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Tags: Drama, Youth Theatre
Back in the icy UK the Six Nations championship achieved its annual climax on a thrilling final day of gripping rugby matches. As is the way with this epic challenge some of the participants had reason to be well content with the progress of their campaigns whilst others did not. This year some of those who ended up in the latter camp were not, however, the sides that had been predicted so to do at the outset of the tournament. Nor – clearly – did they themselves expect such an outcome.
For the first time in many a year the Celtic cousins – Ireland, Wales and Scotland – finished the tournament in first, second and third places (respectively). I say ‘many a year’ – I’m not actually sure if this has ever happened before. All power to them, say I!
Many congratulations to the splendid Irish, who not only won the championship on the penultimate weekend but went on to record what is only their third ever Grand Slam. The Welsh may have been slightly surprised to have lost two matches but still to have ended up second in the table (or – knowing them – maybe not!).
For the Scots – third place from three wins represents their best finish for some years. They will not be content with their away record nor with the lack of precision which resulted in a fair number of points being left out on the field. They have made great strides, however, and play an attacking brand of rugby which is admired by supporters of the game of all hues. The manner of their victory in the Calcutta Cup in particular was to be cherished.
As for the remainder of the sides – well, perhaps we will draw a discreet veil over them for now…
My apologies in advance. I am aware that for some readers of a… er… sensitive disposition, this may be just a little too soon! Oh well…
I have not – contrary to my custom at this time of year – made any mention thus far of the Six Nations Championship. (I have not – in fact – mentioned rugby at all of late, though in part that is because Canada have been having such a shocker – failing to qualify for next year’s world cup unless they can win next November’s last-gasp repercharge competition).
The reasons for my unnatural reticence are not hard to discover. Following Scotland’s excellent summer and autumn results against Australia and their close run encounter with the fearsome All Blacks, many commentators were guilty of getting rather carried away with their potential for the altogether more serious northern hemisphere championship.
True to type Scotland went to Cardiff three weeks back for the opening encounter with Wales and were – to put it bluntly – humiliated. Mercurial fly-half, Finn Russell, played poorly and the team lost by a disappointingly large margin. Russell was not much better the following weekend at Murrayfield against France, though wiser heads helped the team to keep its nerve in the face of a fast French start, clawing back enough points in the second half through penalties as the Gauls tired badly to win the game by a narrow margin.
At this point in the tournament there is a brief hiatus – a two week break before the third fixture. This gave the pundits plenty of opportunity to speculate widely as to the likely outcome of today’s Calcutta Cup fixture against England at Murrayfield. Last year at Twickenham the English had done to the Scots what the Welsh did this year – only more so! Much was written and posted about how the Sassenachs – in pursuit of a Grand Slam and eying a record third championship title in a row – would target the hapless Russell and embarrass the Scots, extending to more than a decade the gap since the latter had beaten them anywhere.
I feel that I hardly need write more – and indeed those interested should head for the sports pages for the full story. Needless to say, the Scots made the English look ordinary, Finn Russell turned in a Man of the Match performance and Scotland won a famous victory 25 – 13!
I will certainly be celebrating (more so because a depleted Bath also beat Sale by a point at the Rec in the Premiership) – and if Canada could follow last week’s storming win in the Americas Rugby Championship against Brazil by sneaking an unlikely away win in Argentina this afternoon… then I would be a very happy boy indeed!
Slàinte mhòr…
Tags: Celebration, Rugby, Scotland
Of course, the very day that I post a fairly flip piece about the Winter Olympics – and about Canada’s passionate though surely understandable love affair therewith – along comes a performance to take away the breath, to steal the heart and to show up as jejune any paltry attempt at humour.
I refer of course to Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s stunning recapture of their Olympic ice dance crown four years after their disappointment in Sochi and their subsequent (but clearly premature) retirement.
Pushed all the way by training partners, the French couple Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron (who set a new world record score in the free dance) Virtue and Moir faced having to set a record themselves were they to retake the top spot. As the scores flashed up to reveal that they had indeed done so the Kickass Canada Girl virtually leapt off the sofa – and was clearly moved to tears.
I was in no position to offer succour as I was myself busy blubbing like a baby. In my case this was less to do with the colour of the medals or the perfect justness of their win, but was entirely elicited by the impossible beauty and passion of their performance, dazzlingly choreographed to the ‘Moulin Rouge’ version of ‘Roxanne‘.
