Our return from our month-long Orkney trip led quite nicely into the start of the Boro season and a home friendly against Spanish side Espanyol. In the same weekend we also managed to get a bit more of the Yorkshire Wolds Way in, covering twelve miles in an out and back route, heading north from Nunburnholme.
Our walking was delayed as we detoured into the church at Nunburnholme to have a look at the Commonwealth War Graves. The service had just finished, and we were invited inside for coffee, biscuits and a tour of the interesting stuff.
There was a stained-glass window that was more than seven hundred years old. They were hoping to have it restored, which would involve taking it apart for cleaning before sandwiching it between two pieces of toughened glass. They also have a sarcophagus dating back nine hundred years that was recently dug up accidently whilst repairing the drains.
Highlights of the walk itself were a couple of red kites and watching a glider released and then soaring upwards.
For the Espanyol game we decided to get a box. Split between twelve it was fifty quid a head, which is less than a tenner more than you’d pay walk-up for a regular West Stand Upper seat. Our thinking was largely driven by Tom wanting to bring his son, Nolan, for his first game and trying to make it as easy as possible with a kid who has only just had his first birthday.
We were served chicken and rice for a pre-match meal. Alistair’s little brother Jem was also attending his first Boro game and he highly rated the chicken nuggets that came as a kid’s option.
Our seats were in the back two rows of the West Lower and whilst they were great for the kids to wander down to pitch side to track down Roary the mascot, I think I prefer a more elevated view from an upper tier these days.
On the field it was good to see former Boro player Kike get a decent reception on his first return.
I thought that we looked ok in the three-three draw, with a couple of new signings on show. It appears that we have bought extremely well in this window, and it bodes well for another promotion push.
Spending a week on the Orkney mainland gave us the opportunity to see a few more of the sights. We had a wander around Stromness, a town where I’d played Bobby George at darts thirty-one years previously. He won. The Cuween burial chamber involved a walk up a hill that gave some good views across the island, but the chamber itself didn’t take up too much of our time as it had a gate across the entrance.
The Ring of Brodgar was worth a visit, particularly as it had a path around the stone circle that then detoured away alongside the nearby loch. It is a popular attraction and any photos that we took without people in them were carefully framed and timed to avoid the coachloads of visitors from the cruise ships.
There were some football games kicking off at seven o’clock on the Thursday evening. That gave us sufficient time after I finished work for the day to head out to Yesnaby Castle. It is a two-legged sea stack that you get to by walking along the top of the cliffs.
It was windy enough for a waterfall to blow upwards. We thought that we had spotted some nesting puffins, but closer examination of the photos revealed that they had skinny pointed beaks, so they were probably some sort of gull.
The fixture I’d selected was at the Dounby Community Pitch. It is next to the school and just along from a community centre. Dounby seems like a proper village, more so than the likes of Harray or Twatt (yes, really) with the Smithfield Hotel providing a focal point at the crossroads.
The game was in the Reserve League, with Dounby in second place and Thorfinn sixth of the seven teams in the League. The teams play each other twice and we are closing in on the end of the twelve-game season. Dounby needed to win if they were to keep the pressure on Hotspurs at the top of the table.
The blustery conditions made life difficult for the teams and neither side really got to grips with the wind in the first half. I watched most of it from my car, pitchside, as did the other six or seven people in attendance. The ref limited the half-time break to five minutes, which I think is sufficient. FIFA take note.
Dounby had chances to clinch the points in the second half, hitting the same post three times in the space of eight minutes. Sometimes, though, it isn’t your day and Thorfinn scored twice in the last quarter of an hour for an unlikely victory.
As Dounby only had one remaining fixture, the result meant that Hotspurs would be crowned champions.
The plan for the Orkney holiday was to start with a couple of weeks spent on small islands. We began with Shapinsay, then Hoy, before moving back to the mainland and staying in Stenness for the final week.
Shapinsay is great. It’s a small island with around three hundred residents. We were staying in a former farmhouse with no neighbours other than sheep for a few hundred yards. We walked to the Bay of Sandgarth and up to a standing stone, Mor Stein.
The best walk on Shapinsay was along the coast and past Balfour Castle. There were seabirds swooping down, possibly in protection of their nests. The highland cattle took an interest in us as we passed them but didn’t approach. The only downside was a couple of locked gates that stopped us doing the circular route that we had planned, but it was no real hardship to retrace our steps along the shoreline.
