The Cottagemen's Club (don't ask)

How much fun can a week away in a cottage on the North Yorkshire/Lancashire border actually be?  Now stop for a moment and consider that question for a moment.        

                                                     A cottage which you have to walk 300 metres from just to get mobile  service and wifi that only lasts till 11pm at night? In the end the answer is a lot. Especially with 11 men in one cottage competing in excessively long tournaments of FIFA 2013,  cooking meals for 11 starving men,  engaging in massive games of swimming pool volleyball, learning several new phrases which will mean absolutely nothing to people who weren’t here,  oh and scaling massive waterfalls in the wilderness.

Yes, it’s true, Mr Michael Houldridge scaled the heights of Gordale Scar disappearing from view above a swirling maelstrom of water crashing over rocks, we worried for his safety, none of us had phone service, we’d lost it five miles back. So we stopped and considered and just like all great explorers, we sent a man after him. Only those great explorers probably wouldn’t have sent the one member of the team who actual walking causes pain. Yes, we sent Mr Nathan Hornsby up after him. He stood for one moment atop the massive monolith and there as he stood we heard a shout from the hillside behind us. Mike had found his way back around so we didn’t really have to send Nafe up anyway.  But by this time it would have been harder to come down the waterfall again so we had to wait for Nafe  to find his way round and down.

We played football  on a waterlogged field surrounded by chickens , sheep and a vegetable patch. Injury after injury were picked up as we did more exercise in that hour than we did in the previous  year, well unless we played football for Scunthorpe Irons.  Nafe ate more portions of scrambled eggs than you think it would be possible for one man to eat. Mr Daniel Green won the FIFA tournament with the inauspicious club of Fulham and I, it will surprise no one held up the bottom of the table with Reading FC.

We learnt how to talk like the legendary Martyn Williamson (that’s a y in his first name, not an i) so if anyone notices the word “geese” inappropriately enter our conversation over the next few weeks, please, cut us some slack or learn the speech of Mr Williamson for yourself.

So if anyone wondered what happened, which I’m  sure nobody did, that’s some of it. Not all but some. Enjoy.