Chilli Sauce, Cricket Clubs and Aleisha The Mouse...

I'm dreadful at this.  I'm going to get better.

It's been a while since my last Blog and there has been lots to update.  The cricket season finished as it started. Damp.

The rain dashed our plans to play up until the end of September and the Indian Summer we were promised by the drongo's on the TV, obviously stayed in India.  The final few weeks proved to be interesting to say the least.

The First Eleven stayed alive in the Saracens Herts League Div 2, with a sprinkling of good performances surrounded by many mediocre ones.  The Second Eleven were affectively accused of cheating by fielding myself who happened to bowl straight on occasions and some teams felt this was unfair.  Nursing an injury, we were always in the right and appealed to the League which, rightly, was upheld.  The performance enhancing drugs I had been taking for several months certainly did help me through this volatile stage of the season, thanks goodness.  The Thirds has their cummupence basically and were horribly screwed through their trousers most weeks even before getting out of bed but the real success this season was the promotion of the Fourth Eleven.  They did brilliantly from start to finish and utterly deserve their promotion to a new division.  The fact that many of their team were members of their own family or family friend's pets that owed a favour is testament to the hard work the Lads put in.

Sunday cricket had its ups and downs but is a real flag up the pole of a successful club.  We consistently fielded 2 sides that had mixed success in the Chess Valley Sunday League.  Considering most players were at that age that waking up on a Sunday morning is hard enough anyway let alone understanding what roof their trousers ended up on. We did well.

The end of the season came round fast enough though and despite the issues we had to endure from certain quarters, we did really well.  It is brilliant to see people helping and spreading the load.  With pressures from other responsibilities, it gets harder but those that do run the club need to push to get others even more involved.

However, beer was drunk, wickets were taken and even runs were scored on occasion.  The Annual Dinner and Dance proved mucho hilarity and a great celebration for the Club at the end of a hard year.  Usual antics got out of hand and the younger generations exchanged bodily fluids or passed out, quick time.

With the onset of the crisper months, the Preston Cricket Club Hiking Society has had its first outing. Meeting at 12 in Welwyn, we celebrated the art of Brewing all day and encountered many wonderfully bad beers as we trudged our way, cross country, from Old Welwyn and back to Preston in time for Irish Stew, more beer and a rowdy evening listening to the Ploughmen, live from the Red Lion saloon bar.  In fact, we all fell into the pub, half asleep, fought half a pint all the way down to the froth and went home; broken, already hung-over with breath that could melt bank vaults.  Are we getting older?  Yes. Obviously, we are looking to book our next outing and exploration of the back street boozers of Cambridge, that often throws up a few surprises with interesting nooks and crannies of Cambridge's underbelly being explored, pickled eggs eaten and falling headfirst into overused and under-maintained urinals.

There's something about walking through unknown fields, lost, having had a few, with a head-torch on that's rapidly losing the gnats fart of power it had in the first place.  We came across a stream in the pitch black, which my colleague suggested in a macho way that we should wade across to safety. Watching him go up to his nuts in freezing glacier melt it didn't look all that appealing and made most of us wince to be honest.  A gentle tap on the head-torch and a simple glance left revealed a perfectly adequate bridge, by which the rest of the group traversed this tricky geological anomaly by.  Once we found the sanctity of the Strathmore Arms, there was nothing else to do but warm against the Autumnal air than partake in the Chilli Sauce challenge.  The landlord collects chilli sauces of weapons grade strength that are quite obviously illegal.  A small dot placed on a small cracker will have most men coming out in hives, eyes closing as if stung by wasps suffering from hayfever, nose and ears streaming a mixture of saliva, snot and blood and praying for sweet merciful death.  Anyone looking to relieve themselves in the bathrooms and touching any piece of their manhood, will spring the deadly unseen danger of handling old bottles of chilli sauce. Years of use will see small but lethal deposits encrusted on the bottle exterior. When that residue is transferred to said young mans penis, one can only imagine the intensely searing pain, inflicted by the "pisser" himself. A genius, hideously effective final insult to those already dying from within due to eating chilli sauce that would make the sun itself feel like a choc-ice eaten in Reykjavik, naked.

Happy Days.

The past week has seen me and our new guest at home doing battle in the kitchen.  We have a mouse.
The girls have called it Aliesha.  Yup, I can't answer that one either.  Put it this way, Aleisha's winning as she (?) runs me ragged around the kitchen as she performs feats of mouselike acrobatic excellence to avoid the fakking chop.  Traps are down now so hopefully Aleisha's power of smell, sense of hunger and downright stupidity, may get her in trouble.  Traps are loaded with little crackers covered in peanut butter and we'll see what luck might be in the air.  No hope, I know. She's there right now, behind my skirting board with her mates, on her mousey sun-lounger, sipping little blue mousey cocktails with little umbrella's wondering when it's time to run the fact, bald bloke ragged round his own home again.

Barn Owls, Cottaging and New Wheels

Fucking Owls.