For our second week we moved to Hoy. It’s much bigger than Shapinsay, but with a similar small population. I was working again by then so most of the good stuff took place after four in the afternoon. In a place where it doesn’t get dark until well after ten, that allowed sufficient time for most things that I’d want to do.
We called in at the Naval Cemetery where I noticed that some of the sailors were older than me when their ships went down. At the Lifeboat Museum in Lyness I chatted to a bloke who was friends with someone I’d worked with thirty years ago. At the Dwarfie Stane, the dog pissed up against another Neolithic tomb.
One evening we walked the six-mile round trip between Rackwick Bay and the Old Man of Hoy. It must be up there with some of the most scenic walks that I’ve done. Small birds hopped along the path in and out, with gulls nesting in the cliffs around the stack.
We also spent a day on Flotta, walking around the edge of the island. I worked there for seven years and spent the last six staying at the terminal. It was strange being back as so much of it didn’t match the memories that I had. The football pitch that we played on in the summer evenings was much smaller than I’d remembered. It was nowhere near the full-size that I’d thought it was, although it’s possible that it has since been reduced. Similarly, the post office where we bought cans and drank them at the counter with the postmaster had vanished altogether. Surely it really had existed?
The walk was good though and the dog made a decent effort at chasing a rabbit. Whilst he didn’t succeed in catching it, he got closer than we’d anticipated. Maybe all the walking is boosting his fitness.
Whilst the islands were all great to visit, if I wanted to watch some football the Orkney mainland was the only place where that would happen. I checked the fixtures for our final week and saw that I could get to games on the Tuesday and Thursday evenings.
The first one of those evenings had a fixture in Harray. I knew the village quite well, having picked up a colleague who lived there on the way to work for a year. I’d also been fishing on Harray loch, although I didn’t catch anything. It was a ten-minute drive from where we were staying at Stenness and I parked pitch side, next to the Community Centre.
From what I can see, the Orkney football clubs are divided into an A League and a B League, with six and seven clubs in each respectively. There’s also an eight-team league for reserve teams.
Outside of this structure, there are parish competitions and East v West games, where players represent the area that they are from, rather than a club. This fixture was in the E Frazier Electrical Limited B League. Hosts Harray went into the game in sixth place, with visitors Accies up in third.
I’d initially thought that the other cars might have contained people watching, but most were empty and likely belonged to the players. That meant that the game kicked off with just four spectators, including me. Three others turned up midway through the first half, perhaps they had gotten stuck behind a tractor.
Whilst we had a ref, the linos were recruited from the subs. One fella gave the impression that he was new to the game and when he ran the line, didn’t realise that he should stop at half-way. For a while we had the bizarre sight of two linesmen monitoring the same half of the pitch. He also delayed proceedings whenever he abandoned his flag to cross the adjacent road and search for the match ball in the long grass.
The swirling wind wasn’t conducive to a decent game, but both teams tried to keep the ball down. Accies scored twice in the first half, but the second half was more open with both sides missing chances and the goalies making some decent saves. In the end, the two goals were sufficient for Accies to take the points.
I hadn’t been expecting much added time, but, perhaps due to the frequent stoppages for ball retrieval and a short break to fill a hole discovered in the penalty area, we got nine minutes extra at the end. Fortunately, it stays light late up here in the summer.
I worked in Orkney thirty years or so ago and had often fancied going back for a holiday. My current job has an ideal combination of a month-long summer holiday and then generally working from wherever I want the rest of the time. This meant that we could head north for three and a half weeks and spend some time there.
We spread the driving to the north of Scotland over four days and initially broke the journey on the way up by stopping at Grinsdale, near Carlisle. This allowed us to do a little bit more of the Hadrian’s Wall National Trail. It wasn’t an ideal section, with some uncertainty over the temporary rerouting of parts that had been closed. The next day we did a few more miles of the West Highland Way near Drymen. That one wore the Beagle out for a while.
Despite having four days to reach the ferry terminal, I almost messed it up by arriving in Scrabster where, upon attempting to check in, we were told that our ferry went from Gills Bay instead. A hurried half-hour drive later we boarded the boat to St Margaret’s Hope.
