Tag Archives: anthony

Saturday 20th June 2015 – WHAT AN AFTERNOON!

I’ve been sitting here all afternoon waiting for the battery on the laptop to expire. I’ve been extolling the virtues of the impressively long battery life, but it does have a drawback.

I dunno if you remember but I’ve been having memory issues with the new laptop. It simply isn’t powerful enough to run Windows 8.1 and after a while, it slows right down and it is necessary to restart it.

However today, I was distracted by a few things while I was copying a few things from one external drive to another. When I came back, the machine was showing an error message “insufficient memory to run these programs please close …” and then it listed all of the programs. Like Firefox, VLC player and the copying software. That was all that was open.

If that weren’t bad enough, it wouldn’t respond to the ctrl/alt/del escae mechanism to enable me to close the programs, and the cursor had frozen so I couldn’t access the menu.

While I was fiddling around with this, the screen switched off and won’t restart, and this is where I’ve been for the last 7 hours, waiting for the battery running out so it will all go into suspense.

I cant switch off using the crash button because this will stall all of the hard drives in mid-operation and that can have fatal results as we know. So thank heavens for the ancient Aspire 722 with its smashed screen and broken keyboard. I’m giving serious thought to refurbishing it and pressing it back into service.

Last night I was playing football for Pionsat, up front with Anthony. I passed the ball to him and the keeper dashed off his line to clear the ball from Anthony’s feet, but missed his kick and stubbed his toe, injuring himself. Everyone stood around waiting for the ref’s whistle but it never came so I shouted to Anthony to play on So he kicked the ball towards the goal but, incredibly, it was going wide from such an easy position. So he had to run after it and pop it into the net. At which point the referee disallowed the goal as he said that the game had stopped, although he had never blown the whistle. This led to a huge and heated argument.

It was all rather reminiscent of an incident in gridiron a few years ago when a thrown ball was intercepted but not caught or deflected out out of play. It was therefore still a live ball (classed as a fumble) but everyone stood around for a good 30 seconds looking at it before a player suddenly realised what had happened, picked it up and ran for home.

From here, I went on to Australia and went into an office which was an old brick-built circular building with, exceptionally, the (male) receptionist sitting in the centre of the room with his back to the door looking inwards. I had a small office on the ground floor and I was doing all kinds of personal things there, without realising until much later that there was a CCTV camera looking right at me.

Outside, it was hot and dusty and bright sunlight, and I had to walk acrosss the road to the trafic light and take up my position to run home amid all of the traffic, reckoning that even over a very long run I could keep up with rush-hour traffic on foot. I remembered an overhead railway with all kinds of brightly-coloured locomotives passing by.

This brought a feeling of déjà vu, with something that I had done in a particular nightly ramble several years (during one of the previous incarnations of this rubbish) ago when I used to go running from our old house in Davenport Avenue Crewe via Shavington and Stapeley into Nantwich and then back home via Wistaston. That of course relates to the “incident” in 1994 when I was caught up in a certain event in the middle of the night in Brussels and then had difficulty sleeping for years afterwards, so I started running around the city late at night in order to tire me out. But that didn’t work because I found my second wind pretty quickly and ended up doing half-marathons every night.

This morning, I had to make some more muesli for breakfast and then I started on thie mega-back-up that has led to all of these problems.

I hope that thgis problem is all going to clear itself up soon because I can’t go on like this.

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Sunday 29th March 2015 – SUNDAY IS A DAY OF REST

But not for me it isn’t – at least, not today.

Mind you, it was the day of a lie-in and it was 11:00 (or 10:00 in real money because we put the clocks forward today) that I crawled out of my stinking pit.

After breakfast, I carried on with the tidying up. And it looks a little more respectable in here (only a little, though) and another pile of stuff was taken out. I’ll crack this place yet, even if it will take me a century to do it.

At the footy this afternoon, FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 2nd XI were playing Sauret-Besserve. With a full side out, and even a substitute, the team was nevertheless rather imbalanced. Felix, the goalkeeper, was playing in attack and Vincent was in goal. That filled me full of foreboding as his only other match in goal had … well, not been a success.

