Crinklybee

On The English Riviera With Our Bucket and Spade

As previously announced on these pages, we took our bucket and spade off to Devon for a week.  Here are ten things we found out along the way:

1- If you leave all the doors of a Fiat Punto open for three hours (for example while you pack your bucket and spade, all the contents of your house, and a baby into the back)  you will run down the battery, with the result that when you turn the ignition key absolutely nothing will happen at all, and you will not be able to start your 300 mile journey to holidayland until the man from the AA has come and rescued you from ten yards outside your front door.  Which will be a little bit embarrassing, although it will give the bloke from two doors down the chance to tell you about the time in the 1970s that he had got five yards into the annual family trip to Scotland when one of the wheels fell off his Ford Cortina.

2- Those quintessential English villages that you see on picture postcards and in luxurious adaptations of Agatha Christie novels made for American TV really do exist. Or at least one of them does.  It is called Thornbury and it is just north of Bristol, where we had booked into a rather plush Travelodge for the night.  Out of our room window you could see the local cricket club pitch, and there was a real red telephone box and a very English-looking old-fashioned inn where you went to get your dinner.  To complete the picture we came across a real live English eccentric, respendent in blazer and bow tie, who was checking in just as we came back from the pub.  We had the good fortune to overhear the following exchange, which I will reproduce here as a masterclass in how to book into a hotel: 

'And would you like a newspaper tomorrow morning at all sir?'

'Telegraph!'

'Very well, sir.  And which breakfast would you prefer- Full English or light continental?'

'I have absolutely no idea!'

3- English caravan sites are exactly the same now as they were when we were kids.  Really!  There are primitive microwave ovens, electric hobs, net curtains, and white plastic plug-in kettles with faded floral designs on.  There is a little portable telly in the corner, and when you turn it on Selina Scott is reporting on the latest from the Miners' strike.  Oh, and when you open the door there are Scottish people all over the place, just like in Whitley Bay in the mid 1970s.  Do Scottish people exist anywhere else except on caravan sites?

4- Scottish holidaymakers on the Devon seaside are outnumbered only by seagulls.  They are all over the bleeding place, and very scary.  One tried to nick Charlotte's fish and chips on Paignton seafront, and another narrowly missed crapping all over her head outside John Burton Race's posh restaurant in Dartmouth (we couldn't get a table; it was all booked up and anyway Charlotte had seagull shit all over her shoes). 

5- Unlike his mother, Frankie isn't at all scared of seagulls.  He is also relatively unperturbed by enormous rottweillers and burly employees of the Gas Board who have come to read the meter. But he is very afraid of two-year old boys, like the one in the caravan next door, who was called Nathan and would catch sight of Frank and run right up into his face screaming 'Babeh!  Babeh!' at the top of his voice in a Derby accent.  Frankie would promptly burst into tears at which Nathan would shout gleefully 'Babeh cry!  Babeh Cry!'.

We felt like giving Nathan a good clip around the ears but contented ourselves with exchanging cutting comments about his parents' poor disciplinary skills from behind the  net curtains of our caravan.  No doubt when Frank is a two year old boy and terrorising small babies with his own deranged antics our neighbours will do the same.

6- Terrifying two-year-old boys notwithstanding, caravan sites are extraordinarily neighbourly places.  It takes twenty minutes to get anywhere because you have to exchange holidaytime pleasantries with everyone you meet, or else risk being blackballed from polite caravan society and banished back to the strange world of futuristic metallic kettles known as the year 2005.  As most of your neighbours for the week are from somewhere unintelligible like Derby or Scotland this can take up a lot of your time.

7-  One glass of scrumpy, bought from the old woman at the farm next door in a four litre plastic container, is a refreshing and harmless summer amusement.  Two is another matter altogether.  You will feel a trifle faint, then two minutes later be lying on your back outside the caravan singing ancient Devonian sea-shanties of your own invention. That label saying just 6% alcohol really cannot be right.  Although you had better finish off the container by the end of the week, just to be sure. 

8- The well-to-do yachting resort of Dartmouth is full of Geordie pensioners.  Or at least it was the day we were there.  Maybe there was a coach trip in or something (you come across coach trips of Geordie pensioners in the most unexpected places, you know).  They were all over the place, tucking into packed lunches and drinking tea out of flasks.  You couldn''t get a seat on a park bench for love nor money.  I doubt John Burton Race got much business out of them, but the seagulls were having a field day nicking their fish-paste sandwiches.   

8- The inland 'New Age Mecca' of Totnes is a surprising delight.  There were no Geordie pensioners, but lots of interesting cafes, and on the day we were there, a flea-market.  You could buy a box-full of rusting boat propellors for a fiver.  I bought a very nice Hawaian shirt for not much more.  I'm wearing it now as I type!

