Ostrich on the Hoof

[Kaz]

[TheOstrich]

I’m happy to report another quiet week back at the Nest. Well, only the two medical emergencies in the Close ….

The first was two doors up from us on Monday when the ambulance attended mid-morning, I assume regarding the old gent on the mobility scooter. I do have to watch reversing out of the drive sometimes as he has a tendency to come bombing up the pavement at a fair old rate of knots. The second, on Thursday, involved both paramedics and ambulance on blues and twos and was two doors down from us, at the “newcomers” house – he is quite a fit guy and has done a lot of manual work around his garden, and would be the last person you’d think to have a problem, but of course you never know. Ossie refers to them as “The Cornish Egg Company” (as that’s where they hail from and they keep a number of rescue chickens in their back garden, selling boxes of 6 fresh eggs from a stall next to the drive at the same price, actually, as you’d find in Waitrose. When they moved in, Mrs O initially had to dissuade Ossie from crouching down behind the neighbour's back fence and going “Aawwaaaarrkkkk–kuk–kuk-kuk-kuk” ……. Anyway, because we’re “dahn sarf”, we haven’t got a local gossip mill so we don’t actually know what happened in either of the circumstances, but I suppose we’ll find out eventually, and I do hope all's well.

Oh, and the pet crematorium burnt down on Wednesday night. Bit of a blaze, by all accounts; I didn’t even know we had a pet crematorium until I saw the local FB news page.

Monday saw Mrs O and myself set out for the village of Sutton Veny, near Warminster, where we’d been recommended a bespoke upholsterers. A one-man band, he operates out of a small Nissan hut on the local trading estate, and he’s going to repair and reupholster a small oaken child’s chair which has been in Mrs O’s family for a long time, possibly 70 years, she estimates. Someone tried to do a repair job on it a few years back, but left a lot of nails sticking out of it on the underside, so it wasn’t really fit for purpose, and it’s something that might well be useful, once refurbished, for our G/S. We are going to be paying quite a lot of dosh , but the guy is a craftsman, so we know we’ll be getting a good job for the money.

And talking of dosh, the brand new polymer £20 note is being launched on 20th February, in case you weren’t aware. No need to panic about exchanging the old ones yet awhile though, as the BofE says “We will announce the withdrawal date after we have issued our new polymer £20 note [and] we will give six months’ notice of this withdrawal date.”

I haven’t seen a Brexit 50p piece yet either (it’ll probably take about six months before they reach Dorset ) but in the meantime, there’s a fine old furore arisen in the nearby Somerset village of Holton . On January 31st, some wag decided to fly the EU flag from the top of the parish church. This has produced a quite extraordinary and venomous letter published in the community Blackmore Vale Magazine from (presumably) a local, whom I can confidently identify as Mr. “name and address supplied.” Being a breach of Ecclesiastical Law was the least of the flag-waver’s sins, and should he be caught, I believe he will be hung from the ropes in the bell-tower by his ankles , which sounds an extremely good plot for a “Midsomer Murder” if ever I heard one!

So, to today’s sporting extravaganza, and an opportunity to see the football team which is officially the oldest club on the planet. Don’t get too excited – it’s only Notts County! At the end of last season, they ended 156 continuous seasons in the Football League by being relegated down to Step 1 of non-league football, so they’ve racked up in the same League as Yeovil Town, although today’s game was an FA Trophy 3rd round tie.

After all the pre-season take-over turmoil, Yeovil have performed pretty well in the National League, but they’ve been off the boil a bit since Christmas and have dropped down to 4th place. Notts. County are 6th in the table, so both clubs are still in with a good chance of promotion, even if via the convoluted play-offs. With no league worries resting on this match, what we got was a very entertaining, old-fashioned, blood-and-thunder cup tie, with more than hint of controversy, and the referee, Lancashire-based Tom Parsons, certainly earnt his money today!

Yeovil started hard and fast, and the Notts County keeper made two fine saves from Dagnall and Lee. County broke to the other end on 7m, and Yeovil custodian Liam O’Brien could only push a curling Kristian Dennis shot up in the air, allowing Connell Rawlinson to powerfully head it down and back into the net, despite a defender’s best attempt to keep it out, and even then there was some dispute as to whether it crossed the line or not. Yeovil went straight back down the field, and Marc Richards met a absolutely perfect pin-point cross at the far post, only to slide the ball just wide. It didn’t look like it was going to be Yeovil’s day!

