Gold, wet and windy

So, here I am, in our little seaside bolthole and what's happened today? It's pissed it down so we had to resort to soft play. God help us if it rains again tomorrow.

So, a few Olympics firsts this week - not for me obviously unless you count watching it obsessively.

We now have 22 gold medals and lie in 3rd place in the medals table which beats our Beijing result and isn't bad for a very small island. Go Team GB!

We won our first dressage gold, our first canoeing slalom gold, our first mens' gymnastics team medal since 1912 (when it was a slightly different discipline including rope climbing..) and first showjumping gold since 1954 and first sherry, wine and vodka drinking gold since 2011 (oops -sorry, that was us).

There've been several irksome issues so far and we still have 5 days to go. For example, as I mentioned above....dressage. I know this will upset certain of my friends who have already sent me various querulous comments but, honestly, what is dressage all about? Can fannying about on a prancey horse really be called sport? The Radio 5 commentator the other day mentioned that "not a man nor woman is making a sound  in this 20,000 seater arena, not a whisper can be heard". Could that be that because it's so deathly boring that no-one actually turned up? And can anyone in the GB team whose surname is a) French and b) means Of The Garden really be taken seriously? Congratulations, though, on Gold Charlotte.

Next up, swimming. Team GB have disappointed us badly and then claimed that it was because swimming is the hardest sport. Really? Would the dressage horses say that? Could it be that the best female in the pool this year (USA's Missy Franklin) has built in flippers with her size 13 feet (how will she get a boyfriend with feet like that?) and that Michael Phelps hadn't yet retired? Perhaps there should be a height restriction for swimming? Clearly a very tall person with inhumanly long arms can touch the side before anyone else?

There are many other gripes but most of all, our national anthem seems to have been butchered. Indeed there is even an image doing the rounds on Facebook that questions the absence of the four most important notes of that heraldic tune.

Crabbing Bucket - doesn't actually
do what it says on the can

Anyway, back to glorious Devon and this week I have been mostly surgically attached to the Olympics website in the hope that I can pick up a random ticket or two for Friday night's athletics without having to remortgage the house and also I've been partaking of what should be a new Olympic sport. Crabbing. Oh, how I remember now those days as a kid when my sister and I brought a bucketful of crabs back to our Devon holiday home and left them in the bath to fester for a week. Not so this time. This time The Monkey has been taught how to crab. Slightly disappointing then that we showed a nice Austrian family how to do it only for them to then catch 10 nippers in their bucket while we stuck at zero. Even more disappointing that, once the seagulls had swooped and swiped our entire pack of Co-op bacon (minus packaging of course - very eco-friendly seagulls), the Austrian family then felt that they should deposit one of their crabs in our still empty bucket in gratitude for our tutelage along with a rasher of far superior Marks & Spencers maple cured bacon. These Austrians must have more money than sense. Perhaps we should go into coaching instead of participating.

Mary Mary, quite contrary,
why on earth did you do that?

Despite the weather, Dartmouth is glorious. And I have discovered two things. Firstly, that, despite being quaint and pretty with posh shops you can still get the ubiquitous "special" massage here  and secondly that, once Mary Mary had finished being quite contrary in her garden (see previous blog), she retired to the seaside and adorned her house with cockle shells. Said house is

"You want a side dish with that?"

now for sale.

Good luck with that.....

Might go for a Mo tomorrow.