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Grapevine Spring 1999 President’s intro On the 29th January, Exiles had the chance to see democracy in action at the AGM. The financial report was sufficiently blurred to make everybody happy and hastily written reports were read out. There were a few changes in the committee. Brett retires after several years as team captain where he did an excellent job ensuring enough people turned up on time to play. Despite being injured several times he continued to support the team from the sideline and reffed several games as well. He’s reliant that he will be selected now on his fitness alone just like Paul Malone? Neils B has replaced Ravn, the people’s choice, as PTI liaison officer. Mark L came on board as recruitment officer. On the playing side Crispin became Team Captain and Paul T vice captain At this years Annual General Meeting of the Dansk Rugby Union the main point on the agenda was the reorganisation of the divisions. The outcome, although not fully finalised, should mean better games for the Exiles providing we finish 1st in this years division. The other main point was to try and change the league so we play the calendar year instead of summer to summer so to avoid a four and a half-month break in mid season. Unfortunately a tearful speech from an old age pensioner from Amager about wishing to see his team play in the super league in the summer swung the vote although no one had the nerve to explain to him that under the new league system his team would be unlikely to reach the super league. Training Indoors training has now ended. Many thanks to all who made the effort to attend and work on their fitness. From Tuesday 6th April, training will start outdoors from 18:15 to 20:30. The season starts on Saturday 10th April and continues until 19th June. It’s important that as many as possible attend training so we can practice as a whole team as we have a few positional problems to sort out. There is always a few who think they do enough in games that "their position" is safe therefore they don’t have to attend training. This is not helpful to the others in practicing moves if key players are absent. We have some tough fixtures coming up so keep training through the spring and we will have a successful half season. - Matt King, President Rugby is In the Air! It is such a great feeling to be close to playing some games. It makes all the hard work feel like it was worth something. We have been training very hard this winter, and we’ve been lucky enough to have some friendlies with other clubs. Running around the DTU, what kept me going was the thought of the upcoming season. What is important to keep in mind is that we aren’t the only ones doing the hard work by training. There is so much that goes on behind the scenes for the Exiles that perhaps all of us, including myself, take it for granted at times. Games don’t just happen; Tours take a lot of hard work planning; the pitch doesn’t line itself; this newsletter doesn’t publish itself. To make a long story short, there is so much work that goes into the Exiles. Fortunately, there are some dedicated people that do all of this for everyone. They organise games and training, go to meetings, make calls, etc., etc., etc. So what can we do to help? I think first and foremost we should commit to training as often as possible. Matt is there coaching us every session, and if he’s not he’s at some workshop or meeting. But lets not just do it for Matt, lets do it for our team-mates and ourselves. We have from now until the middle of June to really make all that hard work seem worthwhile. Lets all work hard and do our part, by training, by lending a hand, by contributing whatever we can to the Exiles. Saturday April 10th isn’t too far away. Rugby is in the air boys, so let’s get it done. - Mark Luceri, Recruitment secretary Sock Sucker’s bit What have I done since the AGM? Difficult one. I did organise a bowling evening for an expected turnout of about 40 people on 27.02, thinking that maybe 7 lanes wouldn’t be enough. Your presence was so un-massive that I was forced to persuade Parken to cancel 2 lanes and give us some of our money back. Thanks, guys! Just to round it off, Nick Blake beat me with his good hand completely bandaged up. Not to worry later Tim and myself were able to spend lots of money giving you free Chilli and discount beers in celebration of our birthdays. Well done, Tim and me! And thanks again Charlie for organising the disco and late license. It was a good laugh. The quizzes have been very successful, thanks largely to Paul ‘no longer a protégé’ Turley and Ray ‘Come ‘ere’ McMahon. There are plenty of enthusiastic participants and good prizes, courtesy of Paul’s T’s contacts and John Cashman’s Jameson employers. Thanks, too, to the Globe for hosting the occasions. A couple of people asked me where all the Exiles were on Wednesday, though, as our turnout was relatively poor. Curiously, the English contestants from the club were easily out-numbered by the French and Irish. At least half of the registered players are ‘limeys’! Moving slightly away from social events, we now have the shirts designed for the Budapest tour and they should arrive late-April. This year they will be sponsored by Jon Anderson’s company, Midas, but they are not lined with gold. The hotel is booked, thanks to Brian Mac, and fixtures against two exiles sides there are being organised. This is going to be the biggest and hopefully best Exiles tour ever with as many as 32 going. We will use some of the money raised at the quizzes as a beer kitty that will help to keep everyone together. We will have another quiz before the tour and an end-of-season pub-crawl. Any other suggestions you might have will be warmly received. By the way, if anyone ever asks you what is real, false and floating in future, kick him! - Brett Thomas, Social secretary