Chances came and went at both ends, but things then started to get a bit tetchy, a rash of bookings culminating in Notts County’s West Thomas getting a straight red for lashing out at Wilkinson . At the end of the first half, there was a tangle of limbs and a heated exchange of pleasantries between Yeovil’s Dickinson and Notts' Kelly-Evans which needed a prompt intervention from the linesman before things got further out of hand; both players were perhaps lucky to get away with warnings.

Yeovil piled on the pressure in the second half, but it was County who made it 0-2 on 68m when Kyle Wootton, who had just come on as a substitute, picked up a cross at the far post and blasted it in off the crossbar. Yeovil were also ringing the changes, and when on 76m substitute Courtney Duffus steered home a loose ball in the area to make it 1-2, it looked like we were in for an interesting finale – not least when Notts County went down to 9 men, Damien McCrory limping off injured with all three substitutions having been used. Would the depleted County side hang on? – yes, despite Yeovil constantly pounding away at them, more corners than I could count, and six minutes of added time! A bit of a relief in a way; if it had been a draw, we’d have had extra time and penalties, and with the wind starting to freshen in advance of the incoming Storm Ciara, I was glad to get on the road home. Excellent game, up there as one of the best this season.

08/02/20 –Buildbase FA Trophy Round 3: Yeovil Town 1 Notts County 2
Parking: £3
Admission: £13 concession. I got Block L Row L Seat 28 in the Screwfix Stand. This was eventually discovered directly in front of the Press Box in Block K!
Programme £3. The usual glossy puff which can be read in 4 minutes flat, or 28 minutes if you’re bored enough before the game to include the all the adverts, word by word, and then repeat backwards.
Refreshments: The £6 Meal Deal. A (small) pasty, an (even smaller) bag of cheese ’n onion crisps, a choccy bar (I let them chose and was awarded a KitKat) and a drink (PG Tips in a cardboard cup. It is impossible to fit the plastic cup lid over the cup rim without it coming off as you walk back to your seat and spilling tea all over your fevvers. )
Attendance: officially 1,946, which was surprisingly low as Yeovil have been getting 2,800-2,900 for league games this season ….. perhaps a bit fickle, the Glovers' fans.

[Ally]

Fab read Ossie.

Whenever I'm flying back home from the UK at the airport I always buy a meal deal.

Big fat sandwich, big drink and a big bag of crisps. Usually £3.99. As we don't get anything like that here I'm like a kid in a sweet shop choosing.

[cromwell]

Anyway, because we’re “dahn sarf”, we haven’t got a local gossip mill so we don’t actually know what happened in either of the circumstances, but I suppose we’ll find out eventually, and I do hope all's well.

No gossip mill?
That's bad. If we'd not had a gossip mill we would never have found out that Sandra down the road discovered that the chap (she has chaps) she was separated from had just got married. She found out on Facebook!
Anyway I hope all's well too.

Oh, and the pet crematorium burnt down on Wednesday night. Bit of a blaze, by all accounts; I didn’t even know we had a pet crematorium

You don't now!

Monday saw Mrs O and myself set out for the village of Sutton Veny, near Warminster, where we’d been recommended a bespoke upholsterers. A one-man band, he operates out of a small Nissan hut on the local trading estate, and he’s going to repair and reupholster a small oaken child’s chair which has been in Mrs O’s family for a long time, possibly 70 years, she estimates. Someone tried to do a repair job on it a few years back, but left a lot of nails sticking out of it on the underside, so it wasn’t really fit for purpose, and it’s something that might well be useful, once refurbished, for our G/S. We are going to be paying quite a lot of dosh , but the guy is a craftsman, so we know we’ll be getting a good job for the money.

You are lucky to be able to find a man like that Os. (It's Nissen hut btw - I always spelled it your way until spelling pedant Mrsc, ex-teacher, corrected me!).

I didn't realise that Notts County were non-league now. Too preoccupied with Leeds' precipitous but totally expected collapse in form. I hope the £20 note is a bit less slippery than the tenner. Sounds like you saw a good match though!

[TheOstrich]

Advance warning that, in the light of Storm Dennis, there'll be no footie blog this weekend. Ossie spent last Sunday hanging grimly onto the wheelie bins (despite parking them all together up our narrow back passage by the gate, one almighty gust caught the virtually full one and moved it - sideways - a good 10 feet back down to our kitchen door! ). It looks like we will be having a repeat performance tomorrow, judging by the Met Office, and the Prophets of Doom, aka the Environmental Agency, have put us under a flood alert warning for the umpteenth time this winter.

