The image editor posts hopefully
Scotland vs Italy
Previously the wooden spoon fixture, these teams have made some recent progress but the Italians are definite underdogs here. Italy have made 4 changes and given a dayboo to Simone Gesi on the wing. However, they lack Capowuoouuzzzo at full back so, whilst they look fairly settled, they don’t have much in the way of X factor.
Scotland have made 5 changes including leaving out Finn and Hoggy so, while I predict a win, the margin will be smaller without them. Also, given they have lost their last 2 games, they will be motivated to end in style (same could be said for Italy tbh).
Scotland have a better pack and cooler heads. Against Wales, Italy played like headless chickens for much of the game and gave Wales some points either by coughing up the ball in their half or failing to execute the basics. Scotland will be patient and gradually rack up a decent win.
Head-to-head Planet Rugby says that Scotland have won the last 8 fixtures but this only goes back to 2017 and I haven’t dug further. It would take a miracle or a card for Italy to win and it won’t happen this weekend as Scotland get their 9th (or more) win in a row.
30 – 10 to Scotland.
France vs Wales
France, France, France. Until last weekend many people said they had been underwhelming despite only losing in Dublin. That all changed when they swaggered into Twickenham and put 50 on some boys Borthwick had found. They said they could play rugby, double promise, cross their hearts – but they couldn’t.
To be fair, that was the best performance I’ve seen from a team against the English since the dastardly Saffas won the 2019 RWC. Maybe even better. Every time Dupont kicked the ball into space it opened up the back line and a French player waltzed over the line about 10 seconds later. Their defence was aggressive, their ruck speed brutal and every carry seemed to gain at least 3 Robshaws. But most impressive was how clinical they were. I can’t remember a scoring chance being wasted.
Wales on the other hand were solid last weekend but otherwise haven’t set this tournament on fire. They still drag around the reanimated corpse of AWJ but have some new talent including a footballer on the wing. How there isn’t a better 13 in Wales than George North I’ll never know.
There is a ‘last hurrah’ feel to this team but rather a white orc filled Dad’s army willing its way to victory, this feels like a Clive Woodward selected Lions team. If Clive Woodward had coached Wa…. You know what I mean! France to make it 5 in a row against the men in red.
50 – 12 to France
Ireland vs England
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
60 – 8 to Ireland (*starts crying*)
Laughing and crying by Craigsman
Onna telly this week
Friday 17th March
| Bulls v Western Province | 17:00 | Sky Sports Arena |
Saturday 18th March
| Scotland v Italy | 12:30 | BBC1 / RTÉ2 |
| France v Wales | 14:45 | ITV1 / S4C |
| Ireland v England | 17:00 | ITV1 |
Sunday 19th March
| Scotland v Italy (U20s) | 14:00 | BBC iPlayer |
| London Irish v Exeter | 14:00 | BT Sport 1 |
| Ireland v England (U20s) | 17:00 | BBC iPlayer |
| France v Wales (U20s) | 20:00 | BBC iPlayer / S4C |
Ovally Balls 
“We will, of course, probably lose to Georgia and Norway in our next games.”
Just as well Wales didn’t have to play Norway under Pivac.
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@OT – Interesting though from that it doesn’t look as though Canada’s figures are necessarily all that wonderful in themselves though obviously there’s something ‘special’ about the US.
I still think any society would benefit enormously from the great majority of the population having as little idea about how to go about shooting people as I have and as little access to the necessary equipment.
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I’m revisiting my youth, I just bought Billy Bragg tickets
Call up the craftsmen
Bring me the draftsmen
Build me a path from cradle to grave
And I’ll give my consent
To any government
That does not deny a man a living wage
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@ticht
One of the best gigs I’ve ever been to was Billy Bragg in Brighton. He puts on a good show.
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I’m revisiting my childhood and going through all my old Citadel miniatures, Transformers and Biggles books. Now this is with a view to making money, but I fear the research that’s been involved might lead to spending some as well.
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I’m revisiting my childhood and skipping work to go and drink. Otherwise known as a corporate launch with lousy sandwiches and worse wine.
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I was over the transformers by the time I went out drinking. Still into the Citadel stuff though. And probably still read or re-read the odd Biggles book despite Biggles, Algy and Ginger setting an example and abstaining.
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If any of you want to pay a four figure sum for a Transformer car that has turned out to be stupidly valuable due to being the ‘wrong’ colour then I can sell you one. I’ve been advised it may go for not far off what I sold a perfectly serviceable Toyota for a few years ago, madness. Likewise who would have thought that the worst Biggles books (the last few written) would be the ones that are most collectable?
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Biggles and his crew walking into a rough and ready bar in a some out of the way town in the Canadian Arctic and all ordering malted milks (and still getting involved in a fight) is one of my favourite scenes of all.
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I’ve been meaning to ask, CMW, how’s everything after that horrible car/lorry incident a while back?
