Still The Best Game In The World

Rugby Union Football of course. The game I was originally carded to watch yesterday was a second team fixture at King's Norton. To no one's particular surprise it was cancelled due to shortage of players. Such is modern rugby. However the powers that be sent me on a new mission to Camp Hill. I arrived and went in search of the lower team referee I was to advise and, there in the referee's changing room I found a Berkshire Society official preparing to handle the first team game - none other than my former vice-captain and all around good egg, Julian Rainford. He still looks in game shape. Is it really twenty years since that magical season when he scored forty-three tries?

Jules meets Big Fat Pig

Fair do's to Camps who treated me like minor royalty. The beer was good (Ubu) as were the scratchings. After Jules had dealt with his watcher we had time for a brief chat and he got a local to take our picture. Once were warriors. Some day I must tell you about that December afternoon when we beat Sutton Coldfield. Better still get Gary Street to tell you - because in his version he did it on his own. Nearly true but Jules got the decisive try - which Gary duly converted from the touchline. I left Camp Hill felling well-disposed to my fellow man and grateful to be a member of rugby's citizenry.

And now I am sitting in our rather lovely kitchen and am sipping L'Extra par Langlois - a Loire sparkler which was put in our way by the ever reliable staff at Majestic. Donald Trump, Tony Blair (whose recent hubristic bollocks on the subject of Brexit I am choosing to rise above) and other assembled gits seem joyously distant. But then, tomorrow is another day.

The Political Merry-Go-Round

Well, well, well. Just for now the Tories have stopped fighting each other and crowned a new leader, or should it be leaderene. All of a rush, Theresa May has become Prime Minister, Andrea Leadsom having taken a peek over the brim of the seething leadership volcano and responded with the political equivalent of 'Sod this for a game of soldiers.'

Cameron went with some style, much as one would expect. His legacy is the impression of his political laziness (a not uncommon trait in the uncommonly gifted) which culminated in a referendum it had never occured to him he could lose. So, in short, he ended up looking a plonker - a nice twist on Enoch Powell's dictum that all political careers end in failure.

May has started rather deftly - wrong-footing the commentariat by giving Boris Johnson the Foreign Office and bringing in two thoroughly decent Brexiteers in Liam Fox and David Davis. George Osborne has been shown the (back) door as has Michael Gove. Osborne has reaped as he sowed. Gove is a slightly different case, a man who has had a lot of interesting things to say (politicians often don't) but whose recent manoeuvrings have been comically badly conceived and as badly executed.

All of which has taken the spotlight off poor old Tony Blair and the aftermath of the Chilcot Report. What are we to make of Blair in the light of the Report? Exactly what we already knew - he thinks he did the right thing and has deluded himself as to the extremes he trod in getting his way. However, much of the contumely coming in his direction is just plain cant. God knows I am no defender of Blair  but Alex Salmond's gimlet-eyed hate speech does nothing nothing more than confirm the nasty Scot as the most unpleasant man in mainstream politics.

Meanwhile in the (temporarily) sunny suburbs life goes on much as before any of this fool's comedy commenced. The Labour Party? Well, you couldn't make that stuff up, so I won't.

Crisis, what crisis?

So what is a man to do as the country careers out of control? Go to the home of Mikey B and play as his guest at Woburn for a couple of days, that's what. The whole Dunmore crew will be there so Radio Free Roberts will be silent for the next few days.