Happy New Year to One And All. A new dawn beckons the millennium approaches, all good things come to an end, you’re naïve and stupid would you like to be captain. This is the way to start a new chapter in Exiles history. Out with the old, goodbye to Chris ‘’Cardinal’’ Gunsten, who has left a very big hole in the Exiles and the second row. His car will be sorely missed. (I believe the VC has been officially ordained as the new Cardinal or at least until the tour). In with the new, welcome to Richard, who already has one of the best training attendance records in the club, beware fellow full-backs. Selection, always an emotive subject. ‘’How do I get selected?’’ is a cry that can often be heard at training sessions and team announcements (Poetic licence at use here). The answer is very simple you just have to follow the ‘Easy three step guide for successful Exiles rugby’ (Patent applied for). Note - The Venn diagram is not published in this edition of the Grapevine, but can be found at http://www.exiles.dk/vennbollox/ 1) Subs - Fairly obvious, pay Johan 500 Kr and be an Exile. Not only will you qualify to play, but also be able to go on tour, get cheap beer and help keep the club going. Seriously this is the money the club needs to keep solvent, you will get this paid back to you many times over during the course of the year. 2) Attendance - Turn up to training (It is Tuesday right?) and if you have made yourself available to play, keep to it. Let us try and dispense with the usual moans from the changing room on match day, if you want to have a skin full the night before either say you don’t want to play or turn up and keep quiet. Obviously there will be days (weeks/months/years) where you will not be able to make training, but an attendance above 50% should be achievable by most. 3) Fitness/ability - Take playing and training seriously and you will be taken seriously as a player. Analyse your own game and talk to Matt or another player to help improve on these areas. You don’t have to be a budding Jonah Lomu to win a place on a rugby team; commitment and enthusiasm count for a lot in any team. If you do feel that you have been hard done by or really want to play, then talk to Matt, Paul T or myself. Alternatively brown envelopes behind the radiator in the Bull do the trick. Obviously from the size of the squad at training sessions (So I’m told) it will mean that not everybody is going to get a whole game every week. So players will have to be prepared to play half a game or maybe we can work some sort of rotation system (Well it works for Chelsea). With all this said, lets make it an enjoyable season. We have games starting in April (Or maybe earlier fixture permitting) and the tour to look forward to. - Crispin Hawes, Team captain
Club Captains Bit, Hi all, Another year begins for the Exiles, and hopefully we can continue with the successes we had in ’98, both on & off the field. The Club is quite strong in its financial/administration situation, and also in it’s depth of players. To ensure a continuation of our present position it’s important to attend training as often as possible and pay your yearly memberships. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all the new players to the Club, we have recruited quite a few over the winter months. If we are to progress to the first division this year, we will need as many players as possible, training on a regular basis. Nobody (since the glory days of Cliffy) can attend training 100%. If you have school/work/meeting or whatever, on training days make sure Matt & Crispin know, and they don’t think that you’re just skiving! There is a new setup in the division structures, which I don’t completely understand yet, but Matt will let us know. Essentially we have to beat Hundested and Hamlet to continue to have as many league games as we currently do. Otherwise we will be seeded lower and have to play teams like Kalundburg, who can never field a team anyway. This year we are touring to Hungary and have 31 travellers in total. This is our biggest tour to date. It’s unfortunate that not everybody who wants to go can at the moment, due to a lack of plane seats. We hope to arrange another "weekend break" in the autumn to Hamburg to play the Exiles down there. Details of this in a few months. The committee has a few new faces this year, welcome to Mark Luceri (Recruitment Sec.) & Niels Bungaard (PTI Liaison Officer). Crispin has taken over the reigns from Brett as Team Captain much to Brett’s relief, and The Protégé (alias Paul Turley) as Vice Captain. Best of luck to both of them for the coming year. As the season progresses and we find ourselves in a position to be promoted to the first division, we should hold a players meeting, to decide on what we want to do, whether we should go up or stay where we are. With the new league structures it should be quite possible for us to afford playing there now. We’ll wait until May/June before this will be an issue for us. On a final note I would like to thank this years sponsors, Midas Fondsmaeglerselskab A/S, and Jon Anderson for arranging it. - Paul Malone, Club Captain.
