Monday, March 23, 2015

'You have been removed ...'

Another long gap between blog posts. Such is life. You'd think being retired I'd have lots more time to waste spend on doing interesting things but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Speaking of retirement I've been retired now since last summer so a message last week from Facebook came as a surprise. 'You have been removed from your role in Linden Church.'

I assume someone had at last realised that I was still an administrator for Linden as far as Facebook was concerned and took me off. I'm surprised it wasn't done long ago and it's the obvious thing to do but ... I suppose it's the way facebook framed their message to me: you've been removed. As if I'd done something wrong. (I haven't.) It just caught me unawares and you know what a sensitive flower I am.

So what else have I been doing? Hm, walking George in Parc le Breos, preparing and leading the women's study on The Wife of Noble Character (aka Miss Piggin' Perfect), watching rugby on television for the best part of a day, and, oh, yes, watching the eclipse.

Parc le Breos was a medieval deer park but was inhabited long before that. At least 14,000 years before that a tribe of hunter gatherers lived there as the oldest cave art found in Britain proved when it was discovered in 2011 in Cathole Cave. The cave is fenced off now so you can't go deep inside to see it sadly.


 
 But it was a glorious morning and we had the parc almost to ourselves for most of our walk.
Super Saturday saw the finale of the Six Nations Rugby Tournament with three games being played one after the other, with Wales in the first one and England in the last. Shall I bore you with details? Let's just say before it began England or Ireland looked most likely to win the championship but Wales didn't go down without a fight in what was a fantastic day of free-running and try-scoring rugby. 

Starting off as outsiders Wales set the target to beat. Ireland beat it and set an even bigger target for England. Which they almost, very almost, in the last minutes did. But it wasn't to be and Ireland, probably rightfully on their performances throughout the tournament, won. But we (the Welsh) can be very proud of our boys.

Almost as entertaining as the rugby was the refereeing in the final game. Nigel Owens was in charge and he doesn't take any nonsense but nor does he award penalties willy nilly. After a scrap between a couple of players he asked to see a replay of the incident on the big screen. Up it came with arms and fists flying and burly men squaring up to equally burly opponents and at the end Nigel said, 'That looks all right to me. Carry on.'
Just a case of 'handbags' but when it started again later I was fully expecting the ref (who's Welsh) to say, 'Do I have to call your mams and tell them how you've been behaving?'

Later Chris Robshaw, the England captain, queried one of his decisions. Nigel explained why he'd made it as he had but the captain wasn't satisfied and went to carry on the argument. Nigel held up his hand and said one word. 'Christopher.' We didn't see but I imagine his eyebrows were raised. Not another word from the captain who turned and walked away head hung low.



This compilation doesn't include his brilliant comment on a throw in that isn't exactly straight. (He's gay by the way.)


So what does that leave? Oh yes, the eclipse on Friday.

Having walked town on Thursday to try and buy some of the special eclipse-viewing glasses that the BBC assured me were out there and failing to find any, 9.00 am on Friday morning found Husband and me building our own binocular eclipse watcher.

I say Husband and me: all I did was cut the holes out of the cardboard; Husband did the rest.

Not being able to look directly at the eclipse gives me a great deal of sympathy for Lot's wife. The temptation is huge.

More on Miss Piggin' Perfect later.


2 comments:

Furtheron said...

Let's just say the rugby left me exhausted. I was left wondering how we'd scored 55 points against the French beating them by a 20 point margin - which to be frank on any other meeting would have had me streaking down the road in celebration - but I still felt gutted.

When Knowle got in for that try about 4 mins to the end I was thinking "We can't really do this now can we?" Sadly we let in too many points at the other end but there you go - you could look back to the 2/3 tries we missed against Scotland too I suppose.

You did better on the eclipse than we did - thick blanket of grey cloud meant it just seemed a bit more dull for a few minutes - although I was in a room with very little natural light in the prison anyway so didn't really notice much anyhow.

SmitoniusAndSonata said...

Thick cloud cover made it a non-event here , too .
Since the eclipse glasses had all vanished by Wednesday ... and I didn't go looking for them till Thursday , perhaps it was just as well .
Your viewer was ingenious !