Skaifeskat

Sir Wiggo & the quickest sporting event ever…?

40 minutes was all it took today to see the ‘Tour of Britain’ cycle race as it passed through Cheshire, and that was only because it took 20 minutes to walk there and back! .

The third stage of the tour passed along the Crewe to Nantwich road, a 10-minute walk from our house. The road closure signs had appeared over the last couple of weeks and we watched the second stage through The Lakes on local TV last night. Alyson had gone shopping early in order to get across the road and into town before the closure. Today’s stage started in Congleton and according to the web site the riders would be at my viewing point in around 45 minutes – not bad considering it is 14 miles away.

11:42am – left home with my digital SLR camera and zoom lens, walked to the main road where a reasonable crowd lined the route – well one man & his dog anyway.

11:58am After about a dozen police motorbikes went past in around five minutes I wondered if it was a motorcycle tour I had come to watch.

12:02pm A commentary car came past and helpfully explained that the four riders in the lead group would be coming soon, followed five minutes later by the main pack, or peloton as it is called.

12:04pm Sure enough the four riders appeared. I heard the crowd further up the road clapping and the distinctive sound of cheering schoolchildren..

Clearly the guy at the front was in need of a drink, and the one next to him, and at the back with the packs of gel, decided it was lunch time!

12:03pm As their support cars followed behind I wondered how many bikes four men could possibly ride…

12:09pm It was a good that the commentary car had told us about the gap as after what seemed forever, the cheering school kids signalled the arrival of the main pack. I was glad to have ‘continuous shooting’ mode on my camera, as they went past and down the road in less than 60 seconds…

I turned my camera round and just caught the back of the pack as they came past me.

12:10pm It was all over. More support cars loaded with even more bikes, several police motorcycles, two ambulances followed close by and disappeared down the road.

As I walked home I met Jill & Peter who had stood at the end of their drive to watch proceedings. It had been quite exciting we reflected, but we were pleased not to have driven a long way & waited for several hours to have seen 10 minutes of action.

I saw the junior school children who had clearly had a great time; let out of their lessons to bring posters and banners to cheer on the spectacle. The teachers at our local High School had decided not to open at all as the ‘traffic chaos’ caused by road closures from 11.00am to 12.30pm would prevent them getting to and from school. Well I guess it seemed like a good reason to add an extra day to the summer holidays!

12:22pm It was only after I arrived home and reviewed the pictures on my laptop, that I realised there was one featuring our most decorated cyclist and 2016 Olympic Champion, Sir Bradley Wiggins. I zoomed in and cropped the photo which is the one at the start of this article. You can see his self-named team shirt & the distinctive tattooed right arm. Such was the speed they were going I hadn’t seen him in real-time. Not much of a spectator sport I mused, but perhaps it would have been better viewed directly by my eyes and not through the camera’s viewfinder?

I called this blog ‘the quickest sporting event ever’, but there is a certain Usain Bolt who crowds travel for hours and thousands of miles to watch, and his event is over in less than 10 seconds!

Experiences not ‘stuff’…three wishes achieved!

Around Easter Alyson & I went through the annual round of trying to decide what to buy each other for our upcoming birthdays. Perhaps it was the experience of clearing mum & dad’s house prior to selling it, which we had been doing for the previous 3 years; or maybe looking at the amount of ‘stuff’ we have accumulated in over 35 years of being together, but Alyson declared she didn’t want anything material. She had realised there is beauty all around in the natural world, and that the pressure of work and family means that free time is more precious than so-called ‘valuables’. Freedom to look around at the beauty in nature, or to sit and watch a glorious sunset, is priceless, with memories last much longer than material possessions.

Alyson has never had any interest in expensive jewellery or clothes, and can’t believe that anyone would even consider paying hundreds of pounds for a handbag. Sure we live in a large family home & have nice things; lots of ornaments, collectables, books and electronic gadgets. These things have a tendency to gather dust or become ‘unusable’ due to being superseded by the latest model. We are fortunate to have some savings and good pension arrangements, so holidays & travel are regularly on our agenda.

