Shitting Hell

Of recent times my walk to work has become seriously blighted, not only by parents who think its perfectly acceptable to force you to step out into the road because they and their children deserve the whole of the pavement, but by something marginally more unpleasant. To paraphrase Will from  The Inbetweeners my daily journey has become a veritable dog shit minefield.

Now, I am old enough to remember the ‘good old days’, the times when it was not uncommon to see dogs crapping all over the place and when people were outraged by the thought of paying a fine for not cleaning up after their dogs. Our school playing field was covered in the stuff, there are some bonuses to being a girl and not being rugby tackled into poo is certainly one of them! But times have changed, people no longer baulk at no dog fouling signs and thankfully for the past 10-15 years our pavements have been relatively faeces free, until now.

I don’t know what has happened, why have people suddenly decided to revert back to faecal free for all? Is this some kind of middle class rebellion? Whilst London had their riots, middleclass Wales is hitting back by refusing to abide by simple commonsense laws and laughing in the face of £1000 fines. I could make excuses for the owners; that they are too old or too immobile that they can’t bend down to pick up the mess, but surely that’s what JML is made for! All I know is, the next time I catch someone not picking up after their dog I’m going to rub the owner’s nose in it… quite literally.

One hundred and eeeeeighty

For me, the best sporting week of the year isn’t the Six Nations finals, Wimbledon, the FA cup, it isn’t even the Olympics when it finally comes around after a 3 year hiatus. In honesty I’m not even sure if my favourite sporting event of the year can be classified as a sport*, but that does nothing to diminish the love I have for it (I am literally gutted that I have to wait until 12 months to watch the action). It is of course the Lakeside World Darts Championships.

Now, when I tell people that I love darts I can immediately see the scepticism in their eyes. Their first reaction is that I surely must be taking the piss, a passtime not entirely foreign to me. But then it begins, my explanation as to why I love the darts, probably more than is socially acceptable. Firstly I love the characters, you can keep you pretty footballers with their womanising ways, faux dives and trendy haircuts I like my sports players to enter a room to their very own theme tune, to have a ludicrous nickname and be able to rival a heavily pregnant woman in the swollen belly stakes. Even the players that you think look slim initially you come to realise only appear this way due to the fact they’re standing next to a man mountain. Maybe that’s why I feel such an affiliation with darts, it’s a sport where fatties are champions.

Wolfy Adams has lost and still looks that happy.

Not only are they larger than life in multiple ways but they play fair, in fact, the players seem to like each other. These men are friends. This year in the quarter finals two men played against each other, one of which had given the other a lift to the venue. Whilst in the semis Wesley Harms asked for the board to be changed because his opponent (the legendary silverback) has had too many bounce-outs. Then of course there are the wives and girlfriends, by the end of the week you could pick Ted Hankey’s mother out of a crowd and could name each of Wolfy’s kids.. and possibly even the grandkids. That’s how the Lakeside makes you feel, like your part of some darts family and it doesn’t really matter if you’re there dressed up as Red Riding Hood or at home biting your nails willing that dart to go in the double, you're still just as included.

  

That's why when the Olympics come to London this year I won't be brimming with excited, I've had the climax of my sporting year in the very first week.. and it didn't run £9billion over budget.

* Of course when you think about it darts involves competition, hand to eye coordination and lengthy periods of standing up so I’m going for a resounding yes.

Ali's return to Wanderland

For weeks… well, months actually, I’ve been thinking that I need to get blogging again. Somehow though time has passed and I have failed to do the simplest of things, write something that could fill this space, this miniscule amount of cyber space just here. Huge events have happened in the past nine months – the Arab uprising, London riots, Jimmy Saville’s death, and yet here I am on an unremarkable afternoon beginning to blog again. Maybe it’s that the big global, world-changing events (no one will ever have Jim fix it for them again, and no Shane Richie pretending to be Jim is frankly not going to cut it) in life can be all a bit too overwhelming. Everyone’s talking about them and most people are saying more profound, cleverer, wittier, more informed things than you. It’s not that I don’t want to join the discussion,  I very much do, it’s just there are too many thoughts for me to write coherently down in time for me to publish an entry that is still relevant. Talking about it to real life people who can fill in the blanks and prompt me with names and new ideas, that’s the best way for me. The upshot of this is that I will continue to blog in an ad hoc way, generally about my own life with some larger themes occasionally thrown in for those who feel the need to stretch the old grey matter. I’ll even try to not to leave it 6 months before I blog again, but no promises. As I’ve said before I don’t do resolutions...