The Olympic Experience

I have to say that Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the Olympics was spectacular. I was a bit worried after the Beijing Olympics that anything in comparison would look like a damp squid but he really pulled it off: mainly by playing to our strengths by being fast, funny, self-deprecating, ever so slightly bonkers with perfect chorography and an Olympic cauldron that was a work of genius. The odd thing is, by the time this started I had already been to my Olympic event on Thursday.

The Olympic Football seems to take some stick with some claiming it has no place in the Olympics and others claiming that it is a second rate tournament. I would disagree on both counts as it has been at the Olympics almost from the beginning and, with the men’s event being restricted to under 23’s, it still retains an element of the amateur origins of the Olympics that have been largely lost with the mega-bucks of the main track and field events. I actually bought my tickets for Hampden last year – seemingly in a minority – and had been hoping for one of the big names in the form of Brazil or Spain. I was duly rewarded with the World and newly crowned European champions of Spain playing Japan with the added bonus of Morocco vs Honduras to start off.

The doomsayers in the media had been predicting some sort of organisational Hell for the games. I was a little worried when it was reported that the video for the North Korean women’s team at Wednesday’s Hampden game had been accompanied by the flag from the South. Oh well, at least it wasn’t as if we offended some sort of unstable dictatorship who keep letting off nuclear weapons and who we are probably still technically at war with. As it was, the security around the ground was fine: mainly as Strathclyde Police were running the show and they have plenty of experience at organising major international football events. However, I also have to say that the non-police security staff were both efficient and courteous. As it was we got to the ground a bit too early and had to wait an hour before the first match started with a local pipe band providing the pre-match entertainment.

The one area I would quibble with was the catering. The pre-game literature pointed out that no food or drink would be allowed into the ground but that quality nutritious food would be available. It wasn’t and I think the average Stenhousemuir home game has a better selection. As it was, the choices were Scotch pies, steak pies, a bean pie (whatever that was – intended for the veggies) and chicken curry pie which appeared to be a halal option – this was a nice touch given that Morocco were playing but entirely useless as it is Ramadan and the faithful wouldn’t be able to eat anything anyway. The drinks were a choice of Coca Cola fizzies, coffee or something described as “Beefy Drink” which I am assuming is a de-branded version of Bovril. I suppose it’s quite typical of the fayre at Scottish football grounds – at least it would have been in the 1960’s.

Anyway, on to the football. Morocco kicked off against Honduras at 12:00 with the ground only half full. I rather suspected that this may be the case with Spain being the main attraction. However, those that turned up late missed a cracker of a game. I have to say that I sided with  Morocco as the Hondurans were rather au fait with the diving antics of the senior professionals that really wind me up. Also, I was rather taken with the speed and talent of some of the Moroccan forwards, particularly the shaven headed Nordin Amrabat (actually an over 23 player) who appeared to have the ball attached to his feet with Velcro such was his control down the wing. The Moroccans scored with a belter of a goal in the first half just in front of where we were sitting. In the second half things started to get a bit tetchy with the Hondurans scoring and then being awarded a pretty dodgy penalty (it looked like a straight dive from my pretty decent vantage point.) I managed to get a photo of this being converted:

Morocco were not to be outdone and managed a fantastic equaliser before things started to get nasty. Zakarya Bergdich was sent off for kicking out at a Honduran player (who I later discovered had just kicked Bergdich) but there had been a fair bit of baiting going on before hand. Morocco held on but it rather put a dampener on the rest of the game.

