Give Rhys a Chance
It was Rhys' stag do in Cardiff. This involved a five-a-side tournament in which I was unwilling to play. However, my ignorance of, and complete lack of interest in, football were not held to be any kind of drawback to my being the referee. I wore my old Waterstones polo shirt (because I wasn't expecting to enjoy myself) and was handed a whistle and two sets of red and yellow cards. I immediately proceeded to just stand there.
Because I had to be near the electronic scoreboard in order for the remote to work, I was stationed on the far side of the pitch from where everybody else was standing, in this freezing cold industrial unit. What should I do? The games were only fifteen minutes long so sleeping was not an option. Luckily, I had a notebook with me. Here are some excerpts from the journal I kept of my time in the wilderness:
12:31 Lonely. Confused. No change there then. Feel like a scientist stationed in some Arctic outpost, monitoring the obscure social rituals of a new breed of penguin. My prime directive: do not interfere. All I can do here is keep score and blow the whistle. It should be easy.
12:48 I blew the whistle. It seemed to work. They actually stopped playing!
Must not let this power go to my head.
1:10 Keeping score not so simple. On the telly you know when they've scored because everyone is cheering and hugging and having furious sex on the pitch. This lot aren't so demonstrative. Well, except maybe for Rhys' team. I'm going to have to rely on more subtle clues, such as attempting to observe with my actual eyes whether or not the ball has gone in the net. Shit.
Is anyone really bothered about who wins? I mean, it's only a game.
1:40 Have witnessed several acts of brutal violence, mostly committed by Rhys. Wonder if I should do anything. Oh, is that a pigeon up there?
No.
2:32 Bored. Yet tense. It's like watching paint dry. Except it doesn't dry. It keeps moving. All the colours swirling around in front of me. Feel strangely weak... Head... melting!
Shortly after this, the Great God Cthulhu appeared. But that's another story.
From the moments immediately following this game comes the only photograph I managed to take during the entire day. It shows a man in pink hotpants and an England shirt, seemingly alone in a car park, in broad daylight, downing a half yard of Special Brew. Rhys looks not so much like a man on his stag do as someone with severe mental health problems.
(The pink hotpants and England shirt were imposed upon him, by the way. All of the shame, I understand, lay in the England shirt.)
So we went into Cardiff in the late afternoon. It was touch and go whether we would all get there, since a bus journey was involved and, in Cardiff, the bus driver's well-known resentment of people who aren't carrying the exact change is enshrined in law, meaning that such people may be shot. Or at any rate not permitted to travel.
Despite this, we managed it, and proceeded to crawl through numerous pubs. Rhys was provided by Mat his best man with various challenges, one of which was to eat a raw chilli. This he did with considerable nonchalance for about thirty seconds. Then, metaphorically speaking, his head exploded.
It was his worst nightmare. The rest of it was a cinch. After several gallons of Coke, he was made to don Mat's grubby, ill-used Gordon the Gopher glove puppet and go round getting women to kiss it. Which is not too far from a normal Saturday night for Rhys, as I understand it.
As we moved further into town the pubs got louder and Gordon lost most of his clothing. (Much later, Mat had a dream in which Gordon - mute for years - got his squeak back. 'It just needed warming up', Mat said disturbingly.)
I was enjoying myself, at least until someone called Lleu turned to me and said: 'Are you Rhys' Dad?' Immediately, I was back in those snowy wastes, watching the penguins playing five-a-side. Thinking back, I wish I'd said yes and seen how far I could take it. 'Yes you could say I'm Rhys' Dad, although technically of course his father is a Staffordshire bull terrier. It was a strange time, the Seventies, let me tell you...'
Rhys said, when I told him about this and he'd finished laughing, that he didn't know who should be more insulted, me or him.
I thought me.
However, true to my elderly stereotype, I was among the first to go back to the hotel (a Toby carvery). Rhys, although very anxious that nobody should go home at all, followed about ten minutes later along with Mat, who had spent the previous hour burbling on about how what he really wanted was a nice cup of tea. We had been busy extracting Mini-Cheddars and chocolate bars from the vending machine. Some would have preferred a kebab but, as Dave put it the next day, 'You don't get dysentery from a Yorkie.' Which is the tagline to their new ad campaign, I believe.
