Ostrich on the Hoof

[Ally]

re train.

The thought of wholemeal pastry makes me feel ill.

Great read (apart from the pastry bit)

[TheOstrich]

“The ‘oover’s not picking up the fluff again” muttered the Ostrich. You may recall last year’s debacle when we discovered we’d gone over three years without changing the dust bag ….

“Have we got any spare?” I enquired of Mrs O. Errrr yes was the reply, with a single one duly produced from the remote depths of the cleaning cupboard. This appeared to be the last bag of the batch, so Ossie made a note of the make and serial number with a view to procuring replacements from the local hardware store. A visit there on Tuesday and a ferret through the serried racks of hoover bags produced plenty of Henry’s but only two packs of Panasonic (our particular make), and those with a slightly different serial number. But I was assured that with Panasonic, one size fits all, so I bought both 5-packs for a tenner and returned triumphant back to the Nest.

“I’ve got 10 new hoover bags; that’ll see us good for the next 10 years at the rate of one bag a year!”
“Why did you buy those?” quizzed Mrs O.
“Cos we’ve run out, of course!”
“No we haven’t, silly bird” – producing a large box from the back of the cleaning cupboard.
“You never told me we’d got some more”
“You never asked!”
Mrs O pulled a full pack out of the box.
“Oh well, look on the bright side, we can change the hoover bag six monthly then”
Mrs O pulled a second full pack out of the box.
“Alright, well every three months then”
Mrs O then pulled two more full pack out of the box!
“..... and these are the ones you bought last time you panicked and thought we’d run out …..”
“<sigh> OK, so we’ve now got 40 unused bags, then ….”

Anyone out there got a Panasonic upright hoover? Need bags?

After an unprecedented recent run of rugby matches, largely due to the abysmal weather conditions, I was due to return to the round ball game today – but on Thursday, an Interesting Thing caught my eye . Both the local soccer and rugby clubs have strategic advertising boards out around town, and I idly noted that the rugby club was advertising a game against “Christchurch”. It took a moment to register – but, to the best of my knowledge, Christchurch doesn’t have a rugby club! (Well, Christchurch, New Zealand, does, but their team is packed full of All Blacks and it’s perhaps a bit of a stretch for them to be turning up at North Dorset RFC.)

So, Ossie put on his Sherlock Holmes cape and magnifying glass in hand , hit the internet to try to find out what was going on. The first thing discovered on social media was that indeed, Christchurch, Dorset does have a brand new rugby club, launched this year, and it has a reasonably active Facebook page. They seemed to be playing friendlies against local clubs, and that fitted the general pattern in rugby union circles – play a season of friendlies, and for your second year, you get placed in a league proper.

Next, a visit to North Dorset’s club website, which was duly displaying an upcoming Second Team fixture against “Christchurch RFC First XV” – so far so good – and as that website is automatically linked to the RFU’s main portal, it suggested that the RFU’s own website might be of help in obtaining some further background on the new club. Which was where I entered the murky world of the Merit League tables – social rugby outside the formal pyramid system!

The RFU site listed various fixtures and results for Christchurch RFC, and these were described as “Group 2”. Group 2 of what, precisely? Entering “Group 2” into the weird and wonderful RFU search facility brought up some Under-16’s competition in Devon. Well, reasoning if there’s a Group 2, there must be a Group 1, I searched that next, and finished up staring at a league based in Cumbria! So then I just searched “Group”. Big mistake – by the time I’d reached the bottom of a ginormous list of Search Results which included the “Surrey Vets 4 Emerging Phase 2 Chairman’s Group” amongst other strange peculiarities , I was still nowhere near identifying what “Group 2” actually was.

I then noticed that the “Group 2” reference to Christchurch’s results was itself a link, and clicking that brought me to something called the “Dorset & Wilts Matrix”, a competition I’d not previously heard of! And Christchurch appeared to be playing in that. OK, Ossie’s master spreadsheet duly updated for this new-found league, it seemed entirely appropriate to go see them play at Slaughtergate today. So I duly rolled up at 1:54 for a 2:30 kick off – and, after all that, found the game had been cancelled!!!

Which left me just six minutes to get across town for a 2:00 kick off at the soccer ground, a feat unachievable even at the best of times given all the usual local traffic snarl-ups.

I eventually made it at 2:07, and needn’t have worried because as I parked up, I could see there was only one team out on the pitch. Eventually Wool United made a begrudging appearance and we got under way.