There was an hour’s gap before the Spain vs Japan game and we queued up for the crap food for much of this time. It also became clear that the ground was now filling up quite nicely. I had noticed quite a few Moroccan fans before the games and the Japanese were also there in good numbers and had made quite an effort with a couple of girls dressing up in Kimonos and one chap looking something akin to a Samurai warrior (sans weaponry). I took this picture of the couple who were sitting just behind us. It was more difficult to see many Spanish fans, there were probably quite a few there but they were swamped by the number of British (and, presumably, mostly Scottish) fans who had turned up in Spanish replica shirts or with Spanish flags and scarves. Let’s face it, this was the big attraction and we were all waiting to see a master class from the World Champion’s wunderkinder. Except, no-one had explained this to the Japanese…

It’s the great mystery: just how do you stop the Spanish Tika-Taka passing your team to death. The Japanese youngsters seem to have found a way – simply by sharp tackling, intercepting passes and a frantic, furious work-rate. I really have not seen so much energy expended in 90 minutes as this young Japan side were able to draw on. They certainly had the skill to take on the Spanish on a man to man basis but the pace of the counter attacking was really breath-taking. It really didn’t come as a major surprise when they took the lead through Borussia Mönchengladbach’s Yuki Otsu – other than the Spanish really looked to be in total disarray. It could have, and should have been, a 2-0 lead at half time. Inigo Dominguez tripped Nagai on the edge of the box. Nagai got up and took a quick free kick for Higashi to score – only for the referee to pull play back and send Dominguez off for fouling as the last man. It was a poor choice in my opinion and neither in Japan’s nor the game’s interests.

As the second half commenced the Japanese only seemed to become better with counter-attack after counter-attack. The only floor I could see in their game is one very obvious one: the game finished 1-0 and for all the spirit of Japan’s game, their finishing was rather poor. However, the other odd thing to witness was that the Hampden crowd, who had come to see the mighty Spanish, were now cheering and willing on the East Asians with chants of "Nippon! Nippon!” being heard around the ground. Towards the end of the game it was quite clear that the Japanese players were exhausted but they still kept attacking the Spanish goal right into stoppage time. A standing ovation was to follow and the Japanese players came over to acknowledge Hampden’s North stand at the end:

For all the naysayers the football was a hugely enjoyable event and a great day in the Olympic tradition. It’s certainly not one I will forget in a hurry.

Hidden Messages

I’ve been decorating Jake’s bedroom this week. We removed the badly fitted units and stripped the wallpaper down to the plaster so that it could be repaired and re-primed. We also aimed to paint the room in colours more of our choosing and less of the previous owner’s preference of dazzling bright colours mixed with nicotine shaded ceilings. After removing all the paper it was clear that the walls, for the most part were in a reasonable state of repair although they needed cracks filling and a thin cost of paint to cover the now bare plaster. There were various marks on the wall marking out the unit sizes in feet and inches but on one wall was this very faintly pencilled message:

My grandfather was a builder and I always remembered that if he was papering a wall he would leave a message underneath with his name, the date and some snippets of news, the football results or some topical trivia. I’m not sure whether this was through nostalgia or vanity but after looking long and hard at this message I determined that it was:

Camelon Co-Operative Paints & Dyes

28/6/23

D Johnson

A Harris

 The names are my best guess as they were very blurred but the company name was very clear (Camelon is the district in West Falkirk that neighbours Larbert and Stenhousemuir – and probably nothing to do with King Arthur) but the date is quite amazing: 28^th April 1923 – almost 90 years ago which probably relates to when the extension on that part of the house was done. They obviously did a good job.

I was also quite intrigued that it was a co-operative that carried out the work. I always imagine painters and decorators in years gone by being like the men in Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists who were constantly scraping an existence on subsistence wages. It’s nice to think that Tressell’s work may have inspired the creation of a decorator’s co-op.

As it is, the message is now gone as the wall was primed following the plaster repair but I’m sure that Messers Johnson and Harris would have appreciated a job well done.

Glenbuck

 

As I was travelling down the M74 this week I took the chance to take a minor diversion and visit the village of Glenbuck - or at least what remains of it. Glenbuck was a small mining community in Ayrshire which had, at it’s peak, around 1,000 people living there. The last deep mine closed in 1931 and the community went in to decline. The bulk of the village was demolished to make way for an opencast site in the 1990s and the village would have been all but forgotten had it not been for the remarkable success of their local football team, the Glenbuck Cherrypickers, who produced at least 38 (and probably more) professional footballers including the legendary Liverpool manager, Bill Shankly.