And guess what? For only the third time in living memory, and the first since we moved "dahn sarf", I'd only gone and bought a flippin' ticket for a game on Saturday! When I was at the ticket office before Yeovil vs Notts County match last Saturday, I broke a rule of a lifetime and purchased a £17 advance ticket for tomorrow's home game against Chesterfield. I knew at the time I was tempting fate …… well, it's a 17:20 kick-off (being televised live on BT Sport) and I don't exactly fancy a 50 mile round trip to Huish Park Stadium in driving rain and stormy conditions. Roads under water is the biggest concern round here. I might have attempted it 20 years ago, but Ossie is an older and wiser bird these days.

And anyway, I can catch up with Chesterfield at Woking on 28th March.

[TheOstrich]

Result!

Yeovil Town can confirm that this evening’s fixture with Chesterfield has been postponed.
Increasing high winds and adverse weather have left safety fears for both supporters and players.

The referee arrived at Huish Park at 9AM this morning, with the idea to make a decision early to avoid Chesterfield fans making the journey down to Somerset.
Fans can get a refund on their ticket by visting the club shop/ticket office before the rearranged fixture.
Details of a rearranged fixture will be confirmed in due course.

[Kaz]

Egg-cellent result Ossie

[TheOstrich]

A strange week. Ossie has been suffering from the Coronavirus , or the equivalent local bug which seems to be very prevalent around town at the moment . These afflictions are always welcome, because it gives me the opportunity to indulge in fantasy cravings , which usually revolve around chocolate biscuits, and in particular McVitie’s Dark Chocolate Hobnobs . At the first sign of illness, a double-pack is secured, and hidden in the medicine chest to which Ossie makes regular forays, ostensibly for Strepsils. Mrs O’s brows furrow at the trail of crumbs across the floor back to the nest, but thankfully, as long as Ossie is not too indulgent, the indiscretions are diplomatically ignored.

When it comes to health scares, though, spare a thought for the citizens of Amesbury. Back in July 2018, sadly, Dawn Sturgess died of Novichok poisoning, and today, less than half a mile away just up the ring-road and turn right, the Coronavirus-quarantined passengers from that Diamond Princess cruise liner touched down at RAF Boscombe Down. I wouldn’t want to live there. Not without a barrel-load of chocolate digestives, anyway …

The Footballing Gods generally do not tend to smile on the Ostrich . If the bird is lucky, he might get a weak, sickly grin, but just at the moment, they seem quite implacable in denying Ossie the opportunity to knock off a few clubs on the South Coast. After last season’s Hamble Fiasco – game abandoned due to deluge with the bird at the ground - and this season’s Brockenhurst Fiasco – game called off due to deluge with the bird resigned to another afternoon’s shopping in Southampton , we now have, due to the most recent deluges, the collapse of a railway embankment between Romsey and Salisbury, suspending all rail services to the coast, and initial forecasts are that this disruption will last at least two months . And this incident follows the derailment of a freight train at Eastleigh a fortnight ago which wrecked a number of crucial points and junctions, and which still hasn’t been fully repaired. In consequence, it’s pretty much impossible to access Southampton by rail, and I’m certainly not going to rely on replacement bus services! Until next season, then …..

Anyway, by this morning, the Ostrich was suitably recovered in health and fitness (although possibly an extra pound and a half overweight ) to contemplate a local soccer match, and Gillingham Town’s reserves were due to host Shaftesbury Town Colts. I drove down to the Woodwater Lane ground about 1:15 only to find it locked up and deserted. Oh well, Plan B then. That was either Holt United, who had switched their match to the 3G pitch as Blandford School, a new venue for me, or a completely weird fixture at Sherborne Town’s Raleigh Grove ground. Needless to say, I chose the latter!

A very entertaining journey down the A30 ensued. I was pootling along through the countryside between Henstridge and Milborne Port, minding my own business, when I spotted out of the corner of eye a couple of deer haring across the field to the right of me. And heading straight for the road. I managed to reduce speed sufficiently to give them the opportunity to scoot across in front of me, only to have to jam on the brakes when I suddenly realised it wasn’t just a couple of deer, it was a whole blinking herd of them – all strung out in a line! Thankfully the bloke behind me, and the cars behind him, had also seen what was happening and we all stopped safely. There must have been 10 of them, including a large buck with antlers in the middle of the line, from which I assume they were roe deer rather than muntjacs which are also prevalent in the county. Quite a sight!