The home team were Gill Dons, who up to last year played out at Donhead St. Mary but now seem to be ground-sharing with Gillingham Town, although it’s all a bit of a murgle because Town only have one pitch, and they also run a Reserves side called Gillingham Town Phoenix. The solution seems to be that Town’s old ground at Hardings Lane has been brought back into use this year – it’s about ¼ mile from the new Woodwater Lane campus. The old ground is in a sorry state now. It’s easy to get into and has been the victim of petty vandalism in recent years, culminating in one side of the wooden grandstand being burnt down by local yobs using it as a drinking den last winter. The vast majority of the seats have been removed, but I was still able to get inside it and sit on bare concrete; at least it got me out of today’s very strong, chill breeze. Empty cans and smashed glass littered the floor, many advertising hoardings had been ripped down, and I was a bit perturbed by the sight of one of the floodlight pylon cables flapping loose in the wind.

The game itself was moderately entertaining, but with too many misplaced passes and poor play to be anywhere near being described as a classic. That said, Wool’s portly goalkeeper played a blinder in the first half to keep his team in it, and Wool took the lead just after the interval when their No.6 launched a wind-assisted 35 yard lob which dropped just under the crossbar, defying the home keeper’s efforts to keep it out. Dons tried their best to come back from that, but Wool clinched it with a neat play on 74m, switching the direction of their attack superbly and unexpectedly from right to left, and when the home goalie could only block the incoming cross, Wool’s No.6 was on hand again to knock the ball in. A well-deserved if somewhat unexpected victory for the away side.

11/01/20 –Dorset League Division 1 (Step 9): Gill Dons 0 Wool United 2
Admission: free, no programme
Refreshments: A Mars bar for 90p from the nearby social club, (they fell out with the football club quite a while back - I’ve never found them in practice to be that particularly social anyway )
Attendance: 16

[cromwell]

Anyone out there got a Panasonic upright hoover? Need bags?

Sorry Os!
What a shame about the vandalism, and the cancellation too.
Wool - what a name for a village! In fact it's been in the news.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/h ... 48176.html
That Wool goal sounds like a purler Os; shame the Dons keeper dropped one...!

[Kaz]

That Wool goal sounds like a purler Os; shame the Dons keeper dropped one...!

He was stitched up!

Another entertaining read Ossie, it does sound a shame about the state of that ground though!

[cromwell]

He was stitched up!

[TheOstrich]

Just after the start of the New Year, the big yellow signs went up around town heralding the start of Dorset County Council’s £3.45m Road Improvement scheme on 13th January, which basically involves putting cycle lanes down the Town Centre Bypass and creating a small one way system, thus making things inestimably worse for the motorist. Don’t mind me, when it comes to sustainable cycling and councils’ wasting money, I’ll happily admit I’m biased.

I did attend the Public Consultation back last November when we were allowed to look at the basic Plans and raise questions and comments. I made a number of observations, both verbally and in writing, and I wasn’t the only resident to get a bit … well, you know …. let’s say, forthright . I told one Council wonk that when it came to the first serious injury or death of a cyclist as a result of cars turning left across the cycleway at their proposed junction into the supermarket, then said Council should be held fully responsible – a tad strong, but then you’ve got to get your message across or they’ll just rubber-stamp everything. Incredibly, they do have appeared to taken that criticism on board, because revised plans have been published showing that they are now going to take the cycle path off the main road well before said junction and run it along with the pedestrian footpath to a separate, much clearer crossing point over the supermarket road. They also appear to have listened to a number of other concerns raised by other residents, from what I can see, so maybe these Public Consultations do have some value after all!

So here we are, one week into the proposed 22 week scheme of improvements, and what have we achieved? Well, not a lot – they have taken over a sizeable part of the town car park as a compound, wandered around a bit with clipboards, and then removed all the 13th January signs, replacing them with ones saying 26th January! This is – shades of the Chipp’num Bypass – going to run and run ….

Anyway, as we start the second half of the season, the Ostrich has been taking a careful look at his spreadsheets, and designating a few clubs as “must see” before the conclusion of matters next May. First up, Royal Wootton Bassett RFC in the latitudinally-challenged South West 1 East division, largely because it’s my last club in that league. Given the added impetus that all my local teams in that league are toying with relegation this year , I thought I’d better get a shuftie on, as the expression goes.

