Poynder Park brings back muddy memories for a Yorkshire lass

Last week I was feeling pretty spring-like, what with my fancy pants over-wintering broad bean plantlets and sprouting spinach seedlings.
Me (far right) and a couple of Yorkshire pals with our black puds, yesterday.Me (far right) and a couple of Yorkshire pals with our black puds, yesterday.
Me (far right) and a couple of Yorkshire pals with our black puds, yesterday.

This week I am feeling decidedly chilly billy, after a Saturday afternoon at Poynder Park at what could have been either a rugby match or all-male mud wrestling (I jest, but it was pretty filthy, and the pitch was a sea of mud too).

Kelso triumphed, 16-10, to a lively Aberdeen. We were there in the first instance because the Kelso Cougars mini rugby provided a guard of honour, and the Young Mistress was one of the guardees.

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Secondly, though, coming from Yorkshire as I do, I grew up watching games (admittedly it was The Other Rugby) where in the depths of a clarty winter, it was sometimes hard to tell which team was which by half time. Aaaaaah, it brought back the memories.

The next day I found myself chilly again, watching her train with said Cougars, lumps of ice dotted about the muddy grass. Proper rugby weather.

To digress for a moment, as I often do, leaving my poor long-suffering readers afloat on a sea of utter randomness, being tossed hither and thither like a car on the Tweed in full flood, whose owner thought ‘Road closed’ only applied to other folk in cars. But then I double digress. Rein it in, Mrs E, back to the point with you.

The original digression was to muse on the quite inappropriate and very adult websites/FaceAche pages which a search for ‘Kelso Cougars’ throws up when you Google said sports club for small people. I am sure you, dear readers, can force yourselves to imagine the sort of unsavoury photos of women of a certain age clad in various types of faux animal skin which pop up on to your Hudl. A world apart from the rosy-cheeked little cherubs in their beanie hats and over-sized Canterbury tops galloping along clutching a kiddie-sized rugby ball. Anyhoo, back to the subject in hand.

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After the obligatory post-training bacon bap (sorry, bacon roll. The very mention of Yorkshire has me reaching for my flat cap, whippet, black pudding and half a mild), the weekend’s tasks kept us warm.

Hurricane what’sisname left us with two trees down. Well, not exactly down in the ‘laying flat on the ground’ definition of the word down. But down in the sense of uprooted and leaning against other trees.

Which is good in the case of one of them, which would have fallen on to the chooks’ perimeter fence, flattening a large section of it.

This would have been nothing short of carnage if the chooks had staged a mass breakout when Jock the Patterdale had been roaming about outside.

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There’s nothing Jocky Boy likes better than a nice chicken dinner. Or breakfast. Or supper. He’s really not fussy. And he really enjoys catching his own tea. Chasing chickens down would be Jock’s equivalent of being a kid in the strawberry patch on a Pick Your Own farm in July.

But luckily the only casualty were the trees themselves, tipped up with roots on show, resting at 45 degrees against their neighbours. Sharpen that chainsaw. Free stove fodder. Happy days.