Relenting a little; Tales from Baildon

Well, the retirement from football didn’t last long. We were sitting in the living room a couple of hours before his game was due to start when I noticed the rather long face being pulled by Ottawacker Jr. Having correctly assumed it was down to the fact that his team was due to play at home to Carleton Place and he was sitting in the chair, I made a couple of snap decisions and followed these up with a few texts and phone calls. At 6pm, I was warming him up at Elizabeth Manley Park.
 
In the end, there was little for him to do in the match – a routine 6-1 victory – and it was good for him to get out and have some exercise. I think he is recovering sufficiently from his illness to be in good stead for his operation – or, at least, I hope he is – and so we got away with one. So, he ends his season having played five league goals, kept three clean sheets, and conceded two goals. He can be happy with it, I think.
 
The rest of the day was spent with me getting various things done: photos, cataloguing, calling relatives. I also watched the funeral link for Keith Larrad, father of my friend Mark. He gave a splendid eulogy and told a lot of funny tales. His dad was quite the adventurous type, canoeing down the Mackenzie River when he was in his sixties. Having only met him the once, I liked him – and I am sure he would have laughed at one of his son’s asides.
 
Telling the tale of how in the nineties, when he was a headmaster in Yorkshire, his father had managed to coax a recalcitrant schoolboy off the school roof, Mark told how the police were unwilling to get him down because the lad was threatening to jump. There was a crowd gathering, the police, the ambulance service, the fire brigade, but nobody could move the lad. So they got the headmaster. Keith strode up to the school building, grabbed the loudspeaker, and said to the boy that either he came down immediately or he’d come up there and throw him off the roof. The boy came down immediately. Cue Mark’s line. “Of course, he wouldn’t really have thrown him off the roof. He was many things, but he wasn’t a psychopath.”
 
Oh to be remembered like that.