The Best Bloody Tour I've Ever Been On

Back in the days of thunder when rugby clubs used to tour rioutously at Easter, the Aston Old Edwardian version always used to conclude with the End of Tour Supper back at the club. And the supper would be followed by a few awards (Most Pissed Person on Tour etc) and very brief speeches. Denis Walker (long since deceased) would bring the curtain down with a vote of thanks to our Tour Supremo, Alan Haynes, TD, JP. And every year Denis would finish with the line that this had been 'the worst bloody tour I've ever been on'. It was an affectionate jibe. I loved those tours - those days have gone, swallowed in the maw of modernism. Oh well, I was lucky to have been alive.

Last week under the brilliant stewardship of an old fellow rugby warrior, RM (under whose captaincy I played the best rugby of my undistinguished career) and the standing committee (they don't keep minutes or hold elections - too bloody right) the ever-burgeoning QMT golf tour ventured South-West to Tewkesbury. This was brilliant. On Wednesday we played at Puckrup Hall which transpired to be fabulous. At Puckrup in the Grand Match (edition one) Floyd House (it's a school thing) beat the Rest of the World 3.5 - 2.5. As ever, Floyd rule - God is in his heaven and all's well in the world. The Pig and his great mate Silverdog took an unexpected half from the ROW captain and the formidable TW. Days of thunder live.

18th at Puckrup Hall

From Puckrup on to Tewkesbury Park for two days of hangover golf. Not such a good course though plenty good enough. SB took the honours on QMT day and the curtain fell with a Texas Scramble on Friday. The Pig was honoured to share a buggy with NMC the godfather of Aston Colts rugby - the man who gave the Pig his first taste of captaincy in that first season in 75/76. days of thunder live indeed.

The best bloody tour I've ever been on.   

Another Fish Finger Sarnie And Chips

This time to Sinners Cafe in Berwick-upon-Tweed as a prelude to a meander around the town. This was cafe food at its basic and tastiest best with no pretensions or frills. This magical part of the world has not disappointed on the culinary front and we always knew that it would be scenically brilliant. I love it here.

Berwick bears the marks of the relative poverty that has settled on English townships in the face of those twin impostors - the internet and Covid. It is no earthly good the fortunate amongst us snobbishly bemoaning the surfeit of charity shops and empty properties if we do all our shopping online. I don't have an answer to this although I did buy myself a new stove-top coffee maker in Berwick today. One fish finger sarnie and a coffee maker and the Pig somehow convinces himself that he's done his bit.

Anyhow, Berwick is a distinguished town what with its town walls and three bridges. It seems still to have a good conceit of itself. Quite bloody right - we all should. Ruination lies the other way.

Goodness but I slept well last night after all that running amd walking. No run today and relatively little walking. There's aways tomorrow.

An Excess Of Exercise. A Greater Excess Of Eating

As the Moody Blues put it, it's a question of balance. And Big Fat Pig is on the wrong side of the equation. We have been on holiday for four days now and I have been a good boy and been out running twice - including a tortuous 5K this morning. So far, so good. The problem is that the Pig cannot help himself when faced with a pub menu. I have already told you about the excellent fare at the Joiners Arms, and now we have to add the Market Tavern in Alnwick to the list of recommendations. Not so haute cuisine as the Joiners but none the worse for that. A truly gargantuan portion of ham, egg and chips and two pints of Alnwick Amber Ale. Stuffed.

That was yesterday and today we have been good. Not only did I go for that run but the Groupie and I also walked from Newton-on-the-Sea past Emebleton and out towards the daunting ruin that is Dunstanburgh Castle. We went along the beach for the outward portion of the walk and then trudged up and down the coastal path through the dunes for our return. We were walking alongside Dunstanburgh Castle Golf Links, one of my favourite courses. As an added bonus I even found a golf ball (Callaway, so no cheapo) that must have been hit heroically off-line on the eighth. We took a picnic lunch (bought locally of course - support your local sheriff) and have actually managed to go a whole day without diverting into a pub. My poor old legs feel as stiff as the proverbial. I feel more than vaguely virtuous. Mind you there's an impudent Gavi chilling in the fridge here at Piggy Hall.

Where Did The Apostrophe Go?

The Joiners Arms, Newton-on-the-Sea, Northumberland. No apostrophe. This describes itself as a 'gastro pub', a self-delineation that I sometimes think can be a hostage to fortune. No such worries here. The food is superb. Chicken in a mushroom sauce for the Groupie, and a hearty fishfinger stotty with chips and a bowl of five bean soup for BFP. The Pig washed this down with a pint of Black Sheep Bitter.

You may gather from this information that Groupie and the Pig are on tour, staying in a suitably luxurious apartment in Beadnell. We were supposed to be in this glorious corner of England to celebrate the Pig's sixtieth two years ago, but Covid put paid to that. Now we are here and the Groupie had her own significant birthday yesterday. I won't get all soppy on you but it has to be said that it is the highest of honours that she passes her life with me. Many Happy Returns Gorgeous.

Before our lunch we had walked along Bamburgh's magnificent beach and in the evening we had a further celebratory drink in Beadnell's Craster Inn, a walk of fully fifty yards from the apartment. They were serving some gargantuan looking portions of fish and chips but we will save that treat for another day. The Pig confined himself to a pint of Beadnell Blonde. Life's been good to me so far. 

Pop Partially Regurgitates Itself

A couple of events that, if they don't totally clear my mood of pessimism, do at least cheer me up a tad.