I could not help but be taken back in time to 1984, watching the grainy TV images from Sarajevo of another Olympic ice dance final as Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean stole our hearts to the accompaniment of Ravel’s ‘Bolero‘, taking a straight sweep of perfect 6.0s for artistic merit and changing the sport utterly in the process.
Wow! Many congratulations to Virtue and Moir (and to all involved) and a hearty ‘thank you’ for the great pleasure that you bring to millions.
Tags: Canada, Celebration, Sport
Further evidence (should such be required at this stage) that The Girl and I compliment one another nigh-on perfectly might be gleaned from our respective enthusiasms (and the consequent advocacies for those who strive on our behalves) during periods of Olympian endeavour.
The average Brit (and – yes… such a creature does exist, regardless of the protestations of some of those of a more intemperate and extreme ilk) who – like me – grew up marveling that such a diminutive nation could really have instigated or developed quite as many sports and games as it did (only to then cede dominance in them to other more aggressive and single-minded races) has probably been quite taken aback by the UK’s recent Olympic performances.
In the Summer Olympics at least!…
After the usual period of pre-games cynicism and belittlement many of us rapidly become the secret sports-nuts that we as a nation perpetually breed and find ourselves watching all manner of events on TV that, but a few days previously, we not only had no idea were sports at all (let alone Olympic sports!) but further did not know that Brits practiced them to any acceptable level. When we then win some unexpected (to us at least) medal in said contest we rapidly become InterWebNet experts on the matter and claim that we expected all along that our ‘athletes’ would do well.
The Winter Olympics are, of course, a very different story. Save for a glorious and now long-distant chapter in the history of ice dance (a form beloved of one particular sector of society with a fervour only matched by that appertaining to musical theatre) we Brits have, apparently, no winter sports skills at all* – with the strange exception of events which involve throwing ourselves off mountains clinging to some rudimentary and entirely unsuitable piece of hardware the chief characteristic of which is, to all intents and purposes, its cheapness (and please don’t feel the need to regale me with the actual cost of these chimerical devices)!
It is at this point that The Girl – being Canadian – comes into her own.
To be found, in the main, during the summer games loitering around the back of the stands puffing away at an ‘old fashioned’ rather than exerting themselves on field or track – come the winter Canadians suddenly start taking everything incredibly seriously. Should you suggest to your S.O. that – having won a sack-load of silverware already – it wouldn’t be the end of the world should Canada actually lose the hockey (never ice hockey!) to the US, you are likely to find all bedroom privileges curtailed unceremoniously for the foreseeable future.
Canadians have a passion for all snow and ice based sports that ranks alongside any other nation on this irriguous planet. “Quelle surprise” – I hear you mutter (with a slightly smart-arsed reference to the nation’s bi-lingual heritage) – thinking perhaps to add some gibe about the Canadian climate. Well – the fact that we rarely see snow at all at this end of Vancouver Island clearly does nothing to diminish The Girl’s enthusiasm for all things Winter Olympics – and such zeal is, of course, infectious!
So… Go, Canada, go!
* I refuse to mention Eddie ‘the Eagle’…
Tags: Canada, Celebration, Sport
I could not resist taking some further snaps of some of details of our recent renovations. I hope that my posting some of these to this forum will not try the patience of the gentle reader too far. This will – I promise – be an end of it!
Tags: House, Photo, Renovation
Some before and after views of our just-about-finished renovation – before we moved back upstairs. Double click on the images for the full effect.
This is our living room:
Here is our sparkly new kitchen:
This is my bathroom… yes, it is the same room:
…and this is The Girl’s:
Master bedroom and entrance hall:
Now to clean thoroughly and to move everything back upstairs again.
Phew!
Tags: House, Photo, Renovation
…like an arrow – but fruit flies like a banana!
Terry Wogan
As I write this post I am awaiting the arrival of a shock (or whatever may be the appropriate collective noun) of electricians who should be the last of the contractors to add their expertise to our long-running renovation. Hopefully by the end of the day all that will remain to be done will be further painting and cleaning.
Glancing back over the scribblings that I posted last January (a mistake I know, but it is fascinating to see how the years vary… or even repeat themselves!) I find to my great surprise that it was exactly a year ago this very day that I visited the North Saanich Municipal Offices to deliver the paperwork for the application for a building permit for our new deck – which was eventually constructed last April and May. That project was just the start of the long process of renovation which has been going on pretty much continually since then.
