Thread: Gonna be a long night......

A very extensive TV viewing lined up for this evening, starting of course at around 6 p.m. local with Harry and Meghan's wedding. Regardless of views of the Royal family and Meghan's family etc, nobody does ceremonial events quite like the UK, particularly when they're held at historic sites such as Windsor Castle. Going to be interesting who is actually in attendance. Coverage on BBC1 HD from 3 p.m. local.

This will roll very nicely into the latter part Stage 19 of the Giro d'Italia, with the 186 km stage finishing at the top of Monte Zoncolan with it's gradients of up to 22%. Will Simon Yates retain his lead over Tom Dumoulin and keep the pink jersey, or will Chris Froome put on his climbing legs? Coverage on Eurosport 1.

Winding up will of course be the FA Cup Final, with Manchester United and Chelsea each bidding for one piece of silverware to end the season, and possibly the last chance that Conte and Mourinho will have of sharing their mutual dislike on an English touchline. My money is on United (of course), not least of which because it then sets up August's Community Shield between United and City, which couldn't be a better hors d'oeuvre for next season. Again coverage on BBC1 HD from 11 p.m.

It honestly bemuses me that any heterosexual male would spend the day watching a wedding on tv.

Isn't it on at the same time as the cup final?

Anyone flipping between the two might want to check to make sure that their home furnishings aren't perfectly coordinated before retiring.

Now I know why that Buddha of yours looks so heavily influenced by Ru Paul.

Oh well....'enjoy', as Meghan might say.

^Yup, PAG just handed over his 'man card' right there.

I sent PAG a green for coming out. I reckon the security boys are on full seppo alert.

Originally Posted by cyrille

It honestly bemuses me that any heterosexual male would spend the day watching a wedding on tv.

Isn't it on at the same time as the cup final?

Anyone flipping between the two might want to check to make sure that their home furnishings aren't perfectly coordinated before retiring.

Oh well....'enjoy', as Meghan might say.

Wedding starts at midday. Cup Final kicks off 5.15 p.m. UK time.

Any event like this is choreographed along military lines, and as ex military, poses more than a little interest to me at least. Barring the next Coronation and Monarch's funeral, there won't be another event like this for probably 20 years.

and this kid really isn't even charles' son, right?

Originally Posted by PAG

this is choreographed along military lines

What will lizzie be drinking ?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aCxiNE6eIss

A wedding, grown men in spandex on pushbikes, then a load of fairies chasing a ball of air.


It would be interesting to see the spread you’ve got laid on, i’m guessing there’s a quiche and profiteroles involved

Originally Posted by Dillinger

A wedding, grown men in spandex on pushbikes, then a load of fairies chasing a ball of air.

It would be interesting to see the spread you’ve got laid on, i’m guessing there’s a quiche and profiteroles involved

Actually ...
I used to make a mean quiche. Even the base from original.

My Dad, a working man, refused to eat it. (we lost our Mum early. Hence, as kids, we learnt to cook early).

Then, one day, I made it look a bit different, told him it was an Egg and Bacon Pie ... and he loved it.


But Dill ... I get your drift.

Originally Posted by Dillinger

A wedding, grown men in spandex on pushbikes, then a load of fairies chasing a ball of air.


It would be interesting to see the spread you’ve got laid on, i’m guessing there’s a quiche and profiteroles involved

I know how to live........

PAG ... you an Aussie?

Originally Posted by David48atTD

PAG ... you an Aussie?

No, though have a few Aussie and Kiwi friends.

Paul Vice had been through a lot before Prince Harry saved him. Through cornfields hiding Taliban triggermen, through surgery for 400 shrapnel wounds, through a lot of near-death things and an afterlife viewed through the bottom of a beer glass.

Not one to make a drama of his crises, he hates “this hero bullshit” and prefers to cheer the prince. Today he will be at the royal wedding and tomorrow he will prepare for a mind-boggling motorsport debut in his 200mph Jaguar F-Type.

