Out on the Wiley Windy Moors...

... there stand two dry stone walls, facing each other, eighty yards apart. Between them is not heath, but finely cut green grass. For most of their length, the walls are natural stone. Only the central section of each wall is whitewashed.

Haworth West End cricket club possess the highest cricket ground in Yorkshire, and perhaps the most wind-swept cricket ground in the world. Cricket grounds need a sightscreen behind the bowler's arm, so that the red ball is clearly visible to the batsman. On Haworth moor, the white walls serve as a wind-resistant sightscreen. Of course the walls are only about five foot tall, so the sightscreen only really works for very small bowlers.

The pavilion of this cricket ground was the starting point of a fell race yesterday. 279 people lined up to run across Haworth moor and back again, including me and my dad. Running across a moor is similar to running anywhere else. Except every now and again the ground suddenly gives way, and you find yourself with one leg on solid ground, and the other leg knee deep in a mini peat bog. If this happens while tramping uphill or against the wind, you pull your foot out and continue. If this happens going downhill wind-assisted, you either trip and tumble, or come to an emergency stop. I did both a couple of times, and was happy to return to the cricket pavilion with both ankles intact.


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Ernst Schad 4 - Torpedo Entenhausen 3

No Bundesliga report is complete without a mention of the "Werkself". Literally "factory eleven", it refers to the team of Leverkusen, who are backed by pharmaceutical giants Bayer.

The spare time league of Bochum now has it's own Werkself: Ernst Schad is a leading manufacturar of cogwheels and is based in the neighbouring city of Dortmund. The company proudly claims that it is

Certified by the DNV according to EN ISO 9001:2000

and I'm sure we all know what that means.

The Bochumer Cliche reports:

The factory eleven suffered from teething troubles in the first half, but after a 3-1 half-time deficit they stepped up a gear and had Torpedo on the rack. The 4-3 decider was a typical clutch goal.

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A football related story from the Daily Telegraph, about some posh totty getting a cab to the wrong Stamford Bridge. When I studied in York I cycled to the Yorkshire Stamford Bridge. It was a very nice little village, but could have used a few marauding vikings to add realism to the battle site.


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Juggling

I've not achieved much of note in the past months, but I learnt to juggle a four-ball Mills mess. This requires the juggler to keep crossing and uncrossing the arms like in some song with a custom dance. The routine looks a bit like this (around 1:40 he gets it to work very nicely). According to all reliable sources, the balls which start in one hand are never caught by the other hand, but every time I try to confirm this I drop them all.

Whilst looking for that animation, I read about Rupert Ingalese (a Yorkshireman, note) and his juggling book from the 1920s. Ingalese, although recommending his readers to start with wooden bottles and enamel plates, gives an idea of what people did before there were shops selling special juggling items: it seems they took whatever was lying around at home: lampshades, billiard balls, china plates, champagne bottles and midgets. Nowadays you can easily buy soft balls, plastic rings and weighted clubs, but juggling midgets are hard to come by.



In a laboured effort to connect the previous two paragraphs, I would point out that Ingalese probably never managed a Mills mess, as it was first popularised at some time around 1973. Had he been around at the time, I'm sure he would have mastered it whilst also balancing a couple of lampshades.