We passed the island of Flotta, where I could see the flare stack and the oil storage tanks. I first went up there in 1995 and worked at the terminal for the next seven years. It’s a lot quieter these days, with a much-reduced workforce.
The next day we did a few touristy things, starting at the Italian Chapel. This was built by prisoners of war who were working on the causeways that link what were then separate islands towards the south of the Orkney mainland.
Dogs weren’t allowed, so Jen and I took turns to have a mooch around.
We had time to visit some of the older attractions too. Jen called into the neolithic chambered tomb at Maeshowe and then we took the dog to the Standing Stones at Stenness. Whilst that sounds like a pub, it’s simply what it says on the tin, some stones, stood up. Like Maeshowe they have been doing it for five thousand years. Not that their age prevented the dog from cocking his leg against one of them. There was also a Bronze age house nearby and he pissed on that too.
After buying The Orcadian newspaper the day before, I had discovered a football game going on that I’d been unaware of. Futbology has very limited coverage of Orkney, so it’s like the olden days. Not quite neolithic, but it feels that way when you have to search the inner back pages of the local printed press for fixture news.
The game was in the Parish Cup, which is a big deal in Orkney. It’s a competition where you play for the parish in which you were born or live. I’m not sure which, maybe both. It’s been going on for almost a hundred years and judging from the coverage in the paper, is much more highly regarded than the local league or playing for the Orkney representative team. Games are played over two legs with the final usually taking place on County Show Day.
The fixture we were going to was a semi-final first leg between Holm and St Ola. It was played at Holm’s Rockworks ground, next to one of the causeways and with the Italian Chapel visible in the distance. Rockworks has a pitch that looks as if it was dug out of sloped ground. That meant that if you parked your car on one of the two higher sides you had a view from an elevated position.
We got there just in time to park up behind one of the goals. There were around a hundred cars parked up, so probably three hundred people or so in attendance. There was no charge for admission, but I dropped some cash in a bucket collection. Nothing to eat or drink either, although a lot of people had brought picnics.
Holm are the current Parish Cup holders and took an early lead in what was a scrappy first half. St Ola had a chance to equalize from the spot, but the Holm goalie got down well to his left to keep it out. I thought a St Ola player following up was bundled to the ground, but the ref was well placed and saw it differently.
With twenty minutes remaining in the second half, St Ola equalised with a well-placed shot across the keeper into the corner of the net. Holm regained the lead with ten minutes left on the clock with a header at the back post to take a single goal lead into the second leg. We set off to Kirkwall harbour to catch a ferry to Shapinsay, where we would be staying for the next week.
Paul and I have been going to the World Cup ever since we discovered how enjoyable it was in Germany twenty years ago. Neither of us had much desire to visit the US at this time and so our options were Mexico or Canada. Whilst Mexico would have been good, and remains on the list for the future, we opted for Canada. It was a good choice.
We had tickets for two games in Toronto and headed out a few days before the first one for a short stay in nearby Kingston. It’s a very pleasant town with sufficient bars for us to mix things up as we watched around three games each day on the telly. Some were packed with football fans, others less so.
We went for a couple of walks whilst we were at Kingston including a wander around the Little Cataraqui Creek Conservation Area. Paul spotted a snake which made its escape into the undergrowth before I noticed it. I’d been hoping for a bear or two, but the best we saw was a chipmunk that filled its face with seeds intended for birds and a turtle that was crossing the road. I helped it on its way.
I managed to pick up a tick, which I discovered embedded in the back of my leg three days later in Toronto. I think it was probably dead by then due to the amount of alcohol that I’d been putting away. I bought some tweezers and removed most of it, but I think that some of its head remains lodged in my left calf.
Our first live game in Toronto was Ghana against Panama. BMO Field was easy enough to get to from where we were staying, but we had the added complication of wanting to watch the England game that kicked off three hours earlier. Fortunately, the Fan Park was only fifteen minutes away from the ground and so we watched the England match from there.
Usually, the Fan Parks are free to get into. This one did have a free section, but those tickets were long gone. That meant paying sixty-five quid each to watch the win over Croatia on the big screen in a different section of the park. The admission charge meant that it was a quieter than usual atmosphere, at least in our section anyway. It was well organized though, with clean toilets and no queues at the bar. I can live with that.