9- There are palm trees everywhere in Devon.  God knows how they got there.  Maybe the Spanish brought them in with the Armada or something.  Francis Drake would turn in his grave.

10- Devon is a lovely place for a week's holiday.  After all, thirty thousand Scottish people, three hundred thousand seagulls, and a coachload of Geordie pensioners cannot be wrong.  Maybe we will go back again next year.  I wonder if our caravan is free for the same week in July....

Consequences

We are back from deepest Devon with our bucket and spade, as well as half a beach worth of finest Paignton sand which seems to have made the journey back with us and keeps turning up in unexpected places like inside our socks.  We will tell you all about our adventures in the English Riviera (they've got Palm Trees and everything, man!) in due course- but in the meantime, how about I send you over to Troubled Diva, where there is a game of Consequences going on.  The idea (blatantly nicked from the original, which started here) is that the last sentence of one post forms the first sentence of the next, which will be written by a different person.  Here is my first offering (out of a maximum of two during the lifetime of the game which is going on until the end of July).   It is about... oh, I see, you've all gone.  Come back in a while, y'all. and I'll show you my holiday snaps!

Bucket and Spade

Saturday morning in Manchester, and I am taking a two-minute break from attempting to fit the entire contents of our house into the back of a Fiat Punto to tell you that we're all going on our summer holidays.  Hurrah!  Right- we're off to Devon with our bucket and spade and will be back the week after next.   Now then- back to that packing...

The Battle of The Sticky Baal

Our Tuesday night five-a-side game has been going for so long now that its origins are almost lost in the mists of time.  According to the most commonly accepted version of our history, the game began in the early 1990s, when a loose amalgamation of  twentysomethings, drawn primarily from the payroll of Blackwells Bookshop and the student body of the university law school, would gather in Birchfields Park on Sunday mornings for a hangover-busting kickabout.  Some players would be there every week, while others- flatmates, friends and passing acquaintances of the main nucleus- would come and go. 

It was in those days an easy-going, come-as-you-please type of game whose participants were never the same any two successive weeks.  If you had a pair of boots, and turned up at the appointed time, you were in.  For a while we were joined by a mystery bearded German called Hans, who would come jogging across the park in his boots, lay his rucksack down among the pile of jumpers serving as goalposts, and take his place just in time for kick-off.  At the end of the game he would pick up the rucksack and run off again, into the bushes and out of sight.  One week towards the end of summer he never showed up, and after that we never saw him again.  Nobody knew where he had gone, or for that matter, where he had come from in the first place.   

When winter came the less enthusiastic players stopped turning up at Birchfields, and the squad shrunk to a hardcore of ten or so.  In the first move towards a more organised set-up, we hired a weekly slot on the outdoor pitch at the McDougall University Sports Centre in Hulme, which we kept up until we tired of nearly breaking our ankles on the uneven concrete surface rutted with hidden drainholes- and ran out of players young and academic enough to hold current student discount cards.  We decamped to the Sugden Centre under the motorway flyover off Oxford Road, and a nomadic decade ensued.  From the Sugden Centre we moved to The Armitage Grounds at Fallowfield, then on -for one unbearably hot and sweaty week only- to the indoor Ardwick Sports Hall on the A6.  There followed spells based at some often-flooded college sports grounds by the banks of the Mersey in leafy West Didsbury, and at the Pitz pitches in the rather less salubrious environs of the Slade Lane roundabout.  Eventually we arrived at our current home- the newly-built Vida sports complex attached to the Whalley Range High School.

Along the way my own involvement with the game deepened- from being a fringe member of the Birchfields Park game, introduced by a Victoria Park housemate who briefly worked at Blackwells, I had become a central figure.  Eventually, when another of the originals left the scene to take a job down south I became responsible for booking the pitch, and making sure we had exactly ten players every week.  Some weeks this is easy- a quick email to the other nine regulars and Bob's your uncle- but more often than not there are several people injured or otherwise unavailable, and I will spend great swathes of Monday and Tuesday daytime frantically ringing around, persuading half-forgotten ex-workmates out of temporary retirement, or getting friends of colleagues to call their neighbours to see whether their slightly sporty-looking flatmate might fancy coming along and making up the numbers.  Some of these tenuously-connected one-off call-ups have become regulars themselves and ended up involving their own friends, colleagues and associates in the ever-changing Tuesday night game.

A map showing the connections between the game's past and present personnel would resemble a spiders web, with those early 90s twentysomethings in the middle and the most recent and tenously connected current players at the extreme edges.  By this year only two from the original set-up remained- so when it became time for one of these, Simon, to play his last game before moving down south to take up a new job, it was a notable occasion. To mark the event, Simon brought with him a parting gift of a football.

