Turf Zone – HolyCharger
Well folks, it has finally happened to me. That thing you dread the most when you set out for a turfing session. I’ve dropped the car off at Meadowfield Garage in Newtongrange to deal with some soon-to-be-needed advisory work following the recent MOT test, namely front tyres, front brake discs and brake pads, and rear brake shoes*. There was a day when I’d happily tackle this myself but the days of getting skinned knuckles, an aching back and covered in road crud are no longer attractive. So, happy to pay the price for someone else to do the work.
Anyway, I’ve unloaded the Brompton G Line, unfolded him and started to get ready to turf Newtongrange. Then I discover the disaster, I’ve left my mobile phone in the house. Bugger! Not only that but I nearly fell off the bike when pedalling off because I’d forgotten to attach the left-hand pedal. Could be one of those days, I reckon.
For today’s turf blog, I was thinking of something entirely different. Once upon a time I was gainfully employed earning money and occasionally had to participate in those silly and pointless team-building sessions in swanky hotels like the Crieff Hydro, which were actually little more than an excuse to eat too much food, get pissed and I’m sure a few of the others were up to certain grunting and groaning shenanigans during the night. Anyway, one of the things we had to do was brainstorming sessions or out-of-the-box thinking. Thought I might try that for turf.
First one I came up with concerned the points you get for taking a zone. My idea was to have dynamic points allocation. Every time a zone is taken the points value reduces by 5, all the way down to the lowest points value in turf, i.e. 65, after that it resets back to the original value. Conversely, for each day that a zone does not get taken the points value increases by 5 points, then after being taken it also resets back to the original value.
The next one was inspired by a movie I’ve been meaning to watch called The Purge, where on one day a year, for 12-hours, all laws are suspended and you can go a deal permanently with that turfer who keeps blocking you all the time. In turf, this might be something like, for 24-hours on the last Saturday before a new Round begins, all take times and block times are suspended. I wonder how that would affect turfing?
Another out-of-the-box idea would be to blanket cover the country with zones, perhaps using automated software to place a zone every 250m, regardless of where that actually is in reality and with no regard to property, safety and so on. It would be up to the turfer to decide if the zone should be taken or not. There are approx. 13,000 zones in Scotland and given a land area of approx. 80,000 sq. km, this would increase the number of zones to approx. 750,000. Now that would be interesting!
Another idea was about the time of day that zones are usually taken. It would probably be accurate to say that most zones get taken during daylight hours and one way that might encourage turfers to take zone during the wee small hours, say 12.00 midnight to 4.00 am would be to include a few bonus points. Would that work, I don’t know.
*Turns out they were not required and not fitted and they adjusted the handbrake. Nice to find an honest garage.
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