Twat of the Month. As Club Captain, awarding this accolade four times a year is one of my hardest duties. The prize is awarded to those who have made the ultimate self-sacrifice in putting themselves up for ridicule, and indeed there are many nominees! The single-minded purpose of the nominees, and the spectacular means by which they amuse us, is laudable and not to be scoffed at. This month we pay tribute the following that have made the finals list: - a) Danish Immigration/Dave Dunlop b) Matt King c) Niels Bungaard d) Ravn At a referees meeting held in February this year, the Exiles had 4 representatives. As the meeting was approaching the conclusion, the section of AOB that is, the chairman asked if anybody had anything to add, to which Ravn tried to propose that all referees (himself being one) should undergo regular fitness tests! Could this be the same Ravn that we last saw training when it was legal for Noddy to sleep with Big Ears! Niels Bungaard, a confused young man, never quite knowing if he was Danish or French. Didn’t we used to have a similar problem with a certain Danish/Irish chap. Niles was quite happy to spread the word around the email fraternity that the mighty French would never, ever lose at home, and to the WelshÉ."not in my life time" I think was the quote used. We’ll NielsÉÉvotre temps est terminé! President King, obvious a big fan of his brother. He contacts Duncan(his brother), to see if he wants to come on tour with us. Duncan agrees and goes to book a flight with the details given to him from Matt. Luckily there are flights from Bucharest (Romania) to Budapest and had seats available, Duncan is flying from the UK by the way. Geography is not one of Matt’s fortes obviously. But without a shadow of a doubt the winner this time is the Danish Immigration service. For months they were trying to send poor old Davey D. back home. Two days before he is supposed to travel, he gets married to Heidi. As a wedding present the authorities decide they will give him a residence permit for three years and a wedding certificate for life !!! ...all parties were happy. The Wonderful Language that is Dansk For us foreigners living in Denmark, Danish is not a beautiful language. It is however, economical. The general mantra seems to have been, why invent a new word when two old ones are perfectly adequate? For example, direct translations give: the dust sucker (vacuum cleaner), swine meat (pork), beating meat (stewing meat), body burning (cremation), flying machine (aeroplane) and, the best of all (as far as Exiles are concerned anyway), breast wart (nipple!!!). Words like everything else, are recycled where at all possible e.g. hej means hello and hej hej means goodbye. Imagine the Beatles singing in Danish. "Hello, Goodbye" would be called "Hej, Hej Hej" and the chorus would be a muddle of "I don't know how to say hej, hej, I say hej"É.confused?? The other confusing thing for us foreigners is that listeners have to pay attention to context and tone of voice if misunderstandings are to be avoided. Maybe this is why Denmark produces 25% of the world's hearing aids!! Danes, Norwegians and Swedes are tuned into each other's languages and can converse in their native tongues, though Danish and Norwegian sound very different. It has been observed (by people who observe these types of things) that people in hilly countries speak with up and down sing-song accents while people in flat countries speak with flat accents. Denmark is a flat country QED. People who know Ireland can also vouch for this as people from mountainous Kerry speak very up and down and end every sentence with a high pitched "boy"!!! There is no system of phonetic notation that can do justice to spoken Danish. The consonants are often so softly enunciated as to be undetectable except to the trained ear, while the language possesses vowels which require the speaker to make noises that would be inadmissible in polite society in any other civilised country. Then there are the "r's". The Italians and the Scots roll their r's at the tip of their tongues; the German's have a more guttural "r" which comes from their deep throat tendencies. The Danish "r"É.well let's just say that it has to be fetched from deep below your tonsils, and requires very special muscles. Nothing to do with deep throat, however (mar dhea)É.mar dhea (pronounced mar ya) for the non-Irish among us, is a Gaelic expression meaning something along the lines of "Yeah right". Anyway, to continue on to my next rant about the Danish language. A knowledge of the Danish alphabet may seem esoteric, but it can be helpful to know that, in looking up words in a dictionary, names in a telephone book or places on a street map, v and w may be treated as being the same, aa is the same as å, and that æ, ø and å are at the end of the alphabet. Anyone looking for Aabenraa at the start of the list will have no joy. On a