Chicken Run

L has Monday off to recover from the Thunder Run but I’m at work. She gives the impression she spends the majority of her day off looking for lost balls on the park.

The diagnosis is that we have a puppy who likes to run off with a ball, then to sit and chew it. Whilst we also have a plonker (I assume she means our Crufts silver medalist) who likes very much to drop his ball in the longest grass he can find. As I well know, it’s difficult trying to keep an eye on both dogs at the same time but then she bigs up a chap with an allegedly sensible dog choice aka two spaniels but apparently he too was shuffling through the long grass searching for a ball. So spaniels can’t find balls either. 

I suppose the weekend must have gone ok because I’m not in an ankle cast, I even manage to fake looking mobile at dog training on Monday evening although any hobbling is down more to my blisters rather than my ankle.

That said I don’t cycle on Tuesday or any other day this week. I just couldn’t swing my leg over. L manages to swim, which she says is very therapeutic on the legs. I think I would have drowned if I’d attempted to swim but then I probably always say that.

Wednesday we take L’s Dad to The Yard on Pride Park for his 80^th birthday and then the rest of the week is spent camping at my club’s dog show or Chicken Run as L calls it.

Oddly as we are camping both kids are camping too at almost the same time. Perhaps we haven't scarred them for life after all.

Thursday is set up day for our show and after that I meet L in Burton where we try the new

Weighbridge Bar which is in a weighbridge office. These are the types of places I deal with in my job but none of them have bars inside them. I think they should.

After that we stay on site as we have a bar there for the whole weekend although it frustratingly insists on closing at around 5pm every day.

The show itself goes well although the weather is terribly changeable. The heatwave continues throughout Friday but then decides to end in the middle of our show. Saturday brings 40mph winds and we have to suspend the show mid afternoon until things die down. I am tasked at 7am to help pull one of the show tents out of the hedge where it had come to rest. Sunday is pretty much all rain.

MD does ok in his runs, fourteen of them over three days. We don’t get any rosettes but he does enough that I am no longer considering his imminent retirement. He probably doesn’t want to hear that as I bet he was looking forward to it. 

(Sunday 29^th July)

A Cheeky One

L picks me up from work at 1.30 as I have the afternoon off for the unhappy occasion of the funeral of L's mother's sister at Bretby Crematorium. Which is somewhere near Burton.

After the service a few nibbles are served locally at a place that seems to specialise in post-funeral entertainment and not much else. It certainly doesn’t have any beer which is probably no bad thing. We save ourselves for later on both the beer and food fronts, forsaking the buffet in favour of the traditional Friday Thai Curry.

Later arrives earlier than expected on the beer front as we nip for a cheeky pint of Damson Porter at the Devonshire Arms. As we’re in Burton, it would be rude not to. It is also my first chance to try a half of the new Draught Burton Ale. This was a beer that was one of the few real ales around locally when I started drinking but it was axed recently by its current owners Carlsberg.

This is not an official version but a new version brewed by the Burton Bridge Brewery, who should know what they are doing because two of their directors were involved in the development of the original brew at Ind Coope back in the day. You what, it’s not bad at all.

Then it's a post funeral Friday night, I'm not sure if that's the done thing or not.

(Friday 15^th May)

German Time

Today we head off to near Burton where L has entered the Fradley 10k. It’s a two lap course, which is good for spectators, if a bit dull for the runners, and the bacon butties aren’t bad either.

I offer to buy the post-race Sunday lunch before realising its Mother’s Day and therefore the chance of getting one would be highly remote. Instead we visit my mother and hand over something chocolaty.

In the evening we eat at Broadway, drink the Centurion and see a film. 

 Suite Française is an adaptation of an incomplete novel by Ukrainian-Jew Irène Némirovsky who died in Auschwitz in 1942.

France has fallen to the Nazis and the whole country is in disarray. There has been a mass exodus from Paris and in Bussy the refugees arrive in their masses. These are soon followed by a regiment of German soldiers who take control, bark orders, impose 'German time' and billet themselves with the locals.