As you know my favourite axiom is that pop will eat itself and I have applied this tediously and often to Twenty20 cricket - you know what I mean, that 'speeded-up' version of beautiful old cricket wherein sides now take two hours to bowl twenty overs. What a crock. Well, anyway what should come riding over the horizon on a white charger other than the revenging knight of a fabulous test match. England conceded more than five hundred and fifty runs in the first innings yet somehow conspired still to defeat New Zealand on the back of a pyrotechnic innings from Johnny Bairstow. Quite brilliant. And, yes, I suppose I do have to concede that some of Bairstow's audacity may have been honed in limited overs cricket. That however is not the point.

Not quite so stratospheric but nonetheless welcome was the climax to the Canadian Open golf on Sunday. That is to say a championship played over seventy-two holes. Better still if you want assurance that golf's soul may just be rescuable, track down millionaire John Rahm's press conference before this week's U.S. Open. Modest, grateful and wise. Thankyou.   

But let's get away from my sporting hobby-horse. I've watched another film. An odd one this one. Radioactive is a worthy biopic about Marie Curie, played enthrallingly by Rosamund Pike. It deploys with limited success some flashing backwards and forwards from Curie's mature years. It take seriously the boons and the hideous horrors of the taming of radioactivity. It succeeds in making you think but, somehow despite Pike's excellence and the taut direction, it doesn't seem to me ever to be as involving as it wants to be. 69/100. 

Crazy Golf

I love my golf. You knew that already. I love to see it played well. You knew that already. I despise any lack of courtesy in this most mannered of sports. You knew that already. All of which preamble leads me to the vexing subject of LIV Golf, the new incarnation of professional golf that has arrived at our televisual door (you have to go to YouTube to watch it) drenched in immoral Saudi dollars. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this. I spend a lot of time pondering these things when I might be better served thinking of something else. You knew that already. 

So what are we to make of this new bastard child of professional sport? Well, the amounts of money involved are eye-watering so it will have some effect. On balance I liken it to that other bastard child, Twenty20 cricket. Pop will eat itself. You knew that already.

So we have the pathetic spectacle of assorted greedy golfers being paraded before the world's press (at their most sanctimonious - the press that is) to justify their presence at a confected tournament that has next to nothing to do with rewarding sporting merit. It's all rather sad. I don't deny they are entitled to take the filthy lucre that is on offer but some of the attempts to separate themselves from the proper queasiness at the Saudi backing are nothing short of pathetic. Phil Mickelson has always struck me as a nice if rather simple soul. I have had to modify that view - he's plain thick. As for Graeme McDowell (not so thick, much lesser golfer) sitting there in his sponsored hat (hasn't anybody told them it's rude for a chap to wear his hat indoors?) and spouting the party line that 'the Khashoggi business' is 'reprehensible', well, yes Graeme dear, the strangling and dismembering of a journalist is a tad on the naughty side. Just admit that you're there for the mega bung of cash and stay off the politics. And while you're at it admit that the desecration of the seventy-two hole strokeplay format as the supreme measure of a golfer is asinine - 'LIV' - fifty-four in Roman numerals. Geddit?

And while on the subject of golfer's hats (which I was a few sentences ago) have you noticed that poor old Mickelson has lost his KPMG sponsorship. Since KPMG and the others in the Big Four symbolise all that is wrong with the professional services market these days, I'm rather surprised that they wanted out of association with somebody getting grossly overpaid. Don't get me wrong, there are loads of talented people in these firms but they are not ubiquitous. Do I sound bitter? Honestly I'm not - I'm just disillusioned. And before anyone asks the obvious question - yes I do feel the same way about the big law firms. When parasites become bigger than their hosts something has to give. Pop will eat itself.

Just to finish with a petty but true observation - I never much cared for Greg Norman. This LIV business seems to give some weight to my unreasoned prejudice.       

Missing An Open Goal

I tuned into Prime Minister's Questions today in the vain hope of some parliamentary fireworks. Instead what I got was that prize drip Keir Starmer (who let us not forget served Corbyn so loyally) failing to hit the net from six inches out and with the goalkeeper nowhere in sight. Thus the loathsome Johnson survives to pass another political day indulging his trademark political nothingness. Forty-plus percent of his own parliamentary party have signified that they don't trust him/have confidence in him and yet he blunders on. The Conservative Party needs to relocate its vaunted ruthlessness and show this mendacious toad the door pretty bloody pronto. I am fed-up to the back teeth of the SNP being the most efficient Westminster party.

So what's a man to do as his country crumbles around him? Start running again, that's what. The Big Fat Pig has been nursing a sore Achilles since January but yesterday he thought 'sod it' and headed out of the door with the full lycra on and sporting the precious go-faster Oakleys. He shuffled and perspired for a virtuous thirty minutes and thirty-four of your English seconds. Today he is feeling the full muscular tenderness of the short distance runner but the virtuousness has not rubbed off. Pig redux.

I'll tell you who I had in the back of my cab - that Neville Chamberlain. I was reminded of this when watching Munich - the Edge of War the other day. It's adapted from Robert Harris's novel Munich, the title of the film presumably expanded to disambiguate it from Spielberg's dour but worthy movie of that name. In Edge of War, Chamberlain gets off rather more lightly than popular history has allowed. Harris likes playing with history. Jeremy Irons does a more than passable physical imitation of Chamberlain but makes this starchy Tory too avuncular by half. Not a bad film I suppose but it never quite overcomes the fact that we know how it is going to end. 62/100. 

And another reason to be cheerful - golf at Royal Pype Hayes on Monday evening with an ever-expanding band of AOE brothers (fourteen of us this week). Weather: fine (makes a bloody change after two consecutive soakings); golf: moderate but not unpromising; company: matchless; Guinness: lovely.