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Post by bringbacklenwhite on Jul 16, 2014 20:25:02 GMT
Lowena dhis, labas, lumela or la ora na. (Depending if you are Cornish, Lithuanian, Lozi or Tahitian).
Longing for laughs leaving little left to laetificate ? Largiloquent largesse of laxisms or lickerish lithsome literations ?
Yes, we are now into Week L for Chaos Too already.
Leave lying the libellous and loose literal lassitudes. All yours ..........................
Macca will decide the next recipient of the Mantle of Brilliance.
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Post by Epworth Hatter on Jul 18, 2014 11:00:56 GMT
Lytham St Annes Hockey Tournament, Summer 1993
The tour was an annual weekend of hockey, beer, hockey and more beer. This year it was played at Lytham St Annes, a beautiful part of the world, as I recall. The reason the scenery stands out in my mind is that we were actually staying at a B&B in the centre of Blackpool (sorry, Len).
There were 4 of us staying in one B&B. It was a mid-row terrace on three floors which the owners had converted. The living room was an authentic 80’s style pub bar – no expense (although plenty of taste) had been spared. The fake oak panelling matched the burgundy* and green patterned carpet perfectly. *It was technically probably claret, but that is way too posh for this place!
For the hockey itself we played on grass, not uncommon in the early-nineties. The main benefit of playing on grass is that, compared to astroturf, it doesn’t hurt as much - and you lose less skin - when you fall over. And given that every team had, on average, three drunk players per match, this was quite important – for them anyway.
It was a County level tournament, so in theory the standard should have been quite high. The combination of grass (no, not that kind) and beer, meant it was actually pretty average.
I played on the left wing for the tournament. This proved to be advantageous during one game against Hampshire. It was an early afternoon game and we had all enjoyed lunch – and this one was definitely of the liquid variety. I was having quite a good game. We were 3-0 up and I’d managed to set up all three. Right at the start of the second half my liquid lunch reached my bladder. It seemed to come out of nowhere and I was about to explode. We were in a field full of hockey pitches; the club house was but a dot on the horizon.
Only one thing for it.
We had a long corner on the right hand side, so I took my chance. I ran off the side of the pitch to the edge of the field where there was a hedge all the way along. I quickly relieved myself (and it was a huge relief!) and ran back on to the pitch hoping no-one would notice. Some hope. My mate, Kev, had noticed me run off and had not taken the corner, but decided to inform both teams of my sharp exit. As I ran back onto the pitch, I had 21 players, 2 umpires and about 30 spectators all watching me. The slow hand clap added to the embarrassment. The umpire on my side also got in on the humiliation, brandishing a yellow card (5 minute sin bin) – issued for ‘getting your dick out during play whilst ladies were present’. Thankfully, it was a mock gesture and I was able to carry on playing.
Well, sort of carry on playing. Every time I got the ball, the jokes started…
They shouted... Urine it to win it Urine the way Urine trouble now We can’t tell if he’s coming or going? (even I laughed at that one)
And they sang… “Please relieve me, let me go…” “All we are singing is give p*ss a chance…” “I streamed a stream in times gone by…” (from Les Mis – apparently) “Loo-ey Loo-ey, oh no, sayin' he gotta go, yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah, said Loo-ey Loo-ey, oh baby, said he gotta go” – they were very pleased with that one!
I ended up with the nickname of ‘Slasher’ from that time onwards.
We ended up winning 3-2, but only just, as most of my team were putting their efforts into thinking up new urine-related puns – as indeed I’m sure you are right now, dear reader.
The game proved to the high point of our tournament. We won 1, lost 1 and drew 2, managing to qualify for the knockout stages as one of the group runner ups.
It meant that we had a game on the Sunday morning (which we lost and so were knocked out), but it didn’t stop a celebratory drink or two in Blackpool. I was pretty hacked off with all the ‘urine’ jokes, so decided to take my time getting ready, leaving the rest of the team to get started in the B&B bar admiring the carpet whilst sitting on the fetching light green velvet stools.
When we did go out, there was no real mention of the game or my bladder (other than calling me Slasher), so I was pleased. We ended up, as I recall, in a large bar which had a resident DJ. There was a lot of drinking, dancing and laughing (in that order!) and it was a good night.
That was until… I saw Col, our captain, speaking to the DJ. It was a real ‘Murder She Wrote’ style moment: I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but looking back I realised it was a vital clue. He came back to the group, grinning like a Cheshire cat.
And the next song the DJ played, to which my lovely team mates sang along to at full voice?
“I can pee clearly now, the pain is gone I'm free of p*ss now - gone away Gone is the dark, dark ale from my bladder I've done a bright, bright sun-yellow spray”
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Post by hatter_in_macc on Jul 18, 2014 12:18:01 GMT
It was a County level tournament, so in theory the standard should have been quite high. Not a sentence that we Hatters get to read very often, Eppers...!