Not just any old ball, mind you.  We had become used to a succession of tatty £10 specials, many of which had ended their association with us in ignominious fashion, such as being clumsily hacked over the rooftops of Hulme by an overenthusiastic clearance, never to be seen again.  Simon's ball was another thing altogether- a top-of-the-range Adidas affair in silver and red, the same model used by the top players, no less.  It was certainly a joy to behold - but we were so unused to its luxury that we couldn't play football with it at all. The trouble was it was just too good- the £10 specials would bounce mischievously about like an excited mongrel, but this pedigree item would stick obediently to your heels- too obediently.  There seemed to have been an application during manufacture of some patent extra-light adhesive covering, which Zinedine Zidane may find useful in exerting the exact required amount of spin on an unstoppable free-kick, but which left us hapless, lumbering amateurs looking even more hapless and lumbering than usual.  We spent the first few games after Simon's departure tripping embarrassingly over his parting gift, which became known, thanks to its alarming texture (as well as the North-Eastern origins of several of the current players), as 'The Sticky Baal'.

After a few weeks of this unedifying spectacle, we began to get the hang of The Sticky Baal, however, and the time came when we could not imagine going back to the days of the mischievous £10 specials.  Hell, some of us were even starting to fancy ourselves as players, now that we had mastered the ultimate tool of our trade.  And so it was a great shock when I went to my sports bag one Tuesday night to find it empty- the precious ball was nowhere to be seen.  On arriving at the venue I asked around- but nobody else had picked it up, and needless to say it had not been handed in at the desk.  Clearly I must have left our pride and joy on the pitch at the end of the last week's game, and we would never see it again.

But then, we did.  The following week the end of our hour-long game was announced, as ever, by the clanking open of the big metal gate in the corner and the emergence of the Nine-o-Clock Blokes.  As custom dictated they signalled their rightful claim to the patch by ambling towards the centre spot passing a ball back and forth.  A top-of-the-range silver Adidas ball, with red edging, just ever so slightly worn at the seams.  Our ball, Goddammit!

It was Andy- the brother of Simon, our departed benefactor, who saw it first.  Rather hesitantly, he sidled up to the the burly fellow who was engaged in attempting to detach the bouncy but strangely adherent spherical item from his shoelaces: 

'Er, mate- you didn't find that ball here last week at all, did you?'

'What you on about?'

'That ball- you didn't find it here, by any chance?  Only it looks just like one we lost'.

'Sorry mate- this ball is ours.'

'Oh, er- OK.  Funny though, it looks just like our one.  Absolutely identical.  Oh well..'

The burly Nine-o-Clock Bloke fixed us with a steely glare and we retreated, mumbling quietly- then spent the rest of the week berating ourselves for this pathetic display of cowardly submission.  The worst part, we reflected, was that we would never have the chance to redeem ourselves- because surely the Nine O Clock Blokes would not have the gall to parade their ill-gotten gains before us on a weekly basis.

But we were wrong.  A week later these brazen scoundrels once more clanked open the gate knocking our stolen ball between them- by now a little more expertly, having seemingly become attuned to its patent stickiness.  Well- this was an affront to the honour of the Tuesday night game that could simply not be tolerated.  This time it was a different bloke  with the ball at his feet, not quite so menacing-looking.  Brimming with the testosterone rush occasioned by the preceding sixty minutes of exertion I drew myself up to my full five-foot nine and strode up, purposefully.  I turned the Geordie accent- always useful in a brawl- up a notch or two as well:

'How- that baal- you find it here, like?  Cos wuzz lost one just like it.'

'You what, pal?'

'You find this baal?  'Cos wor mate give us one like that- before he had to gan, like'

I didn't actually say that my mate had 'had to gan, like' to Strangeways Prison on account of two convictions for Grievous Bodily Harm, and wouldn't be taking kindly upon his release to hear that his parting gift to his loyal associates had been appropriated by a bunch of weedy Mancunian ne'er'dowells, but my general demeanour may have suggested as much.  In any event the response this time was rather more acquiescent than the one of the previous week:

'Oh- er, you know what?  I think you might be right.  Here lads- did we find this ball here a couple of weeks ago or what?

There was a grudging murmur of assent, and the Sticky Baal was placed, stickily, in my hands.  Me and Andy (who had come along to offer moral support) left the scene, maintaining, with some effort, our surly and confrontational demeanour until we could get round the corner and out of sight,  before dissolving into relieved laughter. 

Ours was not a complete victory, however.  In the excitement at regaining our treasure, we had left behind the tatty £10 special we had just been playing with.  We considered making a daring raid to get that one back as well, but decided to leave the Nine-o-Clock Blokes with some meagre spoils from the Battle of the Sticky Baal.  The honour of the Tuesday night game had been upheld, we reasoned, and that was enough for us.  Through the Mancunian summer drizzle, we set off to the cars, reflecting that everyone on that spiders web of footballers- the Birchfields Park originals, Hans the mysterious German, and all the other itinerant players who had come and gone- would have been proud of us.