Monday, January 23, 2012

A quiet weekend ...

... and when was the last time I had one of those?

In fact most of Saturday and all of Sunday morning was spent writing the scripts for the next few monthsworth of radio programmes. Liz and I will be spending most of our time talking rubbish. I know that that's what we usually do, but this time we mean it. I was at a loss as to what subject to choose, but then on Tuesday I received my Puy-de-Dôme en Mouvement magazine in which one of the topics was the Departement's plan to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill, and on Thursday I received the magazine from the Bank, in which one of the topics was donating unwanted goods to charities and good homes. A subject therefore immediately suggested itself, and as for my thesis for my Diploma in Pollution Control I wrote about waste and landfills, I'm perfectly qualified to talk rubbish and so that was that.

We had an interruption at midday on Saturday for a shopping expedition to St Eloy where I bought nothing exciting, but that was that.

Saturday night and Sunday afternoon was football. Not at Pionsat as the Puy-de-Dôme football leagues are on a winter break (and doesn't this weather make a mockery of the idea of a winter break? Six weeks with no footy in the Puy-de-Dôme with some of the mildest weather I have ever had in winter, and when the season restarts next weekend - just you watch _ we'll be snowed in for a month!) but Saturday night was at Marcillat across the border in the Allier where their 1st XI took on Chantelle. This was a match that is nominally in a division one step higher than Pionsat's 1st XI but the standard of football in the Allier is total rubbish and it was an appalling match.

Long-term readers of this rubbish will recall that at one time I expressed an interest in watching a 3rd Division match. This is the lowest tier in football in the Allier (the Puy-de-Dôme has four) but having seen matches higher up the pyramid, I wondered how bad an Allier 3rd Division match would be. As luck would have it, this afternoon Terjat (about 8 miles from here) were entertaining (if that is the right word to use) their near-neighbours Ste Thérènce in a cut-throat local derby in the basement of the 3rd Division. Obviously, with nothing better to do (there was no paint drying and no grass growing anywhere in the vicinity) a visit to Terjat was called for.

And I wasn't disappointed. It was predictably awful. There was only one player on the field that looked reasonably competent (I'm excluding the Ste Thérènce goalkeeper - what on earth was someone like him doing playing in a team as awful as his?) and that was the Terjat centre-half. It was clear after the first five minutes that nothing was ever going to get past him, and it didn't either.

The trainer of Ste Thérènce clearly had the same opinion as me, and the talk that he gave to his team at half-time was just so predictable. 30 seconds after the restart, with the Terjat taking off after a loose ball down the right flank, two Ste Thérènce players came after him, put him firmly, fairly and squarely into the advertising hoardings with a thump that was heard all over the Allier, and that was his match over. The result was predictable after that.

Next stop was to Liz and Terry's to rehearse our radio programmes for the next month and Liz very kindly cooked tea and made cake, some of which found its way in a doggy-bag back to my house, for which I am extremely grateful.

So we are recording tomorrow morning, and then I have to crack on with the next outstanding task - my presentation on the Trans-Labrador Highway for the village discussion group. It's all go here.

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