Ivor Thurston reports on the Bays’ end of season jamboree. (Colonel Mustard was to help co-write this twaddle, but he’s currently suffering from an ingrown wallet and a nasty bout of scabies following a disastrous trip to a back-street chiropodist in Bishops’ Itchington)
In attempting the impossible, that is, to replicate the shenanigans of a ‘full blown’ evening out with the Bayshill, this humble reporter warns in advance that any account of note will inevitably fall well short of the mark. With this pathetic shield of an excuse hastily put in place I begin…
Crocodiles are pesky uncompromising beasts with a taste for anything that moves. When they’ve bitten whatever it was that moved, they also develop a taste for the non-moving. The fact that Bayshill cricketers seem attracted to the reptile family is strange, but this simple fact cannot be argued with. Moths to a lit candle they were. The Deya brewery sports trendy anthropomorphic versions of a croc doing all sorts of ‘uncroccy’ things, in the same way Bayshillians do all sorts of ‘unhumanny’ things.
Middle afternoon is always a difficult ‘place’ to be. It doesn’t have the seriousness of lunch time and at the same time hasn’t the dignity or reverence of early evening with its fading light coupled with the realisation that another day on planet Earth is disappearing for good. It is however the time when late mad dogs or more specifically Bayshill players climb out of their various pits of snakes to assemble and report for duty. At the strike of three from the not too distant Victorian Christchurch Jurassic limestone tower, two intrepid Bayshillians arrived at the DeyaCroc Brewery. (No dear reader not Livingstone and Stanley)
In the same way that Tolkien had his various dwarves arrive at Bilbo’s round green door, players from the team began to assemble near to the ‘mad crocodile’ in their bright Hawaiian apparel. There was no Bifur of Bofur, but there were certainly a number of Bomburs.
‘Happy Pils,’ the suave barman purred, delivering a pint of sandy coloured opaque ‘beer.’
‘Why do all their beers look and taste the same?’ a Bayshill beer critic noted with due sobriety, although in his bright shirt, looking for all the world like one of Chris Horner’s explosive Pollock canvasses.
‘Citrus notes, cloudy and everything else that a trendy hipster needs, even the prices discourage the riff raff,’ another Bayshillian of years’ standing noted, trembling bankcard in hand, whilst gaping at the silo, which possibly contains a secret cruise missile in plain sight. Cheltenham’s own nuclear deterrent? Methinks not. An outpost of Porton Down’s facility more like.
After a pint or three the inevitable move to another drinking establishment was posited, with ready readies running low. But alas, to which one? The Station, The Bank, The Bayshill, The Rotunda and even The Midland (just 50 yards away) were all mentioned in good faith. Unlike a trip on the Nile, the move from Croc central to Cheltenham’s centre seems an innocuous enough journey. No hippos or crocodilians to negotiate for starters. How wrong
such a naive thought proved. The decision was somehow made though and so onwards to The St. George’s Vaults with its not so secret garden. The chairman and website supremo, both wearing shirts that would scare small dogs, weasels and children of the current generation had decided to pass on the curried delights and further imbibement in town. What the Dickens did they know, that the others in the party didn’t?
Zwings, walking or even taxi? A combination of all it transpired. Zwings are not a comfortable option if you’re wearing a backpack and happen to be sharing said machine with Bayshill’s newest centurion. Hitting over 126mph (same speed as Mallard’s record breaking run) , with the wind and large numbers of insects blowing mercilessly up your nasal orifices, you consider rather too late, whether you have made the right decision and indeed whether you will live to see next season or indeed the morrow.
Arriving at the second reptile (mythical in this case) inspired hostelry, things began livening up. Knowing that the time for food was approaching, the vice captain returned to the extraordinarily secret garden (how he found it again we’ll never know) from the bar with all manner of crisps, nuts, cheesy puffs, porky pig scratchings, pangolin flakes and the like.
Catching practice like spontaneous combustion now started immediately with the puffs (cheesy ones – no cheap jape there!) and moved onto throwing practice. Could one of the above snacks be lobbed sportingly into a fellow cricketer’s pint? Or how about the much easier option of gathering all the missed snacks thrown inaccurately to the floor and then simply dumping them into the pint of the captain who’d gone to inspect an exquisitely painted mural concerning horses. Could this possibly be a long lost Leonardo or Michelangelo that just so happened to have turned up in the very, very secret garden on the day of the Bays banquet? Nobby certainly seemed to think so, examining the minute details of the fine fresco before returning to his pint, now brimming with grit-laden cheesy puffs.
A lesser mortal may well have taken umbrage or castigated his minions, but no, the Nobster is made of sterner stuff, he happily removed and ate the puffs before downing his pint ready for his curry. Meanwhile Crazi had had spent a lot of brain power to invent a ‘werewolf smoking pint’… What fun!
Cobras are dangerous and should not be approached unless you have at least a GCSE grade 5 in Reptile Handling. No Bayshill players have this qualification (Steve Pritchard – razor sharp educationalist and world renowned philumenist will verify), and this possibly gives an indication of why things began to unravel as they always do. Brave Bayshill crutch-laden player Bagos, had been injured earlier in the evening by a large and unfriendly Indian elephant, which for some unknown reason had sat on him and dislocated both his knee caps (Bagos – not the mastodon). Cobras, as the evening wore on and turned inevitably to night, festooned the wall lights, hung from the players themselves, from the soft furnishings and from one another.
Bombay, I reasoned in the tropical humidity and flies (damn flies), if that’s the right word for my addled thinking at the ungodly hour of nine o’ clock, had changed its name to Mumbai.
But no I was sadly mistaken. A tiger can’t change its stripes that easily! Bombay it still was all right.
Some of the players carelessly drifted out of the batwing doors into the dark and all encompassing jungle to be satisfyingly swallowed by the night. The few who were left and there were only a few by now, fought the damn cobras off in hand to hand combat! There were at least 5 full grown such beasts writhing on the table and as yet, untouched by human hand! Bagos now wielding his crutches like a man possessed, dispatched two Cobras single-handedly within two blinks of an eye, possibly his finest hour for the Bays.
Horner, VP No2 and Vice Captain and surely the most level-headed of the team, assured the remaining 4 escaped the carnage by managing to arrange for his personal tuktuk to rescue those clinging to the wreckage. How he managed this we’ll never know, but we’re eternally grateful. It was as always a close squeak, but the mighty Bays had survived once more to. Only the spectre of the nearing AGM, with its daunting Matters Aising now came to mind! What would the chairman say?
The story goes on…