Three seconds of fame

The Bampton raft race is an event the S-Club 5 have supported for a number of years. It has featured in this blog on several occasions, here and here. We always try to dress up and this year we were Grumbies of Monty Python fame. Yes my brain does hurt.

Imagine my surprise then when we were featured briefly on ITV this week. ITV have  been following a group of children from when they were seven years old up to the present time, and they put together a programme charting their life,  every subsequent seven years. The current series is called 56 UP.

One of the featured people is now a lay preacher and Bampton is one of the villages he frequents. I do remember a film crew being there last year but assumed it was for the local news. Instead, there we are singing merrily as we paddle towards the finishing line, all grumbied up.

I do hope the ITV exposure does not alert the health and safety jobsworths from Kendal to the raft race.It exists in the sort of environment the 56 UP participants will have been familiar with when they were growing up as seven year olds all those years ago. We in the S-Club do feel that our involvement has seen the event grow into the thirty raft event which it is at the moment,  and it would be tragic if it is canned as a result of over planning. Long may it continue unencumbered and de-regulated........aaaargh!

Hall of Fame

I noticed today that the old buffer from the world of golf, Peter Alliss, had been inducted to the Golf Hall of Fame yesterday in America. I am sure the word is induced but that's just me getting my physics and formal reception terminology mixed up. Peter did use the finger during his acceptance speech when gesturing about his old headmistress. It is a pity he does have senile moments occasionally.

Famous people do have the pleasure of being recognised by their peers and voted into these Hall's of Fame, and it got me thinking about whether there should be a series of these places for ordinary folk. One might argue that the Queen's honours process announced at New Year and at her birthday does now recognise Joe Bloggs and the good work they do, and the Guinness Book of Records motivates some people to take part in the excessive and ridiculous, but I wonder if there should be something more.

Cadbury's chocolate launched the CDM awards in the Seventies when people could nominate their friends and relatives for the award. I always thought that if you got two you could indicate you had a CDM and bar but it never caught on.

So what might I qualify for through longevity or talent? 40 years with the same Company never used to be a rarity, but there will be very few people achieving that in the future, and 40 years ( and we hope a few more) of attending England rugby internationals may also be a record to be proud of. The singing certainly has not improved but it has lasted the test of time....

Nothing else really springs to mind, I doubt I am anywhere near the top of the tree for downing pints of London Pride. I am member of the Young's 135 Club though, and did complete the Fullers passport. Both of these entailed drinking in every establishment in their estate at the time. I have no reputation for  eating remarkably hot curries. I have never broken 80 playing golf so have twenty years to go before I have any change of shooting below my age. I do have a hole in one although there is no Hall of Fame for that, its membership would be exhaustive.

I won first dividend on  the pools in November 1989 and collected £351.85. There must have been loads of draws that day!! I still have an uncashed cheque for 66p from a previous 6th dividend win, It would have cost more than that to print the cheque.

So I will just settle for what I am and what I have got, a brick in the wall at Twickenham Stadium, another in the Olympic Park in Atlanta and a copy of the Daily Telegraph from 6th June 1992 showing me as the joint fourth fastest 200m runner in the Country, same PB as  Linford Christie: that must have been some typo!!

Bonking Boris bounces back

The old boy has bucked a trend in the recent council elections, and been re-elected as Mayor of London. As the Conservative party took a fair old pounding across the Country, the female pro-Boris vote held strong and he was able to fend off Ken 'the con' Livingstone and remain firmly entrenched in County Hall.

It's nothing out of the ordinary for the incumbent Government to get roasted in the mid-term elections, so I suspect Dave and his crew will be fairly relaxed about the wider political picture. He might, however, be looking over his shoulder from time to time to check that Boris is still maintaining that he has no presumptions about being PM. That could all change though.

In the last term we had the introduction of the Boris bikes into London, and he is now well placed to see through the Olympic Games in a few weeks time. I suspect his major focus, and legacy, though will be to try to force through the plans for an estuary airport  at the mouth of the Thames.
The four runway airport will reputedly cost between £40-£70 billion and would be built on to artificial islands near Whitstable. Bet the oysters aren't too happy! Norman Foster favours a land side airport on the Isle of Grain and there are alternative options for Gatwick and Stanstead, although Heathrow does now seem to be out of the running.  With Gatwick and Heathrow likely to be close to meltdown during the upcoming Olympics, there will certainly be a ground swell for a new facility near London. Link it somehow to the Eurostar and fast trains to the North of England and we could see the Boris Island Airport gather some momentum.

