Category Archives: combronde

Sunday 7th October 2012 – WHAT HAPPENED TO …

… Sunday morning?

Well, to be honest, I worked through much of it, but from the wrong end.

03:34 when I finished what I was doing last night.

I was a little wrong with my estimate of what time it was when I woke up. I reckoned about 10:40 – it was in fact … errrr … 12:41.

I must have been really tired and even though this is what Sundays are for, I still felt bad about having missed the morning.

I was having a lovely dream though – I was driving a minibus through some forests on a main road through some mountains and explaining to the passengers that these were the Bluegrass areas of Kentucky (work that one out). We were being chased – not in a threatening way – by two cars, one of which was an old metallic mid-blue Peugeot 403 estate, and they overtook us on a sharp right-hand bend, crossing well over the solid white line in the centre of the road, which was divided into one lane for vehicles going my way, and the other way had two lanes coming towards me. This bit – the overtaking – I was watching from the air – maybe 500 feet up. Strangely, we were all driving on the left-hand side of the road as in the UK, so I dunno what all of that might be telling me.

After that, I had just enough time to grab something to eat and then off to Cellule, near Riom, to watch the football.

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire football as cellule puy de dome franceBut I shan’t be saying anything about the football in this column this evening.

As Ron Atkinson once said, “I never comment on referees and I’m not going to break the habit of a lifetime for that prat”.

Or as Jim Finks, manager of the New Orleans Saints once said, after a match against the St Louis Cardinals in 1986, “I’m not allowed to comment on the lousy officiating”.

We’ll just leave it at that.

But there’s a fruit stall at the side of the road just outside Combronde and I noticed that it was having a sale of apples. I’m getting low on them and so a 3kg bag of Red Gala apples for €2:50 seemed like a bargain, especially as the way fruit prices are at the moment.

So that’s Sunday dealt with. Monday is another day.

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Sunday 27th November 2011 – I WAS A BIT PUT OUT TODAY.

But before I tell you about that, let me first tell you the good news.

Although it was late when I went to bed, I managed to sleep for 6 hours or so. And after breakfast, I finished off the scripts for the radio programmes that we will be recording this week for Radio Anglais

I had to rush though as Pionsat St Hilaire’s 3rd XI were playing away at Combronde at 13:00 but just as I was stepping out of the door to go, Percy Penguin chose that moment to ring me.
“You fell on your head? It might knock some sense into you”.
It’s nice to have friends, isn’t it?

And so at Combronde, 5 minutes late and the place all deserted. There was no-one around at all. So what’s going on here?

col de ceyssat puy de dome franceAnyway, that was an hour and a half and 75 kilometres wasted. There was clearly no point in staying on here so I fuelled up and went off to Ceyssat for the 1st XI match instead.

That long drive took me round by the Puy de Dome – right past the foot of it, and it was remarkable to notice the change in the weather. From my humble abode to round about St Bonnet it was grey miserable and overcast.

But south of there we had glorious sunshine. The Puy de Dome (and you pass within about 200 metres of it) was especially nice. But once over the Col de Ceyssat I drove straight into a fog and that was that.

I met Bernard the club president. he said that the 3rd XI match was cancelled, and so I berated him for not sending me a text – after all, I told him last night that I would be going. It’s a couple of times now that they have done this on me and I’m becoming rather fed up.

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire football club de foot olby ceyssat puy de dome franceBut the actual match cheered me up considerably.

Olby-Ceyssay were a pretty poor side and FC Pionsat St Hilaire had no trouble whatever in demolishing them 4-0, hardly breaking sweat in doing so.

it’s a shame that they can’t play like that every week.

From there I went on round to Liz and Terry’s where we rehearsed our radio programmes – we’re recording next week.

Liz had baked potato pie and rice pudding for afters, and she even made up a doggy bag and a lump of fruitcake for me to take home. It’s that kind of thing that makes it worth-while having good friends, and helps me to forget all of the worries and disagreements.

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Sunday 15th November 2009 – I had a few surprises today.

car in ditch teilhet menatFirstly, on my way to the footy I came across a car stuck halfway down an embankment at the side of the road. And if there hadn’t have been a sapling in the way it would have been all the way down the embankment.

Now it’s true that where this incident took place is on a sharp bend, but the road between Teilhet and Menat is full of sharp bends and this one is no sharper than any of the others. So how come it was this particular bend at which it left the road?

Mind you, if it was going to leave the road, this is the best place to do it. The next sharp bend has a vertical drop of about 60 feet to the bottom.

I went down to look to make sure that there wasn’t anyone trapped in it – I mean, you never know. As it happened, it was empty but there was a lovely head-shaped impression on the windscreen just above the steering wheel. I bet someone has a headache today.

fcpsh football club de foot pionsat st hilaire combrondeSecondly. Pionsat’s third XI not only had 11 players including a real goalkeeper, they had 3 replacements and two others who didn’t make the team. Not only that, the two officials who had been sulking over something that was said to them in a moment of depression, they had patched up their differences with the others and so we also had a trainer and a linesman! Not that it did them any good though – they still lost!

Thirdly, I’ve bought myself a bass amp and speaker – a Carlsbro 45-watt combo. It’s not in particularly good nick – there’s a loose connection at the input leads, one of the speaker wires isn’t soldered properly and a couple of the potentiometers (volume and tone controls) need changing, but it’s only a fiver or so for the bits and half an hour’s work. It looks like it’s been left for years in the damp and then taken outside where the condensation has got at it. It still managed to rock the house though when I plugged the Gibbon into it.

It wasn’t cheap – €90 in fact, but it was the cheapest combo that I’ve seen in this area. And believe me, there isn’t a great deal of choice. I still have my stack (a 200-watt custom-built transistorised amp, a 200-watt Marshall valve amp and a 1×18 and a 2×12 cabinets) back in Brussels that I never thought I’d ever use again.

The other surprise is something that I found quite touching. As you know, I follow the local football team and take pics and write match reports of the games. Some of them are being used on a calendar for fund-raising purposes for the club but what is really nice is that they took a photo of me today as they want to put that on the calendar too. There’s also a chatroom on the internet for French local football and it seems that I am mentioned quite a bit with regard to the website. It’s nice to know that people appreciate so much what I’ve been doing. But now that I’ve finished my attic I need to bring the site up-to-date.

In other news, Liz, Terry and I had quite a chat about this digger. We’ve decided that discretion is the better part of valour and I’m going to write to this guy in Benin, thank him for his efforts, but tell him that we fixed ourselves up locally with a digger so we won’t ba able to complete the purchase.

And tomorrow, I’m back at work. My holiday is over.

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