Category Archives: Misc

On Your Marks…

Posted on by
1

…and you join us just in time for the start of the third semi final of the 110 metres hurdles for men, A few worth keeping an eye on here: in lane 1 there’s the highly regarded Himmler of South Africa; in 3, of course, we have Jocelyn Carruthers of Team GB, who recently ran the 17th quickest time for a scotsman this month and whose coach has high hopes of finishing the race; and finally watch our for Wing Ming Shiming, in lane 7, towards the left of your screen: one of the very few in the Chinese squad not to test positive for drugs this season. Should be a great race.

Over to you, Brendon:

Team Single

Posted on by
1

If there was a more pathetic site this weekend than the 5 inches of rain falling all over England during this Greatest of all Great British Summers, then it must have been the sight of the Australian Cricket Team’s bowling attack, one-by-one limping off the field having strained themselves while being on the wrong end of a stuffing by the English. One of the more poignant moments was watching one of them – Wayne Shane I think he was called – hobbling off towards the pavilion while 11 pissed young men in the crowd, who’d decided to come dressed as a flock of sheep, serenaded him with (to the tune of Knees Up Mother Brown) “You’re Not Very Good, You’re Not Very Good”. They were ably conducted by a bloke dressed as Bo Peep. Don Bradman must be twitching in his box. The Australian Cricket Team has come a long way since the days of Warne, McGrath and the Waugh brothers. A long way in a downwards direction.

Actually, that’s rubbish. Forget you ever read that because I’ve made a few glaring errors (even more than usual). This is how that should have read.

If there was a more pathetic site this weekend than the 5 inches of rain falling all over England during this Greatest of all Great British Summers, then it must have been the sight of the Team Australia bowling attack, one-by-one limping off the field having strained themselves while being on the wrong end of a stuffing by Team England. One of the more poignant moments was watching one of them – Wayne Shane I think he was called – hobbling off towards the pavilion while 11 pissed young men in the crowd, who’d decided to come dressed as a flock of sheep, serenaded him with (to the tune of Knees Up Mother Brown) “You’re Not Very Good, You’re Not Very Good”. They were ably conducted by a bloke dressed as Bo Peep. Don Bradman must be twitching in his box. Cricket Australia has come a long way since the days of Warne, McGrath and the Waugh brothers. A long way in a downwards direction.

I suppose, as usual, it’s only me that gets infuriated by this modern trend of naming organisations in such a way. Cricket Australia, Team GB, Team Sky (that’s a bunch of cyclists, by the way, not pilots), the list is endless. Now I can’t be exactly sure where and how this all started, but you can bet the favourite of your testicles that it originated over the other side of the pond. Who can ever forget the wonderful Corinthian ethos and warmth of the “dream team” of Team USA – that bunch of multi-millionaire professional basketball players who represented Team Coca-Cola (the new name for all USA – not just sports clubs, the whole country) at the Barcelona/McDonald Olympics in 1992. Do you get the feeling that there are PR/Ad men dotted throughout the kingdom who, upon seeing the success of Team USA, have convinced every sporting body that if they change the name of their club from “West Bromley Bowls, Croquet and Social Club” to Team Penge, that not only will they save on ink on headed paper, but that greatness on and off the field of play is but a flick of the wrist away ?

The fact that there was any cricket played at all up there at Chester-le-Street, Durham ( or Emirates Durham International Cricket Ground as it’s now called. Full of Emirs, Durham is, you know) is some sort of miracle brought about by a combination of an act of God and the Durham ground staff (Team Lawnmower). Over at TV Salford (the BBC to you and me), they were constantly showing pictures of the deluge ruining sporting events throughout the UK. The F1 at Silverstone looks like the first to be held underwater since the ill-advised Atlantis Grand Prix of 1911, (where Team Venice were the only ones to finish). Even my Cricket side’s (Team Philosan) tour to Royal Leamington Spa had to be cancelled altogether. Thankfully there’s a roof over centre court at Wimbledon, so Jock McSour and the Williams Brothers (Team Grim) can play their games of wiff waff, or whatever they do, tomorrow.

The weather hasn’t affected me as I turned my ankle over whilst on one of my enforced marches last week, reducing me to invalidity today. The Doc’s plan to shed some weight from me has come at a high price. I’m laid up in the couch with a throbbing achilles tendon, having re-employed my walking stick (which Team NHS gave me last year) for those vital regular journeys upstairs.
July 15th sees the first anniversary of me falling over in the kitchen while my head exploded and, frankly, recovery continues to by slow and intermittent. I’ve been referred to another in a long line of specialists up at Health Kent since a lot of numbness in my face and dizzy spells have returned. Cider does help but I can’t get it on prescription.