After the England game we followed the crowds to the stadium. We arrived at one of the corners and could see the behind the goal seating that had been added to increase the ground capacity to around forty-five thousand. The additional seventeen thousand seats are only temporary and will be removed after the World Cup, but they looked solid enough to me.
Our tickets were in hospitality and that meant we got beer and snacks included. The official beer was Michelob Ultra, which is drinkable if cold enough. I collected plenty of aluminium souvenir cups. Our seats were just to the right of the half-way line and gave us a decent view. I chatted to the woman on my left who had bought a package of tickets for all six Toronto games. She didn’t really seem to know much about football but was clearly enjoying the World Cup being in her home city.
The game featured the other two teams in England’s group, Ghana and Panama. Both teams had good representation in the crowd, but with a lot of the game played in the rain those in the uncovered temporary stands behind the goal probably didn’t enjoy it as much as they might have done.
There weren’t many real chances in a close contest, but Ghana nicked the points late in added time from a close-range tap in. We headed back inside to take advantage of the beer and snacks until the crowd thinned out.
On the back of the previous weekend’s triple crown of a gig, a walk and a match, I managed to do it again. It’s hard in June as the FA isn’t keen on football taking place, so, World Cup apart, it tends to be games organized for some charitable purpose, or veteran fixtures. Gigs are easy enough this time of year though and June is ideal for going for a walk.
The hike was another section of the Yorkshire Wolds Way. We picked up the trail at Towthorpe Corner, which is ideal for parking the car. It looks like the sort of place that would be frequented by doggers after dark but is peaceful enough mid-morning.
We had Henry with us and he managed the nine mile out and back route to Newburnholme pretty well. Most of the path was through fields occupied by sheep and cows, so he was on the lead most of the time, but he still managed to roll in some cow shit to earn himself a bath.
The gig was Stanley Brinks and Freschard at The Waiting Room in Eaglescliffe. They are French, lo-fi and anti-folk. It may be a combination that isn’t overly popular as they began their set with only around a dozen people in the room. The attendance grew as the evening went on, peaking, I think, at twenty-three.
I enjoyed it. They are pretty prolific with more than one hundred albums between them. We bought the two latest ones that they had with them and there’s another imminent release.
The football game was the first of the weekend activities. It was at Filey Town’s Clarence Drive ground on the Friday evening. We’d decided to stay over so that we could have an easy start the next morning to our Yorkshire Wold Way walk. It took only twenty minutes or so for me to wander over from our Airbnb to the ground.
It was free to get in and there was a clubhouse selling food and drink. I didn’t bother with either as we were planning on heading out after the game.
I had a chat with the manager of the visiting team. The team had grown out of social meetings for men with mental health or addiction issues. They had started playing five-a-side games and that had led to this fixture, their first ever eleven-a-side game.
There was a real mix of ability and age in the Madly United side. The manager, who was kitted out in case he was needed, was sixty-two. Some of the players on the pitch looked to be close to his age. A couple of his team might well have played at a decent level and had a good touch.
Filey were understandably more organized and were clearly used to playing with each other. Most of their players looked like they had achieved veteran status fairly recently.
Filey quickly went four up but Madly pulled a couple back before half time. The second half was tighter until Filey rattled in three late goals for a seven-two victory. I doubt the result mattered too much to Madly and hopefully meeting up and playing football will continue to make the lives of their players that little bit easier.
Some weekends are better than others. I think that any weekend where I can fit in a gig, a walk and a sporting event has to be one of the better ones. Sort of a triple crown, I suppose. This was one of those weekends with a gig in Sheffield, another stretch of the Yorkshire Wolds Way and then a cup final over near Manchester, albeit not in that order.
The gig was at Mary Street Live in Sheffield. It’s a small venue that holds around fifty people and seems more like a storeroom than a concert venue. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it might be used for stabling horses when there isn’t a music event on. It had a can bar, which was very welcome, but no air-con, which was less so. Other than Jen and I, the crowd seemed to be mostly friends and family of the bands. Everyone nipped outside to cool down at any lull in proceedings.
We were there to see the headliners, David Cronenberg’s Wife, who were very good and somehow had managed to get a grand piano on stage. The support acts were ok too, despite it being the first ever show for one of them.