Madame Angellier (Kristin Scott Thomas), a landlord and part-time extortionist (from her tenants) is horrified to have the jackbooted officer Bruno von Falk (Matthias Schoenaerts) as an enforced house guest. Her daughter-in-law Lucile (Michelle Williams) doesn’t really know what to think except what Madame Angellier tells her to.

Lucile is a quiet and repressed young girl with a peculiar absence of anything substantial to her character. Yes I know there's a war on but FFS smile girl. Her husband is a prisoner of war in Germany, not that she’s really that bothered where he is. They’re not close.

Generally the villagers’ feelings towards their invaders are mixed. The local women, starved of male scenery, drool at the strapping soldiers in their midst and many like Celine (Margot Robbie) have no qualms about sleeping with the enemy. For others it is a chance to settle old scores and for the local Viscount (Lambert Wilson) it’s about organising picnics with their conquerors. Farmhand Benoît Labarie (Sam Riley) thinks his billeted officer Kurt Bonnet (Tom Schilling) wants to get his hands on his wife (Ruth Wilson), so he kills him.

Lucille meanwhile would just really really like to play the piano but it’s banned until her bloody husband comes home. When their German lodger unlocks Madame Angellier’s piano and plays poignant melodies on it he seems to have also stumbled across the key to unlocking the dreary Lucile as well. Her dreariness dissolves significantly when she realises that he’s a music lover too, that is when he isn’t carrying out executions in the town’s square. Suddenly her character is transformed and she briefly becomes a passionate minx.

All this happens with no language problems at all. The multilingual Germans speak real German to each other and then French (presumably, voiced in English) to everyone else. Impressive.

It’s mainly a love story but not a very riveting one. Boy invades girl’s village. Boy isn't as horrid as girl first thought. Girl falls in love with boy.

War wise, the opening scenes capture well the chaos that followed the Nazi invasion but the film is only superficially about the struggle to survive the German occupation. Many of the scenes just simply don't ring true as to how things would have actually happened in an occupied town.

Afterwards we visit a deserted Barrel Drop and the Hand and Heart.

 

(Sunday 15^th March)

Moving On Up

L has the day off today to receive our various furniture deliveries and for the plumber to come fix our kitchen sink.

Naturally I’m sceptical that everyone will turn up and that they’ll deliver the right things if they do. I warn L that if a sofa turns up it’s not ours. It is Friday the 13^th after all.

I get the bus to work. As I get off the Red Arrow at Derby Bus Station, it pulls away and I watch it back into the Spondon Flyer. There are so many accidents in that bus station.

L reports that not only has the plumber turned up but that she’s agreed a price with him and he’s down on his knees as we speak. While she’s got him on his knees in the kitchen, she has another man upstairs plumping up the bed. Still no sofa though.

With the deliveries complete, L heads to her Mum’s and then meets me later at the Beer Festival.

Derby is hosting the National Winter Ales Festival at the Roundhouse. I’ve never been before, despite the fact it was also in Derby last year and a few years before that it had a stint in Burton.

L’s not a big fan of beer festivals and even I’m beginning to grow weary of them. I actually feel they are a bit redundant now because we have got such a good range of pubs locally with so many varied beers. In fact there’s not a lot on their beer list that I can’t get elsewhere.

So I’ve basically singled out Lees Moonraker, as you don’t see it very often. So I may just drink that all night or I would have done if it hadn’t already sold out.

R (halves)

1. Fullers London Porter 5.4%

2. Dent T’owd Tup 6.0%

3. Grainstore Rutland Beast 5.3%

4. Beast of Zeals 6.6%

5. Castle Rock Midnight Owl 5.5%

6. Bath Festivity 5.0%

7. Raw Anubis 5.2%

8. Raw Anubis 5.2%

L (thirds)

1. Dark Star Original 5.0%

2. Bath Festivity 5.0%

3. Bath Festivity 5.0%

4. Wentwell Amjeel IPA 5.8%

5. Dent T’owd Tup 6.0%

6. Dent T’owd Tup 6.0%

7. Dent T’owd Tup 6.0%

We get home and move upstairs. Although we’re not sure how Doggo will take to it.

He doesn’t.

(Friday 13^th February)