So step forward the wonderfully named Sandwich Superheroes - proving once again that what the Government won't do local volunteers and people will. Hannah Harrison and Sarah Lawrence really are the heart of Hethersett that beats so strongly. Every time there is a need in the village or a gap to plug they step up.
Their latest initiative is putting together bags of nutritious food for those children in need during half-term. I have sent a story into the Eastern Daily Press on this and hopefully our superhero duo will get the credit they deserve. I know they don't do all their community work for any reward but I feel they should get massive credit.
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I always find the phrase babysitting misleading as it's often used for looking after young children who are anything but babies. Then the phrase child minding is also wrong as it conjures up ideas of semi imprisoning a child.
I mention this because earlier this week we had Poppy (aged five) and Elliot (aged eight) for a sleepover. I am immensely proud of the grandchildren as I'm sure most grandparents are but when they are around I can become extremely silly and probably get down to their level.
In a previous blog I published a story Poppy had written. During this stay she wrote another one. But this time it was Elliot who surprised me by asking to write a poem. It may have had something to do with a walk along the B1172 last Sunday when I commented on new development and a road named after Wilfred Owen.
"That road is named after Wilfred Owen," I said.
"Who was he," inquired Elliot.
"He was a poet during the First World War."
"What does a poet do?" asked Elliot.
"They write poetry," I replied.
"But you can't earn a living writing poetry," he replied.
It did remind me, however, that a number of years ago I visited Owen's grave at Ors in France as part of our almost annual trip to Le Paradis (more about that in a future blog). There we had a very moving rendition of some of Owen's poetry by my mate John Head. It's nice to know that a road so close to our home has been named in his honour.
Back to Elliot. I was most impressed by his effort which he entitled The White Book of Colours. Here it is:
The White Book of Colours
Red moves like the fierce, flickering flames of a fire and hides in the petals of a rose. Red sounds like a hot steaming volcano.
Blue smells like the salty water of the sea and the seaweed that lives with it. It tastes like the juicy blueberries that some people love and some people hate.
White moves like clouds floating across the sky reminding us of ghosts creeping up on us while you are in your bedroom.
Green is a zombie strolling towards us and trees swaying in the wind. Reminding us of wet, soggy grass.
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Time for another reminiscence about childhood prompted by spending the day with two people with a combined age of 13.
One of Elliot's presents last Christmas was a set of cricket rollers. Today they are made of plastic. In my day they were metal and remarkably heavy for their size. They came in a small tin and I believe I still have them somewhere.
I believe they were actually called Owzat but I always refer to them as cricket rollers. I guess there were rules about how to play but I made up my own and they got pretty intricate.
Basically there are two separate rollers. Each has six sides. The first has the numbers 1,2,3,4 and 6 and the word Owzat. For those readers who know little nor care little about cricket, Owzat is the cry from fielders when they believe a batsman is out. The other roller had Not Out, No Ball, stumped, bowled, caught and run out on it.
The basic game consisted of rolling the number roller and adding up the score of a batsman until the word Owzat came up. Then you rolled the other roller to see if he/she was out or not. Each team had 10 wickets and at the fall of the 10th wicket the other player would take their turn and try to beat the score set.
As I said, that was the basic game, but I'm not a basic person. I started to develop rules and regulations based on the real game which I was pretty obsessed with and still am to a certain degree. They got more and more intricate, and involved batting and bowling averages, realistic scores, proper bowling statistics, batting partnerships, number of roles per day calculated along the lines of a real match and even overs taken off when the weather outside was wet or the light was bad. I scaled down real time into units of play and had matches between specially selected teams, having the power to pick or drop players according to how successful they were. I developed a way of two batsman being in at the same time and sharing the strike. In fact it was a close to the real thing as I could make it. I spent hours playing it in the summer holidays and then in the winter had overseas tours. Most of the action took place on the carpet in the lounge and when a batsmen reached 50 or 100 I would stand up in acknowledgement.
In the winter I developed a football league using a dice. This was extremely simple but I spent hours constructing league tables and printing them on a portable typewriter. Basically the home team had 10 rolls of the dice and the away team had seven. A goal was scored each time a six appeared. This mirrored the fact that there is an advantage for teams playing at home.
Before starting a league I worked out all the fixtures and then after each round of matches typed out the league tables. I always played the First Division (now the Premiership) with the one exception - Norwich City were always in it. When it came to the FA Cup I devised a whole different set of rolls. A First Division club at home would have 12 rolls, a first division club away would have 10, a second division (now the Championship) at home would have 10 rolls and a second division away would have eight. A third division team at home would have eight and away would have six. A fourth division team at home would have six and away would have four. Non league teams would have three rolls whether at home or away. So if Manchester United were playing Braintree they would have 12 rolls to Braintree's three. That meant the odds were hugely stacked in the favour of the First Division club but a shock was still possible (mirroring what the position would be in real life).
