That was some football match tonight. US Granville were playing US St Malo tonight at the Stade Louis Dior and even though I’ve still not properly recovered from my recent exertions I walked out there this evening.
US St Malo are third in the table and US Granville are 8th so it was always going to be a difficult task, but Granville matched them toe to toe for the first 50 minutes. While it was evident that St Malo were technically the better side and had more of the possession, Granville looked far more menacing when they were going forward.
And then Granville won a penalty for a mistimed tackle. No card given, but that’s not a problem – it was clearly an attempt to play the ball. And the penalty was beautifully struck – and there was an even better save from the St Malo keeper.
In fact, I don’t know what the St Malo keeper had been drinking but I wouldn’t mind a pint of that. He brought off half a dozen stunning saves that would not have been out of place in the Premier League and he single-handedly (or double-handedly) kept his club in the game.
Granville did score a goal after about an hour, but 10 minutes later St Malo equalised and that was probably the right result. But it was easily the best match that I have seen for some time.
Last night was another disturbed night unfortunately. But not so disturbed that it stopped me going on a midnight ramble.
I was walking along Hightown in Crewe with, of all people, the mother of the boy with whom I spent several weeks in France during my schooldays. A girl was with us too – she might even have been his sister although she probably wasn’t – and someone else. I was pointing out to them all about HIghtown and how it ws 30 years ago and how much it had changed. We were looking at a place that was a venue for high-class wedding services exhibitions but which was in fact probably a secret bar and next door was the old church that became a rock venue and now it had gone up-market and was available for hire for wedding celebrations. But the girl with us was coming out with comments as if she knew Crewe really well which was quite a surprise. This led me to mention the story about a girl aged 7 or 8. She had only been to a certain place a couple of times but we used to send her to the shops there because she could remember the way. This woman, who had now become my niece, said “who do you mean?” and mentioned the name of one of a pair of twins, to which I replied that it was the other one. And that was surprising too because the girl whom my niece had mentioned was much brighter than the other one. We ended up somewhere down Victoria Street in a house with two grey cats and they were huge – massively overweight monsters of things – so I asked my niece whether they were bad-tempered but she replied “not at all. They are the softest cats you could ever imagine” so I gave the biggest one of the two a stroke. My niece then wrote out a shopping list to take to the Chinese takeaway – a bag of chips for 10, 8 food boxes, 1 portion of pie, 1 portion of sausages and all of the usual kind of takeaway food. I offered to go to fetch it. On the way out I heard some people arguing about something and I thought that they were inside the house but it turned out to be a mother and daughter standing outside the door in the street having this argument. In the meantime I glanced at the shopping list and noticed that there was nothing on it for me. It was all meaty stuff, so I got to wonder what was I going to have for tea while I was out there buying tea for everyone else.
Leaning over the edge of a parapet, my notebook fell out of my hands right into the foreign waste and it was a long way down to go to collect it. But I needed to go to retrieve it and bring it back with me. But to get there meant passing through what was to become the first German victory, so I had to crawl along the side of the building under the machine gun fire. But earlier in the evening there had been an opportunity to climb out onto the roof of where we were being held captive – or rather to climb up onto the top and walk about on the sheets that were protecting everyone from the sun -the weather there was absolutely magnificent.
Despite everything I still beat the second alarm, and then after the usual morning performance I had a shower and a general clean-up, followed by a change of clothes.
And then the shops!
LIDL, NOZ and LeClerc and I bought nothing whatever of any importance. I simply did a lap around and came back with the usual stuff.
But I didn’t stay at home long because I had a phone call. Liz and Terry were in town and would I like lunch? So back to the LeClerc and the buffet.
We had a good chat for a couple of hours to catch up on news, and then I came back.
But I didn’t stay at home long because I had to go out for the footy.
On the way back from the football I saw something that made me laugh, and so I had to take a photograph of it.
This is why it’s necessary to wear a hat when you go for a walk around here because the local seagulls have an accuracy that puts RAF Bomber Command to shame. You can see just how well they have done with this car that has only been parked here for a couple of days.
That’ll require a little cleaning before the driver goes too far in it. But what do you expect, living on a rocky crag by the seaside?
All in all, 105% of my daily activity so at least I’m keeping going. But I felt the strain just a little. An early night and a nice long sleep will do me the world of good.
You just watch someone come along to spoil it!
