March

Roger will be running one of the bowls club teams this year – the Triples A Team in the local Triples League. The month started with numerous phone calls to confirm who would be playing and agree any changes needed, before announcing the squad at a men’s meeting on Wednesday 4.

He also rang round to update the arrangements for the re-scheduled bowls club quiz, which went ahead on Saturday 14. We had a music round (organised by Teresa on her lap-top), a picture round and, for the first time, a ‘Who Am I?’ round where the teams had to guess a famous person in as few clues as possible. It seemed to go well, with all the teams getting some good scores, but sufficient discrimination to produce clear winners. We had collected Jay from Oxford the previous day, so she was able to do the scoring.

Not much indoor bowls in the last couple of months because of the snow and one or two other cancellations, but the start of the outdoor season got closer. On Tuesday 10 the mowing teams went to the club to see and try out the new mower – an Allett Tournament 20 model – replacing the old one which had become increasingly troublesome.

Though the Cheltenham festival was on (10-13 March), we saw little of the traffic this year, but there was one small coincidence. One of the harder questions in our music round was an extract from ‘Ruby Tuesday’: it seemed to get a whole lot easier after the Gold Cup and the numerous newspaper headlines announcing ‘Ruby Friday’.*

Helen had the following weekend at home, and we spent Saturday evening at a charity quiz in the Pheasant Inn over the road: we won a voucher for a Thai meal there in the raffle, but nothing in the quiz itself.

On Sunday 22, we celebrated Teresa’s birthday a little early by having lunch on one of the GWR’s specials – an Elegant Excursions lunch for Mothering Sunday:

Our celebration lunch

Toddington’s new village hall opened on Saturday 28. We went to look round just after the opening ceremony itself, for which we were too late to get tickets.

It is an attractive building: the main hall is large enough for badminton, or possibly short mat bowls, while at the front and side smaller flanking rooms provide for the kitchen, committee room, office and storage areas. A particular feature is the heating installation, minimising carbon emissions by using a heat-pump to extract low-level heat from the sub-soil.

More about the village hall

(The new village hall – click to enlarge)

It was Teresa’s birthday on Tuesday 31: we celebrated in the evening with a take-away Thai meal from the pub over the road. Jay had been dying to try this ever since she saw meals being served at the quiz there the previous week-end, and she really enjoyed it.

She also received this rather splendid plant as a present.

Home Diary 2009

*Footnote. The winning Gold Cup jockey was Ruby Walsh.