Hosting RWB today were the Green and Whites of Salisbury RFC, who have not exactly covered themselves in glory so far – Played 16, Lost 16 and by virtue of having forfeited a game and incurred a 5 point penalty, sit bottom of the table with -2 league points, some 25 points adrift of next-to-bottom Trowbridge. Statistics show they’ve used 58 players so far this season, which doesn’t sound at all good, and had conceded 717 points before today’s fixture. RWB on the other hand are second in the table, 5 points behind the leaders, and a cast-iron whupping therefore seemed order of the day.

This morning saw the Blackmore Vale shrouded in low-lying mist which the winter sun was having difficulty burning away; there had also been a slight frost, and certainly many local soccer games were being called off, but that was due to waterlogged pitches, not icy conditions, so I didn’t anticipate any problems with the rugby. The A30 across to Salisbury was a bit busier than it usually is on a Saturday, and a plethora of potholes made driving conditions additionally interesting. But the fog had lifted by the time I’d cleared Shaftesbury, and making the Salisbury club car-park in good time, I wandered down to the clubhouse for a warm-up, despite wearing 5 layers of clothing and a scarf – chilliest day of the year so far!

Salisbury are in the middle of building a brand new changing room complex, alongside the existing clubhouse and conveniently blocking access the old access route to the main pitch which is some 200 yards away, down in the bottom of the campus. I managed to find a way around by clambering over the wall at one end of the carpark although I subsequently found the club had knocked a hole in another section of said barrier to make a more formal entrance! The hike down to the pitch was as muddy as ever, and even the “walkway” of plastic coconut matting seemed to have terminally sunk into the slime and could hardly be discerned. There’s no frills around the pitch when you get there; the marquee has disappeared leaving a forlorn row of plastic office chairs as the only (and very much DIY) seating arrangement. I picked one up from where it was propped against the fence, placed it gingerly on top of the spectator’s bank, and sat down on it, at which point the chair legs sank a good 4 inches into the mud and I had the devil’s own game wrestling it out of the earth at the end of the match! The small beer hut is still in situ, though.

Both sides adopted a kicking game, which usually leads to a boring game, but given the abysmal quality of fielding displayed at times today, a lot of confused and unpredictable play resulted. Sensibly, the referee let the game flow as far as possible. The home side opened the scoring with a 35 yard penalty after 3 minutes, and then clung desperately onto that lead for the next 20 minutes or so before RWB notched two converted tries in two minutes, the second a very opportunistic charge down of a defensive kick. 10-17 at the interval, RWB’s Gavin Ougan was sin-binned for a high tackle early in the second half, and Salisbury took advantage to draw level, but couldn’t sustain the effort and eventually conceded two late tries to record their 17th straight loss of the season. It certainly wasn't a cast-iron whupping, though. Relegation pretty much a certainty now, but they are a major club and I’d be very surprised if they didn’t bounce straight back next year.

18/01/20 –Wadworth South West 1 East (Level 6): Salisbury RFC 17 Royal Wootton Bassett RFC 30
Admission: £12 – BUT that included:
A free 52pp glossy programme
A free drink – apple and mango J2O chosen, and
A free meal! Chicken and leek pie, baby new potatoes, peas and gravy …. so much for the diet
Attendance: 102

[Ally]

The small beer hut is still in situ, though

A free meal.

One question: did you have dinner later?


Great read Ossie.

[cromwell]

Just after the start of the New Year, the big yellow signs went up around town heralding the start of Dorset County Council’s £3.45m Road Improvement scheme on 13th January, which basically involves putting cycle lanes down the Town Centre Bypass and creating a small one way system, thus making things inestimably worse for the motorist. Don’t mind me, when it comes to sustainable cycling and councils’ wasting money, I’ll happily admit I’m biased.

You and me both. The slavish adoration of cycling by the state has me baffled.
Interestingly the Tour de Chuffing Yorkshire (unofficial title) may be in its last year. Business people are wondering where this mythical millions of pounds it brings into the local economy actually is, because they haven't seen much of it. Anyway, I digress!
five layers of clothing ? Cold indeed.

Poor Salisbury, getting beaten every week is no fun. Hopefully things will turn for them - certainly they seem to have a decent set up.
Great read Os.

[TheOstrich]

One question: did you have dinner later?

[Kaz]

I wouldn't be able to resist chicken pie either Ossie

Another fun read, and yes it's been very cold in the SW this weekend