Thankful Thursday

I've been a bit tardy recently in the Thankful Thursday posts.  I've got all sorts of excuses.  I've not had anything to be thankful for (completely untrue).  I've been away (true).  I've been doing lots of other things (true).  I've forgotten on the day or been travelling (true).  One or two things have happened to friends around me which temporarily made it a bit difficult to be thankful all the time (true).  I'm sorry Jaz.  I should have more faith and perseverance.

Anyway I've decided that it's about time I pulled my socks up and got on with it.  Why is it, by the way, that when people one knows are having a Bad Time it makes one feel a little guilty for being thankful?

Warning! 

It's a while since I mentioned croquet.  I think at some time I probably said that I would give it a rest before I became even more boring than I am already.  Well, for reasons you will appreciate before I leave for Scotland next Tuesday, I'm going to do a review of my croquet year for which I am exceptionally thankful. 

Enough!  You don't really need to read the rest of this: it's here for the 'diary' aspect of my blog.

 I didn't win the Golf  Croquet Club Championship this year.  My GC partner, Judy, (we won the GC Doubles together) did.  Today.  I was far more nervous for her than I was when she and I played in the semi-final and she beat me making it, I think, the first time I've not been in the final for, I think, six years just after I started playing croquet.  I played well and she played better and beat me fair and square.  Today she beat the Club's pretender for the Championship.  No, she annihilated him in the second game (best of 3): 7:6, 7:2.    We (Judy and her granddaughter, Zoe, whom I used to coach) went out for lunch to celebrate.

So this year I've not won any of the three GC club championships.  However I have won the Association Croquet (the 'original' and 'thinking' croquet) A Grade and the Intermediate Grade Champs.  However I let my partner down and we were only runners up in the AC Doubles.

In the greater scheme of things amongst the goings on in this world of ours all this is very shallow.  However today I am very thankful for my successes this year.  It may never happen again and I shall return to Scotland with the rather shallow thought that my name is etched in gold on the hallowed A Grade championship board at the Marewa Croquet Club.

A Blogging Haitus

This week has not turned out as I expected.  The International Croquet Test Matches are being held at the moment in three New Zealand locations over three weeks.  This week (week 2) the Tests are being played at the club I play at and the Te Mata Club 20 minutes away.  One of my jobs for the Test at our club (New Zealand v Australia) is to set out lawns and set the widths of the hoops.  If you think, by the way, that it's easy getting a ball through a hoop the Tests are being played with hoops set 1/64" (.5mm) wider than the balls.

I had expected after the day spent putting new hoop positions in that my involvement would be confined to getting up at 6am when I was on duty to put out hoops for the 6 lawns that we have and set the width of the hoops for play to start at 0830.  In practice I have spent most of the days and early evenings since Saturday at the Club partly working and partly watching the matches.  I've also had a friend who came to see two days of the Test staying.

It's now bedtime and I have to be out early again tomorrow so this will be another day without reading blogs.  I have written a quick Thankful Thursday post scheduled for tomorrow though.

Although there is one more day of this Test, New Zealand have already beaten Australia and will play England in the final Test next week.  That Test will be the decider for the series and Australia and the USA will play off for the last two positions.

I go away on Friday to a 6-day tournament in Palmerston North - my favourite tournament of the year.

So until I return I may well only be putting in the occasional appearance in my beloved Blogland.

The Riotous Oldies

It’s 1030 pm.  This, you understand is New Zealand 10.30 pm.  All self respecting 60+s are in bed and asleep.  I’m in a motel unit with three croquet ladies.  The next but one unit is occupied by another 4 croquet ladies.  This is the Veterans Tournament so all are over 60 and anyone in their 60s is probably on the young side.  But these are fit people able to play for 8 and 9 hours a day on their feet concentrating and walking many many kilometres during the day.

And in the evening they ‘relax’.  A small libation may be taken…..many times. A large libation or two as well perhaps.

So picture the scene.  A group of six or so an hour after everyone’s usual bedtime sitting in a unit making enough noise to keep the rest of the smart motel awake.  Croquet person turns up from another motel.  It’s his first ever croquet tournament tomorrow.  He’s forgotten his handicap card (golfers will understand). He’s come to see what he should do.  As if anyone can sort the problem at this hour of the evening.  But... he’s taken a sleeping tablet and is half asleep already.  It’s decided that he should be taken back to his motel.  He’s a teetotal, good-living retired methodist minister and he’s being shepherded down the hight street by an extremely ‘happy’ gang of veteran ladies (some in their night attire). 

Who says the over-sixties are dull.

Oh and by the way I retained my Veteran's  Association Croquet Handicap Singles title.  So I'm happy too.

Thankful Thursday

I've spent a good bit of today wondering what to be thankful for this Thursday.  It's not, of course, that I don't have anything for which to be thankful.  It's just a case of making it sound interesting enough to blog about.  Yesterday I was thinking of Meike's post or comments upon how fortunate our generations (I nearly said generation but we are actually a generation apart) were not to have had to go to war to defend our own soil.  Then I was thinking about how fortunate I am to have been part of a generation - probably the last - to benefit from final salary pensions.  The list is endless.

