Winners and losers

Oh, it’s the “England and Wales” team now is it, Bastien? 🙂 (Actually that’s another reason the whole thing annoys the rest of us… there have been plenty Welsh and yes, even the odd Scot turning out for the Podgy XI over the years, but it’s funny how they’re all “English” when they win…)

As for hoping Motherwell lose… that’s more of a racing certainty than a flight of fancy I would wager! But that’s one thing I do have in common with England fans– when you lose most of the time, it turns winning into an occasion that the glory-hunting Rangers/Celtic/Man Utd/Chelsea/big-club-of-your-choice types can never truly appreciate 🙂

You boy!!

Michael Sheard died yesterday at the age of 65. Anyone under the age of 30 will probably recognise the RADA-trained Aberdonian from his roles in The Empire Strikes Back and two Indiana Jones movies.

For those of us on the wrong side and living in the UK, though, he will forever be the scariest schoolteacher on the planet– Maurice Bronson, the bespectacled, be-wigged languages teacher at Grange Hill, and arch-enemy of artistic, chain-smoking rebel pupil Danny Kendall (who, after two years of running battles in the corridors, was to die in Bronson’s car when he blacked out at the wheel after stealing it).

They don’t make them like they used to…

Freedom!

Last week saw the 700th anniversary of the execution by the English of William Wallace, a cultural icon to Scots around the globe.

Forget what you saw in Braveheart; most of that was Hollywood tosh– if nothing else, Mel Gibson is about a foot shorter than the real thing. (Hence the in-joke in the movie about him “not being tall enough”.)

Wallace did lead the Scots to an unlikely victory over the English at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, but almost certainly without having painted a saltire on his face. The English won the return leg at Falkirk the following year, however, though Wallace escaped. In the aftermath, he relinquished his title of Guardian of the Kingdom of Scotland and Leader of its Armies, which had been deferred upon him by Robert the Bruce (later of spider fame) after Stirling Bridge. He was jointly succeeded by Robert himself.

In 1305, Wallace was betrayed by Scottish baron Sir John de Menteith, who delivered him to the English near Glasgow (in an area ironically called Robroyston). He was marched down to London, and tried for treason. “I cannot be a traitor”, Wallace said, “for I owe (Edward I) no allegiance. He is not my sovereign; he never received my homage.”

Unsurprisingly, Wallace was found guilty, and, at Smithfield, on August 23rd, 1305, he became only the second person to be hanged, drawn and quartered. His head adorned a spike on London Bridge, and his limbs were separately dispatched to Perth, Stirling, Berwick and Newcastle, so that no shrine would be available to his followers.

Needless to say, the Scots were a bit peeved about this, and in the following 10 years, under Robert the Bruce (who became King of Scotland in 1306 following another victory over Edward I), they finally saw off any English pretensions to control the northern British kingdom, most notably at Bannockburn in 1314. In 1328, the English conceded that Robert was king of an independent nation, which Scotland remained until 1603, a year which saw James I of England and VI of Scotland become the United Kingdom’s first monarch. Despite that small setback, we’re still just about holding ’em off to this very day 🙂

Fir Park for Thrills

Mortifed as I am by Motherwell‘s current schoolboyish defensive frailties, there’s no doubt that if you’re a neutral, Fir Park is the best place to spend your Saturday afternoon cash at the moment. In our last five games (four SPL matches plus our final pre-season friendly against Queen of the South), Motherwell have lost at least four goals on four occasions (and past three different goalkeepers). Even more remarkably, we’ve scored four goals ourselves in two of those games as well– in a 4-4 draw with Celtic, and yesterday’s unbelievable 5-4 defeat to Dundee United. A massive early-season injury list hasn’t helped, but at least the coaching staff of Terry Butcher and Maurice Malpas must be feeling it worse than any of us long-suffering fans, having been two of the best defenders in Europe in the early 90’s. They could probably do worse than pulling on the claret and amber themselves for our midweek cup tie with local Lanarkshire rivals Hamilton Accies…

You have flown so high and so well

(I apologise for how suckily this gets laid out if you’re reading on Planet GNOME, but it’s 1am and I’m too tired to do anything about it… visit my blog if you want to see how it’s supposed to look.)

Julie and I did something a bit different yesterday… we took a balloon ride over the self-proclaimed garden of Ireland, County Wicklow. Neither of us had been anywhere near a balloon before, and truth be told we were both a tad nervous, but flying conditions were perfect, and the hour-long, 2000ft ride (and landing) couldn’t have been any smoother if we’d taken a lift1. All topped off in true Irish style with a plastic cup of warm champagne served from the back of a Land Rover in the random field where we happened to land, but we were still feeling so buzzed by then that pretty much anything would have gone down well.


Post script: rather stupidly, I lost my credit card wallet at some point during the “help us drag everything off the trailer and get it inflated” stage. Luckily, on phoning the launch site hotel when I got home and discovered my mishap, somebody had found it and handed it in, but that meant another two hour round trip this afternoon to pick them up. Needless to say, Julie wasn’t too impressed, but by way of compensation I bought dinner up the road at Hunan‘s tonight. We’d never been there before, but it turned out to be an excellent choice– which, with the best will in the world, isn’t something you can often say about dining out in Finglas.

1 Or an elevator, depending on where you’re reading this.

Subjective behaviour

If you’ve been getting “I don’t think you meant to enter that as your title” messages from NewsBruiser/b.g.o recently, bolsh has the answer:

[18:31] 	bolsh	There's something that is intended to prevent you from 
                        setting your password as a blog title by accident
[18:31] 	bolsh	But if you've never set your password, it always returns true
[18:31] 	bolsh	Don't know why
[18:32] 	bolsh	You should blog about it :)

So, just reset your password, and everything will be hunky dory.