So, starting up again, and rounding the next couple of bends – I ran straight into the blinkin’ Hunt! Again, thankfully, the horses and hounds were in the field by the road, but we had the usual cacophony of large horse boxes half on and half off the carriageway, Landrovers reversing out of farm gates straight into the road , and a few sullen toffs in red coats and on white chargers who hadn’t made it across the road yet. This is a main A-road – so I claimed right-of-way and doggedly motored past the lot of them .

So that was what must have spooked the deer …. the only thing I didn’t see today was the local sabs!

Arriving, by now in somewhat of a daze, at Sherborne’s multi-sports complex, I parked up, wandered over to the soccer ground to claim a programme, and then headed for the rugby pitches where I could see the first team warming up. Sherborne RFC are back at last on their main pitches, the recent wind having nicely dried out the originally waterlogged ground. The opposition was Windsor RFC, whom I saw play here in a cup game last year, so not a game of particular interest to me, but I was at least able to watch around half-an-hour’s play before the soccer match kicked off. The guys on the gate very sportingly weren’t going to charge me admission when I told them what I was going to do, but I paid up anyway as (a) they need the dosh and (b) they issue a programme, something I very much like to encourage in this digital age. When I left it was 5-5, the home side having run in an excellent try before gifting Windsor the equaliser via the interception of careless pass.

So, back to the soccer ground, and today’s fixture was an FA Inter League Cup Quarter Final between the local Dorset Premier League, who fielded a side consisting basically of Westland Sports FC’s attack and Merley Cobham Sports FC’s defence, and the Peterborough and District Football League, represented by a motley gaggle of players from a large selection of clubs I’d never even previously heard of! Moulton Harrox FC, anyone? Stilton United?

The Peterborough and District Football League can trace its roots back to 1902. In those days, there were strict eligibility rules – all players had to reside within 10 miles of Peterborough Market Hill. Nowadays, things are a bit more relaxed and clubs playing in the league seem to hail from most parts of East Anglia, I gather.

The FA Inter League Cup has apparently been going since 2003/04 and it’s basically for representative Leagues at Step 7 or below. The hook is that the winners of the competition go on to represent England in something called the UEFA Regions’ Cup. As far as I can see, no UK team has ever made the final stages of this latter European tournament, although a representative side from the Republic of Ireland actually won the whole dam’ thing in 2015 - they did have home advantage, though. The cynic in me says the whole thing seems rather closer to Jeux sans Frontières than the Europa League.....

Today’s game wasn’t that edifying, to be honest, although in mitigation a strong gusty wind straight down the ground didn’t exactly help matters. For most of the match, Dorset looked the stronger side, but entered the closing stages with only a 1-0 lead – a clinically-executed Asa Phillips 15-yarder after 32m. It was the final 10 minutes that were the most interesting – the home defence had fallen into the trap of just going through the motions, and all of a sudden, Peterborough were on top of them, hunting that equaliser. It took two brilliant saves from keeper Matthew Robson to thwart them – the first a point-blank stop, the second a spectacular diving push round the post – and Dorset now progress to play either the Southern Amateur League or the Jersey Combination in the semi-final. Personally, I was just glad to avoid extra-time and penalties!

22/02/20: Wadworth South West 1 East (Level 6). It finished Sherborne 17 Windsor 5, apparently, a good win for the home side.
Admission with programme £5
Refreshments pre-game in the clubhouse – a hefty slice of shortbread and a coffee for £2.50 (the pasties were off )
Attendance: 77

FA Inter League Cup Quarter Final: Dorset Premier League 1 Peterborough & District Football League 0
Admission: £3
Programme: £1 for a folded A4 sheet, but it did make an interesting read.
Refreshments at half time - a cheeseburger with onions, and a chicken and vegetable cuppa-soup which tasted rather funny £3.80 (the pasties had sold out )
Attendance: 84

[Ally]

#pastiegate

Great read, Os.

[cromwell]

Milborne Port. there was a character called Milborne Port in "Deadline", a Tim Heald novel of the late 70's early 80's. Not many people know that!*
Great read Os. You are hard core going to matches in weather like this!

*and even fewer care!