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Post by bringbacklenwhite on Jul 18, 2014 13:15:29 GMT
Brilliant story.
Sounds like you stayed in one of the better B and B's in Blackpool as well.
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Post by bigfudge on Jul 18, 2014 15:11:16 GMT
Fantastic story! Truly excellent!!
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Post by bringbacklenwhite on Jul 18, 2014 16:31:09 GMT
Limerick Competition
Some recent newcomers may just be wondering about the reasoning behind the limerick competitions on County Heaven and how they came about.
In the far distant past there was a BBC 606 site for each and every football club. Sadly, due to admin. problems (and the lack of BBC funding) the site was abandoned by Auntie Beeb. A few of us had become regular posters and decided we would like our own County site - hence County Heaven set up by our esteemed leader, Sheff.
The new board quickly became a firm feature and needed impetus beyond the usual County football chat (to be fair given the results on the pitch it was mostly doom and gloom) and a few side threads developed - ie The Prediction League and Sandy's quiz.
One weekend someone posted a reference to a likely first team signing under the banner, "There was a young lad from Leeds mentioned" which reminded me of a fairly soporific and simple verse form called limericks, and particularly one about a young lady from Leeds which involved a packet of seeds, a certain short period of time and the flowering of the purchased items on specific parts of her anatomy. If you disregard the pun, things just grew from there.
Further limericks were composed about our various posters in turn, some amusing, some flattering and others just plain abusive !! In true County Heaven style this became quickly competitive and earned it's own promotion to a separate room named the Limerick Lounge.
Quite organically this grew into a weekly (sometimes bi-weekly due to fixture congestion)event based around our upcoming opponents using their locality, nicknames, ground name, famous names etc. as a basis for the rhymes. Thankful, due to County's regular descent through the league pyramid, new background material arrives each season to be poked fun at. The shenanigans at EP have also proved a fertile breeding ground for our frustrations and anger to be provoked.
The recent World Cup limericks were an excellent diversion during the close season and enabled our limericking abilities to remain primed and ready for the new season. Thank you to all who enter and keep an old man very amused. Your creativity is to be applauded.
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Post by sandbachhatter on Jul 20, 2014 18:58:57 GMT
Luton Town (H) - Friday 2nd September 2011
As with so many of my County memories these days, it isn't the match itself that remains with me so much as events surrounding it and, on this occasion, an impromptu trip to The Royal Oak on Castle Street afterwards which gave me one of my most harrowing yet, in hindsight, hilarious experiences of my life.
In fact, it was only trawling through the archives to check the date for this piece that reminded me the match finished 1-1. Never mind, the match, for these purposes, is irrelevant.
A Friday night game against our fellow Hatters was enough to coax an 'Uncle' of mine (we've always called him Uncle even though he's not actually related, but a very good friend of my Dad's) to not only attend the match, but to join us for a post-footy Guinness in The Oak - a pub he told us he had not set foot in since the last time my Dad had been to EP around 15 years ago.
As we arrived, the pub was relatively crowded - not so much with fans (of either club) but just Friday night Edgeley-ites out for a drink. As you might expect, it resembled The Cantina from Star Wars.
Anyway, I digress. Due to the lack of space, myself, Beefy, Fudgie, 'Uncle' Andy, his son ('Cousin') Robert and a friend of mine who we'll call Tim because, well, that's his name, got our drinks and took up a standing position towards the kitchen area at the back.
No sooner had we taken our first sips, than the barman came over and informed us we would have to move from our spot as it was by now 9.55pm and 'the entertainment' was due on at 10pm. For those of you who have frequented The Oak, you will appreciate how ridiculous the notion of 'entertainment' might be.
Still, move on we did, to a different standing position near the front of the pub and, as luck would have it, a table soon became available. In hindsight, those leaving the pub were perhaps aware of what was to come and had made hasty their exit. Lucky sods.
It was then we realised that the large screen in the corner of the pub, usually reserved for showing early kick-offs, was in fact a black and white (and very grainy) shot of the area where we had been stood. The 'entertainment' was being filmed.
The tension as the clock ticked towards 10pm was palpable and, sure enough, right on time, music started playing. The song? '9 to 5' by Dolly Parton.
The kitchen door then opened and out walked what I can only describe as the two least convincing drag acts in the history of the genre. They had full beards for f**k's sake.
One, you will not be surprised to learn, was dressed as Dolly Parton and was miming the words to '9 to 5' whilst thrusting his/her huge fake breasts at every poor sod in the pub. The other, confusingly at the time, was dressed as Amy Winehouse. Most of these people had just come for a quiet drink and clearly not a single one of them appeared to be here to 'enjoy' the entertainment.