At the moment there are minimal UK flights to China, India and Brazil that the UK are missing out on very lucrative deals with these rising industrial giants. Guangzhou, the main industrial centre in China has no direct flights from Heathrow. Amsterdam, Paris and Frankfurt have 800 a year between them. So clearly something must be done. Will the finance be there, can the nature and ecology problems be overcome, and would it really take 20 years from conception to delivery. If that's the case Boris better get bonking!!!

Swiss gnome takes charge

The Football Association yesterday announced Roy Hodgson as the new England football manager. The appointment of Roy surprised a large number of  people who had expected Harry Rednapp to be given the job.

There is, however, huge and previous baggage with Harry which remains from his days at West Ham. It concerns his relationship with the players and staff when he was there at the same time as Trevor Brooking. Allegedly Brooking was of the view that Harry would be the England manager while he remained at the FA 'over his dead body'. This view may well have prevailed. Trevor taking a moment to ease off the fence  is a monumental event for English football.

The RFU hase recently announced a new head coach in Stuart Lancaster. Many people were surprised by his appointment as well. That stemmed, though,  from his limited international experience compared with a number of other candidates.

The RFU were aware of this limitation so they gave Stuart Lancaster control of the 2012 Six Nations championship to see what he was made of. He and his team were a whisker away from winning the title and associated grand slam, and this performance was enough to nudge him over the line, and he was duly appointed.

The FA have appointed somebody with International experience, and success at the World Cup instead of a very successful club manager. The main candidates have contrasting personalities which reflect in the way their teams play football, and the FA could have appointed one or other only for the duration of the up coming European Championships. They have, however, ignored that option and given Roy a four year contract.

Time will tell whether the FA or RFU approach was the right one. Hopefully they will both be successful, and can carry the England name  to the top of the World rankings again.

Gene Genie

As part of our initiative to spend a long weekend away somewhere in the UK each month, SWMBO and I have just spent some time in North Devon. I have to come clean and admit it was tied in with me having the opportunity to play the Saunton golf club, a course considered to be one of the top links in the Country.

The only reason it is not on the Open Championship rota would be the inaccessibility of the course and the lack of hotel accommodation. The course is just on the edge of Exmoor, in the prime surfing area which encompasses Saunton Sands, Croyde and Woolacombe. i won't go into the merits of each bay in terms of long board or short, but the locals are pretty passionate about which is  best.

So, having found a location for the golf it was necessary to find somewhere to stay, and I decided Ilfracombe would hit the spot. 'Oh dear', said my mate Ray, an expert on the coast-line of Devon and Cornwall having yomped most of the footpath in his time. 'It's like a time warp, a screen set from the TV series life on Mars'.
Well no problem, I thought, I can cope with that, and it will give us a bit of us time.

We first went to Clovelly, a heritage site and almost a living museum village. we walked down to the harbour on the narrow cobbled stone walkways, and looked back at the distance we had travelled, and the drop we had negotiated. Fortified with a pasty and a cup of tea we set off back up again. It was at this point that I recalled getting back up by Land Rover the last time I was there. I must have been about 10, and my Dad could not face the climb and so we all returned to the top by car. Sadly that service does not operate off season, so a walk back it was.

We took in the history of the place, the fact that until recently all deliveries were done using donkey powered sledges, and that it was the favoured place of Charles Kingsley who spent his childhood in Clovelly before moving on. he always maintained a cottage and returned most  Summers to write. He was part of the Ruskin, Dickens, Tennyson crowd and his best known novels are Hereward the Wake and Westward Ho!.

Westward Ho is not far from Clovelly and also has a well thought of links course, considered one of the oldest in England.

Now back to Ilfracombe, where we arrived to find a very pleasant room waiting for us, with one of these open plan bathrooms as part of the accommodation. I find this sort of design quite strange. Anyway, the proprietors were very pleasant and had not long purchased the place, moving down from Birmingham in the process.