Those who didn't return went to what they described the next morning as 'the place with the test tubes', suggesting that they wound up in a secret underground laboratory where strange experiments were carried out on them. Which is pretty much what I expected would happen.
Because I had to be near the electronic scoreboard in order for the remote to work, I was stationed on the far side of the pitch from where everybody else was standing, in this freezing cold industrial unit. What should I do? The games were only fifteen minutes long so sleeping was not an option. Luckily, I had a notebook with me. Here are some excerpts from the journal I kept of my time in the wilderness:
12:31 Lonely. Confused. No change there then. Feel like a scientist stationed in some Arctic outpost, monitoring the obscure social rituals of a new breed of penguin. My prime directive: do not interfere. All I can do here is keep score and blow the whistle. It should be easy.
12:48 I blew the whistle. It seemed to work. They actually stopped playing!
Must not let this power go to my head.
1:10 Keeping score not so simple. On the telly you know when they've scored because everyone is cheering and hugging and having furious sex on the pitch. This lot aren't so demonstrative. Well, except maybe for Rhys' team. I'm going to have to rely on more subtle clues, such as attempting to observe with my actual eyes whether or not the ball has gone in the net. Shit.
Is anyone really bothered about who wins? I mean, it's only a game.
1:40 Have witnessed several acts of brutal violence, mostly committed by Rhys. Wonder if I should do anything. Oh, is that a pigeon up there?
No.
2:32 Bored. Yet tense. It's like watching paint dry. Except it doesn't dry. It keeps moving. All the colours swirling around in front of me. Feel strangely weak... Head... melting!
Shortly after this, the Great God Cthulhu appeared. But that's another story.
From the moments immediately following this game comes the only photograph I managed to take during the entire day. It shows a man in pink hotpants and an England shirt, seemingly alone in a car park, in broad daylight, downing a half yard of Special Brew. Rhys looks not so much like a man on his stag do as someone with severe mental health problems.
(The pink hotpants and England shirt were imposed upon him, by the way. All of the shame, I understand, lay in the England shirt.)
So we went into Cardiff in the late afternoon. It was touch and go whether we would all get there, since a bus journey was involved and, in Cardiff, the bus driver's well-known resentment of people who aren't carrying the exact change is enshrined in law, meaning that such people may be shot. Or at any rate not permitted to travel.
Despite this, we managed it, and proceeded to crawl through numerous pubs. Rhys was provided by Mat his best man with various challenges, one of which was to eat a raw chilli. This he did with considerable nonchalance for about thirty seconds. Then, metaphorically speaking, his head exploded.
It was his worst nightmare. The rest of it was a cinch. After several gallons of Coke, he was made to don Mat's grubby, ill-used Gordon the Gopher glove puppet and go round getting women to kiss it. Which is not too far from a normal Saturday night for Rhys, as I understand it.
As we moved further into town the pubs got louder and Gordon lost most of his clothing. (Much later, Mat had a dream in which Gordon - mute for years - got his squeak back. 'It just needed warming up', Mat said disturbingly.)
I was enjoying myself, at least until someone called Lleu turned to me and said: 'Are you Rhys' Dad?' Immediately, I was back in those snowy wastes, watching the penguins playing five-a-side. Thinking back, I wish I'd said yes and seen how far I could take it. 'Yes you could say I'm Rhys' Dad, although technically of course his father is a Staffordshire bull terrier. It was a strange time, the Seventies, let me tell you...'
Rhys said, when I told him about this and he'd finished laughing, that he didn't know who should be more insulted, me or him.
I thought me.
However, true to my elderly stereotype, I was among the first to go back to the hotel (a Toby carvery). Rhys, although very anxious that nobody should go home at all, followed about ten minutes later along with Mat, who had spent the previous hour burbling on about how what he really wanted was a nice cup of tea. We had been busy extracting Mini-Cheddars and chocolate bars from the vending machine. Some would have preferred a kebab but, as Dave put it the next day, 'You don't get dysentery from a Yorkie.' Which is the tagline to their new ad campaign, I believe.
Those who didn't return went to what they described the next morning as 'the place with the test tubes', suggesting that they wound up in a secret underground laboratory where strange experiments were carried out on them. Which is pretty much what I expected would happen.
posted by martin at 1:49 PM
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