A week spent winding down the garden for the winter.
We’ve mulched and staked up our roses, although I’m suspicious that the £3 “rose” we purchased from a stall at the annual Town Plant Sale during the summer is in fact a bramble
, judging by the way it’s shot upwards and outwards. It just doesn’t feel like a rose to me …. next door to it, our fig bush has produced a prolific number of fruits, but none have ripened, they’re all rock hard
!
We’ve also cleared out our 9 patio-pot based tomato plants, now that the weather has turned colder, on the basis the remaining tomatoes on the vines won’t turn. In doing so, I actually harvested 18 red ones, and just shy of a further 80 that were green
. OK, some are only thumb-nail size, but there were 2 beef tomatoes in there, and Mrs O has prepared a “mock green tomato chutney” from them
. Looking back, we must have had at least 300 red tomatoes from those 9 plants this summer; they were different varieties of Sutton’s F1 grafted tomatoes, bought from Waitrose on a 3 for £10 offer. The smaller “vine” type plants were prolific croppers and I’ll be on the lookout for them again next year. Of course, it all depends on the summer weather which was optimal this year, but nevertheless ….
We continue to battle with the new Samsung smart phone.
It turned itself into “aircraft mode” on Thursday and I had the devil’s own game getting out of it.
I believe Mick and Kaz are about to have solar PV panels erected? If so, they might be interested to learn that three week’s intensive monitoring of our new system shows a reduction in electricity usage from the National Grid (units per day, according to the electric meter) of around 45-50%. Plus we have hot water now provided by electricity (immersion heater) rather than gas, so a further saving there. As an aside, EonNext, who are our basic energy providers, managed to excel themselves by only advising us of our new gas tariff rates from 1st October by an email sent at 7:50 pm on 30th September
. A great help with planning!
To Saturday, then:
“I need to address all those scurrilous rumours out there,” quoth the Ostrich, drawing himself up to his full height.
And as we know, where ostriches are concerned, that is a very full height indeed!
“What scurrilous rumours are those, then, Ossie?”
“Is it not the case that today’s fixture was pencilled in on the Master Spreadsheet last August so we could go see Newton Abbot RFC play at Chard?”
“That’s right”.
“So our decision had nothing to do with the fact that Chard announced yesterday that unlimited free food would be on offer during the game …...”
My only previous match at Chard’s Essex Close ground was back in September 2016, the home team losing 15-25 to Kingsbridge. Essex Close is off the main shopping street at the bottom of the town by the JD Weatherspoons pub, The Cerdic, and at the ground itself, there is a small amount of on-site parking (which may be limited to members only - however I parked up first and asked questions afterwards
; they let me stay) but there is a pay-and-display public car park with around 90 spaces a bit further up the road.
The clubhouse is on the right as you enter the ground via a pay-station, with the floodlit pitch in front of you - inside the building, there’s a food hatch / kitchen next to the bar (faggots were being prepared
), and plenty of comfy seating. On display is a copy of the January 1946 programme for a Chard Invitation XV’s game against a visiting New Zealand XV, who had a fortnight previously defeated England at Twickenham. That’s apparently why there’s a Kiwi depicted on the top left hand corner of the Chard RFC club badge!
On the clubhouse side, there’s a covered utilitarian standing area, all prefabricated metal; however, what looks at first glance like two impressive, seated stands on the far side of the ground are in fact nothing more than large, tarted-up Perspex dugouts for the coaches and substitutes
, with a dinky electronic scoreboard between them. In fact, I’m not sure there’s any spectator access to the far side at all, potential walkways behind the goals are barricaded off.
Despite being situated more or less in the town centre, it’s a pleasant tree-lined location. More floodlights behind the trees on the far side of the pitch are connected with the local secondary school, Holyrood Academy, on Zembard Lane; the rugby club ground is geographically quite close to the town’s soccer club on that road, although unlike the latter, who were thrown out of the pyramid a few years ago by the FA because their pitch sloped end to end by around 12 feet, the rugby pitch has been properly levelled off and is flat. Chard RFC’s training ground and junior pitches are actually located out of town on the Crewkerne Road; the club are intending to develop and add facilities to what is a very basic set-up there, but there is no current intention to relocate the first team away from Essex Close.
This game pitted two mid-table teams with very similar records against each other, Newton Abbot being just above Chard in the league table purely on points difference. First blood to Newton Abbot after 5m with Max Wright leaping over an unholy mess of a scrimmage on the Chard line to touch down
, Daley adding an impressive conversion. Both sides then exchanged long range penalties before Chard’s Richards finished off a searing run down the left wing by Szydelko (35m). 8-10 at the interval.
Newton Abbot had looked more “up for it” in the first half, but in the second period, Chard’s scrum began to dominate, repeatedly pushing the visitors backwards. A second Newton Abbot penalty on 44m was countered by Gosden touching down for Chard following a scrum close to the try-line; this brought the scores level at 13-13. On 66m, a long range Chard penalty hit an upright and bounced back into play, and that was as good as it got for the home side; on 75m, Newton Abbot’s Daley intercepted a Chard pass and ran the ball back the length of the field for the game-winning try.
Newton Abbot will be delighted with this hard-fought away win - for Chard it was a case of “so near, yet so far” …..
A good afternoon’s entertainment.
01/10/22: Regional 2 Tribute South West (Level 6)
Chard RFC 13 Newton Abbot RFC 18Admission: £5
Programme: included. 16pp match-specific home-produced effort, with all the basics covered.
Refreshments: Charred BBQ (a take-away outlet in town) had a pop-up stall dispensing sample foil containers of their loaded fries and tot-pots of their milk shakes during and after the match
, the hot profferings arriving in a thermal box. I tried the BBQ Beef (smoky shredded beef brisket and smoked Applewood cheese), and their Pulled Somerset Pork (hand pulled pork shoulder and mozzarella); both were delicious
! Needless to say, the stall was doing a roaring trade, but whether that would translate into regular custom for the business, I don’t know - the milk shakes, according to a Menu Card I picked up, were priced at $4.50 - £5.00 and the loaded fries £8.00 - £9.00
Attendance: 249. No children were hurt in the Ostrich’s stampede to get at the free food.
. Speaking of which, Master O also told us of one A&E shift where he was in a cubicle dealing with a patient high on a cocktail of drugs that he got a “high” off the fumes and spent the next 30 minutes giggling in reception 
. The game ebbed and flowed; Stow couldn’t make much headway whilst Salisbury’s handling and passing deteriorated from poor to atrocious. Minor handbags broke out on occasions; the referee decided to ignore them 