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Thanks for asking Ticht, I think I’m more or less OK about it. I do still sometimes have the odd moment when I find it strange to still be alive or feel like I’m some sort of ghost though oddly never when I’m driving. I still get a bit of a dodgy feeling when stuck in slow moving traffic jams surrounded by heavy vehicles, but I’ll just have to live with that. The lorry driver who was at fault got sent on a course (that he’ll have had to pay for so I suppose also a fine in that sense) though I think he would have been in proper shit if he’d killed me. And I’d be dead of course.
I still haven’t had my excess back from the insurance company (I’ve had all sorts of flannel from the law firm they used to get the money from the other party’s insurer) and that annoys me more than it should, but it’s the only thing that hasn’t been put to bed and I would really like to able to draw a line under it.
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I think I said before I also now have a Volvo V70 instead of the ‘French van’ as Sag called it. It’s older, considerably less modern in some ways and with far more miles on it, but it is a better thing.
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with very comfy seats.
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Have to say I’ve found myself rather fascinated by the collectors that I’m selling to on Ebay. There are people with whole rooms in their houses that are wall to wall boxed Transformers toys or displays of Citadel box sets (and/or their painted figures). It would be easy to mock, but then I’ve been discussing the Biggles books with my mother and it had become apparent to me that my father must have still been buying them in his 20s as the last one was published in 1970. She told me he didn’t buy the later ones to read at all and didn’t really rate them, but he just had to have them because he was a collector. His main book collection (antiquarian leather-bound stuff, mostly 19th century but some older) is still on display at my mum’s (entirely because neither my brother nor I have anywhere to keep our shares) and I would think anyone was out of their mind who didn’t see it as beautiful. But how is it really any different to the guy with several different versions of Optimus Prime above his desk and hundreds of carefully displayed boxes stacked on the facing wall?
I wonder what my dad would have made of the internet age and people being able to build their collections without having to physically go looking for stuff. Would he have shared that impulse however cold it may seem relative to the way things were or was the joy of it for him in the hunt? I will never know and neither will anyone else.
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“I would think anyone was out of their mind who didn’t see it as beautiful”
This is actually quite controversial as it is unclear whether or not Mrs CMW sees it as beautiful. She certainly doesn’t want to find space here for half of them. I’m sticking to my original statement though.
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“I wonder what my dad would have made of the internet age and people being able to build their collections without having to physically go looking for stuff. “
For a few years now I’ve fancied having an old caman, or shinty stick, hanging on the wall of the room where I play music and watch rugby.
One of these days I’ll come across one in a junk shop/ charity shop, and I do look every time I’m home, though Edinburgh and the Lowlands are unlikely candidates for finding such a thing, let alone Brighton and Sussex
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BB would be your man with his trips to Inveraray. Not sure there’s much worth having going cheap in the shops on the main drag there though. They do have a fairly successful shinty team, I read about their exploits in the Campbeltown Courier. It’s my second favourite part of the paper after the sheriff court reports of the drunken behaviour on Islay.
Last time I was in the charity shop in Campbeltown there was a pretty old set of golf clubs there. I know because I’d just handed it over. Didn’t see any shinty sticks, but then I wasn’t looking. Will keep an eye out next time I’m there though!
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My dad used to take my mum on trips to York when they lived in Leeds/Nottingham/Sheffield. She never saw much of the place though it was just to drag her round various antiquarian bookshops. This would be when they were aged between 18 and 24, how he ever got away with it I’ll never know.
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She also suffered cricket at Headingley, Trent Bridge and Chesterfield and football at Elland Road, Hillsborough and the City Ground. Despite having no interest whatsoever in either. Those were different times.
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Slightly lighter take – and makes the point very bluntly – on Florida’s banning of the statue of David:
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CMW – nothing wrong with antiquarian book shops, but cricket? I’d’ve been down the divorce lawyers faster than you could say googly balls.
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I can remember reading Biggles when I were a lad. There was one (a later one I suspect) where Biggles has to get his old German foe out of some Soviet prison near or in Siberia? And not a Sopwith Camel in sight…
I also remember reading loads of the old Commando comics. I had piles of them lying around my room for a while. Probably got rid of them when I moved up to Glasgow for Uni.
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Oh she liked bookshops herself, but she didn’t have any money and later on he spent all their spare money on books. I think given how things panned out she thinks they could have done other things with it.
She’s been to far more cricket and football matches than I ever have. Think she preferred the cricket because you can ignore it.
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@BB – Biggles Buries a Hatchet. Jet planes which is rare for Biggles. Turns out to be 1958 so there were quite a few after that.
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Just read a summary of the book. Love how they could hide their plane “in the rushes near a river” and that despite being chased by 3 Mig jet fighters, their unarmed propellor plane manages to escape.
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I read one or two Biggles books in primary school, and frankly Biggles and his chums would have been the targets of the buried hatchet.
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Never read Biggles, to be honest. Wasn’t really a big thing down here – you could get them, but I don’t remember Biggles being big. I was enthralled by the Willard Price books, following Hal and Roger around the world (many set in Africa) as they looked for rare animals for their father’s zoo on Long Island. Much of it would be unpublishable today, I think, with the characterisations of locals in many countries, and the condescending attitudes that went with it, but it gave me an absolute passion for the African bush that remains to this day. I read many of them whilst in the Kruger Park and other ‘Big 5’ game reserves in SA and they were thrilling.
