No. 113 - 12 March 2007

WORDS you are not going to hear on Sunday, April 22, 2007: “..and they come bursting into the Mall together…the Ethiopian world record-holder shoulder-to-shoulder with unknown Brit Andy Varley…”

WORDS you are more likely to hear: “..and it’s Andy Varley in a group of thousands heading for the 4hr 50m mark, running for Charity after a winter of selfless dedication, surviving as much by the size of his heart as the power in his legs.”

Which would be the greater achievement? Well I know where I’ll be putting my money in the Flora London Marathon in just over a month’s time..and it won’t be on some emaciated African picking up £300k in appearance money before a starter’s gun is fired.

My modest £50 will be on Cricketer/Footballer Vars, who, inspired by the sudden young death of a friend’s brother, runs in aid of CRY*, a charity which works to raise awareness of Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS).

Andy takes up the story of what inspired him to pound the streets of London in, I’m sure he’ll forgive me for saying, a body built more for comfort than endurance:

“I think it was last August that I suddenly had the urge to act upon many years of regret that I had not challenged myself to take part in the Marathon.” he said.

“It's an event that I have  always enjoyed from afar, as my mother was always an avid watcher. Two of my friends had been talking about the time they had competed and one of those friends was Jonny Lewis.

“Jonny and I have known each other a long time, distantly through our school years in West Wales, and then more closely through Swansea University and the eleven years since.

“Jonny had lost his brother Huw, whom I also knew through West Wales cricket (both Jonny and Huw played for Kilgetty Cricket Club in Pembrokeshire), suddenly in October 2002.

“Huw collapsed and died while playing football in Saudi Arabia due to a sudden and unexplained heart condition. A fit and active man in his early thirties, he had also he had also been training to take part in the 2003 London Marathon.

“Jonny ran the 2004 event to raise money for CRY (Cardiac Risk in the Young), an organisation that assisted him and his family in the immediate aftermath of Huw's loss.

“To say I have the utmost respect for Jonny is a huge understatement, so it was with great humility that I wrote to him asking if he'd be supportive of my aim to run the marathon on behalf of CRY and take up the baton where he'd left off.

“To my delight he responded immediately that he and the family were touched that I should want to do so. In short that is my inspiration. CRY accepted my application for a golden bond place in the 2007 marathon, with all proceeds goings towards Huw Lewis’s memory in CRY, and I was up and running, having committed to them that I would raise at least £1,500.

“Immediately I set about planning my training and fund-raising. To date the fund-raising has been great. Friends and family were quick to respond, with Jack Newton and Paul Runacres (Cappie) creating an early bidding war, which helped.

“I have already exceeded the £1500 mark and am looking to push well past £2000 - I certainly hope the members of WHCC will continue to be generous towards the charity.

“I began training back in November, knowing that a wedding and honeymoon to my lovely new wife Katie, would be right at the beginning of all suggested training plans. Katie bought me a heap of 

training gear for Christmas including a bright yellow running jacket which generates the odd comment from the discerning ‘White Van Men’ of the A10.

“Training has been going well, with the only issue being the continued success of the Third Eleven footy side I am currently enjoying playing for.

“We've managed to get into two Cup Finals, so my weekend running has been restricted to the football pitch - which I love and always struggle to say ‘No’ to.

“Nobody has ridiculed my attempt and people have been thoroughly supportive. I will find it extremely hard-going as I am not exactly built for long distance running (or any kind of running really!) but am determined to enjoy the whole experience, however long it takes.

“I am hoping to chug around in about 4.5 hours. I will also be taking part in a heart monitoring and evaluation project that is being run in conjunction with CRY/The British Olympic Assocation/Brunel University and hopefully getting CRY a little local publicity as well. Getting this into ‘View from the Deckchair’ is a good start!

“My Mum and Dad are also coming down the occasion so Mum will get to see the marathon "live" for the first time and then I'm sure we'll go and have a nice evening somewhere!!

I hope you can all support Andy in his endeavours…an inspiring young member supporting an inspiring cause.

Sponsoring is easily done online at; http://www.justgiving.com/andyvarley

CRY* Cardiac Risk in the Young
Hundreds of young people die unexpectedly of heart defects every year. CRY works to raise awareness of Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS) and campaigns for proactive screening of young people. It offers help and support to those who have suffered a loss, provides medical information, carries out Mobile Cardiac Screening and ECG Testing Programmes within local communities and contributes to medical research.

Charity Registration No 1050845

FIELD OF DREAMS
IT was more like the First Day of the Lord’s Test than a spiky local derby…lots of hubbub from a grand crowd and none of the normal tensions that accompany a visit to the Paulin Ground by our dear friends from Broomfield.

The only controversial note in our clash ten days ago came when Bob ‘The Enforcer’ Throsby was invited to move along two Bud-drinking visiting Norsemen, who were contravening some Health and Safety issues on the touchline.

Bob naturally said he’d prefer not to get a fat lip and Purple skipper Neil Hurst was forced to do the moving on himself…that and collecting the kitty.

To be fair, Broomfield, just a tuppeny bus ride away in Palmers Green, also entered into the spirit of the occasion…bringing along three gift-wrapped points for us by virtue of missing four open goals in the second half.

With our Welsh custodian Andrew Carter giving an epic display, what could have been a 4-2 defeat metamorphosed into a 2-1 win and made for even sweeter watching…much sweeter.

NEWTON’S LAW
FOOTBALL Vice Chair Jack Newton believes the Section will be heavily over-subscribed as its Youth Development Programme matures and I agree. At the Non-Players’ lunch he suggested an ingenious solution…that we enter a loan agreement with another local Club struggling for numbers.

More experience for our ‘overspill’ players, more teams for another Club and more Football all round. Nice one, Jack.