Just when we thought it couldn't get worse, Dolly got one of her huge breasts out and started squeezing it at some poor unsuspecting patron. To our horror (although not anywhere near as much to his horror), the poor sod got soaked with milk from Dolly's mammary gland. I sh*t you not.
Open mouthed (had Dolly been near us at this point we wouldn't have risked being open mouthed of course), we sat in silence as the song played out and more and more people on the far side of the pub got drenched in booby-juice.
As the song finished, our hopes that this was the end of the freak show were immediately quashed as the initial bars to 'Rehab' by Amy Winehouse blasted out around the pub. Yes, it was the other one's turn, as s/he badly mimed the words whilst struggling to maintain the comically massive (and apparently heavy) bee-hive on top of his/her head.
As if the Dolly-milk hadn't been scarring enough, part way through the song Amy reached up to his/her bee-hive and opened a door at the front to reveal a small beer fridge that s/he had admirably been balancing on his/her head. To everyone's astonishment, s/he took out a can of lager to swig from and then a bag of white powder which s/he blew over the poor people who were still trying to dry the milk off. Sure enough, this turned into a glue-like paste which I can imagine wasn't easy to remove.
Please bear in mind, this all took place not two months after Miss Winehouse had passed away from a drugs overdose. Tasteless? Just a tad. It must have been the most ill-advised entertainment booking in history, especially when you consider the pub and clientele in question.
Our party managed to avoid the milk and the powder fortunately, but I was still mortified as I had persuaded by Dad's good friend to join us at the pub and, as I nervously glanced over to apologise profusely and explain that the pub wasn't normally like this, I was shocked to see him grinning.
"This is the best night out I've had in years!"
Bless him.
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Post by another_ruined_saturday on Jul 20, 2014 22:19:34 GMT
a couple of great ones there, eps and sandy.
lomas, bill
my grandad. although for reasons lost in the mists of time, we always called him 'grandee', pronounced 'grandy'. bill lomas is where the blessing/curse of county in my family comes from. in 1941, one saturday, he and a friend headed up to manchester to sign up as mechanics for the RAF. unfortunately the office was closed. on the way home, they decided to stop off and take in a football match. as they lived on the chapel side of whaley bridge, stockport county was pretty much on the way. he took a break pretty early in his county supporting career by going to burma for 18 months with the RAF as an aircraft mechanic, with my gran staying in england as an army cook.
in 1978, he/we/a committee decided that i should share the county burden with him and my gran. i had already been to edgeley park pre-birth (although in the interests of fairness, i apparently also took in at least one visit to maine road and also the bitter heat of a preston/blackpool derby as my dad is a tangerine), and in '78 i remember being nervous about having to go through the turnstile and be briefly separated from my gran and grandad in the crowd. until it was redeveloped, we were always on the wall as close to the half way line as possible on the popside. me, my 'five foot nothing' gran and my grandad just behind. the fayre wasn't very good, but through them -through him in particular- i became county. he always bought a programme and would write the team changes on the back, and always had the stockport express so we could read reports of defeats we'd been to, defeats we'd missed, uninspiring players joining county, and the seemingly constant threat of either the re-election shuffle or of liquidation.
we didn't go away a great deal back in the late seventies and early eighties, but i do remember us getting battered 5-0 at leeds road with stuart lee missing a penalty, a couple of defeats to an alex-oxlade's dad inspired port vale at vale park, fighting breaking out around us on the terraces at bloomfield road, and the start of our 1980-81 cup run at chester, when tony coyle jumped in the centre circle to clearly handle an innocuous pass and get his marching orders after a second yellow. we drew 1-1, and were at edgeley for the next round in which we held first division sunderland. we didn't go to the replay, it was a bit of a long way for a school night for me, and my grandad drove tarmac and stone chippings around the north in his 'lorry', painted with his name, phone number and town on the doors of its green cab. he was usually away by six or half-six in the morning to waterswallows or topley pike to pick up his first load of the day. unfortunately that didn't really fit with a north east midweek night match.
we put sunderland out of course, before losing to a star studded arsenal side at edgeley in the next round with the likes of alan sunderland and frank stapleton, although i remember my gran being disappointed that they'd rested pat jennings and played george wood instead. my gran stopped going in probably the mid-eighties, apart from special appearances (like bootham crescent as we were heading for promotion in 1991), but i was with my grandad for most of our key games - home to the league and european champions in the league cup in '84, on the coldest day ever recorded (boxing day at field mill in about '86), halifax when we thought we'd gone up in '90, scunthorpe when we actually did in '91. he drove us to wembley (on one occasion via oxford to pick me up) for all four of our 90's appearances, and took us to goodison and blackburn to see some magnificent cup performances as we started to rise up again. saltergate, 1997. we stood with him in the rain and watched it get even better!
