There’s more to messing about on water for Gill (From The Northern Echo)

There’s more to messing about on water for Gill

2:03pm Tuesday 20th September 2011 in Backtrack By Mike Amos

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” sad the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts and company and food and drink and (naturally) washing. It’s my world and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got it not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

IT may not be supposed, as they did in The Wind in the Willows, that Gill Prescott simply messes about in boats.

The lady is also understandably cautious about being compared to the Water Rat, though their enthusiasm for the River is remarkably similar.

“When you’re out there, it’s just you and the boat,”

says Gill. “No one can get hold of you, no telephones, none of the stresses of life.

“There’s pressure but it’s a different kind of pressure from everyday life. I’ve just really come to love it on the water.”

It’s just six years six Gill, a 53-year-old mother of girl triplets, put a tentative oar into the Wear at Durham.

Now she’s back from the World Masters rowing championships in Poland with four gold medals, though she insists it’s not the family’s greatest achievement this summer.

“The girls have all qualified as junior doctors.

Everything pales into insignificance besides that.”

Her husband Richard is medical director at Darlington Memorial Hospital, her parents and his were doctors; Gill’s a vet in Durham.

She’d last featured hereabouts in 2008, after winning a 50-54 age group gold at the national indoor championships. A rowing machine was just a training tool, she said – “not a lot of fun” – the river was where the adrenaline really flowed.

She, Richard and their dogs Ginnie and Daisy run for 90 minutes before work – “I can’t let them get unfit,”

says the vet. She also works out four times a week in the gym and usually has six sessions on the river.

The golds were all in doubles and four events, the course complicated because her training partners are all in Strathclyde, a six-hour round trip away.

“It is quite tough to fit in everything in, but Richard doesn’t really notice because he’s always at the hospital, anyway,” says Gill.

She insists there’s plenty of room for improvement, hopes for individual gold next year, gives much of the credit to her coach Geoff Graham, a Durham Amateur Rowing Club man for 54 years.

“It’s all down to her,” says Geoff. “For someone relatively new to the sport, what she has achieved is quite amazing.”

Gill, meanwhile, was heading back to the water, a little vet to a water rat. “I really miss the river when I’m not on it. I suppose Ratty and I have that in common.

There are times when, honesty, it’s the only place to be.”

THE bus pass brigade are triumphant. England’s Over 60s cricket team has beaten Wales – three stumpings on his debut for dear old Tom Stafford, the man with the WD40 knee.

“I nearly got a leg-side stumping, too, but the umpire was too slow to see it,” says the 64-year-old retired newsagent from Yarm.

The game was at Ombersley, Worcestershire, Wales unbeaten for two years and seemingly certain to extend the run when on 139-0 in reply to England’s 243-7. The total, of course, meant that Tom – the original tail-end Charlie – didn’t have to bat.

Then the Welsh crumbled, York’s Mike Kenyon claiming 4-34. Tom, standing up throughout, conceded just two byes.

“He was electric and very competent,” says skipper Martin Pearse. “The leg-side stumping was quicker than the eye could see.”

All that clouds Tom’s sporting horizon is football.

He’s Teesside’s No. 1 Arsenal fan, too.

AS if were needed, the STL Northern League magazine offers proof that the young uns can’t stand the pace, anyway. Guisborough Town secretary Dan Clark, just off to university, headed with the troops for a match at Jarrow, had a couple before the game, a few more to celebrate victory and then returned to the Guisborogh clubhouse. That’s where he fell asleep, in the middle of calling out the bingo numbers.

FOR me the weekend’s sporting highlight was presenting a salver to Thornaby FC to mark their 1,000th Northern League game – and receiving in return a bottle of Bugger Off Bitter, brewed to mark an impending departure.

The club’s Teesdale Park ground is a home transformed. Formerly the Head Wrightson sports ground, latterly much vandalised, it has been wholly reinvigorated through the efforts of retired Cleveland police chief inspector Ray Morton and a team of volunteers.

The site also offers fitness and nature trails, some of the salt marsh plants reckoned so rare that there’s a fine of £20,000 for picking, or nicking, them.

“I could see the potential of this place as soon as I laid eyes on it,” said Ray, the team manager.

Then known as Stockton, the team was elected to the Northern League in 1985-86 despite finishing bottom of the Wearside League the previous season – it couldn’t happen today – and has suffered greatly from the predations of feckless youth.

All that, they greatly hope, is now behind them.

We toasted the future in BoB.

DEPARTURE impends greatly, the final Backtrack column of its present format appears on Saturday, though a weekly column will resume on Thursday, November 3 in the main part of the paper.

To mark my retirement from 46 years’ daily labour, a thanksgiving service for journalism and journalists will be held in Bondgate Methodist church in Darlington town centre tomorrow at 7pm.

It’ll be led by the Rev Leo Osborn, President of the Methodist Conference, and by Canon Granville Gibson, Archdeacon Emeritus of Auckland, followed by a bite of supper in the church and by a drink – first one on me – in the Britannia, across the road.

Many wonderful people have been encountered in the 26 years of the Backtrack column. It would be very good to see some of you there.

And finally...

SATURDAY’S column asked what Tim Bresnan had achieved that no one else had managed in the history of test match cricket.

The answer, which none knew, was that he’d been on the winning side in each of his first ten tests.

Wholly topically, Paul Hewitson in Darlington today, intriguingly, invites the identity of the four countries who’ve only appeared in one Rugby World Cup.

To mark the end of 26 years of a bi-weekly Backtrack column, Saturday’s edition will profile 26 wonderful sporting personalities – if not necessarily an AZ – who’ve made the dear old thing what it is (and of whom non- Backtrack readers would mostly never have heard.)