Gubbins Athletic

Well, my blog now has its own football team, Gubbins Athletic, courtesy of the Daily Mail. They are doing one of those online fantasy football things for the coming season, so I thought I'd get in on the chance to win £25k which is probably a lot less than many of the team take home each week, but still... Many of you know that I don't know the first thing about football, so I almost fell at the first hurdle when it talked about having to follow a 4-4-2 or 5-3-2 - what's that all about? It did then go on to explain what all that was about, but there were too many people to choose from and I didn't have the time or inclination to google all the players so that I could choose them on the basis of looks. Thank goodness for the Lucky Dip function, with one click of the mouse I had my own team for a bargain 48.8 mil, leaving me some money to do transfers during the season if I decide that I don't like one of my team's hair, or they get caught in a roasting scenario or something. I'm not going to list the full team here - not in case anybody steals it (yeah, as if), but because I've only heard of a few of the players anyway. Good start though, as it selected Paul Robinson as the goalie, gubbins regulars may remember that he was the fit one in the world cup whose picture accompanies an earlier entry. So, depending on how the team does, you may or may not get some updates regarding where Gubbins Athletic are in the table - the competition starts tomorrow!

My other project today has been icing a cake, after work tomorrow I'm going round to my parents and my gran is coming down from London for the day, so I volunteered to make the cake to have with tea in the afternoon. I've gone for the pineapple and pecan cake which went down really well when I last took it into work, it's made with pineapple and pecans (obviously), bananas, groundnut oil rather than butter, and various spices - delicious! I'm cheating a bit with the icing, using Betty Crocker vanilla frosting out of a tub, but also lemon curd with it. My mum thought that lemon curd as well might be a bit sweet, but not if you use the Prince Charles Duchy Organics sort which is beautifully tart, costs 5 times as much as Sainsburys own brand, but is made with organic eggs, butter, and nice things rather than sugar and yellow food colouring.

In the news today has been the usual stuff about A-level results, and the fact that almost everyone passes (24% with grade A), and the inevitable denial that they are getting easier. Bollocks! Of course they are getting easier, but saying that doesn't take away the fact that many people are deserving of their hard-earned grades. When I did mine, 12 years ago, I was having real problems getting some of the concepts in maths - which was a proper exam, no coursework, all equations and maths stuff to solve. So I got my dad to help with the revision, and he had no trouble whizzing through the past papers, getting 100% after a quick flick through the textbook to refresh his memory from when he did it 30 years before. I got an A, and he'd "only" managed an E. And when he was at school, he failed French O-level twice, and then went back and learnt it at college a few years ago for some project he was doing at work in conjunction with the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, and easily passed his GCSE and A-level with top grades. It may be that today's language teaching is more relevant ie conversational stuff rather than conjugating the pen of my aunt, but this pretence that we are all getting more cleverer (note the irony) must be stopped!