I like Sundays, mainly because I only work one in five and then I finish at twelve, so my afternoons are free for church. It’s not a real church I go to, nor do we worship questionable Gods; It’s my local Cricket Club which I’ve frequented since I was a small boy playing junior cricket in 1962.
All my friends have also frequented the club for years and are made up of, a fellow Prison Officer, some Police Officers, an accountant, a senior financial advisor and a couple of them are company managers. Despite the professional standing of the group, we’re all as mad as hatters and we get blasted every Sunday afternoon…!!!
The Gods we worship here are the patron saints of brewing, conversation, laughter; and what we English call “piss taking”, or making fun of lightly… Nobody is immune from this practice; and you have to be very careful what you say and how you say It or all of a sudden you’re “in the barrel” as I was one week when I made an innocuous comment about transvestites… I should know better.
There’s invariably food on the go in the form of cheese & pickles & salted nuts etc, and occasionally the lad on the left, Ian Parkin, will turn up with something to heat up in the oven. This week It was beef sausage & black pudding, with baby roast potatoes & cherry tomatoes done in garlic butter, heavenly it was. 
Football rivalry plays a big part and has been known to get out of hand, we all support either Sunderland (come on…) or Newcastle United. The problem is, we Sunderland lads outnumber the Newcastle lads so we gang up on them a bit. On “Derby” day, this is where the two teams play each other in the English Premier League, we go from being busom buddies to bitter rivals; splitting up into our two tribes to watch it on TV with the winners getting the bragging rights till the next match. No one falls out over It, and when the games over we converge on our end of the bar and we’re all good friends again…!!!
So after having had a great afternoon we gradually disperse in varying directions home, I live a ten minute walk away and invariably have a bit of a wobble on. This is fine in the winter months when It’s dark, daylight however is a bit different; you wobble past people sitting in their gardens (when it isn’t pissing down with rain) and someone will invariably pull you a couple of days later with the old ” seen you walking home on Sunday Marrsy, you looked a bit out of It ” Well It’s only once a week… Luckily I live in a large house and Susan will be in the sitting room at the front watching TV, and I’ll wobble in at the back and go straight upstairs to bed without bothering a soul and be up bright and early the next morning whether I’m at work or not.
So that’s church on Sunday, oh we celebrated Gary Sams becoming a G’dad at 45 this week, lucky him I’m still waiting for that… And we fairly took the piss out of our young Australian cricketer who works behind the bar, he’s getting better though; he’s starting to give as good as he gets. As Aussies always do…!!!
