Choice Cuts 10

RUGBY TOUR TO GRENOBLE. Newsletter No. 42, 24th June 1974

After gentle persuasion I am pleased to report a return to the literary stage of John "Galloping Guts" Clarke in the first instalment of what is now becoming an annual story:-

RUGBY TOUR TO GRENOBLE (Honi soif, qui mally ponce)

This year's assault on the French economic miracle started on Victoria Station on the Thursday before Easter. We started our miracles three days early this year since there was every evidence of 25 St. Nicholas Old Boys at the same place at the same time to do the same thing. There seemed to be a division of opinion as to how to cross the channel as one member of the party had some strange wooden planks over his shoulder which I thought gave notice of his intention to water-ski behind the Dover/Calais ferry. There were other ideas but after Westray (Sen.) failed to turn water into wine on Victoria Station he decided on a more conventional method of crossing - less topical perhaps - but drier.

We arrived in France still together and everything was going too well until the party restored its identity by getting on two different trains. We had the tickets but they actually went to the right station in Paris. It was during this first journey that several of the party made their first really serious attempts to contract social diseases. Fortunately Al Bishop's innoculation against Cholera was to stand him in good stead. Mr. Pooley on the other hand had not been innoculated against gravity or gin and the combination proved a little too much for him. At the central Paris station the chief topics of conversation were the nude posters which Mr. Burrels thought were worth doing six months for and the possibility/desirability of leaving Westray (Jun.) and Pooley in Paris as our contribution to undermining the spiritual fabric of the French Capital.

I don't know if you have ever been on a French train for eight hours in one of those little carriages especially with Messrs. Dothie, Brown and Payne all on one side of the carriage.. yet one more instance of man's inhumanity to man. Had we been able to harness the atmosphere in the Pooley/Westray carriage to the national grid the energy crisis would have been solved for ever.

"We're on the conteenong, you know," volunteered an unspecified prop with a flair for geographical precision as we unloaded at Grenoble. Safely installed in our Hostel, half the party set out to look for places to have breakfast and the other half for places to die. Unfortunately as it turned out, only the former party were successful.

Grenoble is a modern town set in a range of mountains whose affluence owes almost as much to De Gaulle's ego problems - he spent a fortune on the Winter Olympics - as to highly profitable electronic and computer industries. Above all it is in some beautiful mountains - I know because I saw the postcard I sent home a couple of weeks later. We met Rick Snowden looking suitably cheerful and lotus-eating his way to respectability - he was to be our main contact and we thank him for all his help during the tour.

And so we played the first game against Grenoble University Second XV and lost in the last 5 minutes 10-12. Huge they were - all over six foot six with scars on their faces and great big choppers in their hands. The sun has a regrettable tendency to shine out there, causing the ground to be hard unfortunately when you are all 800 miles from home, excuses like "I ran over a dog," "I got lost going to the bog" and "My mum says I can't play with that nasty Terry Burrells," don't ring terribly true and thus it was with a majority of the 2nd team pack that we took the field where our eyes matched our shirts.

Unfortunately all this meant that some members of the tour had not touched a drop for up to ten minutes so after the game we repaired to the local to line our stomachs with nice sulphuric acid. The early part of the evening was notable only for the fact that the pasties didn't run out and for Graham Curd's nice line in distinctive pink knitware - a hangover from his job as a lollipop-man outside Swakeleys School.

Will our heros stay drunk for a full 96 hours?

Will Chris Anstree find true snow?

Who cares anyway?

For next installment watch this space.