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i remember: catching.

my great strength as a rugby player was not in catching the ball. in fact i lived in fear of being on the receiving end of kick offs in case that ball game spiralling towards me and i would end up fumbling it. i can’t recall ever missing the ball, i am sure i knocked it on a few times. hell i was a forward i wasn’t supposed to catch the ball i was supposed to pummel the opposition.
but all of that is by the by as far as this is concerned.
one year my pal adam got me a rugby ball for a present, it wasn’t a real leather ball but like the ones we used in school for practice: orange and rubber. adam had personalised it, in his own inimitable fashion, with lots of drawings from the various projects we were doing at the time (chunderbirds, the runeleek and jmh space hero: trust me when i say to us they were very funny and very important), there was also a drawing of helen jones, who i had the most amazing crush on and is perhaps one of the prettiest girls i have ever known. helen had a starring role in the runeleek (i am not sure if she knew she was featuring in our epic fantasy rock opera that combined moorcockian fantasy, welsh mythology, terrible puns, awful lyrics and a wonderfully illustrated graphic novel – art by adam), why did she have a starring role in the runeleek? well aside from the fact i was smitten with puppy love for her, she was also welsh. see obvious really.
now adam and helen lived in the same road, ribblesdale avenue as i recall (adam will correct my errors here).
just across from where they were was a large expanse of grass that served as a break between the racecourse estate, where i lived, (and where most of the streets were named after… well race courses) and private houses where adam and helen lived.
we used to end up on that expanse of grass and spend a lot of time playing catch. mainly it was with the rugby ball, one year adam introduced a glow in the dark frisbee. we threw that ball in the bright sun, we threw it in rain, we threw it in gales and in one memorable year we threw it in snow drifts (that was also the year my very full and very brown beard froze and dreadlocks of ice in it…)
as we threw that ball (i guess we caught it about 50 percent of the time, maybe a bit more..) we would also be throwing ideas back and forth about comics we would create, books we would write, films we might make. back then we weren’t interested in changing the world we were looking to entertain it.
now i am sure that this will come as no surprise to adam, and sadly i guess many of my dear readers know me well enough to know at heart i am incredibly shallow, so not only was this a creative throw-about but there was also the ulterior motive of impressing helen jones.
how? i can hear you ask.
my answer is simple: she was welsh. it was a rugby ball we were throwing d’uh.
hey no one said i was sophisticated … needless to say it didn’t work and my love of helen remained unrequited.

look i know you want samples of the gags and puns we came up with but i can’t remember them, well except for a few that were all puns based around wales and songs we were listening to at the time.
“stairway to helen”, “cold as dai’s” and “live and let dai” (feel free to add your own.

i miss that ball and i miss those puns.