With these thoughts Alyson declared that this year she had three wishes.

To sleep in a windmill
To see a puffin.
To see a kingfisher

The windmill has been on the list for quite a few years, as every time we pass one Alyson declares a curiosity about what it would be like to stay in a dwelling with round rooms.

At Easter we were on our annual family weekend at a cottage near Bamburgh in Northumberland & Alyson took a particular interest in the sea birds, guided by ‘big Pete’, who volunteers at a nature reserve near his home. This led to the last two wishes.

As is the modern way I put ‘staying at a windmill’ into my search engine and one of the results that came up was The Windmill Hotel in Scarborough. Now, I have been visiting the Yorkshire seaside resort for over 50 years so dismissed this as ‘just a hotel’ with the name, perhaps because it was on the site of a former building. But no, it was somewhere that had rooms but with a couple of them in an actual windmill. I chose the apartment on the top two floors. The bedroom with en-suite on the lower floor and kitchen/living room above. It also had sails and a balcony which went the full 360 degrees. The stay was booked for the end of June.

Before then we made a return visit to Northumberland in May when the boat trips to the Farne Islands were running, we could land on one and get close to the nesting birds. Our first attempt was foiled not by bad weather but swelling seas. Our boat left Seahouses with a promise of landing on one of the islands manned by National Trust Rangers. The vessel Glad Tidings V was packed full of 60 people who seemed to be aged 55+ and from a coach party. We saw lots of birds nesting on the rock stacks and the largest of the 20+ islands, Inner Farne. We also saw grey seals bobbing around the boat looking at us with great interest. There were plenty of birds in the air; guillemots, razorbills, cormorants, shags and some puffins with their distinctive rapid-flapping flight, and a flash of orange bill. However, despite watching the boat ahead of us almost landing successfully, when it came to our turn the swell was too high to get us safely on and off the jetty. We made do with a tour round the other islands. Arctic tern pecked away at the ranger’s hat on Inner Farne as he came between the birds and their young. There were plenty of eider ducks or ”Cuddy’s ducks” as they are known locally, after St Cuthbert who set up a monastery on Holy Island (or Lindisfarne). We spent the afternoon watching small waders in the mud around the harbour as the tide was out and saw kittiwakes on a nearby cliff.

We decided to have one last go before we left, managing to get on one of the early morning boats. It had only six other people onboard and a cast-iron guaranteed landing on Staple Island, the National Trust run bird sanctuary. We did land and what a treat! Lots of time to wander on the rocks and grass, near ropes separating us from the nesting birds by only a few feet. They seemed oblivious to us as they had got used to the rangers being there alongside general visitors. This meant we saw literally hundreds of puffins close up as they came in and out of their underground burrows. So one line crossed off the wish-list. The photo below is one that Alyson took with my digital SLR camera.

We thoroughly enjoyed our time in Northumberland and I plan to post a blog devoted entirely to this beautiful county.

At the end of June Alyson’s recently changed work pattern meant that we had time for a long-weekend break, so we stopped at The Windmill in Scarborough for two nights. It exceeded all our expectations. The owners have done a great job in the 18 months since they took it over. They have developed it tastefully, added some home comforts and wi-fi whilst at the same time maintaining the character of the place. The balcony went all the way round and we had to walk under the sails. Admittedly the views were over the rooftops of the nearby houses towards the sea and hills. Someone on Trip Advisor wrote that it was in the ‘wrong place’ and views over hills and meadows would have been nicer. As the owner said in reply that was the case when it was built but, they can’t be held responsible for the decisions of local planners over the years to allow residential development! There have been windmills on the site for more than 400 years, with the present one originating from 1784. It was restored after becoming derelict for many years after it ground the last corn in 1927.

The accommodation was warm and the en-suite in the rounded room behind our bedroom was modern and comfortable. The wind rattled round it during the night due to being the highest building in the area, and I know it will be much colder and breezy in winter. The steps up to it are on the outside and could be treacherous if there was snow or ice on the ground. Breakfast was served in the reception area at the base of the windmill and the outbuildings serve as the other rooms of the hotel. The car park has ‘spaces’ for seven cars, but anything larger than a family saloon will struggle to park in them.

