In Belfast for a weekend at the very start of this month – and oh how brilliant is the new Titanic Museum (and the surrounding dock area).
The city was host during our visit to the Word Police & Fire Games, a surprisingly large event featuring nearly 7,000 competitors from 67 countries.
We watched a rather wonderful ice hockey match: Montreal’s police against Tatarstan’s fire department. (Or was it Montreal’s fire department against Tatarstan’s police? Who knows? Who cares! Either way, they were really rather good.)
The schedule included other mainstream sports – basketball, soccer, athletics, cricket, shooting – as well as some quirkier ones. Amongst the attractions were the 20m rope climb, a stair race, a tug of war (with, perhaps, historic shades of the City of London versus Liverpool police contest in the 1908 Olympics), ‘pocket billiards’ (honestly!), and ‘muster’ and ‘SWAT’ contests.
Needless to say, the contest between the various police forces for the Judicial Corporal Punishment medals must have been particularly interesting. I’m imagining that the grand final comprised six contestants each giving six strokes to each of six girls, using their favoured local implement. Facial responses and cries or sobs carefully noted; welts inspected at the end of each half dozen…And then perhaps two fresh girls for the gold-versus-silver play-off: maybe twenty strokes each from each officer this time?
This makes me wonder where the girls came from. Prisoners who had it coming anyway? Police cadets? Volunteers? If so, it gives a whole new ring to the phrase “… and not least, we thank all the volunteers for their dedication and enthusiasm.” Quite a painful honour to be selected for the play-off.