We quickly changed and went out to the restaurant SWMBO had booked as a birthday treat. And indeed treat it was. We had the place to ourselves, our own private chef and waiter, and failed to realise it was a sign of things to come.

On Sunday, we got up and found to our horror that Ilfracombe was closed.......nowhere to have a decent Sunday lunch, nowhere to eat in the evening, the tunnels beaches which are one of Ilfracombe's main tourist features were also closed, so we were stuffed. We ended up in the local 7/11 getting a feast of stuff to take back to the room, popped on a film and slobbed out there!

As a tribute the the open plan accommodation, we did take ourselves to a village in Exmoor called Simonsbath and in due course I will add a photoshop picture to this article as a record of events.

We have now done Christchurch in Dorset, Edinburgh and Clovelly in our weekend schedule, April we look forward to going to Cambridge, we are hopeful of a few more things to do there!!

Lights are on, but nobody is home

I am told that giving a eulogy with a friend or loved one lying in the casket next to you, is a very hard thing to do. It is particularly tough when the person involved has been cut down in the prime of their life.

I experienced the closest thing to it at the weekend when I visited my mate Dave in Queen Mary's hospital in Roehampton. Dave, also known as 'Cellnet' Dave or Dodgy, has been diagnosed with early onset dementia and last year was sectioned. he remains in a secure unit at the hospital while they try to find a suitable care home for him. The implications are that he will remain institutionalised for the rest of his life, eight to ten years in a living casket if you will.

Dave was a bit of a lad as we spent our 30 and 40 somethings together alot of the time. A founder member of the Tuesday club, he was regularly  looking for a deal, or chasing a party. We played rugby together, and embraced the social side of the game,  all around the World. His times in Cannes at the telecommunications gala's and his reputation, unfair though it was,  as a short arms, deep pockets merchant were legendary and it was this latter trait which indicated to me that things were not all good in his world.

During my infrequent visits to London it became evident that people were bad mouthing Dave in a way that was not good. He was becoming nomadic and hermit like, and his behaviour in company was getting him into trouble. It is sad that only when his wife sought help to get him into a medical facility that could give him some help that the true nature of his change became evident.

When SWMBO and I visited him it was like walking into a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Initially  he would not see us,  but we stuck it out and some time later the nurse returned with him. He spent twenty minutes or so in the room with us, but it was obvious that he was really somewhere else. his recall of irrelevant facts was accurate, and his awareness of time and local events associated with it meant he left when the evening meal trolley was due. His wife has since indicated that he was aware who we were, which was a comfort.

I suspect he has days when the lights are off and nobody is home, or they are on and somebody is home. This weekend it was a combination of both. I hope I catch him in a better place next time.

Sofia so good....

Chiswicks best kept secret, our youngest grandaughter, Sofia, is now at the crawling stage, so we took a trip over to the flat on Friday to see her in motion.

She seems happy with herself and ambles around in a very contented way smiling at anybody whose eye she can catch. She is about eight months old now and I suspect she will soon be climbing the furniture to strengthen her legs prior to taking those first unstable steps.
At that stage, all the artifacts at floor level and probably up to about three feet of the ground will need to be moved out of reach as the wrecking ball into which babies transform, will be more than able to search and destroy.

It will be interesting what her first words will be. With a Bulgarian mother and grandmother in residence it may be something Eastern European which will probably sound like mamma or pappa any which way and no doubt she will be multi-lingual like her parents are.

It is strange that number one son has found his home in Chiswick at a time when I have vacated, but at least we know our way round when we visit.
Sofia was baptised in the local Russian Orthodox church whose vibrant powder blue spire can be viewed from the M4. The inside of the church did not have the same finish although the standard icons did cover the back wall of the church.
The  dunking took place downstairs in a giant plunge bath and I am not surprised Sofia came out screaming her head off, the water was icy cold.

We hope she will soon be able to visit Scouseland and meet the human dynamo who is Ava. Give them both eighteen  years (max) and they will be taking the pubs and clubs of England by storm....lock up your son's time!