Tag Archives: FAW

Wednesday 14th August 2013 – YET ANOTHER MORNING …

… when I was up long before the alarm clock went off. I dunno what’s been happening to me just recently – it’s not as if I’ve wet the bed or anything.

So for an hour or two at least it was “full steam ahead” with adding these tags to my web pages and I really didn’t realise exacly how many pages there are. All this time and I’ve hardly scratched the surface.

What’s even more frightening is that I’ve realised just how many web pages are in the pipeline and how much I still have to write. I hope that my stay in Greece will be productive.

Once Cécile’s mum had woken up we sorted out all of the boxes here – Cécile has had a good look at all of the stuff that was in them. THen we attacked the kitchen, and the least said about that the better. I never realised just how much stuff there is in here – it’s amazing just how much useless rubbish one can accumulate.

The big wardrobe went today, that means that tomorrow we can all go shopping and buy some food. We might even be able to eat too.

And later on this evening we went for a long walk around the University grounds and somehow ended up at the Abbaye de la Bois de La Cambre, the abbey that is just down the road from here, sitting quietly in the sunset watching the fish and the ducks and the herons in the old fish pond.

Cécile’s mother, who has never been to Brussels before, is quite pleased with what she saw today. She might not be so pleased with what she might see tomorrow, because Cécile and I are going to empty the cellar.

And in other news, the much-maligned (and quite rightly so) FAW, the Football Association of Wales, has made a complete and utter U-turn and inviting not only Barry Town but also Llanelli FC to rejoin the Welsh Football League. I suppose that “it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all”, as Sherlock Holmes said in “The Man With The Twisted Lip”, but this sordid issue could have been resolved in the same fashion with just 5 seconds of goodwill and earned the FAW all kinds of applause, instead of having disputes, arguments, lies and Court Cases and even more vilification heaped upon the Football Association of Wales.

As long as the FAW continues to shoot itself in the foot, there is really no hope for Welsh football. It’s high time the FAW councillors got a grip or else that’s going to be another group of people stood up against the embankment in the Tir National up the road.

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Saturday 10th August 2013 – WELL, YOU MISSED…

… all of the excitement today, anyway.

You may remember that I told you yesterday that Barry Town had beaten the FAW hands down in the court case concerning the football club’s expulsion from the league.

Anyway, to day in one of the Welsh newspapers was a letter from a member of the FAW commenting on the case, and I have to say that in all my life I have never ever seen such an inflammatory, insulting, offensive letter.

Its contents, full of vindictiveness and hatred, certainly would have brought it into the realm of a “Contempt of Court” charge.

It provoked a whole hornets nest of comment from all kinds of people and I myself spent some considerable time drafting a letter of complaint.

And then what? Yes, the newspaper concerned withdrew the letter with a comment that the author denied ever having written it and does not subscribe to the views that are represented within it.

Frankly though, I cannot believe that a respectable on-line newspaper would have published a letter of such a type without making further enquiry.

If the editor didn’t, then he only has himself to blame for whatever might follow for, as night surely follows day, this matter is not going to rest here, given the amount of dust that has been spread around.

It wasn’t without its moments of humour either. I sent my mail to the editor of the newspaper concerned. It came back with “sorry I’m on holiday, please send your mail to (my deputy)”
So I resent the mail to his deputy. It came back with “sorry I’m on holiday, please send your mail to (the editor)”.

You couldn’t make up a thing like that.

tir national military firing range schaarbeek schaerbeek fusilé cemetery executed by nazisAt lunchtime I went off to do the shopping. I went to the Carrefour at Evere today and made a little diversion on the way.

If you remember from last Sunday, I took you all to the cemetery at Ixelles to see some of the war graves. I mentioned the Tir National, the old army firing range at Schaarbeek quite close to where I used to live when I had the little apartment in the Boulevard Reyers.

I told you all that the Tir National was used as the execution point for those found guilty of War Crimes by the Germans.

edith cavell memorial tir national military firing range schaarbeek schaerbeek fusilé cemetery executed by germans world war 1Many of the victims have been buried there, and although I did tell you that Edith Cavell was there, that’s no longer true.