We enjoyed the break, going for a meal with Janice, our friend from university who trained with Alyson almost forty years ago now, and her partner Graham. Janice declared that despite living in Scarborough for many years she had always wanted to stay in the windmill, and now she had seen it they would definitely book it sometime. As a family we always enjoy stays in Scarborough, and I have been going there since I was about five. Dad was evacuated to a hotel, and went to a local school during the second world war. It was considered safer than his boyhood home of industrial Middlesbrough – a prime target for German bombers.

We managed an eight-mile walk from the South Bay cliffs all the way along the sea front to the Sea Life Centre at Scalby Mills. Lunch was at the recently refurbished Watermark Cafe on Royal Albert Drive, just down from the bus turning circle on the North Bay.

So another one ticked off and I know we will return in the future.

Seeing a kingfisher was proving more difficult, but that was no surprise as this small bird is well-known to be elusive and if you see one it often described as ‘a flash of blue’ as they rarely perch on a branch. That didn’t stop everyone Alyson mentioned it to coming up with plenty of advice, and claiming to have seen lots of them. Karen, Alyson’s sister, said we need to go on a canal holiday as that is where she had seen them many times. The lady we rented our holiday cottage in Ireland from in July said that the river boat trip in Bath was a good one as well. Someone else had mentioned that trip and as our son David lives there we have set him the task of booking it for the next time we visit.

Plenty of the RSPB reserves have kingfishers on the ‘recent sightings list’ often as ‘in flight’, but we never seemed to be there at the right time. This was part of my plan when I bought Alyson RSPB membership for her birthday. Driving up to Northumberland I stopped at a truck stop near Carnforth for lunch. Alyson declared herself unimpressed with my choice of this stark, industrial looking place, despite my protestations that it was perfectly ok. I came clean as we got out of the car and handed her the early present of a membership card, bird guide book and another with information on all the reserves. We drove to nearby Leighton Moss, the one Pete volunteers at. He told that me if we went to the Eric Morecambe hide we may see kingfishers, perched on the fence posts in front of the hide overlooking the tidal marsh there. We had lunch in the wonderful cafe at the visitor centre, drove down a very narrow track under a railway bridge to the car park near the hides in the reed beds. Eric Morecambe hide is large & comfortable, with plenty of poster to help you identify the birds. This was Alyson’s first formal bird-watching experience. We didn’t see a kingfisher but saw little egret, a heron and many species of ducks and waders.

Over the months we kept looking. Then two weeks ago we saw one very close to home. We have been looking after our eldest son Michael’s new house in Northwich whilst he was working in Australia for three months. On one of the visits we took a trip to nearby Marbury Country Park close to the historic Anderton Boat Lift. We walked to the mere and the bird watching screen there. A couple of weeks previously we had visited and not seen much except coots, moorhens and lots of mallards. We did see a nut hatch in the tree on the edge of the mere. This time, however, there were tufted ducks, cormorants and what we now call our ‘daily heron’ as it seems we always see one of these wherever we go – even in the sea off the beach in Ireland. We saw three together that day at Marbury Park. Then it happened! Alyson exclaimed ‘what is that..’ as a small bird flashed past on the edge of the bushes below and landed on a branch. Alyson managed to see it through her binoculars ‘It’s a kingfisher, yes it is!’ I was sat at the wrong angle to see it through mine, and after about 20 seconds it flew away and I saw the ‘blue flash’. Alyson was delighted and we stayed a while longer but it didn’t make another appearance. Walking along the edge of the mere we saw great crested grebe, the three herons, little egrets, and a cormorant. Two men were in the screen when we came back and told us the kingfisher had made a couple more appearances. We didn’t see it again, but Alyson had finally achieved her wish list.

This past week we were walking along the river Severn in Shrewsbury with my university friend Clare and her husband Stuart – and as we came under the railway bridge Alyson saw another kingfisher in flight. I don’t have an original photograph of the bird we saw, so that one is still on my own wish list.

