Toilet Roll Challenge

Everybody seems to have been doing a ‘Toilet Roll’ challenge during Lockdown. This is where someone snips together videos of a group of you chucking a toilet roll to each other (if you can get hold of one) from your bolt holes. My dog club does one and it's great fun to film our segment and the finished product is indeed hilarious.

My run with the Lad is a little longer tonight and takes us one minute over Gove time (allegedly one hour).

I reach 1999 with my Tour de France reruns which is of course the start of the Armstrong years. The main thing I forgot about 1999 was that the organisers initially banned serial doper Richard Virenque from the race but were forced to accept him after being overruled by the UCI, the Cycling authorities.

They said charges against him had not been proven because his case hadn’t gone to court yet. This is despite the fact that the rest of his previous team, Festina, had already admitted to drug use going back years.

Virenque went on to win the Polka Dot jersey again in 1999, for the 5^th time, before coming 3^rd the following year before his case finally came to court a few months later where confessed to years of doping. He was banned for just nine months, returning to the Tour in 2002 before winning the jersey again in 2003 and 2004.

If the world wasn’t even looking at the obviously guilty (and they weren't) then it’s perhaps not surprising that Armstrong and others got such a free pass.

(Sunday 26^th April)

Eighth Straight Win

The first thing to note is that the new settee turns up and so does the floor man, at the third attempt. Naturally they both turn up at the same time.

Still it’s early enough to get the boys on the park afterwards and then get to the match for the 1pm kick off where Derby record an eighth straight win against Leeds. Ta da. Very satisfying.

In the evening we head down to the Navigation on Meadow Lane for food, which is normally our post squash bolt hole. We would have stayed longer were it not for the bands they had on, which repelled our custom rather than attracted it.

Instead we embark on a not terribly exciting pub crawl. There’s still not any Midnight Owl on at the Vat & Fiddle, so we head across town to where the Ropewalk are running out of beer and the Borlase is totally out. The Hand & Heart may have had beer but lacked space, it didn’t even have standing room. So we wind up at the Blue Monkey pub, which I think is ok but L isn’t a fan of their beer.

(Saturday 8th December)