Jimmy Shaker

Mind if you're paying by card at a Banks O' Dee game, they were seen charging an extra 50p to do so, which we're pretty sure is illegal. Also, parking is a riot and you could either end up at the gate or up by the Wellington. Chances are there's no one in any of the Tullos offices on the weekend so if you can get into one of their car parks you'll probably be fine in there.

That’s managerless Inverurie now.

Locos are stuck in some weird zone of irrelevance - no chance of winning the league, no chance of going down (probably) - and I’d guess motivation is a problem along with some terrible personnel decisions across the past two summers. Letting Neil Gauld go to Banks O’ Dee where he had a rare time was a spectacular f**k-up on their part. The natives aren’t quite restless but there’s been more than a few murmurs of discontent in the past week or so.

Formartine didn’t look like like a whole lot of anything at Lossie last month. Wade stood out a bit but more due to his physicality and ability to hold up the ball in the corner in the last ten minutes than anything else. Not convinced they’ve the legs for it, TBH. They almost never do.

We've played 8 games of football this season. Lost 6, drawn 2. Of the six losses, four have been by a single goal, one an 88th minute penalty. Only twice have we conceded three (Fraserburgh and Forres), the former because the Broch are good, the latter because we'd an arse of a day against Forres. The two draws against Brora and Torry FC came as a result of graft, hard work and keeping focus, admirable attributes and at least two that Torry FC were lacking on Saturday, but we need to find goals from somewhere. Of the 16 halves of games played, we've lost only 8 and not two in the same game.

Held one of the contenders to a comfortable draw two weeks ago, lost to the worst team in the league last week, comfortably held one of the contenders to a draw on their own patch on Saturday. Try and work out how good we are from that.

No team has dropped points to Lossie and gone on to win the league since Clach lost at the Ferry San Giro in January 2005 to a Stuart Strathdee howitzer, so that’s Brora down for another 30 meaningless pre-season games ahead of restarting next July. Unlucks. Brora are now tucked in nicely in the Zone of Indifference with Charlie Bangers Circus and Formartine, teams with the league beyond them and relegation unlikely (even for CBC) leaving them with nowt to play for and squads of players who are difficult to motivate. Nairn started like this last season and recovered, although it was later uncovered the players were doing it deliberately to get their then-management team the sack.

Herself does the same. We’ve a cleaner come in once a fortnight, and the night before she comes round the wife does a fortnights worth of cleaning ahead of time. The cleaner has more than once said we’ve too clean a house to need a cleaner and is surprised we booked her.

I was on here before youse were too. Looks like you lot are - once again! - coming on forums to speak to me.

No I’m not.

The drawbridge is up. The biscuit tin is closed. Brechin City Football Club is a club in crisis.

The good ones are over there. f**k knows what this mess is these days.

Good man, thon Tatters.

Nursery tester day tomorrow. Still happy swimming tho.

The odd thing with the series - or at least the latest one - is if even if you think you know what you're going to get, you're still left open-mouthed at some of what's happening. I certainly was, and I've seen them all, most of them on the big screen as nature intended, and I still came away last night thinking 'what the f**k did I just see'. I dunno if I'm too old for this kind of thing, and I say that as someone quite content to watch stuff blowing up for any length of time. Problem with Fast X is it's literally just stuff happening constantly. There's no let-up. It is just relentless. Even in the likes of Terminator 2, Aliens, Speed, etc., there's brief moments of quiet, or scripted conversation to lead into a set piece, or just someone driving in silence or two folk speaking on a bus or something, anything. Fast X announces a scene change by having something explode. A third of a billion dollars to make that.

FAST X An unrelenting, 135-minute explosion of noise and sound. If nothing else, this film is loud. Really, REALLY fucking loud, almost to the point of distortion. Away from the sound being terrible, the CGI is piss poor in places for a film that cost one third of a billion dollars (sic), and the actual set they built for the favela in Rio looks like they spent one third of a dollar on it. There’s no dicking about either, other than a brief recap of the events of whatever the one in Brazil with the safe was, which sets up the pitch for the next two hours, the first of which is set entirely in Rome watching a football-shaped bomb bounce about the place while folk in cars try to get a tower crane to spin at the just the right moment to knock it into the river. And while they succeed, the whole Italian job isn’t even in the top five most ridiculous moments in the film. Vin Diesel escapes the shockwave of said bomb just by driving fast, and later makes two helicopters fly into each other using a car and some rope, but only after his own car is dropped out of a plane without incident, onto the bridge previously used in another FandF outing, for reasons unknown. John Cena smuggles a plane onto another plane and flies it out of the plane using vodka. Jason Momoa plays a bad guy that’s spectacularly over the top and a borderline tribute to Jack Sparrow, but if he didn’t play him like that he’d have been lost amid everything else. Charlize Theron kills an entire army. Helen Mirren shows up, but in at least one scene she features in you can’t see her face and it looks very much like they had to redo a shot without her. Jason Statham shows up, then disappears to sit in the stands and wait for Fast XI. Literally just drives off the set and isn’t seen again. Han looked sad. The action is simultaneously spread across Rio, London, Portugal and Antarctica. It’s like Diesel is in one film, Cena another, the B-list are in something else, and Theron and Rodriguez are in their own thing. Only rarely do any of the threads become entangled with others. Everyone gets shot, stabbed, maimed, blown up, shot down, or endures a car crash that would see a normal person spend a year in hospital learning to say their own :censored: name, but I can barely remember seeing blood spilt. A dam is blown up after Diesel drives down it to escape two colliding oil tankers while an explosion chases him, but obvs he survives - or does he? A plane crashes with the B-list on it but just off-screen so are they dead? Who knows. The Rock reappears. THE SUBMARINE REAPPEARS. I literally walked out with a sore head and had to sit in the garden in the quiet when I got home. This was a sensory experience and a half. A franchise that’s been at 10 for a long time, turned up to 11. Possibly 12. The plot made sense and yet at the same time the film as a whole made next to no sense, and it exists only to warm folk up for Fast XI. This must be what it feels like to have your first Fanta as a five year old. Intense, with a feeling of uncertainty as to whether it’s a good thing or not. A quite strange experience, truth be told.

There's a fair chance Albion Rovers haven't actually checked yet, and almost certainly didn't at any point up until about three months ago, same as the others cannoned out of the way.

Usually out at the end of May. At a guess, I’d say they’ll be known this time next week, early the week after at the latest.

I dunno if he’s too big or if we fed him too early, but he seems to be a happy boy. Smiles almost all the time and doesn’t take a lot of convincing to do so when he’s not. Nursery soon tho.

He’s been on porridge or a poached egg and toast in the morning for about a month now. Curry or something and fruit purée of an afternoon then milk before bed. Eats anything out in front of him He’s 28lb10 and 73.5cm long. He feels heavier, tho.

Still happy. Still more content in the water than on land. Is now the middle child of three bairns split between the wife and her sister, with an older girl and younger boy now on the scene. The girl is already warming up to terrorise the two of them as soon as they’re all walking.

I can’t even get certain teams to give me their subs. Attendances? Forget it.

I dunno if that lot ever see any games or what ground-level knowledge they have of anything. Their weekly POTW polls occasionally raise an eyebrow.

It’s for the wife more than anything. The fact we’re taking a bairn means nothing, we went previously one new year, just the two of us.

Been experimenting with how far we can take the wee man and for how long. So far he's survived trips to Lossie and Fife, with one to Paris and Disneyland in December booked in. Will try something inbetween inbetween then and now.