Today, however, I had something much less significant but, in its own way very rewarding, for which to give thanks.  A few years ago I used to play near enough top class Golf Croquet.  I held the Club's championship cup for three years in succession.  For the last few years I've concentrated on Association Croquet and fallen well down the NZ and World rankings for GC and , frankly, haven't played that well although I've maintained my low handicap.

Today I played the semi-finals of the Club's GC championship competition and beat one of our best players 7:1 7:4.  That wasn't, in itself, important.  What was important to me was that he played very well (particularly in the first game) but I played even better.  I played the sort of golf croquet that I used to play.  It was very satisfying.

So no world shattering things to be thankful for today.  Just a small and insignificant but personal thanks for a very satisfying day.

Frantic Friday

When I write emails I occasionally use completely nonsensical or random headings: a habit that gets some people trying to work out what went on in my head at that moment.  The answer of course is usually 'very little'.   Sometimes, like the above heading, the reason is obvious although completely untruthful.  Today I have a whole day with no need to go out so that I can catch up with some things and prepare tonight's family dinner which is a special one: The Family's Son One, Jamie, leaves on Sunday for his gap year.  His first stop will be Scotland to see family and then to work in Switzerland for the ski season before going to China to stay with his aunt who teaches there and take a Chinese language course.  Chinese is considered an important language to learn in this part of the world.

Actually this week has been so busy I've not blogged (yesterday's Thankful Thursday was done a while ago) and I've only played one croquet match.  It was an exciting one though.  It was a handicap match with me giving the other played 7 free turns (called bisques).  At the 3 hour time limit I was in turn with three hoops needed to win. I broke down after two hoops leaving the game level pegging (I wonder if that's where the term came from because pegs are used to mark hoops made in croquet).  That means that you play on until someone makes a hoop.  I eventually had an opportunity to fire at the hoop with a shot from a few metres away which, if I had missed, would have given my opponent an almost certain win.  My ball hit the hoop quite hard, rattled around and just trickled through ending up where you see it in the photo.  Results don't come much narrower than that.

Yesterday I went to a fitness studio (a gym by any other name) where they tailor a course for you and then monitor you right through the session (a sort of poor person's personal trainer).  The purpose is to strengthen my leg muscles so that they are fitter when I get my knee replaced and also to do some cardiac work.  I haven't been to a gym since the cardiac sessions after heart attack 12 years ago.  I was fully expecting to ache all over this morning but I don't.  That presumably means that either I'm fitter than I thought or that the initial workout was not challenging or both.  Next session could well be a different matter!

Bugger!

Now in polite circles in the UK that's not a word to be bandied around lightly.  In New Zealand it can be heard even on the croquet lawns from the lips of refined 90 + year young ladies who would think it's restricted use in the UK very odd indeed.

Anyway on the lawns this afternoon I said something like 'Oh dear, that's inconvenient!' as I bent over to take a shot and a searing pain went across my back and through my hips.  That was the end of my croquet for the day - and probably for a week or two as well.  We shall see.

New Zealand is a good place for such an accident to happen though.  Within the hour I was on the physio's table having my back examined and worked on.  I have another appointment tomorrow afternoon.  I'd be lucky to see a physio in the UK for weeks - I'd probably be better before I could see one.

So this evening I am stiff and sore but I can walk.  I hope that I can get out of bed tomorrow! 

On Rain, Poetry and The Law.

This has, by common agreement, been the most miserable summer here in Hawkes Bay that most people seem to be able to recall.  Of course these statements are often made when the weather is miserable but there is absolutely no doubt that this is the most miserable summer since I first came here to New Zealand in 2005.

It has always been one of our family sayings that:

“The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just’s umbrella.”

I wondered this evening whether that saying was just a family one or whether it had wider provenance.  Lo and behold I discovered that it was attributed to the English Judge, Lord Bowen (Charles Synge Christopher Bowen, Baron Bowen QC, PC (1 January 1835 – 10 April 1894)).

Now I wouldn't expect any of my readers to have heard of this august member of the judiciary however, as it so happens, the name was known to me.  Why?  Well when I read law one of the most famous and basic tests was that of the "man on the back of the Clapham omnibus".  (The man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical reasonable person, used by the courts in English law where it is necessary to decide whether a party has acted in the way that a reasonable person should.)

Who had originated this test?  You guessed it: Charles Bowen as he then was as Counsel in the famous Tichborne Case.

As an aside Lord Bowen was no literary slouch either and amongst many other things translated Virgil's Eclogues, and Aeneid, books i.-vi.  

More interestingly, for me at least, was another of his quotes:  “When I hear of an 'equity' in a case like this, I am reminded of a blind man in a dark room - looking for a black hat - which isn't there”  I just love that.

Having said all that, despite the dreary day and the rain, I played a game of Association Croquet this afternoon and played much to my personal satisfaction.   Then I played a hugely enjoyable game of one-ball with my original AC mentor and at the end he won by the narrowest margin possible.  We finished, wet and very happy. 

I had originally intended to quote Longfellow's poem The Rainy Day but felt that it's tenor, though very apt in some ways, in no way reflected the joy and lightness of my mood.  Nevertheless as I'd looked the words up to remind myself of them I shall quote them anyway:

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Tomorrow the forecast is for showers; Wednesday it's rain; Thursday and Friday showers.  In fact the weather map is almost totally devoid of sun this week.  The vignerons are getting worried.

Me?  Tonight I couldn't be happier.