So Portsmouth is still in the grip of a blizzard, giving the more work shy yet another reason to skive off work and were my own work place is concerned only adding to my daily personal hell I call the working week, listening to moronic customers complaining about their TV not working, or the fact that they have no broadband, which in the grand scheme of things really isn’t overly that important. Still it's not that you could tell this from the stream of expletives that I usually find myself on the receiving end of on a daily basis, but then I’m sure you could take any group of people involved in this sport and they would be able to regale you with their own similar tales of their daily mundane work lives, but then this is what makes Derby such a great sport, for no matter how crappy a week you have had, you can pretty much guarantee that by the end of a good derby training session you will be feeling a whole lot better, but then again this is no doubt the reasons that so many players refer to it as being their “Therapy”.The other downside to this sodding snow is how like the rain, it prevents any additional training being done, making the Sunday training sessions only all the more important especially when it’s still such a daunting list of basic skills that are still to be mastered, with this almost obsessional need to cram in further training, leading to me spending the morning running around the garden attacking the snow with my wife’s hairdryer while shouting “Die you bastard snow!”.
Sunday's training session marked the final training session of this years derby season, which was made a little more special than usual, with the local paper showing up to do another article on the team, which i'm sure once it gets published I will get transcribed onto here for anyone who is intrested, especially as I’m real curious to know what they think about not only the team, but the sport on a whole, for although it is steadily becoming more recognised as a sport, rather than it's misguided public idea, of it basically being an excuse for folks to strap on a pair of quads and beat the snot out of each other, an image which is changing along with public opinion, especially as derby continues to grow and evolve with each passing year, though I do wonder if the sport will ever become mainstream, especially when it was such mainstreaming which lead to the decline of the sport in the first place and it’s truly the punk DIY aspect of the sport, which continues to help the sport grow, rather than sponsorship deals and fake celebrity status’s overshadowing proceedings.
Meanwhile as I continue in my attempts to learn the rules, which is getting there slowly, while occasionally throwing out fun interesting facts, in particular this rule.
9.4.2 Referees must be uniformed in a manner that makes them easily identifiable as the officials for the bout, e.g. a black and white striped shirt.
So according to this rule, it means that the ref pack can wear pretty much what they want, as long as they are all wearing the same thing to indentify their position, despite this fact the majority of ref’s tend to favour the traditional zebra stripes, rather than something slightly more erm….shall we say exotic, which this ruling leaves pretty open to personal interpretation. These traditional stripes not only make it a lot easier to keep a uniformed pack, especially when importing ref’s from other teams to cover the bouts, which is certainly something that we may end up having to do, when the team does become bout ready. In the meantime before I get too far ahead of myself, I still have to pass not only minimum skills, but also a ref exam as well which is reallyall the more daunting, especially when I look at the sheer amount of revision I still have ahead of me, which is something I wasn’t expecting to become such an epic task, much like finding my own set of strips, for as tempting as the Ann Summers outfit that Michelle had recommended, I really didn’t think I could pull it off, which I sure was a cause of much mass relief for the wenches and anyone potentially considering attending any of our future bouts.
Still it would seem that finding a set of ref stripes here in the UK is far from the easiest thing, with the usual sources like “Amazon” and “Ebay”, all drawing a frustrating blank, so now it currently looks like I will be having to import my shirts, despite some unique ideas from “Zebra Huddle”, which again only highlights how DIY the derby community can be, with stories of finding discarded “Foot Locker” uniforms to one ref spray painting his own stripes, achieving an effect described a “Distressed”, though short of mugging “Foot Locker” employees I think that importing shirts will still be my best option, though seeing how the majority of stores will also do the back plate I can also see it saving on another big headache when it came to sorting that out, much like trying to find skates for my darn hobbit feet, but then no one said this was going to be easy.
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