Not just a joke

Its more than 22 years since I had the pleasure of entertaining the late Ron Pickering (with Robbie Radcliffe) for a day and then sitting next to him and introducing him to a dinner audience. I learned a lot from him not least that even professional speakers get nervous before they start.

He was re-booked to return to the Isle of Man within a year but he passed away in the interim. His wife travelled to the Isle of Man the following year to present a trophy to the Manx athlete who produced the best performance in the Island Games. I really hope that that trophy is still being awarded.

Jean Pickering won the European long jump championships in 1954 and was also a top sprinter and hurdler. But she became best known for establishing the Ron Pickering Memorial Fund which is estimated to have disbursed around a million pounds to young British athletes including some from the Isle of Man.

Sadly Jean Pickering passed away last week and there has been a flood of tributes for her in the media.

One of the skills Ron demonstrated so well was the use of humour to enforce a serious point. Back at the Palace Hotel in 1990 he had us falling off our chairs telling David Coleman stories before lecturing us on the ethics of sport. I often  think of him when I see "professional fouls" in football.

I wonder what he would think of a runner being paid more to run comfortably within his race pace and dropping out at half distance in a marathon than many of the world's top marathon runners will receive for finishing..I suspect that, unlike some of the current commentators who are fearful of saying what they think, he would have given an eloquent reply to a question on the subject.

For my April Fool this year I used the reverse tactic to Ron's dinner speaking. The facts I published about the Isle of Man Government's cutbacks are very real. Hopefully I grabbed your attention before leading you down the garden path, or should it be garden track, with my story about reducing the track at the National Sports Centre to three lanes.

But the cutbacks are going to be real. I predicted on my blog (it didn't require a particularly high IQ to fathom it out!) on the day the changes to the VAT agreement were announced that wherever the cutbacks occurred everyone would argue they should be somewhere else.

The sports budget lies within the Department of Community, Culture and Leisure and within that department the largest spend is on the heavily loss making bus services. We had a visit on Saturday from a friend who is the former head of the transport services. He oversaw a modernisation of the fleet and an improvement in service levels at a time when bus services were being drastically reduced in the UK.

That service provides the basis for the current frequency of buses and we cannot afford to maintain it. I was out running at 7 am this morning; I was walking the dog around Douglas an hour later and by 10 am I was walking with Marie in Laxey. On all three outings I saw buses with  no passengers at all. I never needed to use both hands to count the passengers.

No doubt if the Sunday and public holiday services were reduced or withdrawn there would be hundreds of people saying that they were on the buses that I saw. I think I can see ways of savings a few of those two million pounds required this year but when the cuts come I will visit an optician. For I am sure I will be told that the buses were all full.