"Hemel Hempstead is Hemel Hempstead"

Yep, that was a genuine piece of dialogue from a Play For Today. From 1976  . . . and it wasn't even using Hemel Hempstead as a punchline for a change. I guess there was never many laughs in Play For Today back in the day when you think about it. Though to direct any sort of criticism - however mild - at the PFT canon can result in a lynch mob turning up at your door.

Anyway, back to the darts. The Dart Bot still thinks it's peak Phil Taylor but I messed with its head by scoring a Round 9. It'll punish me repeatedly over the next few days.

*The Play For Today? Bernard Kops' Rocky Marciano Is Dead.

Round 430: The Shendish Hundred

Darts Thrown: June 9th 2020
Blog Written: June 21st 2020

Highest Score: 140
Lowest Score: 7
Sixties: 50
100+: 20
180s: 0
180s Missed: 0

Blogger's Note: Written in haste, so there will be spelling mistakes and slapdash grammar.

When we went into lockdown, I thought I would come out the other end playing darts like Peter Wright. Instead, most days I play darts more like Edgar Wright. So, it's nice to occasionally play a half decent round. My first 50-Sixties round in a long, long time.

I put it down to my anarcho-capitalist/Peñarol dart flights:

*'The Shendish Hundred'? It's a Hemel Hempstead pub darts term from back in the day.

Now for a random video. Alex R. shared this one on Facebook a few days ago. I'd never heard of them before, and part of the reason I'm posting it on the blog is because I know I'll forget it otherwise. The comments on YouTube are annoying 'cos people will insist on making the Talking Heads comparison . . . but it's better than that. I'll need to dig out the lyrics sometime as I'm sure they hold up. But it's the tune that grabbed me initially, and I was adult enough to put to one side that grown men shouldn't be on skateboards.

De Lux - "Oh Man The Future"

Porridge by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais and Ian Marshall (British Broadcasting Corporation 1975)

‘Would you like to read my Angling Times?' said Mr Barrowclough. He was the other screw.

Now that was an opening I couldn't refuse. I could see the headlines screaming at me from the front page. ‘And now -The 2p Lugworm!’ Full of full-frontal salmons and the price of cod inside no doubt. I reached across to take the magazine. As I did the Scottish nurk snatched it out of my hand.

‘God Almighty,' he says. 'Molly-coddling him already. You seem, Mr Barrowclough, to forget what prison is for. He’s got a debt to pay to society, and that debt doesn’t include reading informative magazines.'

With that he settles back into his seat with a last jerk of his neck. Yes, just like a turkey.

The other screw looked just as surprised as I did. I fell silent for a minute or two and gazed out of the window at North London’s back gardens. Then I thought of the long journey ahead with no reading material or television and I thought, Well, we have got to do something to pass the time, haven’t we? I looked at MacKay out of the comer of my eye and said very casually, ‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with C.' Now for some unknown reason he took that very personal. Leaning across and wagging a finger he said, ‘Watch it, Fletcher, watch it,' he says.

‘It was cuffs, handcuffs I had in mind, Mr MacKay. Oh, sorry, I should have said HC, that would have been more fair.'

Don’t come the old soldier with me,’ he says.

‘Wouldn’t dream of it, I says.’

‘Any more trouble with you and I'll . . .'

‘Let me guess,’ I says. ‘You’ll wait till we pick up speed at, say, Hemel Hempstead and chuck me out of the window. Then put it down to attempting to escape.'

This offended the other one's sense of fairness. *Oh, he wouldn't do that,’ he says.

‘I suppose you’re right,’ I says. 'Couldn’t spell Hemel Hempstead. He’d wait till we got to Rugby.'

I felt sure that MacKay and I were going to have a right old game with each other in the months to come. I could tell by the look he was giving me that I was going to be one of his favourite targets.

‘Look,’ said Barrowclough. ‘There’s a long journey ahead, let us not conduct it in a feeling of hostility and aggression. Why don’t we all have a nice cup of tea?’

‘Oh yes,1 I says. 'A cup of tea solves all nasty expertiences as my old Mother used to say. And I’ll have one of those individual fruit pies if they’ve got any.'

Rob Roy gave me a hard look, he wasn’t sure whether I was in fact having a go at him or not. Anyway, he decided that it is a good idea and off he strutted leaving us alone in our first-class compartment with the blinds pulled down so as not to offend the eyes of the gentry with a glimpse of a convicted felon.

I thought, this should give me an opportunity to find out some valuable information about old misery-guts. The number one priority in dealing with two screws is to inject a little bit of bother between them. Divide and rule. So nodding towards the door I says, ‘He's a laugh, ain’t he? Sort of casual like. He plays it careful, won’t be drawn.’

‘I expect it's with him being a Scotsman and having to miss Hogmanay,’ he says.

‘Scot is he? I’d never have guessed,’ I replied. But the sarcasm goes right over his head.

'Oh yes, and they do take it very seriously, the Scots.' 

