A Tribute

All good things come to an end. Including Brian Wright's stay in Northern Ireland. Today he is sadly flying home to Boston. This, the first post back after my holiday, is a tribute and a thank you to him. I'm sure many of you reading this also got to know Brian and please leave your own comment in tribute to the "American Refugee".

Some of you may have been confused in the past be Brian's many names. Credit for this has to go to Joel Sommerville who decided "Brian" didn't sound American enough and began to refer to Brian as "Brad" the trend was continued at the Sommerville's legendary New Year's Eve Party where the name "Buzz" was created by Brian Rankin. Many other names have been coined since including "Sugar Buzz", "Bard", "Bingo" etc. In my opinion Brian sums up most of what is good about America. Good crack, good music and a powerful and reliable ally in times of trouble. Hopefully he'll be able to write some articles exclusively for this blog in the future so watch this space!

Below are some pictures and a cover of Chasing Cars done entirely by the man himself; vocals, bass guitar, electric guitar, mixing etc. If there are any record producers out there interested in this unsigned talent let me know as I have appointed myself his European Agent!

The man himself

Fun times

East-side!

ChasingCars.m4a

Fantasy Football

Totally unrelated but the RP fantasy football league is back with more vengencethn a Robbie Savage tackle. http://fantasy.premierleague.com Contact me for the league code!

A Fathers Day

Many of us on Sabbath Day considered how much our Dads mean to us throughout our lives. Maybe some of us sent him a card or perhaps a present. (Mines still in the post! :)) Some may have even done the dishes...... (Ladies!)

But this got me thinking that it is quite sad that many of the population didn't even consider their Heavenly Father for one second on that day. Many played Sport or did some work around the house, or maybe just enjoyed the fact that it wasn't raining. But the all the local churches were not packed out......this should maybe give us a big spur on for this summer, for more of you older folks (being 15 is the worst!) you'll be heading on GO Teams across the province and I hope this inspires you to bring our Father into peoples lives more.

For any of you who don't know the grace, compassion, love, justice and glow of God, I would encourage you to get in touch with your local pastor or a Christian friend who you could talk with.

So hopefully we all will remember our Father on Earth and in Heaven more often in our lives, the Bible speaks a lot about how they are to be honoured and respected. I know all of us can fall suspect to that. So lets push on and grow in our walks while we do these simple tasks of remembering who is in charge for a change rather than thinking its us all the time.

Other news.......... for the people visiting our sites from SE Asia and the U.S, Welcome and leave us a comment as we'd like to know who you are!

Thanks, Alastair

The Balmoral Show!

As we were all ;) off on study leave we deicided that we would make an appearance at the Balmoral Show. We had two debutants at the show, my colleague and our American Refugee known as Brian Wright.

We quickly showed them the ropes and after the first burger of the day we got going. Me and Michael decided to try and relieve ourselves soon after and suceeded but on the way out realised that we had managed to use the Ladies Toilets. Which answered our questions about how clean and well kept they were. The worst thing was that the lady that I confronted on the way out convinced her husband that they were mixed toilets too!

We quickly passed the embarassment over with a food interval and then progressed to try and look impressed by the machinery while farmers were crawling around us! We squeezed out and entered the Government Department Building and as there wasn't an opportunity for me to fail my driving test like previous years, we filled out pockets with tons of pens, pencils, bookmarks, cheap magnets and stickers. Then we hit the Kings Hall, but it was abit of a let down as we weren't really interested in the new PVC Broom that collects 25% more dust. However we did benefit from a cooking lesson from the good people of Sainbury but left early so we could avoid the free samples of carmalised apples and pork pieces as they wouldn't sit well with our eating schedule!

One of our party became sufficiently more interested in the show as a namesake of mine arrived and we hit the stand to relax and watch some quality Show Jumping but quickly left as we realised the voiceover man had possibly the most boring voice ever. We decided to head for the Childrens Area and went on the Virtual Simulator, which altogether was a bad experience as myself, who had never been known to head a Football in my life managed to get a textbook header on the back of another womens skull in front of me!

One of the Highlights of the day was doing Kareoke infront of a huge crowd at the Dale Farm stand, we proclaimed 500 Miles for all to hear and there was even randomers taking video's of us so we musn't be too bad! James is trying to get a video of it up here so watch this space!

As we decided to head home and hit the trains, we narrowly avoided a coach on the road outside the Kings Hall and managed to head home and watch the Show disappear behind the horizon.

Also I used the F.A Cup Final to get out of revision and forget about watching paint dry, this was like watching a tin of paint dry. Incidentally I switched to the Cricket after the first half, apparently it got abit better but I wouldn't know!

Alastair

Ok still working on getting the video up but until then enjoy this photo of a shame-faced Michael making a hurried exit from the Ladies toilets! Ali had already scarpered!

James

Ok this is hopefully the video. Enjoy. Or maybe not! I've only managed to get a few seconds up but i'm not sure you'll want more!