Imagine it: Winchmore Hill FC; the Arsenal of the SAL.

No. 112 - 26 February 2007

GI: A Judo or Karate costume
AE: A Scots word for one.
DA: A heavy Burmese knife.
ZO: One of the common hybrid domestic cattle found in the Himalayas.

THESE ugly apologies for words, permitted in that most unfair of board games Scrabble, will haunt me for the rest of my life.

To think my favourite Christmas Day pastime used to be trouncing the family in this battle of consonants and vowels…a blessed memory ruined by SEVENTEEN straight defeats in four weeks at the hands of a semi-literate Royal Free Charge Nurse called Antony.

Forty tongue-twisting years in newspapers counted for nothing as Antony danced linguistic rings around me.

Incarcerated while being switched from one Parkinsonism drug to another, my efforts to outwit a smiling giant of an opponent by adding “commensu” to “rate” to make (you’ve got it) commensurate, lay in tatters as Antony “do’d” and “da’d” his way to multiple points in all four corners of the board.

I was even less successful at Table Football as another Nurse, a Trinidadian called Brent, beat me 10-0 FOURTEEN times in the same period. I’ve learned one indisputable fact of life…there’s only one winner in an NHS Hospital Sports League and it aint the Patient.

I even binned my 40-year-old Chester Barnes sandwich Table Tennis bat after ping-PONGING the place out against a fellow inmate who was high on methadone and blind in his left eye.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to return to my second (some would say first) home of the Paulin Ground on Saturday, surrounded by familiar faces, my recuperative reappearance coinciding with a third eleven SAL Cup semi-final.

To you a third eleven Football match may be just…well…just a third eleven Football match. To me, it was Paradise, although I was unable to quite last the course, my enfeebled limbs taking me home just as the match went into extra time with a Winchmore Hill equaliser..

In my absence the threes went on to win 3-2, thereby fulfilling my pre-match prediction to Peter Barrell from the executive boxes of the North Bank …to you, the Back Veranda.

(NB: At the time of writing I forecast that Chelsea will lift the Carling Cup 2-1 against Arsenal…I feel on a winning streak).

But it was meeting all my fellow Club members that made it such a poignant occasion for me; all household names at the 

No. 111 - 23 January 2007
(Should this be Nelson's Column?)

SOMETIMES I long for the uncomplicated days of my youth, with beetroot and sugar sandwiches, piano lessons and a twelve-mile walk to school every day…not to mention NO televised footy.

There were the good bits, too, including my favourite War stories centred around Colditz Castle, where the twelve most successful Allied escapees were guarded around the clock by five hundred members of Hitler’s Elite Guard.

Budgets were so tight at the BBC that there were never more than ten members of the cast visible in any one shot, but if the Radio Times said they had employed five hundred actors to play five hundred Elite Guardsmen then five hundred it was.

I can only imagine that attempts by BBC boffins to spice up their menus on Friday nights with delicacies such as Chicken Tikka Masala was designed to strike down 450 of the Guards at precisely 6 p.m. on Saturday night, which just happened to be show time.

There were also bizarre breakdowns in continuity which made one suspect that there were fewer actors than the twelve prisoners required by the plot, with thespians doubling or even trebling up.

On one famous occasion the indomitable Major Horace Pool-Keynsham was seen taking tea with The King and Queen at Windsor Castle after a successful 2,000 mile escape, only to re-appear two weeks later making char for the chaps in the Castle (Colditz, of course).

How typically English, to nutmeg the Germans once then break back in and do the same thing to the unsuspecting enemy again.

Pooles-Keynsham, a bachelor, was the only man to crack Colditz twice in three television weeks, or, more accurately, three hours of intensive shooting at Shepperton Studios.

Of course the explanation for Horace’s double life is quite simple. He was down to play a different part in his second appearance and forgot to change uniform.

I know it has taken a long time to get to the point this week, but I am trying to demonstrate how nothing in life is quite what it seems and that my bedroom in the mental wing on the eleventh floor of the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead was the equivalent of a cell in Colditz Castle.

To be absolutely truthful, I would have had more chance of getting out of Fortress Colditz than Room 10, King Edward Ward, because all the people are real and find it child’s play controlling a recalcitrant little Welshman with a few loose marbles in his head.

Suddenly in the past few weeks, I have paid the price for being allowed access to the groundbreaking drug ropinerol, which has slowed the effects of Parkinsonism, but created side effects, which have been devastating for my life, my darling wife, my family, my friends and me.

Not to mention all 1,300 medical staff at the Royal Free.

They are not life-threatening side effects and will be cured in days rather than weeks by a different cocktail of drugs so that, in a sense, it has been an educational rather than traumatic roller coaster ride. Unfortunately it has set off a few tidal waves.

For the duration of my Ropinerol Regime, I have been a Rolls Royce Engine in a Tiger Moth’s body, Arkle’s lungs in a Seaside Donkey…John Charles’s heart in Robert Earnshaw’s jersey.

I chose the comparison with Colditz quite deliberately.  The dozen or so middle-class Hooray Henries were brave enough men who killed a few and jeopardised the lives of many others with their acts of Derring-Do.

Closer to home in Pond Street, NW8 there are an army of medics who are deprived of the oxygen of publicity as the save lives and untangle brains on a daily basis.

They are led by Schrag, Turjanski, Bakhi, Ahrens, Sharp and Mallan, shoulder to shoulder with Angie, Sarah, Charles, Bob, Sam, Nellie, Marian, Abdul, Dorothy, Julie, Robert, Sue. Jack, Adam and dozens more, fighting ignorance, neglect and the financial destitution of the NHS.

If the twelve gentlemen of Colditz deserve a poppy each, these heroes should each be given the Royal Free Iron Cross.