The Preston Faithful for the last two weekends have been rolling up their sleeves and pulling down their trousers to make the pavilion ship-shape, clean and tidy for the impending season that will kick off in the next two weeks.

Their is a subtle scent of Bluebells on the wind, the cuckoos are rutting somewhere in Doggers Wood behind the ground and the gang-mowers don't work. Must be April.

Every year we paint, burn, scrub, push, pull, bugger and bend in order that our immaculate ground looks like a new pin; and we have but we have an owl issue. It seems that some sort of Owl is using our guttering as a roof level, mid air, feathery bog. By the looks of things whatever he's eating isn't agreeing with him and it looks like a agricultural shit truck has exploded up the side of the pavilion.

We actually had a our first two games of the season this weekend, a couple of friendlies.

First cricket net of the year. You betcha. Done.

Running in to bowl was like running through chocolate and now every time in sneeze it's like a hand grenade going off in my rib-cage. It was good to get it out of the way though. It can feel a bit sad knowing that when you do something, you will never be as good as you once were at it. It's a bit annoying but there you go. We all get bald, fat, slow and shit.

The 2012 season nears. Like most cricket clubs countrywide, Preston is starting to yawn, stretch and fart itself awake from its winter hibernation. Snow still covers the ground but the faint taint of ionised air on the wind, the sound of the wood-pigeon's in the woods and the fact that I have already bowled a cricket ball into the roof of a sports hall means that the season and indeed spring will soon be here. April is the magical month, when we don the whites again, try and hit a slow moving ball with a piece of wood and relish in the spring and summer ales at the Red Lion.

Having recently been on the receiving end of a particularly aggressive, snatch and grab Kronenbourg session in Bedfordshire, it would be better to ease off and settle for some milder beers. After all, I am in training. Driving in the front seat of someone's (don't know who's) car, it was like being at the steering wheel of the Enterprise and Starship Command had advertised that there was free sex at HQ for one night only. To be frank, Mr Zulu could well have been driving for all I knew. The streaks of light whizzing past and the lurching cornering made me hang on to lunch for dear life.

A new dawn possibly at Preston. We have had to manage a lot through the winter months and some changing of the guard at the Club. But we will still be there. We must look to encourage the younger members to get more involved and I am pleased that some are beginning too. This is essential or we will indeed whither on the vine.

The younger lads want to make it more professional which makes sense to be fair. Get to the ground early, look the nuts and doing warm-ups. Before, the idea of a warm-up was forgetting your lighter and having to walk back to the cricket bag to get it. You would have to hurdle over the other bags of course and long jump over the puddles of pee that collect in every cricket changing room corner. Warm up done, right?

Soon the outdoor nets will start. Every 5th ball you get will smash all three out of the ground while the rest of the 3 and a half minutes you get in bat will be picking the dog-digested cricket balls out from the stingers or off the top of the nets themselves. Soon, the fielding practices, the high-catches, the re-opening of hairline fractures, the falling over, etc.

So, ever efficient to haven't updated my Blog here for over a year.
Has anything happened over the course of the year.  Yes, loads.
Can I remember any of it?  Nah.
The cricket season 2011 saw an amazing 3 out our 4 sides at Preston gain promotion which is a huge success and testament to the hard work the Captains and the Vice's contribute. We now have sides fielded in Div 2, 5, 10 and 13.
The club went through some ups and downs last year and indeed in the subsequent winter months leading up to Christmas 2011 and the New Year.

We started afresh in 2012, with renewed spirits and new optimism.  Then it rained.
It rained so much that the people of North Hertfordshire started growing gills.  Gills, on top of the gill's that they already have along with their one eyebrow and webbed feet.  I didn't mean that.  I'm very proud of where I live and indeed grew up in.

The season has jumped around, jittered, pulled some punches, and kicked us squarely in the knackers as well.  The Firsts continue to do OK, the Seconds have found the going firm, the Thirds, even firmer and the Fourths have really been the shining light for the Club and have won 99% of their played games so far, which is of course brilliant.

Cricket tour to Bristol, always the highlight of the year, was executed with grace and some good cricket played as well as STD's caught.  Wonderful grounds such as Hinton Charterhouse, Painswick and Malmesbury entertained us around the Bristol area.  Beers were drunk, trousers were set on fire, and the usual shenanigans were encouraged. No one lost their pubic mound, snorted vodka and violated any animals which was slightly disappointing - although one of the younger lads needed a grazing licence to take one such trophy home after she was almost unconscious through drinking about 20 blue WKD's.  Great catch.

The rest of the season looks like it will bring some challenges - availability being the main opponent to beat.  Summer Holidays and younger guys wanting to ride around on shitty scooters to watch girls in local parks being the main two obstacles to overcome, I think.  We have always set a standard though and we try very hard to adhere to that.

So, I will try and update more regularly and keep on documenting Preston CC for reasons of prosperity, sodomy, evidence and the lash.