The Very Last Time I Played Rugby…
The last time I played rugby was when I was a (relatively) springy 34-year-old.
I’d moved from south Wales to take up a new job on the English north east coast 45 kilometres or so from the town where I was born. The good news: We found a house in a small, pleasant and ancient market town of some seven thousand people. The not so good: we knew very few people apart from a handful of new colleagues.
How, I asked myself, could I make friends? The local Clubs didn’t appeal and that left sports clubs; why not try rugby again?
I watched a little of the television coverage of the 2019 Academy Awards and briefly scanned the online updates from sources such as Variety and Indiewire., The was one bright moment in Olivia Coleman’s acceptance speech and the US audience ratings appeared to reverse last year’s slump, but it wasn’t essential viewing. It hasn’t been so for the past decade or more.
The rains were coming, unusually, and the peaches we’d been monitoring in the burning sun for weeks were flushed and ripe on our neighbour’s tree. She invited us to take as many as we liked because she didn’t want the birds to snaffle these delights. Neither did we, and so in her backyard Griff welcomed me and watched as I took to a loaded branch with a six foot bamboo pole. 
“Six o’clock!” she cried and the bedsheets undid. “We’ll miss the bus. Won’t catch the plane!”
The locals are restless. The roads are full of camper vans. There are so many people going up Mount Roy and Isthmus Peak that toilets have been put on the tops, to be helicopter serviced at our expense. The final blow, they’ve put trial traffic lights on Albert Town bridge over the Clutha. When you see traffic lights you know things have gone to the dogs. Even my dog, Gozzy, knows you can have too much of a good thing.
rom the archives…)