JonM

My wife works with homeless people here in Cambridge, for a charity. I asked her which charity I should give money to this Christmas and she named a homelessness charity - Centrepoint. Which is not the one she works for

I thought they were playing out of Birmingham & Solihull RU now?

I'm missing 5 now - Cornwall, Midlands (been to Coventry a few times though), West Wales, Toulouse (been to several other grounds there though), Broncos (been to 10+ of their old grounds). Do we count Sheffield as their new ground is on the site of Don Valley? Have Oldham confirmed where they're playing this year?

They owe a quarter of a million to AB Sundecks, but a pretty healthy looking set of accounts overall. When was the last time a RL club had a share offering ?

Not forgetting that it'll be in Newcastle, in October, with hopefully 50 000 people making some noise. We're a different proposition under those conditions.

ECB have found a solution for Covid. Anyone who puts on an England shirt becomes unable to catch anything.

You have half a team of ex-Widnes players in that squad... Think you're right about Luis Roberts - looked very good for Swinton last year and I would expect him to be around the top of the try-scorers charts for the season if he gets to play enough games.

Indeed - if it was just one person's word against another (and we don't know that it was) - and one party already has form for not co-operating/ providing actual facts to the same disciplinary group some months earlier, whose word are you going to believe?

Presumably for the same reason that Fev, Leigh etc. have done - to get access to some better players. Are there any current Championship clubs that haven't received players through a dual-registration deal at some point? I can't think of any.

Biggest fanbase in the championship (and bigger than much of SL)? An academy side that's in with the SL academy teams in 2022?

The Wrigley's Spearmint Rhinos?

Correct. The date is known to be July 30/31 though.

Australia's rugby union team have played 20 games since the Kangaroos last played. Their cricket team will have played 30 games in 2021 - in places like Bangladesh. The soccer team has managed to play games in places like Japan & Vietnam. Australia's rugby league team scared to even travel to other first world countries.

Australia hasn't won a single game in over two years. Hard to argue that's the world's best team.

I had kids in my twenties, and was almost always the youngest parent at school, sports clubs etc - maybe that would be different if I'd lived somewhere a bit less middle class I'd be delighted to have more children now, although I don't think my wife would be too impressed. I've got a lot more time and money than I did then, so I think it could even be easier in some respects. If you're a bloke having children in your late 50s, it pretty much means your other half is 20+ years younger. Certainly for the people I know, that's the case.

Been staying up late? I wouldn't bother

Not too surprising - he found surfing and moved to Cornwall didn't he? Not sure where his business running men's nature retreats is based.

It was nice to see a bit of optimism up-thread. Other forums I frequent seem to be debating whether we can snatch a draw in one of the games and make it 4-0 rather than 5-0. It did feel like England had mentally written off this game before the start - wonder what Broad and Anderson would have made of the fairly green-looking, not entirely typical Gabba wicket today.

I doubt there's much difference in house prices between somewhere like Camborne and Wakefield, tbh. Not all of Cornwall is tourism and second homes/ retirement homes, there's some ex-industrial/mining towns too. Very good appointment. Obviously he's coached two different teams to championship success, coached in SL and international teams, but I wonder whether his experience in union might come in handy if they do end up taking on a few locals. I assume he'll have a few players to bring down from Yorkshire too.

I'm not in any way religious, but I found the Italian chapel on Orkney and the history of the POWs creating it really quite moving. The archaelogical sites like Skara Brae and Maeshowe etc. are why I went there, but the islands & causeways are pretty interesting, and Kirkwall is nice to wander around.

Not much to keep you in Thurso or Wick. Seemed to me that the main thing to do there was to have a fight with the people from the next town. If you have time to take the passenger ferry from John O'Groats to Orkney though? There are minibus tours that will pick you up from the ferry and show you the main sights of Orkney in a few hours, if time is at a premium.

Why not? It's a great place to watch a game. It's been used for interstate cricket finals and internationals in recent years, five figure crowds for women's state of origin in recent seasons etc. Realistically though, they'd play at Gosford and probably just the Manly game at north sydney. Not sure why the fans would go for that over just staying in the NSW cup.

I believe he did a couple in Auckland when he was there for the Lions tour in 2019.

I was wondering where Monsal Trail had appeared from. Cambridge may have disappeared, but we now have three parkruns in the city and several more in the surrounding area. A little bit of a frustrating story with Cambridge. Cambridge Sports Lake trust, the charity that was given the park by the council some years ago, decided that it was better to use the site for other things on a Saturday morning. Car parking fees from parkrun was their main source of income for some years, but lockdown seems to have resulted in many more people using the park. Not necessarily a bad thing I guess. Junior parkrun is still there on Sunday. Fourth place for me today, in a time almost 4 minutes slower than my course PB. Fair to say that conditions underfoot meant that a lot of the fast people went elsewhere, and brought the rest down to my level

Presumably you are already on medication for it - I would've thought they'd be very keen to get that under control asap. I've found having a blood pressure monitor pretty interesting. With a few year's data, I can see that my blood pressure is lower in summer than winter (seems to be related to how much time I spend in the sun - but Vitamin D supplements don't make a difference). I can see that liquorice makes it go up, beetroot and spinach makes it go down. Stress levels don't make much difference either. Normal advice is to cut back on salt to reduce BP. I've found that salt with loads of liquid doesn't have much effect, but small amounts of salt with no liquid do. I.e. it seems like it's the concentration rather than absolute value that matters.