Friday 31st January 2025
Today is the first day of the 2025 Guinness 6-Nations, and Wales are away to France so our first mission is to find Cloggys, then secure seats to watch. As I said earlier, we have had conflicting stories and when I eventually found their telephone number, I was none the wiser!!!
With Kick-off being around 1600hrs local time, and not sure where to go but knowing it will be a 3/4hr journey, Christine cooked “another” full English to set us up for the day. The other unknown is how busy it will be, the old Cloggys was always heaving on match day.
After clearing up we headed to Rhodes Lane, Falmouth Harbour, leaving plenty of time as where this place is, is anybody’s guess!! Also being Friday evening, rush hour could well be early and extend the time it takes to get to Falmouth Harbour.
All our fears and woes were unfounded as we arrived rather quicker than expected!! Cloggys is situated on a jetty jutting out into Falmouth Harbour at Catamaran Marina but parking was limited, but we found a sort of “space” right outside. We had the pick of the seating as we were so early for kick-off, an hour and a three quarters to be precise!! Christine had already said she didn’t fancy drinking all afternoon; that worked well!!!
The new Cloggys is nice, open on three sides looking out past the boats on the quay and into the harbour, so sitting in prime position, in front of a large tv with a bottle of Chardonnay was “purrrrrfect”. Slowly folk arrived when I got the message I had to move my car, apparently I was blocking the “Boss” of the whole complex parking in his prime position. Not wishing to cause a stir, I dutifully moved it beside the diesel tank as suggested; a far more inconvenient place I would have thought, still that’s where it ended up.y
Whilst I was moving the car the big boss came over to Christine and introduced himself muttering something about lunch. He was then interrupted and told this was the wrong person so made apologies and retreated leaving Christine bewildered. When I had sorted the car and returned Christine recounted this incident to me. The next thing we see is an official looking SUV bearing the Irish flag arriving and the chauffeur jumped out, he was in his spotless white uniform with boots you could see your face in and he opened the car doors. The person was greeted by the “big boss” and his wife and then headed to a table laid out for dinner. It turns out this was the Irish Ambassador and his wife; perhaps a day early!!!
As we waited for the match to start the bar filled up and as the wine bottle slowly emptied I moved over to beer, well that’s what I wanted but worse, a bar that promotes rugby, no Guinness, what??? I did point out it was the Guinness 6-nations but it fell on deaf ears! I had to drink Heineken: larger, yuk!!!
All set and off we went, Wales started well in the early minutes but then France got a grip of them and took over. Today was all about the Welsh team keeping their defeat to a minimum; unfortunately Wales are not the team they were and France romped away; in the end Wales did well to keep France below 50-points; the final score was France 43 : 0 Wales. During the second half we ordered a few starters to nibble away at, probably “comfort” food!!
By now it was dusk so the race was on to get back as far as we could before it was dark. Driving here in the dark is a nightmare, firstly the pot holes are difficult to spot, secondly the locals just wander about on the side of the road and “blend in”, so one needs to keep the other “beady-eye” out for them and to add to this grim story, my hire car doesn’t have the main beam on the headlights working!!! Still we got back safely and poured out a rather large rum!!!
We had a Pizza lined up for tonight but having “picked” too much earlier, that stayed in the freezer. We just had a few hands of crib, very close games I’m pleased to say before hitting the sac. Tomorrow is the main event, Ireland V England so it will be back at Cloggys.