An electrician is supposed to be coming next week to commission it. But in contrast, we have no hot water 
– they fiddled around with the connections to the hot water tank in the airing cupboard to “improve” the performance, but the performance has gone in the other direction! So I’ll be phoning them Monday morning ......“ROCK OF AGES!
” shrieked the Ostrich.“Ah yes,” I replied, “the hymn by that Reverend Toplady. We used to sing it at school assembly:
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee
Fancy you knowing that, Ossie!
”“I don’t know anything about any hymn. The thing is, we’ve just passed it!”
“
What? Where?"“Back there, where the brown sign was!”
“Um, well, if that’s correct, then we must be in, err, Burrington Coombe*?”
“Which means we’re miles off course!
” fumed the bird.And for once, the Ostrich was correct.
I usually pride myself on being able to drive directly to a new ground after a simple walk-though on Google Maps. Can’t be doin’ with they SatNav thingys
. However, today, venturing into unknown territory, I went badly wrong 
and only realised I was way off beam when I found myself travelling through the heart of the Mendip Hills before encountering the A38 somewhere just north of Weston-super-Mare! Luckily, I had a good old-fashioned AA Road Map in the car, realised I’d got the B3134 muddled up with the B3114 (although I do blame Google Maps a bit for being unclear 
) and after a lot of U-turns and seat-of-the-pants flying, got back on track after an unnecessary detour of around 15 miles.Chew Valley Rugby Club’s ground, Lobbingtons, on the afore-mentioned B3114 just north of Chew Stoke (with its extra-long 20 mph speed limit, yup, we’re in North Somerset
), is a pleasant ground with a rural aspect and is situated between the village and Chew Valley School. There’s a pay-station at the car park entrance and you enter what appears to be a large triangular car park, controlled by “marshals”, but it quickly filled up so there was much overflow parking on the road, and at the end of the game, I found “marshals” had packed everyone in so tightly, it took me 10 minutes of reversing and 20 point turns to find a viable escape route! 
The clubhouse is set at an angle to the main pitch, which is floodlit, as is a second pitch alongside it closer to the main road. A helpful map on the clubhouse wall indicated that they are developing another 4 pitches some distance away down towards Chew Valley Lake; it’s not clear how these are accessed, though, as Bristol Waterworks seem to control all the roads round there. The lake itself provides drinking water for Bristol; it looked well down in capacity, but thankfully nowhere near dry. There are a number of other sports facilities between the club’s main pitches and the school, but these all belong to the school apparently – there is at least one full-size floodlit 3G pitch for soccer / hockey.
The clubhouse interior isn’t huge, but it is functional with a bar and a hot food station; a widescreen was showing the Merseyside derby and there were a few comfy chairs dotted around. Above the clubhouse, on the roof, is the newly-erected Porge Bryant enclosure (Georgia “Porge” Bryant, who was involved with the club, tragically died of leukaemia aged just 28 in 2018 – she raised thousands of pounds for leukaemia treatment, the fund-raising being supported by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Eavis (Glastonbury Festival)). This roof-top viewing balcony is accessible by an outside staircase (took a bit of finding!) and I positioned myself there for the game as it gave a superb view down the pitch, although being right behind the posts, I very nearly got dinged on the head on a couple of occasions by successful short-range penalties
. There’s a manual scoreboard tucked away in the corner of the ground next to the staircase.The pitch looked a bit threadbare in places but there was nevertheless plenty of green grass on it despite the drought. Both sides exchanged early easy penalties before Tom Bryan neatly chipped the ball over the defence for Miles Moorhouse to run through and score Chew Valley’s first try (11m). Drybrook, the visitors from the Forset of Dean, brought the score back to 10-9 with two penalties before Moorhouse passed inside to send Charlie Smallcross in for the home team’s second try (28m). Dean Brooker plunger over from a 5 yard scrum on 37m to make it 24-9 but just before half-time, Drybrook notched their first try following intense pressure, (the referee calling back two very long advantage plays which broke down to award Drybrook further penalties). 24-16 at the break.
Chew Valley restarted with an absolute sucker-punch, Dan Gratton charging down a Drybrook clearance from defence, and from a resulting close-range scrum, the home pack got the momentum and pushed Drybrook back over their own line for debutant 18yo scrum-half Peter Carter to touch down. Following that, we had long periods of Drybrook possession, but they couldn’t penetrate the home defence and often lost yardage. During this period, Drybrook had several kickable penalties but surprisingly opted for touch
– questionable tactics in my book. On 57m, however, they did convert one penalty and with Chew down to 14 men, scored a try on 71m - but Chew Valley immediately hit back with Liam Evans bursting through at an angle for a converted try to make it 38-26 on 74m. Bryan added a further penalty thee minutes later to complete the scoring.Quite an entertaining game at the end of the day, despite a rather dour second half. Back home via various places I’ve neither previously heard of nor visited before and Shepton Mallet in just over an hour!
03/09/22: Regional 1 South West (the RFU’s new-look league structure)
Chew Valley RFC 41 Drybrook RFC 26
Admission: £5
Programme: free. A much vaunted first ever publication of a programme by the club, hyped up on their social media – but all it turned out to be was an A4 sheet folded to make 4pp.
Advertising apparently may follow later. Let’s just say a work-in-progress ……!Teams: Starting line-ups were helpfully published on each club’s Facebook page before the game.
Refreshments: An excellent ham and salad half-baguette (with real butter, I think) and a Coke before the start for £4.70. Emboldened by this, I treated myself to a half-time pasty but at £3.50, it was nowhere near as good value as the baguette
.Attendance: 228
*
Wiki wrote:Rock of Ages, Burrington Combe
There is a legend that Augustus Montague Toplady (1740–78), who was the curate at Blagdon, was inspired to write the hymn Rock of Ages while sheltering under a rock in the combe during a thunderstorm in the late 18th century. The rock was subsequently named after the hymn. It is now generally accepted that the attribution of this location to the writing of Rock of Ages only arose well after Toplady's death (the 1850s is suggested by Percy Dearmer in Songs of Praise Discussed, 1933) and has no proven factual basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burringto ... f_ages.jpg
That was interesting info, about the hymn 
