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.