Yeah, well they’d take any excuse for drinking seriously, wouldn’t they? Nothing social about their drinking habits, is there? With them, it’s like a religion. They don’t enjoy a few glasses of the old vino, oh, no, they drink to get drunk. And, whereas other people having reached that state get a little warm and sentimental, or as in my case, randy, your Scot, all he wants is to fight and smash a glass in someone’s boat-race. Only one thing worse than a drunken Scot and that’s a sober one, an' we’ve just seen one of them, haven’t we?’

I settled back in my seat feeling the power of having got that off my chest. He sat there blinking through his spectacles, sucking his teeth before saying unhappily, I'm Scots on my mother’s side.'

Football, It's a Minging Life! by Rick Holden (DB Publishing 2010)

Let’s end with an amusing little anecdote at Watford. One weekend when Jean was away, a few of the players and I went out on the town after the game. We ended up at a night club in Hemel called the Living Room, which was renowned as a ‘grab a granny’ venue. Somehow, we’d been split up into two pairs. Myself and Lee Richardson, whose never-to-be-forgotten domestic skills included cleaning vomit up with the vacuum cleaner, and Tony Coton and Mel Rees, two daft ’keepers. Lee and I went for a curry, and the two rocket scientists went back to my house to wait for us to return. When we returned I found a cat-sized hole in the ceiling of my conservatory and Mingan sitting next to half a dozen empty lager cans. I was convinced for months that Mingan was the culprit; being a Leeds cat he would have no problem getting stuck into the drink. It hadn’t really occurred to me that the two stooges had got bored of waiting for me to return and had broken in through my bedroom window, putting their feet through the roof as they climbed. That’s goalkeepers for you. I cleared away the lager cans and, to this day, Jean thinks the hole was made by the cat jumping off the window ledge onto the conservatory roof.

Hating on HP Clash style

Looks like a certain someone won't be getting a civic reception from Dacorum Borough Council any time soon:

What one song would feature on the soundtrack to your life?
London Calling by the Clash. It reminds me of opening my eyes, looking around at Hemel Hempstead and thinking, "I'll get out of here." [Claire Skinner interviewed in yesterday's Guardian.]

And there was me thinking that she was from Kings Langley. It could have been worse. She could have been from Tring..

Longdean's most famous son . . .

. . . gets a write-up in the Football Guardian.

And, yep, the blog still gets periodic hits from people in search of Longdean's most famous daughter.

Phil Neville's Everton teammates politely ask him if he meant to score an own goal for Man United

What an absolutely brilliant result.

I hate Chelsea more than the Sparts hate the International Bolshevik Tendency. That's how much I hate Abramovich's mercenaries.

Just sat through the Chelsea versus Bolton game on Fox Soccer Channel, becoming increasingly exasperated by Drogba's histrionics and Bolton defence's desire to shoot themselves in the foot by trying to pass to Chelsea forwards in and around the Bolton penalty box. (They were that bad, they thankfully missed.)

It was wonderful watching the unfolding drama of the crowd at Stamford Bridge as the tv cameras panned across the changing fizzogs of the Chelski faithful as they went from being the shiny happy faces of fans whose team were winning 2-1 in the spring sun, whilst their rivals were losing 2-0 away from home, to becoming a seeming open audition of emo mums, dads and kids as they witnessed the sudden seismic shift in fortunes of Davies's equalising goal for Bolton with the accompanying news coming through from Goodison that Manchester United had taken a 3-2 lead via a Wayne Rooney goal.

Chelsea fans hadn't looked that miserable since they heard the false rumour that Gordon Brown was thinking of putting a special tax on id bracelets.

Loved it that Phil Neville scored an own goal against his old club to make it 2-2. Never mind that I'm still getting regular hits to the blog via the 'Gary Neville' + 'socialist' google search; he's the wrong Neville brother. Phil Neville is my working class hero.

Also sweet to note that Chris Eagles scored the fourth goal for United in their 4-2 win. What's the big deal with that? Only that Chris Eagles has now officially replaced Julia Bolino as the most famous person ever to have attended Longdean Comprehensive School.

Bookshop Memories

Reminder from Hak Mao that today is the anniversary of George Orwell's death.

And yes, like every other sod in the blogsphere, I too went through my phase of discovering the wonderful writings of George Orwell as an adolescent. (And there was me thinking of myself as such a unique type at the time.)

Living in a one bookshop town, I didn't have a lot of choice when it came to what political literature I could buy and read when the political bug first bit me but luckily it was a couple of years after 1984 and that meant that you couldn't go into this bookshop without tripping over remaindered copies of Orwell reprints. In a short space of time I devoured all the Orwell that I could get my hands on (though I've never be able to bring myself to read Burmese Days, and I'm saving Coming Up For Air for a rainy day.)

I know most people will cite Homage To Catalonia as their favourite Orwell book - and I love it too - but I've also always had a soft spot for Down and Out in Paris and London.