My other favourite was Wind in the Willows, which I won in Grade 2 as a prize (peak of my academic career, that) and have reread many times since. The description of hot buttered toast and tea engendered a love for that too, especially on a cold, wet day, which is what I imagined life was like in the UK pretty much every day. Cider with Rosie changed that impression somewhat, but travel to the UK since then has reinforced it more than not! As a kid I also loved the Giles Annuals, even if I didn’t really understand the politics at the time.
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I think I read all the Willard Price books my primary school library had. My dad had a load of Giles books. I was also lost for most of it, but I was about 7 at the time.
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I read all of Willard Price and loved it, but it was dated even then and I think I was fairly unusual in reading them. Biggles certainly wasn’t big by the 1980s. In fact he wasn’t all that big by the 60s which is why far fewer of the later books were published and the 1st edition hardbacks are now at least in some cases quite valuable. I’m very confident that my having read about 70 of them is not the norm for my generation (I read them in the late 80s), but I suppose I read them in the first place because they were my dad’s and then found I liked them. My mum told me the other day that my dad had said they weren’t worth reading to us or us reading later on even though he had loved them as a child. I can’t help wondering if he would have stuck to that point of view once I ended up loving them. He can’t have lost his own taste for occasionally reading daft adventure books as he left behind enough dodgy Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley thrillers from the 70s as well as all the serious stuff.
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Somehow I don’t see the girls getting into Biggles, but if any of them do then I’ve taken the view that they’ve got sixty-odd of them to read before they need to go near any that are worth over a hundred quid and that that ought to be enough.
The Middle One is reading Murder on the Orient Express at the moment and seems to be enjoying it. I can’t wait for her to get to the brilliantly absurd ending.
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There was of course a Biggles film in 1986 which was a flop. Just looked it up and there’s a novelisation of it by ‘Larry Milne’. Shame he’s not around for us to ask him about it though I think he was keener on one of his other works.
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Beadle’s Glaws Against La Rochelle :-
Gloucester Rugby |
Starting XV
15. Santi Carreras
14. Louis Rees-Zammi*
13. Chris Harris
12. Seb Atkinson
11. Ollie Thorley*
10 Billy Twelvetrees
9. Stephen Varney*
1. Mayco Vivas (First GR start)
2. Seb Blake*
3. Kirill Gotovtsev
4. Freddie Clarke*
5. Matias Alemanno
6. Ruan Ackermann
7. Lewis Ludlow* (c)
8. Jack Clement*
Replacements
16. Henry Walker*
17. Harry Elrington
18. Jamal Ford-Robinson
19. Cam Jordan*
20. Freddie Thomas*
21. Ben Morgan
22. Charlie Chapman*
23. Jonny May*
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Oh man, I loved the Willard Price books as a kid.
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Devoured Alastair MacLean and Desmond Bagley. Even wrote my Sixth Year English Dissertation on MacLean, and why his latter stuff was crap(per) than the earlier stuff because he was obviously writing for cinema.
(Well that’s what I thought at the time, anyway). HMS Ulysses is far and away his best, also liked Guns of Navarone (and the film) and South By Java Head. Desmond Bagley wrote a thriller set in Iceland which became a TV series in which some poor guy drove around Iceland with some gadget (that looked as though it was made of Meccano) being chased by Nasty Soviets. Or were they Nasty Americans? The scenery was stunning though.
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“MacLean, and why his latter stuff was crap(per) than the earlier stuff because he was obviously…”
Drunk. And maybe bored.
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And in some cases partly written by someone else.
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Wow, that’s something of a tour de force of my adolescent reading there. Along with, um, classical Greek literature that my mum was studying at the time. Was always way more entertaining than dour Dickens or excruciating Elliot.
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BB
McLean, Hornblower, Hammond Innes, Neville Shute, ………………dates me
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I never read Force 10 from Navarone, but putting that to one side the first properly bad MacLean book is Puppet on a Chain although that has the redeeming feature of being unintentionally hilarious. They just got worse from then on.
BB is right about the best one.
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The one that got me into them was Caravan to Vaccares from the school library. That’s later than Puppet on a Chain and is really pretty terrible (though one should be careful not to run out of words before having to describe the likes of River of Death). I didn’t know that then though.
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The one that got me into them was Caravan to Vaccares from the school library which is really pretty terrible (though it’s important not to run out of words before having to describe the likes of River of Death). I didn’t know that then though.
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Sorry about the repeat post, my computer playing tricks.
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Running Blind was the Bagley book set in Iceland. The main character drove a Ticht-friendly Landrover too.
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‘Mon Embra!
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CJ’s mate not faring well in this exchange with Cips
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‘MON EMBRA!
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This referee is a nightmare.
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You know, I don’t regret stopping listening to JB’s podcast one bit. I’ll stick with the ‘woke’ Blood & Mud one (Lee and JOsh are a lot funnier to boot).
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Well that was tense. Can’t see Ulster (or even Leinster should they unluckily beat Ulster) worrying too much about either side in the next round.
Mind you, both teams have been Raynal’d.
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Embra need to get the ball to Van Der Merveille in the second half.
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