My bald shins (it’s an old man thing) and feet have become bloated and covered in what looks like a million blood-spots. From a distance it looks like I have a sun tan on my lower regions only. Up close, they remind me of my nan’s shins (I looked at them a lot.) The Doc told me he thought it might be a reaction to warfarin. I asked for a second opinion, so he told me I was ugly as well.

So I wait for the next in a series of docs appointment. Shuffling around, to-and-from trap one, watching the rain outside and sad Australian cricketers. As I struggle to climb the stairs, Incumbent Dartford breaks into a verse of “You’re Not Very Good”. And, to be honest, this time I can’t argue with her.

Mr Unreliable

Posted on by
3

I’d forgotten all about Clive James. Not completely, you understand, or even intentionally, but when you’ve not seen on heard of a person for a while, you tend to forget about them. A bit like Jimmy Carr and the tax man. And like Mr Carr I realise I have made a terrible mistake.

There was a time when you couldn’t turn on the TV in the UK without watching this bald, fat Australian wander around some far-flung corner of the globe, or lolling behind his desk while he introduced his next guest on his chat show.  Like most talented performers, TV companies have a tendency to over-expose them, to milk their cash cow til it collapses in exhaustion and apathy. I feel Clive suffered a similar fate. The public like a talent, but can whiff from 300 yards the smell of a tired idea and over-used performer.

So it’s sad to hear that he has announced that he’s losing his fight against leukaemia, with which he was diagnosed two-and-a-half years ago. That would explain his absence from our screen, after having dominated it for so long.

Take Michael MacIntyre plus Noel Edmonds. Add some talent and you’ll realise how often our Clive seemed to be on the box. But I liked him, as did millions of others, even if the easy-tv option of fronting shows about the world’s worst adverts was clearly below this man’s level.

But it was his writing which I remember made me laugh out loud, and I’m annoyed that I had forgotten this fact. I read James’s autobiographies and travel writings before I’d discovered Bill Bryson. His tales from his childhood in Australia are arse-splittingly funny, every bit as good as Bryson’s accounts of life in mid-west America, and I can pay him no greater compliment then that. When I read this stuff, I realised that I’d made so many wrong life-choices along the way, and if I could turn back the clock, I’d pick up a pen and start writing, and stop farting around with photographs.

Luckily, our friends at Wikipedia (that’s not the lot holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy) have collated some of Clive’s funnier quotes, some of which I list below. Re-reading these, I know now my next move. Cease wading though Antony Beevor‘s magnificent and enormous Second World War, and re-buy Unreliable Memoirs (from where all the following quotes are gleaned).

I’ve read enough books about the War, I haven’t laughed enough. Yet.

  • Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel.
  • Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.
  • I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me.
  • My mother had naturally spiced the pudding with sixpences and threepenny bits, called zacs and trays respectively. Grandpa had collected one of these in the oesophagus. He gave a protracted, strangled gurgle which for a long time we all took to be the beginning of some anecdote.
  • I remember the shock of seeing Ray undressed. He looked as if he had a squirrel hanging there. I had an acorn.
  • Children in Australia are still named after movies and sporting events. You can tell roughly the year the swimming star Shane Gould was born. It was about the time Shanewas released. There was a famous case of a returned serviceman who named his son after all the campaigns he had been through in the Western Desert. The kid was called William Bardia Escarpment Qattara Depression Mersa Matruh Tobruk El Alamein Benghazi Tripoli Harris
  • Riding the crest, I diversified, exploiting a highly marketable capacity to fart at will… By mastering this skill I set myself on a par with those court jesters of old who could wow the monarch and all his retinue with a simultaneous leap, whistle and fart. Unable to extend my neo-Homeric story-telling activities from the playground to the classroom, I could nevertheless continue to hog the limelight by interpolating a gaseous running commentary while the teacher addressed himself to the blackboard.
  • The whole secret of raising a fart in class is to make it sound as if it is punctuating, or commenting upon, what the teacher is saying. Timing, not ripeness, is all. ‘And since x tends to y as c tends to d,’ Fred expounded, ‘then the differential of the increment of x squared must be… must be… come on, come on! What must it flaming be?’ Here was the chance to to give my version of what it must be. I armed one, opened the bomb bay, and let it go. Unfortunately, the results far exceeded the discreet limits I had intended. It sounded like a moose coughing.
  • As I begin this last paragraph, outside my window a misty afternoon drizzle gently but inexorably soaks the City of London. Down there in the street I can see umbrellas commiserating with each other. In Sydney Harbour, twelve thousand miles away and ten hours from now, the yachts will be racing on the crushed diamond water under a sky the texture of powdered sapphires. It would be churlish not to concede that the same abundance of natural blessings which gave us the energy to leave has every right to call us back. All in, the whippy’s taken. Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection. It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home.

