Tag: beer

The Hangover Games

THERE’S a picture swirling around in the cluttered cyberspace maelstrom of Facebook at the moment, posted there by a group called Sunday League Football, and it takes me right back.

The way we were

Back to Brixham, and more specifically to Wall Park, sometime in the early to mid-1980s, to a Sunday morning, a nagging muzzy headache and a faint feeling of nausea.

The picture shows a footballer in a yellow shirt, navy shorts and green socks. He wears white boots, like Alan Ball used to wear when the rest of the world was still wearing black ones from Frisby’s.

He is sitting on an upturned Maes Pils beer crate with his feet crossed at the ankle and resting on a white panelled football. He has a bottle of beer in his hand and, for the piece de resistance, he is drawing deeply on a cigarette. The Maes Pils suggests that he is a Belgian fellow, but to be honest the picture could have been taken pretty much anywhere in Europe.

It is a pose with which many of us who played Sunday football back in the day will be familiar.

I would love to say that Brixham United’s Sunday football team of the time was a well-drilled and professional outfit, but in truth we were an unruly and unkempt mob.

Sunday football in the local Combination League being what it was, most of us would have been in the London, the Long Bar and/or the Parkham until the early hours, having played a South Devon League game the previous afternoon. If anyone was in a fit state to drive we might have ventured over as far as Vergines or the Firwood, which were the only places with late licences.

It was not unknown for players to turn out on Sunday mornings not having actually been home since the match the previous day, having just grabbed a few hours of fitful sleep on someone’s sofa before tucking into a hearty and slightly misguided breakfast.

There would be a head-count before the game as the shirts and shorts were pulled out of the bag, and there would always be a few who would have to be listed as Missing In Action, not seen since some stage of the previous night.

There were some very good players in the Combination League, but not all that many of them. The good ones were made to look very good by comparison with the rest of us.

Many of the teams were made up of shambling, hung-over council park heroes who just wanted to get through until the final whistle.

One memorable Sunday morning we conceded more than 20 goals in a game against a pub side from Paignton. It started badly with a goal from the first attack of the game, and then it got worse.

By the time the Paignton pub had stretched its lead to 15 or so, some of our players had given up completely. A couple of them were leaning on the metal rail around the perimeter of the pitch, chatting to spectators and hoping against hope that the ref would signal the end of the game sooner rather than later.

But the goals kept raining in, one of them when I drove a defensive clearance against a team-mate’s legs and the ball ballooned back over my head and past our hapless keeper for an own goal for which I was blamed, rather harshly, I felt.

No mercy was shown by our opponents, and I believe the match ended 23-0. We probably went down to the Maritime afterwards to drown our sorrows.

Only the cool kids dip their chips at the Monomesta

BIG tur, little tur, big tur, little tur – you may have heard me intoning that mantra throughout last week.

There’s plenty of snur on the slurps, with more falling all the time. Hey hur, let’s gur!

Ruka is a scant thirty miles from the Russian border. From the top of the ski slopes you can see it, and you can ride out on a skidoo until you get to the line in the snur where Finland ends and Russia begins.

This was our second visit to the Finnish ski resort, a small and immensely welcoming village just 25 minutes by coach from the tiny aerodrome at Kuusamo, where the handful of charter flights bringing tourists are pretty much the only traffic.

At passport control they chat to you about your holiday plans and smile, instead of glowering out from their secure booths.

Ruka is growing, but while in a year or two it will be bigger and busier, there isn’t much prospect of it losing its charm.

When the weather warms up from the current minus 20, the roofs will go on a new apartment block beside the lake and Ruka will be ready to welcome even more people.

But the welcome hasn’t changed at Roy’s or at Koti Pizza or the Ski Bistro, where skiers in huge plastic boots clump in and out on the stone floors in search of sugary doughnuts and mugs of hot chocolate to accompany their tall tales of derring-do.

“Did you SEE that jump I just did half way down Red 12?”

Ruka is great, and if you have half a mind to try a Finnish skiing holiday, you should definitely give Ruka a go.

This year we decided to have lessons, in an effort to fine-tune the skills we have taught ourselves over the past few years.

Our instructor was a chap called Ashley, who was clearly not a Finn but had an accent we couldn’t place.

He gave us priceless hints about pushing down with the big tur on one foot and the little tur on the other.