I was proved right in the first 5 minutes. With a howling gale roaring down the pitch towards Pionsat’s goal, Sauret took the lead with a spectacular 40-yard punt that was picked up by the wind and sailed over the despairing Vincent’s hand into the top corner of the net. And in the first 40 minutes, I don’t think that Pionsat had managed to put the ball in the Sauret half.

Things changed as soon as the wind dropped slightly. FC Pionsat St Hilaire found a lull in the wind and soared upfield into the Sauret penalty area where a rather hopeful cross hit the arm of a Sauret defender. A cruel occurrence, but no-one can really complain about the award of a penalty. It may not have been intentional but it did deprive the attack of an advantage. Anyway, old Eric stepped up and calmly slotted home.

30 seconds later, Anthony did well on the right wing to hold up the play and then he hit another hopeful cross into the area. The Sauret keeper and the central defender both hesitated for a second as each one expected the other to come for the ball, and that gave Christophe just enough of a moment to slide his foot in and push it past the keeper into the net for the lead.

In the second half with the gale at their backs, Vincent (who has a huge kick for such a thin boy) was punting his clearances downfield well in front of his attackers. Nevetheless, Pionsat had three or four golden opportunities to bury the game, including one where Christophe sold a marvellous dummy to the Sauret defence, letting the ball go through his legs for Bertrand, running wide, to shoot across goal when surely it had to be easier to score.

And they might well have regretted that too, had it not been for Vincent in goal who made a couple of excellent saves that his big brother Matthieu would have been proud to make.

But with the game in its dying seconds, Felix (who had a good game up front for a goalkeeper) held up play on the edge of the penalty area, drew the entire defence onto him, and then just at the last minute slid the ball across the empty penalty area for Christophe to sidefoot into the empty net.

Yes, a good game, and a good result too. Pionsat’s team can be very proud of that.

Back here, I had a little fire tonight. Not that I really needed it, but it’s Sunday and pizza night. I may as well be comfortable while I’m cooking.

So tomorrow, back to work. And back to emptying the house.

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Sunday 14th December 2014 – GRRRR!!!!

Guess who forgot to turn off the alarm this morning?

And serve me right too.

Mind you, a quick visit to the beichstuhl and then back to bed and back right into my travels at exactly the point where I had left off. That’s twice this week.

I’d been talking to David Cameron about his plans to leave the EU. I was driving a lorry with tonnes of EU papers for filing. He argued that none of that would be needed – it’s just a waste of space – and so I invited him to go into the lorry and throw out any papers that he considered unnecessary. he said that he was more than willing to do so but that he didn’t have the time – and spent an hour or so saying it.

I then ended up in a coastal town in the USA back in the 1880s. This town was on a promontory of a wide river estuary and on the other side of the river was untamed Indian country. However, a huge railway tunnel had been built under the estuary, and my response was that it was a superb avenue into the town for a marauding band of Indians. First through it though was a wagon train, pulled byn would you believe, reindeer, and they had a difficult time in passing through the tunnel as their antlers were too wide. We then spent a lengthy time discussing how to defend the tunnel against Indians. And do you remember that woman and her daughter who appeared the other night? They were back again too.

So after all of the excitement, I was up and about by 10:15 and had a very leisurely morning doing not very much at all.

This afternoon, FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 2nd XI were playing Haut Combraille. Somewhat short-staffed, Pionsat ended up playing Michael in goal. he was formerly the 2nd XI’s goalkeeper but broke his shoulder four years ago and has been forbidden to play in goal. Still, he bravely volunteered and showed everyone just what the club has been missing since those days.

This was a top-of-the-table clash and rightly so – Haut Combraille were the best team that I have seen in Division 4. They relied very much on speed against an ageing Pionsat defence and I really did have to run, rather than walk, the line this afternoon. So much for my cleanliness after my shower of Saturday.

Yes – running! I was linesman again!

Pionsat won 4-3 and quite rightly so. Anthony finally broke his duck with a brave and strong run through the right wing, and Florian, the young lad about whom I spoke the other week, scored another goal – again running on to a loose ball in defence like I’ve been telling him to do. Julien and Gregory scored the other two.

