I have a small bit of glass in my big toe, and I can’t get it out. I think it’s glass, anyway.
I stepped on it yesterday morning, on my way between the shower and my room. I tried a pin, then tweezers, then a scalpel, but couldn’t get it out. The problem is, it’s tiny and right on the bottom of my toe — I’m not quite flexible enough to get a good view of it.
So, it’s still in there. I’m hoping it works its own way out.
Last week was rather sporty…even more so than usual, anyway, at least during the week.
Monday. Shootin’. As you do. Took Workmate Maxine down, and she turned out to be pretty good for a beginner. Well, almost a beginner. She did even better this week…it’s a pity we’ll lose her to Altrincham, as it’s just unfeasible for her to get down to Handforth.
Tuesday. Hoecky. A rare appearance at hockey practice. I’ve just not been much recently. I’ve missed loads of matches this season too. Definitely NOT a vintage hockey season for me, and I’m glad it’s just about over.
Wednesday. Archery. I went for a bit of a taster session with work at North Cheshire Bowmen. I’ll get some pictures up at some point. By the way, have you lot noticed the pictures I put up from Claire’s birthday hovercraft thing? I only got them in there waaay after the post was made.
So, archery. It was ace! I managed seven golds (bulls), including one that was absolutely slap bang in the middle. Lots of reds, blues and whites too. No-one else got more than three from their 27 shots, even the people who’d done it before.
*smug*
Before you all start saying that, well, I shoot rifles so have an unfair advantage…that’s rubbish. It doesn’t quite work like that — that’s like suggesting that a cyclist (in the Tour de France sense) would automatically make a good motorbike racer. Silly, y’see? Okay, I can aim, but that’s only a small factor.
Anyway, my shooting experience turned out to be a bit of a hindrance, if anything. At one point, the instructor actually asked me "You shoot rifles, don’t you?" Basically, when aiming a rifle, you cock your head. That just doesn’t work when you’re using a bow…but I couldn’t stop myself.
Actually, I have tried archery once before, but only briefly, and I was rubbish — it was part of the 3-in-1 clay pigeon shooting, archery and quadbiking day out I organised for my birthday (and Ross’s and Josephine’s and Marty’s) a few years back. I really must surpass that one for next year’s 30th.
I’m going to try and organise an archery evening for the MUGSS and summer hockey bunch.
Thursday. Badminton. One court, and five of us turned up — me, Andy, Si, Raman and Matt. Matt and I are of quite a similar standard, but very different in style, so it always makes for interesting games.
I was writing a good long post about Shiny’s stag do, and a visit to the 3 Rivers Brewery…but I forgot to save it in Notepad. Not normally a problem, as I’d left my PC on overnight…but, for some reason, it got rebooted.
Bugger.
I really cannot be arsed typing all that out again. So…
Three. Two shall not be enough, and four shall be too many. Five shall be deemed Right Out.
It was a CAMRA U30 trip out to the 3 Rivers Brewery in Reddish, deepest darkest Stockport.
Andrew, the Assistant Brewer there, is one of our own — the youngest CAMRA bar manager (that is, he runs a bar at a CAMRA beer festival) in the country I believe, and general good bloke.
So, for the princely sum of five English pounds, we got a tour, three tasty pints, and some lovely hotpot. Superb!
3 Rivers is a rapidly-expanding microbrewery, sited on a business park in the middle of a residential area. They’ve shoehorned their beers into many a Manchester/Stockport pub, and are even exporting to the States nowadays.
The best bit, however, is the members’ club they’ve set up on the top floor of their unit — it’s got a very well-stocked bar, dartboard and Sky TV…and then a seperate little room with comfy sofas. The beer’s cheap, too — £1.20 for a pint of their standard bitter, I think it was. It’s great!
They’re closing membership soon, at something like the 500 mark. If I lived closer, I’d have signed up already.
The weekend saw Shiny Richard’s stag do. Don’t ask why he’s called ‘Shiny’ — he just is!
This came in several distinct sections:
Thankfully, I only caught the tail end of this, as it was on Friday night. Fortunately, they’re a fairly talented bunch of singers, so it wasn’t too bad. Off to Shere Khan for a rather disappointing curry afterwards, and then home.
