Today is Oliver’s 15th birthday. Happy Birthday Ollie. He is delirious about his new Arsenal shirt and training pants and will no doubt now wear them relentlessly for the next 56 hours, until school regulations demand the donning of a rather smart new “preppy” uniform. Having grown up alongside the Spurs training ground I am finding it hard to come to terms with my son’s affiliation with their great North London rivals, but then I remember that I don’t really give a toss about football and all is well. Alison made a shrewd investment of a set of pre-owned Taylor Made irons which also seem to have hit the nail on its proverbial bonce. Happy days. It’s an exeat weekend so we have our boarding daughter home as well as the birthday boy, so we don’t need a set of cards to play Happy Families this evening.
After a wonderful week or two of an Indian summer, the weather has turned. The heavens have unleashed dramatic cascades of badly needed water, combined with a brutally chilly gale out of the North which has dropped the ambient temperature unnecessarily below the desirable and made any thoughts of golf disappear rapidly back from whence they came. In Northern Scotland the mercury has plunged to a very unseasonal -5c…….in September!! However, my immensely reliable BBC weather app is predicting a calmer, drier and slightly warmer weekend so the trusty persimmon might yet be wielded in anger. I went to the driving range yesterday, convinced that I now had the answer. Having spent an hour pull-hooking, snap-hooking, pushing it, fatting it, thinning it, shanking it and very occasionally flushing one down the middle, I realise that joining the local tennis club was a shrewd move. At least I know how to play tennis. Even if I no longer can. In my final year before I have to put a seven at the start of my age, I really had hoped that I had enough good shots left in my locker to at least be able to walk a course without going through a whole bag of golf balls. I fear philately, campanology and bridge nights with the geriatrics are all I have to look forward to. Actually, now I come to think of it, I haven’t heard our nearby church exercising their Monday evening right to disturb the neighbourhood for months. Surely you can socially distance while yanking up and down on a bellrope? Perhaps Mr and Mrs Woke have complained. After all it is probably synonymous with our evil past….those happy days when “witches” would be drowned or burnt at the stake; when Dick Turpin declared “your money or your life” and then took both anyway; when sharpshooting outlaws roamed the forests, robbing the rich to give to the poor (did that really happen?!) whilst Good King John and the Sherriff of Nottingham pillaged and taxed the peasants and when asylum seeking was a profession yet to be invented.
My dear departed adopted Mother was a keen campanologist. She was very musical, although apparently that’s not a requirement. You just need to be good at maths and able to read charts. The closest I’ve come to a Bellringer is when visiting Abbey Ales, Bath’s oldest brewery. It’s a fine brew.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 