That set me to wondering as to when it was that we had actually engaged the designer who drew up the plans that formed the basis of said application. Hunting further back on this blog gave me the answer to that as well – it was in September 2016.
The long and the short of it – and the point of this post is of course that the long occasionally feels both short and long (if you know what I mean) – is that by the time we are done this whole renovation project will have occupied us for around a year and a half – which feels both like the blink of an eye and also an eternity!
Needless to say we are eager to crawl – blinking in the bright light of day – out of our current subterranean dwelling place to resume our former lives above ground level.
I am also – naturally – keen to take and to post to these pages a further portfolio of photographs displaying the results of our labours – that we might dazzle the gentle reader with the sumptuous fruits of our endeavours.
Hmmm – that’s quite enough of that, I think…
Tags: House, Renovation
“It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”
Albert Camus
Ho, ho! Little painting related joke there… which is most apposite because much of our time at present is spent with paintbrush and roller in hand – or failing that with filler and sanding block.
The main floor of our lovely home comprises a living room, a dining room area, a kitchen, master and guest bedrooms, two bathrooms, a laundry, several hallways and four sizeable built-in closets… All of which must be painted before our renovation is complete.
As painters we are most fortunate that our dry-waller – who gave us splendid new non-popcorn ceilings – also painted them as he went. Further, our excellent contractor budgeted for his painter to handle the woodwork – baseboards (skirting) and trim. Indeed, he would have done the lot were it not that I felt guilty about our playing no role at all in the proceedings (other than in the financial sense).
So here we are – with several thousand square feet of wall to be prepped (filled, sanded and cleaned), primed as required and given two coats of decent quality eggshell (or pearl for the bathrooms).
In this enterprise we are even luckier to have a dear friend who not only operates a sideline in interior decorating but is quite the most ferociously perfectionist craftswoman I have encountered. When it comes to the laborious, time consuming and delicate operation of cutting in it is my view that she has no equal. Furthermore she seems actually to relish the challenge, leaving to the ‘oily rags’ like me the prosaic duty of wielding the roller – a low-order task if ever there be one!
Even luckier (for us!) she is gifting us her time and expertise – and extensively so – on a quid pro quo basis. There can be no doubt at all as to who is getting the better part of this particular deal.
We are truly blessed!
Tags: Friends, House, Renovation
I was thirteen when the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
As were so many others I was already captivated having heard such extraordinary songs as Eleanor Rigby, Tomorrow Never Knows and Strawberry Fields. Now – on experiencing their first post-touring long-player – I was completely blown away and a lifelong love of the works of Messrs. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr was cemented.
My most immediate and startling memory, however, of the post-Pepper-release period was not directly to do with the Beatles or with the record at all. My school at that time held an annual public speaking competition, involvement in which (somewhat strangely in the light of subsequent events) I contrived to avoid throughout my entire career there. This widely disregarded event took place over two days. On the first each of the competitors mounted – one at a time – the stage in School Hall to recite a poem. On the second day they gave a five minute address on some subject either close to their hearts or the choice of which they coldly calculated would most appeal to the judges and/or the forcibly assembled audience.
On day one of the 1967 competition one of the seniors (a popular prefect – words rarely heard together in those days) stood proudly upon the platform and recited – instead of the usual Tennyson, Wordsworth or Coleridge (or if particularly daring, Byron or Keats) – the lyrics to Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, a song at that point banned by the straight-laced BBC for being quite obviously about the experience of taking LSD. We plebeians in the stalls gasped and looked shiftily at each other and to the masters present, trying to gauge how they would react to their solemn ritual being thus traduced.
The world – naturally – did not end. The staff simply looked bored and did nothing. The popular prefect did not win the contest. We mere mortals, however, realised that something, somewhere had changed irrevocably – and we were right.
What was most remarkable about Pepper of course (apart from the dazzling imagination and unprecedented soundscape on display) was the sheer variety. From LSD to traffic wardens, from Victorian fairground barkers to Indian gurus… all human life appeared to be represented not merely on Peter Blake’s pop-art cover but also within.
For this reason Paul McCartney’s whimsical musing on just what it might be like to achieve three score years and four seemed hardly out of place at all and those of us who could not begin to imagine ever reaching such a decrepit age simply took it as one more example of a fertile imagination.
This week – you will by now have deduced – I turned sixty four!
Tags: Birthday, Celebration, Memories, Music, school
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