Big bucks has turned Olympics into a big yawn

At long last, the big yawn that was the Olympic Games is over for another four years. It was, apparently, TV that sparked the change from sport for its own sake to sport for big bucks; from amateur to professional participation.

Rudyard Kipling’s fine sentiment ‘it counts not that you won or lost, but how you played the game’ got shredded like last year’s bank statements. Is it any wonder then, that performance enhancing drugs are now as common as Smarties?

A lady who is playing the game well is Susma. She took over what was once the Elephant and Castle, then Oranges, then the Memphis Bar (with Chinaman Paul Chan singing Elvis songs) and turned it into a fine restaurant serving her superbly cooked, native Nepalese food. It is the restaurant of choice for Mrs B and her chums when they go for a ladies’ night out.

It seems to me that changes are occurring in Ashford’s male population. We have had, for a number of years now, elderly gents displaying wrinkled knees and shrivelled shins projecting from entirely unsuitable shorts.

Recently some of them, and many younger men are now to be seen pushing small children in buggies, entirely unsupervised. Some of the younger chaps even wander round wearing proudly parental expressions on their faces with homunculi strapped to their chests!

I have long held that there are too many dogs in the town centre. At one time they were usually of the docile kind; labradors, setters and other lolloping breeds with mournful eyes. When sitting or lying on pavements, their tails invariably arranged in such a way as to trip the poorly-sighted or unwary. There are, of course, those whose tails had been lopped off in puppyhood. These present less of a hazard.

I find, surprisingly that we now have increasing numbers of grown men, apparently unembarrassed by the fact that they are accompanied by what have hitherto been considered women’s dogs; small, yappy handbag dwellers, often with bug eyes, yappy ankle-nippers, little bigger – and no more attractive – than large-ish rodents. Such beasts are invariably bad-tempered and insist on issuing absurd, vociferous challenges to any proper dog that passes. Owners of such genetically-modified creatures apparently consider this as a source of pride in what they see as plucky behaviour!

‘Changes are occurring in Ashford’s male population’