After a very welcome bacon butty oriented breakfast at Pete’s place, we traipsed our way across the country to Swinefleet, near Doncaster, for an afternoon of Madtrax. These are basically outdoor off-road buggies — sort of like a cross between go-karts and quad bikes — that you ride around on a muddy up-and-down track, complete with a jump!
It was definitely fun, although the fact that you just planted your foot on the accelerator for the entire lap, and final times were separated by a few tenths of a second, took a bit of the gloss off it. I did my usual trick of being good at the start, then failing to improve. Holker won it in the end, followed by Cattac and then Lees.
I’ve got to thank Holker for driving me there and back — I spent most of the journey asleep!
Back to Manc, then on to Belle Vue for some serious dog racing. We had a fancy 3-course meal there…which was a bit disappointing, really, but we were all absolutely ravenous by then!
Then, much betting was done. Holker and I took it reasonably seriously on our table (which we shared with Shiny himself), and didn’t do too badly — I reckon I finished up on the night, and Holker wasn’t far off. However, we did all put 50p in for a "table bet" at the start, shared with Justin, Al and Jem on the next table over…and instantly won £15! Holker and I continued with the table betting — by the end of the night, each 50p stake had grown to £4.70. How good is that?!
Where would any self-respecting stag party end up in Manchester. Yup, Teasers! Unfortunately, it seems to have closed down, so we ended up in Walkabout instead. Fairly dirty and drunken, really. And that’s where I shall stop 
There are two sets of photos on Pete’s Facebook site (thankfully, there’s no need to register):
Sunday was spent feeling distinctly "Sunday Mahinda".
I’m up to Edinburgh tomorrow for Shiny and Suse’s wedding. It should be a good one!
Last weekend, I went down to London to see the folks, but the primary purpose was something quite different.
"Aunty Hosana" was in hospital. Now, she’s a social "aunty" rather than being related to me but, in years gone by, she’d been closer to me than all but my direct family. I use the perfect tense (possibly past perfect continuous) because I’ve seen precious little of her during the last decade or so, which is a shame.
She was our local GP when I was growing up in Kensal Green*, and literally lived across the road from us. As a fairly sickly child (I had certain problems, I gather, that I’m not going to go into here), I suppose mum had plenty of dealings with Aunty in her professional capacity, and that spilled over into firm friendship. Aunty’s son, Saleem, is a couple of years older than me, and I spent most of my early life hanging out round his place — after all, he got all the cool toys like Transformers, He-Man figures, an Atari 2600, and so on…eventually working up to an Amiga, Sega Megadrive, etc.
* That Wikipedia page contains stuff I never even dreamt of — for instance, the local library, where I spent a significant part of my life between the ages of 5 and 10, was opened by Mark Twain himself!
As a result, many of my childhood memories involve Aunty Hosana and Saleem, complete with a supporting cast comprising Rajesh, Rubel, Martin, Tariq and associated parents.
But I digress. Aunty used to walk Saleem and me to school in the morning, testing us on little maths questions as we walked. I don’t think I wrote about it, but this was Chamberlayne Wood JMI School, which recently had a narrow escape from a tornado! If you look at the pictures on the BBC News site, you may spot it a few yards from one of the totalled houses. Like your average south Brent state school, it wasn’t exactly a pinnacle of educational prowess, and Saleem ended up in Gower House, a small private school in Neasden with a truly awful uniform — maroon blazers are fair enough, but was the lemon yellow piping really necessary?!
It was Aunty Hosana who pressed for my parents to put me in Gower House as well, and (lemon yellow piping aside) I never looked back. She, more than anyone else except my mother, was responsible for me getting a decent education. I reckon. She was always someone I could go to for advice and support. Even after we moved out to Hertfordshire, she was always there for the whole family.
As the years rolled on, I saw Aunty and Saleem less and less. Since graduating, I’ve spent very little time in the company of my folks — six to eight weekends a year or fewer, in fact — and, as a result, I’ve hardly seen the pair of them. I’m not exactly great at keeping in touch with people, either.
The last time I saw Aunty was over a year ago, and I was appalled to see how this sharp, wise woman had degraded into someone who drifted in and out of her own world, amazingly lucid passages interspersed with fuzzy recollections where she didn’t realise what year, or even decade, it was.
