The Grumpy Old Blog

  I have never been a great sports attender. Yes, as a secondary schoolboy, I don't believe I missed a single International Rugby Match at Lansdowne Road between 1970 and 1973. And I was a very keen tennis player. Other than that, I attended the 1988 Challenge Cup between Wigan and Halifax at Wembley where Wigan won the match 32–12. I had not the slightest clue what was going on. I also went to watch an international cricket match that summer at Headingly, and had even less of a clue as to what was going on.    It appeared to be grown men dressed in white, starting to run miles away while scratching their nether regions with a ball, and then prior to collapsing with exhaustion from their 3-mile run into the stadium, throwing the ball at someone holding a cricket racquet.    My final foray was for Leeds versus Reading at Elland Road on the occasion when they were trying to move up a division, a match they lost. Some chap kept screaming at the Leeds team while ru...

Had a fantastic morning preparing for England's win in rugby. Or will it be a win in Derby? Well, it's not that I will be attending the match, or that I might even watch it on television – in fact I don’t even know if or when they are playing - but I could tell something might up judging by the copious amount of Carlsberg Lager people were buying from the supermarket when I popped in at 7.30am. I had been instructed by the wife to purchase some "low fat" (could have sworn that is the name of our local Chinese Take-Away) red cheese, and found out something that made me slightly suspicious, not that I might be in any way cynical when it comes to supermarket shopping, you will understand. All the red cheese - the normal, the "Be Good" to yourself, the simply red cheese (presumably the stuff Mick Hucknall buys), the super-duper "Taste the Difference" and the Con You Sir, oops, I mean Connoisseur red cheese contained EXACTLY 33.7g fat p...