The walk was the following day, six miles along the Yorkshire Wolds Way between North Newbald and Arass, then back again to fill in a gap between sections we had already done. There wasn’t much in the way of wildlife other than a decomposing rat and a grounded bird too young to fly.
We’d recently had a young crow in the back garden that couldn’t get more than two feet off the ground. I put a few worms out for it, but its parents were watching and I think it took its food from them instead. Two days later it was gone, either by flying well enough to clear the wall or by being carried away by a fox or hawk. There were no feathers left behind, so hopefully it was under its own steam.
And the other part of the triple crown? That was the Gilgryst Cup Final featuring Manchester Corinthians and Tintwhistle United of the eleventh tier Manchester League Premier Division. It was played at Ewan Fields which is currently the home ground of Hyde United and in the past one hundred and forty years since it opened has hosted the reserve teams on both Man City and United, as well as the American Football team, Manchester Falcons.
It was five quid admission and with few other football options available at this time of year I wasn’t surprised to see that the almost three hundred and fifty strong crowd included a fair representation from the groundhopping community. I started off in the main stand. Others were drinking in the standing terraced area to my right, whilst many stood behind the dugouts on the far side.
Corinthians were the stronger team in the first half and they opened the scoring as we approached the quarter of the hour mark. A ball was threaded through into the box and the striker controlled it well before cutting it back across the keeper into the far corner.
At half-time I queued for some food. Hot dogs were popular, but I went for a cheeseburger. I’ve been asked to give a little more detail about the matchday food so I can reveal that it was ok. It was initially handed over without onions, but when I pointed this out, they added them. Other than that, I remember little about it, so the best I can say is that it was unremarkable and edible. They should put that on their posters.
Corinthians continued to dominate in the second half. I switched to the opposite side of the stadium where I was able to listen to their manager constantly berating his players about their need to “switch on”. Maybe it worked as twenty minutes into the second half they switched on long enough to add a second with an unchallenged header from a cross swung in from deep on the right.
As we entered added time and with the game effectively over, the Tintwhistle keeper flattened an attacker chasing a through ball. After some consultation with the lino, the ref sent him off, maybe it was DOGSO, perhaps serious foul play. Either way, both the challenge and the subsequent decision all seemed a bit unnecessary to me at that stage.
The keeper didn’t join the queue for a medal at the end. I didn’t realise that punishing red carded miscreants by denying them a role in the post-match ceremony was still a thing. Perhaps it isn’t and he just didn’t care with it being a loser’s medal anyway. Regardless, it was a decent final and a good weekend.
This game came about because I needed to pick Jen up from York and Ripon is pretty much on the way. We had plans to walk some more of the Yorkshire Wolds Way the following day, so the logical thing would have been to have stayed over somewhere. That idea was thwarted though by us having Saturday night tickets for Stewart Lee for The Globe. He was very good, as ever.
Next day we drove down to North Newbald for a section of the trail notable only for sheep. Just as well that we didn’t take the dog.
The match was at Mallorie Park, which I understand might be scheduled for demolition. It was the final fixture of the season in Second Division of the York Football League, so that’s tier 13. Ripon City Reserves were at home to Cliffe.
It was free to get in and when I called into the clubhouse for a pre-match snack, they sold me a pork pie for a quid that I think might have been left over from a function earlier in the day. They had the Hearts v Celtic clash on the telly and whilst I’d hoped that Hearts would get over the line, I think we all knew how it would pan out.
I took a seat in the wooden four row covered stand. Most of the people around me were players from Ripon’s first team who had played their match that morning and were celebrating their own end of season. There were a couple of wags and a dog that might have been wearing a Cliffe kit. Other than that, it was the usual mix of family, friends and one or two groundhoppers suffering from the reduction in choice of fixtures.
Cliffe were the better side and rattled in four goals without reply in the first half. They added another soon after the restart. There was some excitement on the hour when Ripon pulled one back with a low shot into the corner that prompted a cry of “Come on boys, we can win this”. It wasn’t to be though as Cliffe added another three for a seven-one away win.
In the final throes of the game, Cliffe sent their keeper up for a corner in the hope of adding an eighth. Their ambition was neither rewarded nor punished with the corner sailing out on the full as the ref blew to bring the season to an end.