So a good weekend, finished off by my having to search out for some events to broadcast on Radio Tartasse tomorrow as, once more, they’ve forgotten to send us any.

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Sunday 30th November 2014 – GRRRR!!!

It was a lovely bright sunny day today and seeing as this is the last good day of autumn (the high winds of the other day tell us that the weather is changing for the worse and there will be snow here by midweek) I took advantage of the bright weather for a leisurely drive down to Chamalieres and Pionsat’s 1st XI away.

Chamalieres have a very good footballing side and Pionsat’s team was the weakest that I have ever seen. Yet they took the lead with a good free kick into the area from Cedric, headed across from almost out of the keeper’s hands, right across to the far post and a simple nod in.

Pionsat only had 11 players today and apart from Cedric, the rest of the defence was all 2nd XI players. Didier, the 2nd XI right winger, was playing at right back and he was carried off after 20 minutes with a knee injury, leaving the team with just 10 men. Chamalieres scored twice later in the first half, and yet Anthony had the ball in the net from a corner (which was disallowed for handball but which will nevertheless do his confidence the world of good) – and then the fun began.

Chamalieres’ ground is situated in a bowl that was an old quarry, in the forest high above the town, and just before half-time a deep, thick cloud rolled in. No-one could see a thing and after waiting for half an hour to see what was going to happen, the game was abandoned.

And so we all had to go home. And not half a mile away from the ground, the weather dramatically improved and we went home again in bright sunlight. Mind you, this might fo Pionsat a favour as when the match is replayed, Pionsat might have a stronger team out.

And I didn’t sleep through the alarms yesterday. They simply didn’t ring.

And how do I know this?

Well, at 0è:30 the perishing alarms went off here. it seems that somehow the date on the telephone has advanced one day so yesterday was, according to the phone, Sunday (hence the absence of alarm) and today was Monday (hence the alarm).

So after the early start, I wrote another radio show for Radio Anglais, to match the Christmas Special that I wrote earlier in the week.

That’s the radio programmes for the month of January now completed, except for the rock programme, and that’s next weekend’s work. I’ll crack this yet!

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Saturday 25th October 2014 – A GAME OF TWO HALVES

I’ve just come back from the footy at Pionsat where the home side has been defeated by one of the teams from the suburbs of Clermont Ferrand, Clermont Biblioteque.

And if ever there was a game of two halves, then this was it, that’s to be sure. Clermont were a big, quick, powerful team and they were sprinting through FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s makeshift defence almost at will.

4-0 up at half-time without even breaking sweat, although I do have to say that a penalty that they were awarded was not ever in a million years a penalty – the keeper clearly pushed the ball away from the Clermont player and that latter fell over the outstretched keeper’s leg after the ball had gone. Not only that, the fourth goal was the last kick of the first half and had the referee blown his whistle 2 seonds earlier this goal wouldn’t have counted anyway.

When Clermont scored their 5th goal straight from the kick-off, all sorts of horror stories were running through my head. And then a most astonishing thing happened.

Nico found the ball in plenty of space about 30 yards out, looked up to see the keeper about 15 yards off his line, and lobbed the ball right over him into the net.

10 minutes later, Pionsat won a corner and the ball broke out to blond Frederic who was about 25 yards out on the left-hand side of the penalty area. He launched it low and hard back into the area and, unbelievably, it sailed right through the crowds and into the far corner of the net.

If that wasn’t enough, about 10 minutes after that, Anthony lobbed a beautiful ball over the defence into space and Nico, beating the offside trap cleverly, beat the keeper comrotably to score a third.

Clermont launched a couple of huge waves of attack and only some desperate defending by Pionsat kept them out. And if they had defended like that earlier in the game they wouldn’t have been in all of these problems. It really was magnificent stuff.

The match ended with FC Pionsat St Hilaire back on the attack, camped in the opposition half trying to claw their way back into the game. It was a shame that a couple of Clermont’s early goals had counted.

Apart from that, I’ve been radioing today – writing a couple of programmes and a rock show for Radio Anglais in my comfortable abode up here. And I crashed out for a couple of hours too – I can’t think why. It’s not as if I’ve been overworking just now.

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