I think I'm back on track again as far as keeping the website updated, but I guess I owe you some sort of explanation for the lack of activity in the first couple of months after the season ended.
Partly it was due to the incredibly hectic (though still thoroughly enjoyable) final week of the season. First there was the Basketball Finals Weekend, in Birmingham, and they were as enjoyable as ever. Usually there's time to draw breath and recharge my batteries for at least a couple of days after what, traditionally, has been the season's climax, but that was far from the case this year, as there were still two major events to come, in a very short space of time.
There wasn't even time to go home after the weekend in Birmingham, as I was straight up the M6 to Manchester, for the four days of the Visa Paralympic World Cup.
I thought I knew my way to the hotel that the organisers had arranged for me, as I'd looked it up in the 'net, and decided that if I followed the signs for "Granada Studio Tours" I couldn't miss it, as it was just across the road. Unfortunately, what I hadn't realised was that that attraction closed a while ago ... and all the direction signs to it have disappeared!
The result was that, after a relatively easy trip up the motorway, it took me an hour and a half of increasing desperation, driving round Manchester, to find the hotel Arriving at half past midnight was hardly the ideal preparation for commentating on the first game on Monday ... at 9.30am!
The wheelchair basketball was, if
anything, even better than last year, and the organisers had done a magnificent
job in making it very much an event rather than just a series of matches. The
venue, at the Velodrome, did not have the intimacy of the customised basketball
facilities at the Amaechi Centre, but its spaciousness had its own appeal, and I
can't praise the attitude of the staff too highly.
I thoroughly enjoyed the matches, and being involved at courtside, on the microphone, but on the Wednesday I woke up with a problem - raging toothache. Efforts to find a dentist during the day proved fruitless, despite the help of local volunteers at the Velodrome ... and even the major dental hospital turned me away, with the advice to "come back and start queuing at 7.30 tomorrow morning"!
Dosed up with painkillers, I got through the day somehow, but it wasn't until the following morning (when the team doctor was able to treat the symptoms with antibiotics) that it really began to ease ... and by that time my face was so swollen that I resembled a one-man impersonation of Laurel and Hardy, according to which profile you were looking at.
By the time I got home, late on Thursday, the swelling had gone down enough to avoid scaring my daughter (or no more than usual, anyway), but that, on top of working twelve hours a day for four days, had left me feeling pretty tired.
At least I then had a full 24 hours at home, but then it was off to Cosford for the RAF Final Fours. Not working the microphone this time, but helping out with the stats, and trying (not totally successfully) to keep up with the match reports.
Once again, EB and the RAF had done a great job of organising the premier Under-18, Under-16 and Under-14 event, and the teams played their part in making it another excellent weekend.
Not surprisingly, though, after spending eight days out of nine away from home, I felt like taking a brief break once it was all over - a break which I planned to be for about a week, while I put my feet up.
As it turned out, that week stretched into a month, and then two, and once I did start seriously updating the site again, it's taken me till now (nearly mid-August) to fully catch up!
I
suspect the culmination of that hectic end to the season, was more tiring than
I'd realised. Another factor, though, was losing our near-14-year-old Labrador,
at Easter.