Today, yours truly’s exercise class of choice is the inaugural Studio Cycling session at a Leeds leisure centre. Not the intensive and deeply exerting spinning type of pedal work; moreover a gentle easing into the world of gymnasium cycle activity….. Or so I’m assured by the leisure centre operative with whom I spoke yesterday. At least. I think the conversation took place with a member of the centre’s staff. He’d […]
Despite being the most distressing life event I’ve thus far experienced, I never wept when my father died in the October of 2017. I similarly remained tear free during his funeral, even while delivering a twenty minute eulogy I’d written as a tribute to a man I adored. A beautiful person whose passing devastated me; his departure leaving a cavernous void in my soul that feels like it’ll never mend. […]
Almost exactly a week after attending the funeral of a Gateshead Fell cricket club (GFCC) legend***, a club I represented for a decade between 1977-1987, this morning I was further saddened to hear of a former junior & senior team colleague Brian Gray’s passing. *** – Last week’s melancholic events more extensively detailed in my narrative Respecting A Club Icon. Today’s bereavement news coming via text from John Hutchison, another member […]
Yesterday, 2nd January, saw me attending the first (and hopefully my last) funeral of 2020. The journey up to Gateshead taken with buddy and former team mate John Hutchison, paying respects to a recently passed doyen of a cricket club we’d both represented at various junctures of our life odysseys. The wake giving me an opportunity to, for the first time since summer 1987, enter the club house of Gateshead Fell […]
It was an arching run up with trailing bowling arm and slightly unorthodox delivery action I mimicked on numerous occasions during my 1970’s childhood. This then homage to Warwickshire and England cricketer Bob Willis ordinarily undertaken during ‘Test Matches’ my brother Ian and/or friends participated on the tarmac wicket of Dorchester Gardens, or dog dirt strewn cricketing square on Allerdene field, in Gateshead. When the game was played at the […]
I’ve just got off the phone from a conversation with my son Jonathon, who lives with his charming fiancee Jenny on the outskirts of York. This conversation incorporating our usual inanely random chatter; topics including UPV door adaptations, aspirations for Christmas gifts, his new love of golf and his idiosyncratic grandma (my mum). My son’s fairly recent love of playing eighteen holes on his local golf course, accompanied by his […]
During my fledgling years my main love was association football, as an old Pathe news commentator may’ve dubbed the game in his authoritative BBC English tones. In particular, I was enamoured by the all conquering 1960s/70s Leeds United teams managed by Don Revie. Accomplished exponents of a game that led to a boyhood pipe dream of one day playing for the team representing my West Yorkshire place of birth. This unconditional […]