She was disinterred shortly after the end of World War 1 and taken to be reinterred at Westminster Abbey and ended up being buried at Norwich Cathedral on 19th May 1919 as Annie so kindly informed me.

However, her name is there on this World War I monument along with that of the people who died with her, and plenty of others from World War 1. A mere thirty-odd, you might think.

One is more than enough but 30-odd does pale into significance when compared to the several hundred others from World War 2

robert roberts jones grave tir national military firing range schaarbeek schaerbeek fusilé cemetery executed by nazis world war 2Amongst these hundreds and hundreds of graves from World War II is this one of a certain Robert Roberts-Jones.

With a name like that you might be forgiven for thinking that he is a Welshman, but he is in fact a 3rd-generation Belgian and was a lawyer before he was shot in 1943.

Brussels was honeycombed with spy networks (for example, the Soviet “Red Orchestra” had its headquarters a brisk walk from where I’m currently sitting) and escape routes, called “rat lines”, which were used to dispatch escaping and evading Allied forces personnel and others into neutral territory for trans-shipment back to their units.

The most famous was arguably Andrée (Dédée) de Jongh’s “Comet Line”. This was however infiltrated and collapsed in 1943 and Roberts-Jones, one of the members of Comet, was arrested, tortured and executed.

He has a street named after him, at the back of the Russian embassy here and I often wondered, while I was driving down the street to pick up visas and the like, what the street referred to.

unknown graves tir national military firing range schaarbeek schaerbeek fusilé cemetery executed by nazis world war 2More poignant though are the “unknowns” here. Probably a hundred or so graves are marked as “unknowns”.

No-one will ever know who they are and what they did – they will be amongst the victims of what the Germans called Nacht und Nebel, “Night and Fog”, the name given to the method by which people were quietly abstracted from their environment and “disappeared” for ever, presumably after suffering all kinds of horrors ant the hands of their torturers.

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Friday 9th August 2013 – WELL …

… this apartment might be sold (again).

Someone who visited it yesterday has made a written offer via a promesse ferme d’achat and, being fed up of things dragging on (and on and on and on) I’ve accepted it.

Of course, I’m not vending the peau of the ours before I’ve tue’d it. I’ve enough promesse ferme d’achats to wallpaper the living room, as you know, but it’s something at least positive. I just hope that it comes off.

But it wasn’t all roses today. I was just about to step into the shower this morning when the doorbell rang.

One of the people from yesterday wanted to take a couple of measurements. And then he offered what in th common parlance would be described as an offre bidon in cash underneath the counter, take it or leave it.

Of course he went out of the door with my boot up his nether regions. I hate people who totally waste my time like that.

And what with the fracas I forgot about my shower. Mind you it does remind me of that famous cross-examination in a British court in the 1960s during a trial on a charge of affray
Barrister “and you were kicked in the fracas?”
Witness “oh no – I was kneed in the bÛllÛcks”.

And so the amateur came round to make the offer and what should have been a 15-minute task turned into 90 minutes and more and in the end I had to shout at the agent immobilier to run off her battery of mobile phones so that we could flaming well do the flaming task that we had flaming well come here to flaming well do without a flaming interruption every 30 flaming seconds.

Rude, impolite, unprofessional, pig-ignorant, call it what you will, but it wasted everyone’s time and both the purchaser and I have better things to do than to listen to her on the telephone.

I’ll be glad when the apartment is finally sold and she p155es off.

But she didn’t go yet because she came back with 4 or 5 clients at 16:30 and was here until gone 19:00 and my day was totally ruined. I didn’t even have time to do any cleaning up and that annoyed me greatly.

Mind you, it wasn’t all bad.

I finished my magnum opus, all 41kb and 7700 words of it – enough there to keep us going for a lifetime I reckon – the second longest script I’ve ever written (apart from the Christmas Specials of course).

But there’s a lot to be said on the subject I’m discussing and there are some surprising issues that will have a few British people gripping the edges of their seats once we get well into the issue.