 The road that led to the centre of the village is now an access point for the opencast site. As it was a Saturday when I visited there didn’t seem to be any activity.

There are some cottages remaining. This cottage appeared to be occupied as there was smoke emerging from the chimney. I didn’t look any further as it was a private road.

When it was announced that the old village was to be demolished a monument was erected by Liverpool fans to acknowledge the village's sporting history and as the birthplace of Bill Shankly.

I’m not sure if the site is regularly visited but there was a Liverpool football shirt left in tribute – it had their shirt sponsors from a couple of years ago so I don’t know if it had been there for a while (I replaced it after I had taken the pictures).

The only other sign of activity I could see was the trout fishing at the loch.

It’s difficult to say why a tiny community like Glenbuck produced so many professional sportsmen but I can think of at least two reasons. Firstly, there really wasn’t that much to do so the endless games of 5-a-side passed the time and gave the men something to look forward to after a hard day’s work. With this concentration of playing the poor players would become competent, the competent ones would become good, and any with a real streak of talent would become exceptional. Secondly, mining is a hard and dangerous life and, in all probability, an early death. In the early part of the 20^th Century professional footballers where not the highly paid superstars they are now but they earned more than miners for essentially doing an activity which they loved in the first place. Any chance to play professionally would be grabbed, gratefully, with both hands.

Aside from Bill Shankly the town produced many players who excelled both in Scottish and English football, including Sandy Tait and Sandy Brown who won the FA Cup with Tottenham, Bob Blythe who managed Portsmouth, the Knox brothers who would play for clubs such as  Sunderland and Everton and also Bob Shankly, Bill’s older brother, who played at Falkirk before coaching at Stenhousemuir and managing at Falkirk, Third Lanark, Dundee, Hibernian and Stirling. His time at Dundee was quite remarkable as he won the League Championship and went on to take them to the semi-final of the European Cup. This must have provided an inspiration to Bill as his Liverpool side won the English Second Division in the same year. I managed to find the following article which has some pictures of the town as was.

Scottish football has been in turmoil recently and it is difficult to remember that, until fairly recently, Scotland was a major exporter of football talent. I’m not sure whether the decline in grass roots football has more to do with the failed Rangers model of buying in players from abroad or that there are now more distractions and life is generally easier than the one the Cherrypickers endured. It’s hard to say but the financial jolt from the Rangers debacle may be inspiration that the game has needed for many years.

Summerlee

I’ve been off work this week. With it being the first week of the school holidays we had considered going away. Originally, we had discussed going to the West Country but gradually put this off in favour of going away later in the year. As it was, the torrential rain and flooding in Devon makes that look like a lucky escape but we have hardly had the driest week ourselves. There are only so many times that the children can be kept amused by the latest Eastern European animated feature on LoveFilm Instant so it is fortunate that we actually live somewhere that is a major tourist destination itself.

 One of the things I’ve discovered over the years is that many of the best tourist attractions in Scotland are often free. Places like the Kelvingrove and Riverside Museum in Glasgow are great entertainment for the boys but this time we decided to go to Summerlee, the “Museum of Scottish Industrial Life”, which is in Coatbridge. I used to pass by this when I worked in Bellshill but I didn’t really know much about it. I set the Sat Nav, just in case I got lost, although it was the Sat Nav that had the problems as we had the wrong postcode. Anyway, my memory of Lanarkshire isn’t too bad and we found our way there. The museum is on the site of the Summerlee ironworks which closed during the great depression. Part of the ironworks has been excavated – it seems odd that archaeologists are now turning the attention from ancient ruins to sites that would be within the memory of the town’s oldest residents but these things are as much a part of our history as the castles and battle sites and are worth preserving in their own right.

