{"id":2605,"date":"2010-01-19T20:25:51","date_gmt":"2010-01-19T20:25:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=2605"},"modified":"2010-01-19T20:51:24","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T20:51:24","slug":"so-farewell-then-bill-mclaren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=2605","title":{"rendered":"So farewell then Bill McLaren"},"content":{"rendered":"

The voice of my youth, Saturday afternoon television commentator on Rugby internationals, Bill McLaren<\/a> has passed away at the age of 86.<\/p>\n

And now, sitting here in Oxfordshire, but remembering the sound of his voice as we, in Llanover in those days, watched The Old Enemy (that would be England) getting dismantled by just about every other country on the international Rugby Union stage, memories occur.<\/p>\n

In defence of that statement, this was a long time ago. It was a period when the Northern Hemisphere had one team everyone had to beat (Wales, of course), and the Southern Hemisphere also had one team everyone had to beat (New Zealand).<\/p>\n

And I’m not too young to remember that epoch-defining, historic match day at Parc y Strade<\/a> when the final score read Llanelli 9 – 3 Seland Newydd<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

There were boys who didn’t come to school the Monday after that match. Intoxicated with pleasure, unlike the adult males of the valleys, who were intoxicated by many different types of liquid – many different types of liquid because some pubs ran dry of beer that weekend.<\/p>\n

I remember the smell of haddock, too. For some bizarre reason the family evening meal every Saturday, while we sat and watched and Bill McLaren did his stuff, was haddock. No wonder I’m a vegetarian now.<\/p>\n

Haddock!<\/p>\n

And all these memories have been woken by the passing of one man? That’s impact for you.<\/p>\n

Isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The voice of my youth, Saturday afternoon television commentator on Rugby internationals, Bill McLaren has passed away at the age of 86. And now, sitting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}