DIARY
The
Queen is coming to Scotch Colony!
by
Robert LaFrance
Looking at the calendar this
morning, I noticed that it was spring already. That winter certainly flew by,
didn’t it?
Well no, it didn’t. Although at my
advanced age the time fairly zooms by, that winter we just endured did not. I
just hope spring doesn’t arrive too soon; the residents of Perth-Andover know
what I mean by that.
As I mentioned in a recent column, I
can now see some of the soil of my front garden even as I type these timeless
words. I can picture where a few short rows of radish, lettuce, and beets will
be, and a large bed of Touchon and Chantenay carrots. Just over there by the
rhubarb patch will be some Caribe potatoes – unless I decide to plant another,
earlier, variety like Eramosa.
To make a radical shift in the
subject of this column – people say ‘quantum leap but like me they don’t know
what they are talking about – I want to change to pro basketball: I am not a
fan of that game that hurts the neck to watch, but occasionally when I am too
lazy to change the channel I will look in on an NBA game.
When I was a kid and after my
brother bought a 21” black-and-white television (for a mere $550 in 1961) I
used to watch the Boston Celtics and their great players Bob Cousy, Bill
Russell, Tom Heinsohn and others; I never ONCE saw one of those players perform
a dunk shot and then hang onto the rim. Not once.
Now it seems that the players do it
after almost any shot, or when they just feel like hanging around.
Here’s my idea to put an end to this
very annoying habit: Fine any player who does that one thousand dollars. Even
if that were only two minutes salary for those guys, after a while it would
make a bit of a hole in their income. Enough so they would have to vacation in
Minto rather than Aruba.
The reason I used to watch Boston
Celtics was that in the early days of TV in my area of Victoria County we could
only get two channels – WAGM in Presque Isle and CHSJ in Saint John. After a
time we could get the ‘educational’ channel that is now PBS or MPBN, but for
sports we pretty much had to watch WAGM.
Therefore, when I watched baseball,
I had to watch the Boston Red Sox whose big names were Ted Williams (who often
fished in northern New Brunswick), Jackie Jensen, Carl Yastrzemski, Vic Wertz,
and two guys with wonderful names – Rip Repulski and Pumpsie Green. Imagine
going through life with the name Rip Repulski! There was even a pitcher named
Gene Conley who played in the NBA in the baseball off-season. I’ll bet he
didn’t grab the rim and hang on like a mindless mule. By the way, he played the
Celtics.
***********************
Back to the present, I hate to say
anything nice about anybody, but I must say I certainly admire Queen Elizabeth
II who, at the age of 164, is still going. I was about to say ‘going strong’,
but the patient and longsuffering readers of this column can only be asked to
believe so much.
Her husband, Phil, is also still
going at the age of about 168, but he’s starting to show his age. I had a car
like that once, a 1961 Falcon. It looked great for years but after I hit that
hydro pole in Drummond, it started going downhill. Literally.
Back to good Queen Bessie, I tuned
in to BBC-TV last evening to see the Royal One opening a new shopping centre in
Bolton, which is just outside Manchester, the home of my favourite football
(soccer) team, Manchester United.
The announcer was saying that the
queen rarely opened shopping malls any more,
but this particular one covered about fifty hectares and had 1200
stores, even bigger than West Edmonton Mall. So she wasn’t really opening a
shopping centre; it was a city.
Here in Victoria County, New
Brunswick, named for another queen long ago, we don’t get many visits from
British Royalty, but that is soon going to change. My friend Flug, unbeknownst
to me, started an email correspondence with QEII back in the fall, and, would
you believe, he has persuaded her to come over to the Scotch Colony and Tilley
this summer to officially open two new pubs, the Colony Arms and North Tilley Pub,
the latter built on the site of the now demolished Block X School where I had
so much fun in my youth.
Asked how he had managed to persuade
the queen to come over and lend her prestige to what might not be considered
important businesses, Flug said: “Well, I may have slightly exaggerated the
size of the two enterprises.” I didn’t ask any more questions. It remains to be
seen what her reaction will be this summer when she gets here.-end-
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