers at the Olympic Games in Atlanta USA. Our brief was to help man the Georgia Dome, a multisports venue which, at the time had been purpose built for the Atlanta Games.

We worked some long and hard shifts from 06:00 in the morning to gone midnight some days. venue was split in two and was used for the men and women gymnastics and the men and women basketball events. We were lucky enough to be on duty in both halves of the arena at various times.

We met the world during those two weeks, which nearly became three, as the pre-qualifiers began before the opening ceremony and the finals of the basketball were held in the second official week.
I chatted to the CEO of Delta Airlines who was happy with a bit of man chat while his wife and three daughters became engrossed in the women's gymnastics. SWMBO was vetted for a visit by Bill Clinton, but that never came off which was a pity. Our uniforms were awful, but did get us lifts home in the rain on a couple of occasions.

Today, therefore, marks an end of an era, as the Georgia Dome was detonated and reduced to rubble in the space of very few seconds. It was a 21 storey building and the biggest indoor sporting arena in the World when it was built. There are , no doubt, plans to erect something else in it's place, but a bit of our heritage seems to have disappeared with the building today. Our memorial bricks are still in Centenary Park and some parts of Buckhead remain, like The Five Paces and  Mike and Angelo's but progress has no time for sentiment so accept today for what it is and move on! An anniversary tour in 2021 might be a goer though, y'all.

And they're off....

It's Olympic Games time, and I am trying to be positive about them, albeit they have done me no favours over the last few years. Indeed they have done me no favours next week as I have had to change my hotel in West London as it is slap bang in the middle of the cycle road race and I would have no access to my car for most of the day. let's hope Bradley Wiggins does the business in that one and then BBC sports personality of the year 2012 should be a nailed on certainty.

The Games kicked off yesterday with a spot of ladies footie. the standard is certainly improving, and isn't it great that they don't fall over at the slightest touch, or scream at the ref all the time, the male professional game should look and learn. They won't of course.

I played golf last night with a gentlemen who was at the opening ceremony of the 1948 games in London, as a seven year old, and he has moved heaven and earth to get tickets for the opening ceremony on Friday, that must be a great feeling for him. he said he could remember the 1948 event like it was yesterday, so I hope he has a  really enjoyable experience in Stratford, regardless of the fact hotel prices in the area are 400% higher than normal.

I have not given up hope of getting to the stadium for the athletics. Usually sponsors tickets get returned last minute so I am looking daily to see what's around. It might need to be a day trip, but at least we can say ' we were there!'

Arrivederci Roma

We were in Rome at the weekend for the Italy v England rugby game. The previous weekend had seen Rome carpeted in snow for the first time for about 25 years, so we were not surprised when the skies went dark on the Friday night, and about three inches of the stuff deposited itself on us.

We were in the rooftop bar of the hotel at the time, so the sights were very spectacular. Our need to eat got the better of us though, and as there were no taxi hires available we cancelled our first choice venue and walked, or more likely slide, down the hill to a nearby pizzeria.

We had a tolerable meal, however the highlight was watching the Roman equivalent of a grit waggon in operation. Coming slowly up the hill was a builders truck of the type you would expect your jobbing roofer to have. Open at the back it housed several bags of grit and two men with garden trowels. These two individuals then sprayed the salt onto the road before a bulldozer followed along behind and picked it all up again!! Priceless.

The game this year was played at the stadium built for the 1960 Olympic Games, and a very fine stadium it is too. There was no under soil heating though so the game went ahead on a partially snow covered surface, and suffered a bit for that, but a win is a win and England move on to face Wales in a potential grand slam decider.

The stadium was my sixth Olympic stadium, although I have no particular wish to tick the rest off.

So all in all Rome was extremely cold and extremely expensive. Most meals worked out at about £50 per head and our top bar bill was £157.00 for 12 drinks. The Euro zone needs to get itself under control before I think about going there again.