I wait with interest the next experiences/challenges Alyson comes up with.

Life & Death – Part 1

Someone once said that football is not a case of life & death; it is more important than that – or did they? I have watched the video of former Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly’s interview in 1991. After saying how, for his whole life, he had put his heart & soul into football to the extent that his family suffered, the interviewer asks if he regrets that. This is his exact reply:

‘ Yes, oh I regret it very much, yes. Somebody said football’s a matter of life and death to you. I said listen it’s much more important than that.’

When he left the game after resigning in 1974, Shankly suffered depression and ended up a sad figure. Going to the training ground at Melwood, he would talk to the players, and even started trying to take training sessions. He was barred and died of a heart attack at the age of 68. A fit man who exercised regularly and was teetotal, Shankly succumbed not to the usual excesses. He died of a broken heart; the result of an addiction to football.

Our home is in the North West. For the past week Liverpool, and the families of ‘The 96’, have been on regional news programmes as well as the national ones. Three weeks ago I watched the Europa League match when Liverpool came back from 3-0 down against Dortmund to win 4-3 in the last minute. The media were full of the usual quotes about the game being one ‘that will be talked about for years to come’. I love it when sport produces such moments, but mostly they are fleeting events and ‘real life’ resumes. The following day at Anfield was the final memorial service for the victims of the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster. 27 years after ‘real death’ had visited Liverpool.

On Wednesday 27 April 2016 coverage of the ‘unlawfully killed’ verdict by the jury at the Hillsborough inquest was constantly on our news bulletins. At last the families had the truth they craved and the fans were cleared of contributing to the disaster. It will be some time yet before they get justice.

The very next evening the attention of Liverpool fans returned to football matters. As I started to write this blog, the dulcet tones of former player Mark Lawrenson and Radio 5 Live commentator Ian Dennis were on my laptop. The stadium this time was Estadio El Madrigal the home of Spanish team Villarreal in the first leg of the semi-final. The match ended 1-0 to Villarreal with a goal in the last minute. Fans phoned into the post-game show and mentioned the comeback against Dortmund.

Ten years ago I met my friend Mark at Birch Services on the M62 after we had both done a day’s work. We drove the 110 miles to the Riverside Stadium, home of our team Middlesbrough. Boro were 1-0 down to Romanian side Steaua Bucharest from the away first leg in the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup. In the quarter-final we had come back from 3-0 down against Swiss side FC Basle to win 4-3. The previous Sunday we had been at Villa Park to watch us lose in the semi-final of the FA Cup. Being only 1-0 down, the chatter amongst the fans walking with us to the ground was of a real possibility of reaching the final in Eindhoven.

Manager Steve McClaren, players Gareth Southgate, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, and Stewart Downing (now back at his home town club), will be names known to today’s football fans. Andrew Taylor, now with Reading, also played that night. After 20 minutes we were 2-0 down on the night, 3-0 on aggregate. Surely it couldn’t happen again? Well it did. Like Liverpool we scored 4 goals, the final one in the last minute a diving header from our young Italian striker Massimo Maccarone At the final whistle there were grown men in tears and, as well as Mark, I hugged a complete stranger, an enormous, bearded, bear of a man from the seat in front of me. The players came out after 15 minutes to warm down and we celebrated all over again for what seemed like an hour. Mark and I got home at 2am and were back in work early on the Friday.

The local radio commentator for that game was Alastair Brownlee, or Ali as he was known. Ali had been a fan long before he was on the radio and was unashamedly biased. His excitement that night reached its peak. His screams at the final whistle echoed those of the Norwegian TV commentator after his country had beaten England 2-1 in a World Cup qualifier in 1981. That night it was;

‘Lord Nelson! Lord Beaverbrook! Sir Winston Churchill! Sir Anthony Eden! Clement Attlee! Henry Cooper! Lady Diana! Maggie Thatcher – can you hear me, Maggie Thatcher! Your boys took one hell of a beating! Your boys took one hell of a beating!’