I also worked out ways of playing Olympic Games and also made up a number of board games (usually on large white sheets of paper which the butcher used to wrap up meat). Skiing and ten pin bowling games were my favourites. I always used to think "wouldn't it be good if there was a real simulation for a skiing or ten pin bowling game?" and then, many years later, along came the Play Station and the Wii etc.
I did have a wonderful bowling alley game which consisted of a long piece of polished wood (probably about six feet in length) and 10 small pins that stayed upright thanks to magnets. The balls were large blue marbles and the pins were on strings. As the balls hit the pins they would be knocked from their magnet base and hang by their strings. It was quite realistic apart from the fact that you couldn't use pins to knock any other pins over and knocking over pins in a split was impossible.
I remember playing many other board games with Wembley a particular favourite around the time that England won the World Cup. It's a sobering thought that nobody under the age of 60 would remember that historic footballing day and those aged 60 would only have been seven or eight.
I watched a recording of the final not so long ago and there were some outstanding performances from the England players - notably Bobby Charlton, Martin Peters (who went on to play over 200 games for Norwich City), Alan Ball and of course Geoff Hurst who scored a hat-trick. A few years after the final I was playing for the Norwich School Football Team and our coach (a Welshman by the name of Howard Thomas) referred to me as the school's Alan Ball. I didn't think much about it at the time but, having seen how Ball played in that World Final, I realise it was a big compliment as Ball was a bundle of energy, covering every blade of grass.
Two other games I really enjoyed were based on horse racing - Totopoly and Escalado. Totopoly was a board game and a few years ago I bought a similar game which was called "The Really Nasty Horse Racing Game." Escalado was different. It consisted of a long cloth track which you attached to a table from one end to the other. There was a box with a handle and six metal horses. When you turned the handle the cloth shook and the horses moved along it. At various intervals there were small yellow raised structures which knocked the horses back and sometimes caused them to fall. It was a simple idea with the aim to pick the winner - of course using matchsticks as using money would be frowned on by parents.
Going back even further I had numerous games based on television programmes like The Army Game, Concentration, Take Your Pick, Double Your Money, Criss Cross Quiz and many more. I guess that's where I got my love of quizzes and irrelevant information from. I remember having one game called "The Magic Robot." You popped this robot with a pointer into one side of a board and pointed to a question and then magically put it on a mirror and it pointed to the correct answer (that's a bit difficult to explain and probably even harder to visualise). To this day I still know that a toxophilite is a lover of archery. That's all thanks to the Magic Robot. The problem with quiz games is that after you have played them a few times you get to know the answers and so the whole thing becomes pointless (Oh did I mention I now have a game of that TV programme?).
How things have changed. Today Elliot plays Minecraft and equally strange computer games that are completely incomprehensible to anyone over the age of 40.
He spends a lot of time watching a Minecraft You Tube channel put together by Preston and Brianna Arsement (yes you read that correctly and somehow the surname seems very appropriate although, for the life of me, I can't think why).
Preston and Brianna are a married couple despite the fact that Mr Arsement (still can't get over that name) looks about 14 and Mrs Arsement looks about 17. Actually they are both 26. They spend all day putting together 30 minute You Tube programmes playing Minecraft. The only thing I can tell you about Minecraft is it involves building things. The language used and the hyper-excitement of the Arsements is beyond me (and yes they are Americans). There seems to be little rhyme or reason to it.
But the Arsements have their heads screwed on. Their channels have millions of followers and they are now mega rich through advertising, endorsements and selling T-Shirts. Of course they have their own merchandising web site selling hoodies, baseball caps and much more, many of which have a flame logo. So successful has their venture been that Brianna, a qualified nurse, gave up her job working in an emergency room at a Texan hospital to become a full time gamer. I bet in her spare time she counts all the money coming in from the merch though. But enough of this frivolity.
Tomorrow more reminiscences of childhood and the music charts I used to put together.
Finally today one of the stupidest things I have heard so far re COVID restrictions.
Yesterday Norwich City were at home to Wycombe Wanderers. Supporters were not allowed to watch the match outside but they were allowed to watch on a screen in one of the lounges. So they could watch indoors where the chance of getting the virus is much greater. But it gets more farcical. There they were in a lounge watching a match on a screen whilst they were prevented from viewing the match on the pitch by a barrier. This makes no kind of sense whatsoever.
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