tim's experiment

To Kings Park on Saturday, to provide some Celtic music in the background for Hong Kong Scottish Day. This is not a festival of Scottish culture generally – Hong Kong Scottish is a rugby club.  When I was a player there was a London Scottish rugby club which I suppose gave someone the idea. So the day consists mainly of rugby. In August. In Hong Kong. Tropical Hong Kong.

In those distant times when I played rugby it was a winter thing. I did play quite a lot. I played for the School Colts, drifted sidways into first team Hockey, and then back to rugby in Crawley, which boasted a friendly and very sociably rugby club. Usually I played in the B XV, which was the sort of team about which the Art of Coarse Rugby might have been written. Rugby escaped the scathing pen of Oscar Wilde. It is mentioned in that saying about one kind of football being a game for thugs played by gentleman, and the other a game for gentlemen played by thugs, but I can never remember which is which. What all football in my youth had in common, though, was that it was played in the winter. You exected to get wet. Indeed you hoped the ground would be wet because this made it softer. Rain did not stop play. In fact I can remember on two occasions playing in softly falling snow. We were also sometimes treated to thick fog. Heatstroke was not a hazard.

I did discover later that in Canada rugby is a summer game. I had arrived in about May and the season was just getting started. This is because the winter in Alberta features six feet of snow. All outdoor games on grass are summer games. I felt no urge at all to play rugby in bright sunlight on an iron hard pitch, but managed while watching a game to befriend the hockey players on the next pitch. There were only two teams in Edmonton at the time, I discovered. The University team consisted entirely of Indians (real Indians from India, not the Red version) and the City team of Dutchmen. I became an honorary Indian. Clearly hockey is a summer game in India as well, becasue my team mates were well wrapped up even in a very warm summer. Most of them also wore turbans. Skill rather than strenuous effort was our forte.

But this isn’t really an option for rugby. I must in fairness record that the London Scottish people play Sevens, which means that the games are quite short. Also the pitch is artificial so its hardness is fixed without reference to recent rain. Copious quantities of water were available and I suppose this is a healthy way for young men to let of steam. Still, as the spectacle unfolded and my arms went red I found myself humming a song which is not Gaelic, but has a chorus about “mad dogs and Englishmen…”