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Graham Mumby-Croft


Graham Mumby-Croft
My Mate Mike-A Cautionary Tale.

I have maintained contact with several colleagues from my days in the service, and on the NEC of the PGA. One of these is a former governing governor, and NEC member. For the sake of having a name, lets just call him “North Sea Mike”.

Now Mike is a real “character” and is the sort of person that “things just happen to” and who always has a good story to fit every situation. One such story involves something that happened to him, as a direct result of “Lockdown and the Covid Restrictions”.

This is a true story and the details of “Mike” have been blurred just enough so that any of you who do know him will take at least 5-minutes to work out just who he is.

Living on his own means that Mike has to do most of his own housework, although prior to lockdown he did employ a cleaner. However, visits from the cleaner had to cease once we went into lockdown, and as he is not that keen on cleaning himself, Mike decided that, as he was not going to be having any visitors for the foreseeable future, then there really was no need to clean. So he didn’t.
Restrictions on social interaction, continued for far longer than anyone could ever have imagined, but Mike is nothing but resolute, and having decided to not clean his house whilst restrictions stayed in place, he was going to stick to his principles, no matter what. You could say that it was his way of peaceful protest against the restrictions, but one that did not involve taking to the streets of London demanding the freedom to infect and be infected, but rather the much more laid back approach of simply living in an ever growing mess, of his own making.

As restrictions eased, and at long last we were told that it was once more OK to visit family, Mike’s daughter announced that she intended to visit. This of course put Mike into something of a quandary, as he did not really wish his daughter to see how he had been living, made worse by the fact that she would be bringing friends too. This proved to be the case and on seeing how Mike was living his daughter told him in no uncertain terms to “get his act together and get the place cleaned up”.

So the big clean-up began, and as it was exhausting work, as he went along shifting the weeks of built up detritus, Mike opened a bottle of something smooth and red to help lubricate the work, and to help make the task just that little more pleasurable. Sadly it would seem that he may very well have lubricated the process a little too much as, while sitting on a chair taking a breather, he managed to fall off and knock himself completely unconscious on a wooden box that he himself had previously conveniently located, just where his head could give it a good whack on the way down. A dive into the penalty box for which any self respecting Premier league striker would have been proud, although sadly, no V.A.R. to record the event. The result: One very unconscious Mike, laid in a heap on the kitchen floor. This is how his daughter found him, and of course immediately called for an ambulance.

First responders arrived at his home, and it would appear that whilst carrying out an initial assessment of him, Mike was able to emerge from the depths of his unconscious state for just long enough to ask of the First Responder, “Who The F*!k Are You” before sinking again into the level of unconsciousness that only a combination of a good bottle of Red, and a whack on the head from a wooden box, can truly achieve.

Cut to the casualty department of the general hospital in a well known Suffolk town, and Mike is being examined by a doctor, who he would later describe as being about the same age as Adrian Mole, (13 and ¾).
Mike finally began to emerge from his unconscious state after at least 30 minutes, of which probably 5 minutes was due to the blow to the head, and 25 minutes was due to the rather good red wine sedative that he had “self administered”. Dr. Mole confirmed that they had carried out a brain scan, (insert own joke here) and there seemed to be no lasting damage, and once he had rested he was free to go home.

The moral of this tale? Well there isn’t one really, except to say that if you do decide to give up cleaning for any period of time, it might be best if when you do get round to tackling the mess, you try to stay sober, at least until you have cleared away anything that is likely to cause you injury, should you, for some completely random reason, decide to fall off a perfectly stable chair.

GM-C