One of my aims for this year is to complete the Yorkshire Wolds Way. That doesn’t sound too ambitious, given that the trail is only seventy-nine miles long, but it took us twelve years to do the Cleveland Way, albeit in both directions.
With the plan in mind, Jen and I spent a couple of nights just outside of Market Weighton and ticked off fourteen miles between there and South Cave. We’d have done more if we hadn’t taken the dog with us, due to his age, knee op and tendency to stop and smell everything.
There wasn’t much in the way of wildlife. The odd hare and a couple of birds of prey that I’m not knowledgeable enough to identify. The highlight was probably a white pheasant. I’d assumed that these birds were rare, but on reading up about them it turns out that that they are bred to act as ‘markers’ for the birds during the hunting season.
I had hoped to have been at Wrexham to watch the Boro in their final game of the regular season. I didn’t have enough priority points for a ticket though and so was limited to following our push for promotion on my phone. Our slim prospect of automatic were over early on once Ipswich had gone two goals up in their game. That left me free to focus on the match that I had been able to get into at the New Earswick Sports ground, just outside of York.
I was there to watch the York City and District Saturday Senior Cup Final, a fixture contested by Kirkbymoorside and Tadcaster Magnets, both of the eleventh-tier York League Premier Division. Tadcaster had already clinched the league title, so were going for the double. Kirkbymoorside were in fifth place in the table and so potentially capable of providing decent opposition.
It was free to get in and, if I’d chosen to, I could have watched a cricket or rugby game on the nearby pitches instead. There were around eighty other people there and I think I might well have been the only one who wasn’t a friend or family member of the players. League Champions Tadcaster were a class above. They went ahead in the opening minutes and then added a second just before half-time when their left-back rifled one home from about thirty yards.
Tadcaster were content to sit back after the break and going into the final ten minutes there were still just the two goals in it. The Kirkbymoorside keeper then booted a Magnets striker for trying to block his clearance and was given a red. The Casper-like outfield replacement for the goalie seemed to be trying to avoid being hit by the ball at the resulting penalty. Tadcaster then made it four when Casper got his fingers to a shot that was going wide and deflected it into his own net.
The winners were presented with both their League and Cup trophies at the end and celebrated with the obligatory jumping up and down whilst spraying ‘bubbly’ over each other. Hopefully I’ll watch the Boro doing the same in three week’s time at Wembley.
For the past few months, I’ve been visiting Lulea for work. It’s up in Swedish Lapland and an interesting place to spend some time. Jen thought that it might be a good location to see the Northern Lights and so she tagged along for this trip.
We spent the first day walking along an ice trail that runs across the sea from the town centre harbour to a small island and beyond. A track had been polished that allowed people to skate or use some sort of snow walker. I think my skating days are done, but I was happy to give Jen a push on the walker thing.
We made it to the island and back in temperatures that varied between -26C and -29C. It’s fair to say that I didn’t really notice the difference between the two. Both were colder than my previous experiences in Atyrau and Moscow, where it didn’t ever dip below -25C. What I did notice though was my nostril hair freezing and ice forming around the stubble on my chin.
When we got back to the apartment, I discovered frostbite on my thighs, despite having worn two layers on my legs. As I write this a month later, it is still very visible, although it hasn’t yet turned black, which suggests that I probably won’t need my legs lopping off.
You’d think that temperatures like that would mean no football, but that’s not the case. It’s pre-season in Sweden and they get around the issue of frostbite by playing the games indoors. That meant that Jen and I could pop along to the Arcushallen whatever, stadium, complex, aircraft hanger?
We called into some Swedish burger chain for something to eat beforehand, where the highlight was seeing a couple of old blokes, presumably celebrating Valentines Day, eating ketchup mixed with a few sachets of salt whilst waiting for their order to arrive.
The pre-season friendly was between Bergnasets and Boden. It was a fixture that I’d seen for real the previous summer. There was probably a similar crowd of eighty or so on both occasions, but when it’s approaching thirty degrees below zero, there’s not many places you can leave the house for.
The game got off to a lively start with Boden going a goal up in the opening minute. They doubled their lead in added time at the end of the first half. I think both sides were drawing on some ringers and Boden had a bloke up front listed as Thor the Lion. I hope that really is his name.
The second half was both scrappy and closer, with each side scoring for an eventual 3-1 away win.
Trail of the Lion King 