Allocation, Allocation, Allocation

Posted on by
1

A bad start to a Sunday morning: It’s a sad day when a few honest and true officials spoil it for everyone else.

Yes : It’s Happy Corrupt IOC Official Day again. The day, which comes round once every four years (not to be confused with Happy Corrupt FIFA Official Day) when a national newspaper (you remember newspapers : full of worthless nasty, bent journalists who should be arrested for bribing our policemen) expose the members of the International Olympic Committee, its agents, its agents friends and its agents friends golf partners as corrupt and dishonest – willing to sell votes and/or tickets to the highest bidder.

It’s difficult to comprehend that such an esteemed organisation, which is and has been led by such good-eggs and men with spotless records such as Juan Antonio Samaranch, Jacques Rogge (though not yet Michel Platini or Sepp Blatter) would allow such rotters into their fold. I mean, for heaven sake, some of these men high up in the IOC were fine, champion athletes in their own time, so that certainly admonishes any of those from any guilt or indeed suspicion where corruption, incompetence or dodgy-dealing is concerned.

Fortunately, officials from just 54 countries are involved in the allegations – which is merely a quarter of the 204 countries competing at the games, and there is absolutely no indication or allegation that anyone from the host country, Great Britain is involved in any way whatsoever (and shame on you for ever thinking so). The straightforward, uncontroversial and glitch-free way in which tickets have been distributed in Britain (and at such competitive prices) should rule out any suspicion falling on the GB arm (or leg) of the organisation.

It cheers me to think that no-one on the home organising committee has been implicated in this most disgraceful of all alleged practices, which seems to have been carried out solely and exclusively by those Johnny Foreigner-types. Us Brits will not stand for such nonsense and skullduggery. It’s just not cricket. If we’re gonna be ripped off, we will be happy to be done so by multinational credit card, alcohol, food and soft drinks companies charging well-over-the-odds to the captive market within Olympic Park, and not by some greasy Daigo or Arab who probably had never ever heard of Lord Coe or Boris Johnson.

I dunno why we have to have ’em over here in the first place : volunteering as stewards, sleeping under our bridges, running on our tracks and winning our medals…

How to Complain. #97: Writing to the Council

Posted on by
1

An elderly reader hopes that by sharing his experience of the newly-named “Royal” Borough of Greenwich, others will be wary of promises made by their local council and spared from similar misery.
.
Mr. D Rapley
11 ********** Road
New Eltham
SE9 ***
Sirs
 I write in frustration regarding my ambitious request for a mattress collection. A request was successfully made to your office by my wife and collection duly arranged for last Thursday 7th June.
 We were instructed to leave the mattress out for collection before 6am on the 7th. Wow,we thought,these mattress men are really early worms. Mattress in position and collection naively anticipated.
 Guess what – we still await collection,despite several phone call attempts to advise you of the situation of our deteriorating bedware.These attempts unsurprisingly only resulted in a loop tape of recorded messages reassuring me of all the wonderful services the now Royal Borough boasts.
 
On one lottery-odded occasion an actual  human eventually decided to pick up the receiver.
 Luckily my wife still managed to remember why she had phoned (she put the phone on speaker during the recorded options, managed to prepare a 5 course meal,wash up and finish knitting a balaclava), and was then given vague assurances from the inexplicably named customer services department that we were “on the computer” and the arrival of the men in the yellow lorry was imminent.
 Well,it still hasn’t happened. Not a reversing beep. Not a welcoming woosh of an airbrake.Nothing.
 Oh yes,all this in despite of the fact that the monstrous £21 charge you demanded was trousered on the spot. Council procedures dictate that the request couldn’t even be registered unless payment was made. I was 20 guineas lighter before the receiver had been slammed back into it’s now cold cradle.
 So,I must dutifully inform you that unless this now sodden,hopefully vermin invested health hazard is not collected as you promised (as is your duty),it will give it a new home in the road.
 I shall then take a picture or two of the festering,soon to be vandalised item and send them,along with a brief invective, to the appropriate consumer interest editor at the local News Shopper. Most probably the same hack who reviews the local pubs with such damning vitriol.
 I live in hope and remind you of the borough’s – sorry,Royal Borough’s – crest that proudly proclaims “WE GOVERN BY SERVING”. Can I have a bit of that please?
 
Regards
 
Dave Rapley
 
Your loyal rate payer of forty plus years standing..and waiting.