The museum is split into two sections. The main hall is a more traditional museum with restored items of machinery along with artefact’s from those who lived and worked around the ironworks. The rest of the site is more of a living museum with a working tramway (seemingly imported from the Ruhr) going a short distance to miner’s cottages which have been decorated to demonstrate how home life for the workers would have been in periods from the 1840’s through to the 1960’s (sadly, I recognised quite a few items from the later homes). Next to the cottages is a preserved mine-head which Raymond and I went down with a tour guide. Fortunately, this was dark enough to prevent me from becoming entirely claustrophobic but it is narrow, damp and rather unpleasant. It does give a very good idea of what the working conditions were like for the miners but it isn’t somewhere I would want to be on a regular basis.

Aside from the museum there is also a café and decent sides playground so the kids were kept amused and the rain, thankfully, did ease off. Overall it was another decent day out and quite a cheap one at that. We did venture into Edinburgh later in the week but the traffic system is now so messed up there that even the Sat Nav gave up!

Blowing Hot Air

I’ve had chance this week to assess what the energy use is like in our house. I took the meter readings that I have been collecting each month and plotted the daily use of both electricity and gas over the year. I used 26^th June as the starting point because this was when I insulated the loft last year. The graph below shows the daily use in KWH of  gas (in blue) and electricity (in red) throughout the year: 

 Overall, my reaction to the figures was HOW MUCH?!? The worrying thing is that this was after I had made some attempt to improve the insulation and over the year I have made various changes to reduce the overall energy use and/or cost. Some of this was intentional, such as swapping out incandescent and halogen light bulbs for  low energy equivalents. Some has been incidental such as swapping an electric shower for one that runs off the gas heated hot water supply or replacing our broken down CRT television with an energy efficient LED one. In fact looking at the cost is quite a useful analysis both in financial and environmental terms as the price of electricity is a reasonable proxy for its CO2 emmissions compared to gas:

 Now the interesting thing here is that my effort to reduce the amount electricity we use has been quite successful. I suspect that the largest factors are to do with washing and drying: Our tumble drier was “C” rated when it was bought (actually reasonably efficient at the time) but the lousy weather we have been enduring this year has meant it has been used more than we would like. However, the one massive factor is that the energy use is seasonal and the vast majority of usage is simply keeping the house warm. In fact it is so high that if the use in Winter was sustained throughout the year it would place us within the government’s definition of “fuel poverty”.

The question is, what can we do to reduce the energy use? I’ve insulated the loft so that has gone as far as is possible but it was quite interesting to see how the rest of the house held up during the coldest months. The house has essentially three sections. The extension at the back was built 20 years ago and so is built to reasonably modern standards. The only area of improvement I could see here is to replace the patio window (which has a metal frame) with something more insulating: this is a relatively high cost item for only a small benefit. Interestingly, the old stone built Victorian section was relatively cosy throughout the Winter months. This was the section where I installed the loft insulation so I expect it helped. The only place I noticed that was very cold was the marble fireplace which was cool to touch and covered in condensation when it was frozen outside. By far the worst bit in terms of heating is the 1920s extension in the middle. This is built out of solid brick with quite a high ceiling and, I would expect, little or no insulation. The heat in the back bedroom in this section appears to rapidly drain from this room and both the ceiling and window jambs were cold to touch. This is the next area I am planning on tackling. The idea is to insert foam behind the jambs and to install a false floating ceiling with insulation above it.

In terms of cost reductions it will take a very long time to recover the cost of extra insulation but I would take any saving as a bonus to what I would actually want to achieve: a warm house. Our old house was smaller but the heating requirement was about half of what we have now. It was also a 19^th Century stone building but in that case the conversion was effectively a modern house built within the walls of an old farm building. Whilst it would be difficult to make an older house emulate the insulation properties of a modern construction it should still be possible to vastly improve the heat retention of our house. Hopefully we can make some improvements before the weather really takes a turn for the worse.