This would help the edges of our skis cut into the snur as we made our way gracefully down the slurps.

My feet, it turned out, needed to be clurser together.

The accent beat us all, and Ashley had to divulge in the end that he was a native of Canberra, the proud capital of Australia.

He saves all his holidays for an annual trip to Finland, where he teaches buffoons like me to get down the mountain without hurting themselves.

My big tur routine helped me snowplough a little less, and by the end of the week I was almost proficient at parallel turns.

On the final day we stood at the top of the longest and steepest red slope in the resort – Red Ten, also known as Pessari.

In skiing, you start at green slopes, which are barely inclines at all, then move on to blue, then red and then maybe one day black, which is basically like throwing yourself down that hill at the back of Pimlico, on snow, on skis, with no practical means of stopping.

At the bottom of Red Ten is a bar called Monomesta.

Everyone says you should go there, because it sells delicious golden beer and baskets full of crispy chips drenched in spices and sauces.

All the cool kids go there to see and be seen in their best new kit, but there is no way of getting there without having first hurled yourself fearlessly down Red Ten.

Only Red Ten skiers get to dip their chips at Monomesta.

Thanks to the advice of the patient Australian I made it to the bottom in one piece.

I drank a beer and ate chips, posing in my budget salopettes as if I was the new Franz Klammer.

I’ll be ready for all eventualities if Paignton ends up getting any snur this winter.

Windbag’s nasty tumble

CHRISTMAS wouldn’t be Christmas without a headlong pelt into the deep, dark unknown. The Haldon Hash House Harriers celebrated the festive season by sending us off into the pitch darkness, through ankle-deep mud and straight down an actual waterfall. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

The last hash run before Christmas is traditionally a rather sedate affair, sometimes a short plod through quiet town centre streets, admiring the twinkling lights and ending up in a pub full of tinsel and crackers for a little gentle re-hydration.

This year, however, we found ourselves in Kingswear, under starter’s orders outside the Steam Packet, bouncing up and down and cursing the cold as we awaited the appointed hour to set off. Hashers, as you probably know, follow a trail made up of various symbols, etched in flour on the ground. It is all perfectly environment-friendly, because the flour disappears in the next shower of rain. Some of it does not even survive that long. Somewhere near Brownstone the beam of my head torch picked out the tiny eyes of a mouse eating its way through a blob of flour set down to mark our route.

Fortunately it had left enough for us to find our way. Ernie, a Jack Russell terrier and a supposedly ruthless hunter of all small creatures, took one sideways glance at it and pressed on. He had a beer stop to get to before last orders, after all.

From the village we had climbed out along the coast path, down the steep steps one side of the valley, up the steep steps the other, and out into the dark, dark forest, running on a soft and springy carpet of pine needles in utter darkness, just the little circle of light from the head torch illuminating the way.

Down to our right the waves were crashing in against the rocks, but we had total faith in the hares who had created this late-night labyrinth that they wouldn’t lay a trail that took us over the edge of a precipice and plunging to our certain deaths, so we ploughed on.

A hasher called Windbag took a nasty tumble on the slippery steps. The fall rather took the wind out of his bag, but no lasting damage was done and he was quickly back on the trail.

At the daymark, the tall chimney-like structure at the top of the hill built as a beacon for ships far out at sea, the hares had left a sweetie stop, a tub of festive chocolates whose presence was indicated by a twinkling star propped up against the stonework. It was the best location for a sweetie stop ever. We watched the clouds racing in front of the stars as we ate, looked out at the lights of ships in the Channel and the flashing warning of the buoys marking the mouth of the Dart. What else would you be doing on a cold winter’s night?

Then it was inland to the bona fide waterfall, which may in dryer times be a rocky lane. After a couple of weeks of more or less incessant rain, however, it was a torrent, and it must have been a sight to behold as a long line of figures with little torches on their heads picked and splashed their way down the steep decline.

There was one more long, long climb in the darkness, with the lights of Torbay creating a glow in the sky over the outline of the summit ahead, and then a beer stop.

This is the hashing tradition we like best – a little table set up beside a parked car somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with plastic cups, water, beer and snacks. On this occasion a small snifter of the Famous Grouse was also on the list, and that was very festive indeed. From there on it was all downhill back into Kingswear, where warm, dry cars containing warm, dry clothes waited.