In 2013 Vice was in a trough of despair. Blown up by a bomb in Afghanistan two years earlier, he had dealt with the operations, a leg amputation, the brain damage, the searing pain and being hooked on 26 tablets a day. But then he was signed out of the Royal Marines.

“My default setting set in and I hit the booze,” he says under a pewter sky at a kart circuit in Devon. “I hated the world. I hated everybody. I took it out on the ones closest to me. It was a terrible time. That lasted six months and then I went to the Warrior Games in Colorado. I saw people who were properly f***ed up and they were loving life.

“I was with Harry when he said, ‘We’ve got to do this bigger and better at home.’ I thought, ‘Yeah, it’ll be a couple of crap tents on an RAF airfield like a school sports day.’ But when it happened the next year I felt like a rock star. Harry doesn’t want any praise, I know he doesn’t, but he doesn’t get enough. He’s a nice, normal guy. I can’t tell you what we were up to that night — he’s a soldier, put it that way.”

Invictus Games Racing takes the wounded-veteran concept to a new level, with servicemen driving modified cars in the British GT Championship. Vice, 34, will take over at Silverstone in three weeks’ time. With limited use of his right hand and a prosthetic left leg, he says getting to the start line will feel like a win.

War minus the shooting was the Orwellian put-down but the power of sport can be understated by those who have never needed its crutch. Vice was one of them in 2011.

“First light, already raging hot and we’re walking through this field in Helmand,” he says. “Farmers are working, kids playing but I get this spider sense, call it atmospheric, a mood change, like going into a pub on the moors in your city suit. I’m hyper-vigilant and looking for the abnormal. Some of the kids are legging it and the Taliban don’t kill kids if they can help it. About 200 metres away I see two guys hunkered down. I follow their eyeline to the wall beside me. I look down and see an old oil drum sticking out of the wall with some bracken camouflaging it. Time can’t slow down but my brain has so many thoughts it gives the perception of it. I turn and shout, ‘Run!’ ”

Maybe it is the life-affirming jolt of having his heart stop twice that makes him talk of those last steps in the present tense before turning back. Flung into a wall by the IED, his neck broken, he checked his limbs and saw a pool of blood forming by him. “When I reached into my shoulder pocket to get a tourniquet my hand slipped into my neck and I realised I had bigger problems. The carotid artery was severed. I thought, ‘The bastards have finally got me.’ We’re trained to a ridiculously high standard of trauma management but I don’t know how to repair someone whose head is hanging off.”

He remembers the medic saying: “We’re losing him,” and his comrade sticking a knee in his neck and imploring him to “think of Tessa and the kids”. There was an out-of-body experience as he looked down and saw the medic working on him. He felt the heat of the Chinook helicopter. Another soldier was crying. Somewhere in his half- consciousness, Vice accepted that this was his time. “It was my fourth tour of Afghanistan, two in Iraq, and you can only roll the dice so much,” he says.



Vice has kept part of the exposive that injured himHailing from the rough end of a Bristol estate, soldiering was the only thing at which he excelled. “It’s so cool,” he says. “Until you’ve been in a firefight you can’t describe it. There are other highs — racing cars is a high — but nothing comes close to having bullets skim your head. When you’re that close to death all your senses are heightened and there is a feeling of sheer elation. There is no better buzz in the world.”

Recovery was a duller challenge. “I was fully opiated-up but the nerve pain was horrendous,” he says. “It felt like my skin was on fire and I could not have a bed sheet touching my leg.” Brain damage merged with nerve damage and intense guilt over injuries sustained by other members of his unit. Finally, after a year, the youngest of his four children asked him about the bomb.

“It was the usual — cutlery, nuts and bolts, a sheep’s carcass, human shit stirred in to infect you,” he explains. “I had so much shrapnel in me and asked if I could keep the piece that stuck in my knee. It turned out to be a sheep’s tooth.