Apart from that, the Football Association of Wales, which features regularly in these pages, has shot itself in the foot yet again and has been humiliated in the courts.

Basically, the FAW expelled Barry Town from the league because the secretary tendered the resignation of the club.

However, the secretary doesn’t have the authority to do so – it’s only the owners or the Board of Directors who can do that and the secretary (who was formerly the owner) had relinquished control to the supporters earlier.

Nevertheless, the FAW accepted the resignation.

And despite all of the FAW’s pleading in court today, the judge ruled that “the FAW council had acted unlawfully in refusing the club full FAW membership and entry into the Welsh League in June this year” and that the FAW’s decision was “flawed and irrational”.

Yes, a right bunch of miserable pleaders, the FAW. Never mind anything else, it’s the members of the FAW Council who are bringing the game into disrepute if you want my opinion, and it’s high time that someone charged them with misconduct.

And so, in honour of the FAW’s achievements today in dragging Welsh Football through the mire and into the gutter, here’s Oliver Cromwell’s speech to the Rump Parliament, and as an address to the FAW, I couldn’t have put it any better myself –

“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice.

Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess?

Ye have no more religion than my horse. Gold is your God. Which of you have not bartered your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices?

Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance.

Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do.

I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place.

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!”

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Thursday 11th March 2010 – One thing that you need to bear in mind …

… when cutting down trees is where they are likely to fall. It’s all very well doing “back-of-an-envelope calculations but if a branch gets caught up somewhere all of your plans can come to naught.

heavy snow old ford cortina mercedes 240d w123 fallen tree les guis virlet puy de dome franceKeen readers of these pages last winter will recall that I had a domino effect – one tree into another and that one into a third. This year I managed to drop two trees across the Cortina and the Merc. Ahhh well!

Luckily there was no serious harm done to anything.

But I remember Liz noticing the look of consternation on my face as Terry used a years supply of wood to get his bonfire going the other day. “Don’t worry” she said. “There will be plenty more”. Well, she wasn’t wrong, was she?

heavy snow fall les guis virlet puy de dome franceBut we had more snow today – piles of it. I was trying to clear up the wood but on two occasions I was driven inside by heavy falls. And by the time 17:00 came round and I was soaked to the skin and all my three pairs of working gloves were saturated, I called it a day, came inside, made myself a coffee and watched Fandango.

Now Fandango is a magnificent, vastly underrated Road Movie that should be part of everyone’s DVD collection. The music is superb. But talking of the music it contains one of the most astonishing out-takes ever. The film is set in 1971 as it quite clearly states, yet the theme music is “Saturday Night’s All Right For Fighting” from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road which, as any fule no, wasn’t released until 1973!

In other news, keen readers of these pages will recall an incident from a few years ago concerning a Welsh Premier League match at Porthmadog. A supporter shouted out at a linesman “Who’s the Paki with the flag?”. He was apprehended by a couple of supporters, marched down to the club’s offices, made to apologise to the club and the linesman, and then booted out of the ground and banned for life. However the Welsh Football Association charged Porthmadog with “failing to control its supporters”, fined £13,200 and docked 3 points. And so earlier in the week at Llanelli a group of supporters made monkey chants at Port Talbot Town’s Drew Fahiya, who is of Afro-Caribbean descent. The supporters were unidentified.

Now this sounds something like 10 times more serious that whatever happened at Porthmadog, but there are one or two subtle differences. Porthmadog is a small rural club run by a group of volunteers and continually bounces along the bottom of the league. Not the kind of club that will put up a great fight especially when money is tight and three points here or there is pretty meaningless. But Llanelli is a big city club – a leading light in the Welsh Premier League and run by high-profile businessmen. The club is challenging for the Championship and a place in the European Champions League, and the fortune that goes with it – is at stake. There are many eyes, including mine and several hundred others in Porthmadog, who are following this case with interest and awaiting the Welsh FA’s next move with bated breath.

And in other other news, I have a candle lit in my room sending a message to a dear friend who departed from this plane of existence a year ago and who I am desperately missing.

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