I know that some of you positively look forward to my lottery emails, and expect some enlightening or entertaining paragraph about my weekend. Well this weekend nothing interesting happened. I washed my car, did the hoovering, changed the bed linen, and worked on a couple of guitars. I did go to the cinema to see "Sucker Punch" to which I was completely indifferent. My only lasting impression is that whoever made it must have seen "Pan's Labyrinth" and said "well that was good, but what it was missing was a load of good looking young women in short skirts with samurai swords and machine guns doing battle with fantastical CGI monsters.
I was reminded of something that happened several years ago when I was staying at my mum's house in Plymstock. A woman knocked at the door carrying a bucket.
"Hello - I'm collecting for the Plymstock swimming pool"
"Err, do you want me to go and run that under the tap for you?" I asked.
"No, I'm collecting money for the Plymstock swimming pool" she said rattling the coins in the bucket.
"Really? I didn't think there was a pool in Plymstock"
"That's the whole point, we want to build one"
"Brilliant" I said wracking my brains for somewhere in an expensive and sought after suburb they could fit a pool. "Where's is going to be?"
"Well we haven't actually identified a suitable site, that's one of the things we need money for"
I gave her some money and went back to the lounge and explained to my parents that there had been a crazy woman at the door collecting for a swimming pool that didn't exist, and didn't even have a proposed location. It turns out that my mum has lifetime membership to the same completely notional swimming pool.
Anyway the Plymstock swimming pool committee celebrated its 18th birthday last week, or as I charitably think of it, 18 consecutive years of failure.
Richard "nothing to report" B