“The only bit of my kit left was my helmet. My sergeant major gave it to Tess. It was pouring down that day. There was still blood on it and as she held the helmet it filled with red water. That properly messed her up but she didn’t tell me for seven months because I was all over the place on the drugs and the brain damage was taking over my life. So she bottled it up.”

The trip to Colorado changed everything. Vice had been a sniper but could not support a rifle with his damaged arm and had to learn to pull the trigger with his thumb. He was 17th in the shooting in 2014 and won a gold medal in cycling at the Invictus Games in London that year. He was amazed at what Harry had done and the shifting perceptions of the military. “When I first joined we weren’t allowed to wear our uniform home,” he says.

Later that year he had his leg amputated so he could play with his children, rather than struggle to walk after them. “Thanks for the misery,” he wrote on it beforehand. He set three goals that defied medical predictions: walk unaided by Christmas, run in an athletics meet by March and play football that season. The triptych was completed on a wet night on a five-a-side pitch on the edge of Dartmoor. When he clashed with an opponent his foot spun 90 degrees on its bracket. “You’ve broken my leg,” he teased. The opponent was aghast: “Ref! Ref! Stop the game!”

He won seven medals at the 2016 Invictus Games and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with Tess. Yet the story did not just end neatly with healed wounds and multiple medals. Left off the team for last year’s Invictus Games he was devastated and started drinking again. Then Invictus Games Racing came up, an offshoot thought up by James Holder, the co-founder of Superdry.

Some frown at sporting war analogies but they are real to Vice, from team camaraderie to the loss of identity from careers cut short. Where he would be without sport? “God knows but it wouldn’t be very pretty,” he says. “I definitely would not be married because there is only so much anyone can take. I came dangerously close to losing it all.”

There are similarities between soldiering and elite sport. “Take rugby: you can’t carry a stretcher with three people and a front row doesn’t work without a second row,” he says. “If we came under fire we would spread ourselves as wide as possible — that’s a defensive line in rugby. Go into attack and you need your commander, your No 10.”

He seems to regard his 4x100m Invictus medal from 2016 more highly than his Military Cross, which he recently found in the back of his car when he took it in for a valuation. He says it was stupid to run into machine-gun fire and that he made sure it was not a “sympathy medal” before accepting. “Baker, plasterer, soldier — it’s just a job,” he says. “The 4x100m was special because I could not walk two years before.”

Small steps have become giant leaps and he will be forever grateful to Harry and Invictus. Today Vice will join those waving flags at Windsor. Then he will think about chequered ones at Silverstone. “It’s not a learning curve,” he says. “It’s a learning wall.”

Pag nice wine you'll be sipping one of my favourites Koonunga hill,I'm sure the snowflakes will be offended by its name.

Don't forget your box of Kleenex.

Originally Posted by Dillinger

A wedding, grown men in spandex on pushbikes, then a load of fairies chasing a ball of air.


It would be interesting to see the spread you’ve got laid on, i’m guessing there’s a quiche and profiteroles involved

^
My local pub

Originally Posted by Chico

Don't forget your box of Kleenex.

Masturbation is not currently in my itinerary for the evening.

Saracens v Wasps, premiership semi final kicks off at 12.30 I believe so with all the pre match guffaw, can totally miss the wedding for a day of sport.

Originally Posted by PAG

to showcase the UK (and one of the greatest cities in the world, London) to the rest of the world

Are you from the colonies Khvn PAG, the Wedding in Berkshire not London

I hope you enjoy the spectacle, each to their own, pity only one parent in attendance

I'd give it a couple of years before wealthy woman needs more space

Originally Posted by david44

Are you from the colonies Khvn PAG, the Wedding in Berkshire not London

Indeed, though within daily commuting distance for thousands. Windsor Castle is 25 miles from Buckingham Palace. My inference re London was the pomp and ceremony that will be on display, associated with London and the Royal family.

the wedding is on every channel here !!!

can't miss it,

Originally Posted by Dragonfly

the wedding is on every channel here !!!

can't miss it,

Let them eat cake