Martin Johnson’s Retirement Home
On the 11th of September, in preperation for the Rugby World Cup, we bought 15 fishes (8 ‘mickey mouse’ forwards, and 7 ‘golden sun’ backs). Daddy carefully named each and every one after the England rugby team. All 15 survived past the final on the 22nd November, but now only Martin Johnson is left.
The results of the England team were directly linked to the health of our fish: the day before Richard Hill injured himself, his counterpart, a ‘mickey mouse’ called ‘Richard’, actually jumped out of the fishtank, and caused mild panic when Daddy tried to get him back into the tank. He survived the ordeal, but it took several weeks for him get back to normal swimming.
Sadly, since the big day, the fishes have one by one shuffled off this mortal coil. Each of them has been given a grand ’sending off’: flushed down the toilet while “Swing Low, sweet chariot” was sung. Now there’s just Martin left - alone in his retirement home.
Of course, not many people realise that Daddy (and not Martin Johnson, Clive Woodward or Jonny Wilkinson) was the mastermind behind England’s success.
It all started when Mummy and Daddy spent a weekend in Pingshi in Autumn 2002. A tradition there is to make a large paper lantern, write your wishes on the sides of it, and then ‘launch it’.
You can see that great care was taken first to create the lantern, and then to write the wishes on the side. A little bit of a short cut was taken as the character for ‘win’ is a bit complicated, and there wasn’t room for the 3 characters for ‘rugby’. It was assumed that the relevent gods are bilingual and could read Daddy’s unique blend of English and Chinese ‘England win Rugby world cup’.
Once the lantern was finished, it was taken to the main bridge in the town, and then it was fired up. Note that, as in the semi-final against France, the wet rainy conditions did not cause a problem.
It slowly disappeared into the night sky, taken the dreams of the England rugby team with it (you can just see it as a red dot in the final picture).