in the championship, my brother and i started doing silly distances for away games by ourselves, but still went to the odd one at hillsborough, crewe, vale, macc and other local ones with grandee. he drove for his work, and always drove us. not that many years ago, we started taking him instead. my gran died in 2004 and he had a serious operation for cancer in his jaw and tongue in 2007. bone was taken from his hip to help rebuild his jaw, but like cancer does, it had shattered him, along with my gran dying. it was very sad that we were unable to return the duty of taking him to wembley in 2008 to watch us break our hoodoo. we really wanted to do that, but he wasn't really strong enough for a long journey and a lot of walking anymore.
my cousin -who lives in whaley bridge- had been taking him to home games for a few years, for which i'm very grateful, and then i took over. driving from leeds to whaley and onto stockport wasn't much of a burden for a man who took me for years from boy to man; but we shared it and my mum and dad would often collect him from stockport after the match. i was quite stubborn about keeping him going to the game. i'd always believed that if they're not at least a bit active, elderly people can just sink into themselves and fade away. it was becoming clearer that there would have to be an end to it though. i'd ring him from glossop or hayfield to remind him we were going to the game and that he needed to start getting ready, and would then give him another reminder from chapel-en-le-frith...i'd get to his bungalow and he'd be in his slippers, surprised to see me... my brother and his girlfriend once waited to meet me by the telescope shop and sent grandee off to the main stand turnstiles. when we got in, he wasn't there. suffice to say after we'd looked and couldn't find him we quickly reached panic stations. half an hour into the game, and we were first in shaw heath where we parked, then on the A6 in a police car, courtesy of one of county's football intelligence officers, who i was very grateful to that day. while on the A6, we got a call from my cousin to say that grandee had eventually responded to a call over the tannoy and spoken to a steward. he'd gone and sat in the main stand where we used to sit about ten years before, right down the other end! of course, we'd missed what turned out to be the only goals in a 1-1 draw against mansfield!
it was hard letting go because even more than his lorry and his garden, county was the thing that most defined my grandad to me. for years i'd get the 192 from buxton on a friday after school, have tea at their bungalow, and go to the match before staying until sunday afternoon. my brother for much of this time, too; and then in the nineties, he spread the county infection to my cousin as well. my cousin and i still sit in the same seats in block F that we sat in with grandee; the extra space taken by my cousin's five year old daughter. i stopped taking grandee in early 2011, a few months before we got relegated from the league. he wasn't really watching the game in the same way anymore, didn't know the score, and getting him up and down the steps and to and from cars had begun to be too hazardous. and i'm kind of glad that his seventy years watching county ended before we lost our proud league status.
he has been in a nursing home for the last couple of years and has dementia. last week, he'd effectively lost the muscle memory to be able to swallow and has been put on 'end of life care'. on friday night, the legends he supported with us were back at edgeley park, my cousin's daughter was one of the mascots, and my brother, his girlfriend, my cousin and his family and me were all there. all there because of him. it was a real family affair. thanks grandee. for all the memories.
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Post by gazz on Jul 20, 2014 22:33:38 GMT
I think it's time to close CHAOS too, because that's never going to be beaten, ars.
I had a lump in my throat reading that. I am so sorry to hear about his condition, and I hope they've made him as comfortable as they possibly can.
That's a hell of a piece, mate. The best I've read and probably ever likely to.
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Post by another_ruined_saturday on Jul 20, 2014 22:46:16 GMT
appreciated gazz. because his health has faded away dramatically in the last few years, it has felt much easier to accept than when my gran died - she just had a stroke and died the next day...but writing the last bit i still made myself cry! in the unlikely event that he makes it to september, he will turn 93, and i'm lucky to have had him around for so long. lots of happy memories.
week 'L' coinciding with the week he went on end of life care, the legends came back and my cousin's daughter was mascot, it just felt appropriate.
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Post by bigfudge on Jul 21, 2014 1:28:53 GMT
Brilliant story ars!
Sandy has given me flashbacks to that fateful night....
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Post by sirroger on Jul 21, 2014 7:50:13 GMT
Exile, that's the best post I've ever read, whether on here, the various versions of YB or the halcyon days of 606. Outstanding stuff.
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Post by archie on Jul 21, 2014 7:53:40 GMT
Very moving, a_r_s.
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Post by bringbacklenwhite on Jul 21, 2014 8:10:30 GMT
Nice eulogy ARS.
He will be very proud of you.
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Post by sandbachhatter on Jul 21, 2014 12:34:26 GMT
Beautiful a_r_s. I feel a bit daft for having written mine now as it isn't fit to share the page with yours.
I'd second Lennie's sentiment - he'll be extremely proud of his grandson.
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