Ali’s slightly more weird shouts in the clip below are fuzzy. As well as his passion when Boro score the goals, after the final whistle sounds listen out for:

‘Boro have struck a stake to the heart of Dracula’s boys…’
‘It’s Eindhoven! Eindhoven!’
‘One of the most glorious nights in the history of football. We go back to 1876, the Infant Hercules, fired out of the foundries of Teesside, mined out of the Eston Hills, are roaring all the way to Eindhoven in the UEFA Cup Final.’
‘It’s party, party, party. Everyone round to my house for a ‘Parmo’!

Ali died on Valentine’s Day this year aged 56 – the same age as me. He told his listeners that he had bowel cancer in November 2015. Football and ‘The Boro’ were his life, he did a lot of charity work and promoted Teesside and the people. The fans think promotion back to The Premier League will be a fitting legacy for this season. I can’t be certain, but I think Ali, ‘Mrs B’ (as he called his wife in commentary) and his daughters would give up all that for a few more years of life.

The ‘death of the steel industry’ came to Teesside this year with closure of the modern Redcar Plant. Seemingly to our government the one in Port Talbot is more important. The estimated £200 Million boost to the local economy that promotion to The Premier League will bring, could help ease the pain of the thousands of families affected. Boro are a club whose links to the local community are strong and important.

Boro went on to lose the 2006 final 4-0 against Sevilla. If Liverpool do indeed stage a comeback in the return leg then I hope they win the final. However, Sevilla could be their opponents too.

These days I would not drive overnight to a game, and given a chance would put time with my family first. I think I can speak for Mark and say he feels the same about his young family.

Some things are more important than football – life & death for instance. Just ask the families of the 96.

The best 5k of my life – even if it took over 39 hours!

Yesterday marked a number of significant ‘milestones’ – an apt word for taking part in my first ever ‘Park Run’. 23rd April is our school friend Keren Harvey’s birthday. Protocol dictates that I shouldn’t give her age away, but it was 39 years ago that Alyson & me started ‘dating’ at Keren’s 18th birthday party.

I had been meaning to take part in our closest Park Run at Delamere Forest, situated between Northwich & Chester, for several weeks. Our son Michael could not run with me, having had a significant milestone of his own this week. He moved to work in the Sydney office of his company for at least 3 months. I had suggested to Michael that we do the run last Saturday. Apart from being busy with his packing, he observed that the publicity over a council starting to charge Park Run for using paths, which until then had been free, may have meant a larger turnout than usual showing their support for the organisation.

Checking the forecast all week it seemed that it might be wet. Being a fair-weather runner and unsure of my footing in slippery conditions, the prospects didn’t look good. On Friday I was mentally and physically tired from the events of the previous two days. However, on Saturday the sun was shining and it was a crisp, frosty start and I felt full of hope (and energy!). After an early breakfast I set off at 7.30am with the aim of arriving early, to see how the organisation of the run worked and to check the parking situation. I got to the main car park for 8am, and it was deserted save for a group of seven or eight of varying ages carrying logs and weights ready for an early morning workout with a personal trainer.

In the hour until the run started I checked out my fellow runners as they arrived and filled the car park. There were running club groups from Warrington, Ellesmere Port, with vaguely ‘Scouse’ accents, and others more from the more local rural villages in Cheshire, with less harsh voices. There were families with young children and pushchairs. There were couples of all ages and shapes in shockingly tight bright Lycra. A few singletons who, like me, appeared to be ‘first-timers’ arrived and jogged nervously round the car park and found the start about 200 yards away on the edge of the forest. Then there were the inevitable dog-walkers.

Wearing my tracksuit jacket, thinking it may be cold, as 9am approached the sun shone and it was warm enough jogging on the spot. The top came off to reveal my 2006 Great North Run(GNR) t-shirt. I had chosen this partly as it is cotton and doesn’t rub when I run, but mainly to remind me of the last time I did an organised run. I completed my fifth GNR in a time of 2.5hrs and raised over £2,300 in memory of a church member who had died of bacterial meningitis just after Christmas that year. It was very emotional as I got to the home straight on South Shields sea front and imagined Mike running alongside me and encouraging me to finish. Today’s run would turn out to be equally emotional.

