danieldwilliam | On Quick Updates in April (Reply)

Time for a bit of a catch up.

1) Rugby - rugby is going well.

We were at a festival in Stirling at the weekend. Stirling County RFC are one of the other Super Six clubs in Scotland, so they have a pretty large and well organised set up. Nice festival. 8 teams in our age group. Played 7 games of 9 minutes long (quite short). Definately a festival spirit, the referees weren't keeping score.

I thought we played lots of good rugby, lots of good support running, lots of good passing out or, or before, contact. Defence was a bit patchy, particularly towards the end. However, it's not something we can't fix. We're struggling to deal with the spearhead approach. Often other teams will pick a good runner, ususally someone who is quite fast, has decent evasion skills and is crucially pretty big, they get this kid to stand 5 yards back from the scrum-half at a restart. They run up, on to the ball, and through the defence. It's effective but it's not pretty to watch, it won't work next year when the tackling and the defensive structures are better and I'm not sure it's helping the kids learn to play rugby. For the record, I largely don't care about winning P4 rugby games. I may care when the kids are Under-16's or Under-18's. So long as they aren't getting whalloped I'd rather they learned the instincts of quick passing, good running, playing together, being a team, how to read and manage a game rather than knowing that if Kid-X starts with the ball they will probably score a try.

Good refereeing by the SCRFC folks. Biggar RFC P4's stand out for their organisation in defence and their sportsmanship. They are both nice club. Stirling's ground is very picturesque, being by the Forth River, between the castle and the Wallace Monument.

Briefly met my old school friend who now lives in Ayr. She was up with her son who plays in P6.

The Captain had a good festival, lots of tries, lots of good running, lots of tackling. He's great to watch. Particularly when he plays with the rest of his team.

2) Work. Work is busy. Interesting, but busy. I'm deeply invovled in two quite large projects on top of my usual work and some succession planning stuff too. It's busy. Good, but busy.

3) Family -

BB is planning her post-graduation life in Bristol. She submitted her dissertation. Now only 3 exams and a powerpoint presentation stand between her and graduation.

My brother is finalising his separation from his wife. That is sad but necessary.

My parents are okay, although dad seems care worn by, well I guess by the care he's giving his friends.

MLW is working incredibly hard, even by her own standards.

We have booked a summer holiday in Northumberland. Mostly so we can go to BB's graduation in July. I'm not entirely convinced that the holiday venue is great. It seems like a sort of cut-price CentreParcs. We'll see. Mostly I am looking forward to having a little clear down time.

4) UD -we've just agreed a budget with some exciting expansion plans. I hope the extra resource allows us to break through in to a period where we're doing more campaigning, gaining more members, increasing our funding, and being more effective and that doing more of all of that means we can do more of all that in some sort of virtuous circle.

5) Brexit - I have joined, but am not actually active in, the Edinburgh pro-EU campaign group. I am releasing my food stockpile to general stores and will re-stock if the political situation becomes fraught. For the first time I think Brexit is now probably not going to happen.

6) Entertainments, I am reading some books about Greek myths by Stephen Fry. They are jolly good. I may even go to see him in the Festival. I have a new real time grand strategy game on the PS4. This is taking up quite a lot of time and I need to do less of it so that I'm not too tired. Currently watching the Umbrella Academy, Sabrina and Only Connect and about to start on American Gods, Ozarks, Good Place and Star Trek Disco

7) Cottage is in good shape and now has a new heating control system user interface which should make it both better and cheaper. Currently thinking about new boilers for the central heating system. I'd like to replace the standard sized boiler and tank with a very small (10cm by 10cm by 100 cm ) flow boiler and reclaim the corner of the kitchen. Summer is well booked, no big repairs are currently pending.