Age catches up with everyone, unfortunately. Thanks to being far away from my direct family and friends thereof for the last dozen years, I’d been insulated from that sort of thing. Older relatives were all halfway across the world, so I’d never witnessed any decline in them either.
A little while back, Aunty suffered her second stroke, and has been in hospital since. Mum told me that she didn’t think the woman had too long left (mum’s an experienced nurse, so probably has an eye for these things), so I dropped all plans and headed down for the weekend.
Mum and I visited on Saturday evening, and it was really hard. Aunty had all but wasted away, and was incapable of speech. The flicker of recognition was there, and she was trying to tell us things, but we just couldn’t understand. We both came away with lumps in our throats and tears in our eyes.
I’ve been trying to get hold of Saleem (after he left me a voicemail, the week before last), but to no avail. I’ll keep trying…
As mentioned previously on these hallowed pages, I coerced friends into moseying along to Sand Bar on Friday 23rd Feb, to help me celebrate my birthday. Thanks to all of you who came along — lots of people, from a fair cross-section of my mates, most of whom didn’t know many of the others…or any at all, in a couple of cases.
At one point, I counted about 30 people there, and no-one bar myself knew more than about five of the others. Ace!
A total of about 50 turned up, I reckon, at various stages of the evening. Only one workmate (Maxine; although Juliette turned up too), however, and no shooting, hockey or CAMRA types.
My birthday started at midnight on Thursday, of course. Thursday was A Good Day. Having been in the well-documented "mad busy patch at work", Alsion (t’boss) and I finally finished it all at 7.12pm on Thursday…and promptly adjourned to the pub. Her local, in fact — the Volunteer in Sale. As a Holt’s pub, they had decent ale (in bottles, anyway) and it was dead cheap. It was a lovely old building, actually, with plenty of space. I can just imagine the chavvy karaoke nights.
Come midnight, and I was left all alone in my living room. Part of me was kind of glad, to be honest. It was fitting that it would come to that, given the general malaise I’d been going through. So, I poured myself a glass of cider (more on this later) and opened various cards…and one fabulous present — a big box of ale from the Goonies. Proper mucky dark stuff, too. Possibly the best parcel I’d ever received…certainly the heaviest!
Those who know me will know my feelings on cider. I hates it. Sarah, however, gave me two bottles of Luscombe’s fine Devonshire cider as an early birthday present, so it would have been rude not to at least drink one of them.
It was bloody awful. Admittedly, it did get better as it went down, but not much better. I had to crack open a bottle of Young’s Double Chocolate Stout afterwards to get rid of the taste.
By the way Sarah, if you’re reading this, the thought was very much appreciated, and I did make an effort!
After Sand Bar kicked us out, a few of us hardy souls went on to East Z East for a curry. This is a high class curry establishment, that does pretty damn fine food. Now that the mighty King Cobra looks gone for good*, it’s vying with the Great Kathmandu in West Dids for my "best Manchester curry house" honour. Of course, I’ve not yet sampled Shimla Pinks in the city centre, or Dilli in Alty.
* It was closed down after a clampdown on illegal immigration. Pity.
Anyway, I can’t remember exactly who lasted the course — at a guess: Juliette, Doug, Rosy, me (of course!), Housemate Paul and PhlAsh. People had been buying me fine Belgian beer all night though, so memories are a bit vague.
It was a damn fine curry though!
Saturday started with a trek across to the Wirral for a hockey match against Oxton. It was not one of my better efforts, unfortunately, and not exactly a great team performance as we were beaten something like 4-1. I can’t remember exactly. It wasn’t good.
After that, it was over to Ross’s place for his 2nd Annual House Olympics. It was MUCH fun!
Ross, for those who don’t know, is exactly a year younger than me. We’ve co-celebrated in the past, which was always much fun.
Games at the House Olympics included (in probably the completely wrong order):
Some photos can be found here.
Team Green won it, I think, with Team Black pipping Team Red (featuring Rossko himself) to 3rd place. My mighty Team Blue finished a disappointing 4th, with Team Yellow bringing up the rear.I think. It was a fairly drunken affair!
After all that, I spent Sunday mostly recuperating.