I had printed my Park Run bar code which you need to get a time for your run. Noticing it had Michael’s UK mobile number as an emergency contact, I text him to say I was doing the run but not sure what he would do if someone called about me at 6pm local time in Australia!. He wished me luck. About 300 of us gathered at the start and after a few brief instructions about the route and procedure at the finish we were off. Every runner is deemed to start at the same time and the 3o seconds or so it took me to cross the start point would be irrelevant as it is not the sort of event where seconds are important. The aim is running against yourself and improving your times over the weeks and months.

The course at Delamere is uphill through a forestry track for about 3/4 of a mile then a circuit of Blakemere Moss, a large pool in the middle of the forest, then back down to the start/finish near the visitor centre. I found myself at the very back of the run. I was ready for this as the main goal was to see if I could jog at a pace just above walking for the whole distance. Alyson & I had walked the course a few weeks earlier which helped as I was familiar with the terrain and where we were going. Having done quite a few 10k’s and half-marathons over the years I also knew that there would be some who set off like Usain Bolt for a few hundred yards then come to a complete stop and walking very slowly. So it was that a mother and young son were doing exactly that, and I spent the whole of the run going past them and waiting for them to go past me. Similarly a young woman and her mildly overweight friend were doing the same ‘shuttle runs’. They would have managed a lot better had they heeded the advice from the volunteer marshal at the second check-point to do more running and less gossiping! They encouraged each other and I saw them at the end talking about doing it again next week; exactly what this event is all about.

It was all I could do to keep running in a vaguely straight line and not to trip as my footing & balance are less sure than they had been 10 years previously. As we jogged by the point where the track and pool meet the B-road through the forest, the sun came through an opening in the trees, and I took a quick glance at my watch. 20 minutes. At the front of the ‘race’ there were competitive types and the top 10 would already have finished. They would have had their cup of coffee and be in the car on the way home by the time I got to the end. By my estimate we were about halfway round, my breathing was steady and my legs had started to feel stronger and less heavy. This could have been the point where my enthusiasm got the better of me, so I resisted the temptation to start passing a few of those in front. I tripped over a tree root and came close to being face-down on the muddy ground!

Soon we were back on the track down to the Start/Finish line and I did indeed pass a few people on the way. The young lady marshal who earlier had told the two girls to stop chatting, shouted words of encouragement and said I was looking great. It lifted my spirits and I started to get emotional. Around four years ago I was training for a triathlon when I suffered a brain injury. After 10 weeks in hospital during which time I had not been able to speak, move my right side or stand, I took my first steps unaided on the day my mum died suddenly a week after visiting me in hospital. I also had a total hip replacement in 2013. My physio Annette specialises in using an hydrotherapy pool to remake connections between the brain and muscles which have been lost. After a year Annette got me standing correctly and last November, rather than walking like a stiff-legged robot, she taught me how to run again. With exercises for both my core and improved balance, I resolved at New Year to start jogging again. Until yesterday my furthest distance was less than a kilometre on a gym running machine. I was tearful as I gave thanks to God for my faith, the support of my family, friends and the prayers of my church fellowship that had got me to this next stage of my recovery.

Driving back home my car which reads texts to me announced that Park Run had messaged and interpreted 39.22 as ‘thirty nine hours and twenty two minutes’!

More Park Runs at Delamere and volunteering on other weekends are definitely on my list. My brother Andrew has a charity entry for this year’s Great North Run in September. If I can continue to improve you never know….at my present rate I could finish in less than 5.5hrs!

In honour of 23rd April milestone this year here are two Shakespeare quotes that you may think apply to my first blog post:

“Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.” Romeo and Juliet
“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.” The Merchant of Venice

And a Biblical one to end on:

“…let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us….” Hebrews Chapter 12 v1.

For more information on Park Runs and to find the nearest one to you head over to 
www.parkrun.org.uk