Bank holiday Monday

Over the weekend we headed up to West Hallam in Derbyshire to see the In-Laws and part of the itinery turned out to be my Sister in law showing us some of the local cricket pitches and their adjacent hostelries. I was most impressed! How can it be that such small villages have such staggeringly good pitches, club houses and facilities. The one we ended up staying at and drinking in the pub was Ockbrook just outside Derby City. Ockbrook if you look at it on a map is about the size of Westleigh Heights e.g. a 2 horse town (village) yet look at their set up........

How the hell do they do that!? It's not an isolated case, Ockbrook were playing Spondon again another little 2 horse town/village only about 3 miles apart and their pitch and set up looks equally grand on multimap.com. But I suppose we can console ourselves with the fact that we've only got to look at the colour of the grass on the pitch and the outfield and compare with the images of Grays I took last weekend and you can see the difference 200 miles makes to the climate here in England. Yesterday in Derbyshire it was 14 degrees c with wind and overcast and yet only 200 miles away here today in essex we had blazing hot sun at 28 degrees centigrade and wall to wall blue skies and all our cricket pitches are bare and grassless with patches of yellow remains of where the grass once was.

But where do they get all the money to afford such amazing facilities?