Still at least we got a match in, pity the poor Irish supporters in Paris who had to travel from the centre to Stade France only to be told the game was off, so having to travel back into town only to find somebody had nicked their seats, they have to do it all over again on 4th March, c'est la vie.

Interestingly the reason it was built without under soil heating is because it was build on a rubbish tip and there are, therefore, pockets of potentially explosive methane still underneath which the heating pipes could ignite.

2011 and all that

So we enter a new year, and the blog stats are telling me I must do better. I only posted 29 times during 2011 compared with a peak of 88 during 2007, a year which was only 8 months long in blog land. My posts have steadily declined year on year, so one New Year resolution is to post more blogs! I also plan to launch 'The Philanderer, the first four years' as a mobi file, but more of that later in the month.

2011 has been a year of ups and downs for us. Its memory will be dominated by the untimely death of SWMBO's brother Martin in Boston, USA. He was in his forties and having suffered a heart attack and he was unable to be resuscitated in time by the crash team. The family flew to Boston and waited by his bed for good news, but sadly none came.

Similar sad news surrounds my good friend Dave 'Cellnet' Jones who was sectioned earlier in the year and subsequently diagnosed with dementia. He is younger than me and one does wonder whether his extensive work with mobile phones was a contributing factor to his illness. His neighbour Graham Jones lost his wife Judy, after a long battle with cancer. So not a year to be keeping up with the Joneses.

There were good family events though. The wedding of Rebecca and Jon was great and it was foll0wed soon after by the engagement of Kieran and Hannah . The year was topped and tailed by the arrival of more baby girls. My cousin Mike has three girls, and his oldest now also has three girls, so quite how you get a boy to pop out is something I will have to ask my mate Dick about, as he has three of them!!!

Work on the house continued, not always as planned, and while the redesign of the bathrooms ran over estimate, it was the roof expense which was an unfortunate addition to the maintenance budget. Anyway, hopefully we are all done now for a while. The basement is the final area to be subject to a face lift and that can wait a bit longer.

We managed a few trips, most notably to Mauritius, but also to the Lake District twice and Ireland. Golf took me to Portugal twice, and we spent a few days in Christchurch, Dorset over New Year.

So what of 2012, the year of the Diamond Jubilee of QEII and the olympic games?

I have already indicated I will be blogging more (than 2011 at least), I will be taking SWMBO away more and be trying to get back into my running regime. That though will depend on my knees holding out.

I would love to get to a golf championship final, with Turnberry being one such target, however, I am still in the Daily Telegraph knock-out with my 4th round match on the horizon, and a couple more events to come up.

Other than that I will continue to work hard and play as hard as I can manage these days, so hope to have plenty to report on in the coming months.

A Happy New Year to all my readers

Five gold rings

My frustration with the London olympics, and LOCOG in particular, holds no bounds at the moment.
Firstly, I have been rejected, ignored and deflated by my inability to get any sort of interview for jobs with them, over the last five years. This, despite my experiences in the volunteer arena gained at the Atlanta event in 1996, and the chief executive of LOCOG, Paul Deighton, indicating that there is no training for olympic games work, other than experiencing it first hand. Really the volunteers have no idea what they are letting themselves in for.

Secondly, I have been ignored in the great ticket raffle as well. Is it fair to have a ballot, or should the tried and tested Ticketmaster approach have been the way to go? I suspect that LOCOG are rubbing their hands as they shifted many more tickets for the minor sports, than they have expected, while leaving thousands frustrated with no tickets or more tickets for some events than they wanted. I wasn't greedy and went mid-price, so it will be interesting in the last chance disco to see what I am offered there.

To add insult to injury, the German site Dejtour has already sold all its athletics, cycling and gymnastics tickets on a first come first serve basis. they do have women's beach volleyball semi-final tickets available still though....hmmmmm!

Oh well, just off to practice my synchronised swimming, while pondering the question , If one of them drowns, do they all have to?'