brighter note, the one positive thing that has to be said about the Danes and their language is that they are endlessly tolerant of those who try to speak it. This hides the fact that if you do try to speak it, you will invariably be answered in English. I once thought of trying to speak Danish with a Japenese accent so that I would be answered in Danish (this was based on the theory that not many Danes can speak Japanese). I then realised that I don't look Japanese. Maybe I should just try to improve my accent. Or maybe I should recognise, as the Danes do, that Danish is so unspeakably difficult, no udlændinger can make it worse. Skål agus sláinte!!! - Paul Turley, vice team captain Email addresses The club operates an email list server (very kindly administered by Ravn) where members can regularly recieve club news, info, etc. via email. It’s a lot easier than keeping a book containing everybody’s addresses as you can send a message to one address knowing that everybody will receive it. Just send an email to: exiles@hotel.prosa.dk Most of the messages received are actually junk but the list does have some simple rules:
If you do not have email, don’t worry - you’re only missing out on the crap jokes. The important information will get to you in the normal way. There are currently 53 people on the list. Let me know if you want to be added. - Tim Clements, Club secretary
Roskilde Festival 1999
This year's festival will be held 1-4 July with REM, Robbie Williams, Metallica, Manic Street Preachers, Echo & The Bunnymen just a few of the bands who have already signed up. Exiles has had a tradition for the past 3 years to have members working as security/crowd control in the DeeDay tent (Dance, techno, ambient). They want us back again this year. You're required to work shifts keeping an eye on the crowds and the rest of the time is your own. You have access to the back stage areas, bars, cafes, etc. and the whole weekend is normally a good laugh. You do not get paid but you do get meal/beer vouchers and can see the bands for free (of course). If you want to volunteer to take part this year please let me know. I need your name, address and date of birth. - Tim Clements, Hon. secretary
Tour Grapevine As with last year’s issue, the Tour Grapevine will be a bumper issue. We are starting production right now and desperately need your help. We definitely need a photograph and if possible please submit an article. In an attempt to raise more funds, we are selling half/full page adds in the issue for 500/1000 kroner. If you think you can get your company to help sponsor our cultural activities, contact me. I am making an "official" begging letter for you to present to your employer. We need lots of material so get your pens out! The deadline for articles and photos is April 23. - Tim Clements, Hon. secretary
Real quotes "Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but notwith all those flies and death and stuff." -Mariah Carey, pop singer Jon Snow: "In a sense, Deng Xiaoping's death was inevitable, wasn't it?" Expert: "Er, yes." (Channel 4 News) "As Phil De Glanville said, each game is unique, and this one is no different to any other." (John Sleightholme - BBC1) "Beethoven, Kurtag, Charles Ives, Debussy - four very different names." (Presenter, BBC Proms, Radio 3) "Julian Dicks is everywhere. It's like they've got eleven Dicks on the field." (Metro Radio Sports Commentary) Interviewer: "So did you see which train crashed into which train first?" 15-year-old: "No, they both ran into each other at the same time." (BBC Radio 4) Grand National winning jockey Mick Fitzgerald: "Sex is an anti-climax after that!" Desmond Lynam: "Well, you gave the horse a wonderful ride, everyone saw that." (BBC) Question: If you could live forever, would you and why? Answer: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever." -Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest "Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country." -Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese." -Former French President Charles de Gaulle "The Internet is a great way to get on the Net." -Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole "Traditionally, most of Australia's imports come from overseas." Former Australian cabinet minister Keppel Enderbery "It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago." -Former U.S. Vice-President Dan Quayle "It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it." -Former U.S. Vice-President Dan Quayle "Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life." -Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for a federal anti-smoking campaign. "We will do as all conservative politicians have done throughout the history, when they found themself with their back to the wall - we will turn around and fight" - Former Prime Minister John Major |
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