Choice Cuts 11

GRENOBLE TOUR Second Verse. Newsletter No. 43, 2nd Sep 1974

Sorry we're late again but it is the summer season (I think) and that's as good an excuse as any for laziness. John Clarke has kindly completed his exposition of the last rugby tour and as it is awaited by many of the rugby club we will dive straight in. I did wonder on reading it if it should be re-entitled "The Adventures of Ricky the Pooh!!"

GRENOBLE TOUR Second Verse - worse than the first.

Sitting in the frozen-dinner-for-one ghettos of West Hampstead it all seems a bit blurred - but then it was at the time - as you will recall we left our heroes half cut in the G.U.C. Bar after the first game of the tour with Graham "ol' red eyes is back" Curd dazzling the eye with his nice new pink woolly. The evening soon degenerated as to the strains of an improvised brass band we crossed to the medical faculty to continue the anaesthetisation process. When you went in they gave you a straw to suck Cote du Rhone from a barrel they shouldn't put ideas like that into peoples minds especially when they're out of them at the time. Anyway there were some women there must have been at least three in the dress of the one I was talking to. And then the floor got covered in wine and broken glass and Paul Brown went into a trance and kept bumping into people and I can't remember much more except that everyone went in different directions. I am told that young Milky Bar Pooley set new records for the ballistic technicolor yawn - "wot a trajectory" said a bulky prop who got 'O' level Physics.

The success of the rest of the Tour was largely down to the fact that the team split into various groups and drifted off with their French counterparts, dypsomaniacs with dypsomaniacs, necrophiliacs with necrophiliacs, nutters with nutters etc. - this precludes an exhaustive account of group activities so you're only getting edited highlights from now on.

Next day we beat G.U.C. in the main game of the tour, by several to not quite so many - I told you I was hazy about details. I do remember Kami-Kaze Taylor frightening the other 29 to death with his tackles and Pooley having exactly the same effect with his breath.

By this time we were up to Sunday and once again we split up with Dave Thursfield in Fireball XL5 with Brut on draught in the dash board up in the mountains and Terry went skating with a few chums and despité strenuous attempts at suicide failed to make all those dreams come true, breaking his fall with his face.

Meanwhile on the other side of the mountain the Nowlands, Dothies, Alleynes Kohls and the rest of the fondue set were destroying their digestive tracts with great care and devotion to the task over lunch. There seems to have been an awfully jolly evening in the ski station and Hippy Club where the lads proved that nothing exceeds like excess and Mart Taylor was the only one to get back that night and he doesn't remember coming down the mountain or anything else so it's no use asking him.

And then we played the third game against Les Vieillards de G.U.C. who weren't half as vieil as they were supposed to be and they beat us. They had an ex-international prop and Ali Bishop said "I ain't playing against it till I seen it tork" which was very wise as it turned out. After a few more glasses of pastis we went to a restaurant with the team and fed our faces a treat. Then after the longest "Hi-Ho" in living memory we went down to the station to get the train home. Which idiot put a bar in Grenoble Station as far away as possible from the trains? So we sang "Over There" and nothing happened, and when it did all the people who weren't going home got on the train and all the ones who were going home were on the platform and the waiters wanted their glasses back, so we sang "We'll meet again" and the train left. As we crossed the platform after seeing the train off we realised there must have been about 70 people just there to see us off or could it have been to make bloody sure we did get on the train.

The journey home was remarkable mainly for R. Pooley's (it's that man again) attempts to get lost - Fairy Tales can come true, they can happen to you...... But they didn't and he and the others got home and that was that. Needless to say we are grateful to G.U.C. and will be able to show it since they are coming to London again from 3rd to 10th September.

P.S. Rumour has it that as an upshot of the Tour, Tony Westray has been transferred to Grenoble's League side. On the subject of the fee, one of our lot told Keith that we were getting new boots for Tony. "The frogs have been done" he said in a burst of fraternal affection.