The Holyrood Points Competition attracted a good turnout with 11 of us vying to take home either the coveted Loving Cup (also affectionately known as the Elephant’s Foot – obvious when you see the size of the trophy’s plinth) which is awarded to the overall winner, or the traditional Kettle which goes to the winner on handicap.
This annual test of individual skills produced a wide range of scores. It is surprising just how difficult it is to adapt to making one’s own judgement about where to deliver the stone and at which weight without the benefit of a skip waving his brush around at the other end of the rink. And the absence of sweeping is noticeable too, although it is permissible to chase one’s second stone in each direction to try and do something about the appalling delivery that one realises one has just made.
We undertook the standard order of the various exercises as laid out by the Royal Caledonian Curling Club http://royalcaledoniancurlingclub.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/2011-Points-Competition-Rules-Diagrams-and-Scorecard-Web-Version.pdf
The first exercise, Striking, produced a fine crop of scores, including a perfect eight from our president, Dougie. The next, Inwicking, was much more difficult with a fair number of perfect zeros and no big scores – more practise is obviously needed. However, we did well at guarding which also played to our strengths. Overall six exercises were completed, the last being Wick and Curl In which was clearly a challenge (or perhaps we were flagging) as only Deemo, Bob and Rob managed to score anything at all.
Everyone repaired to the bar afterwards and started the post mortem while Dougie and John W furiously added up the scores and applied their carefully crafted handicaps to the results.
In terms of the total gross score, Dougie, Ken and Billy were third equal with 16 points, Deemo second at 19 and John W overall winner with 22 points. So John W had the dubious privilege of carrying home the weighty Loving Cup to put on his creaking sideboard with a mental note to remember to polish it regularly.
The handicapped scores resulted in a tie for second place between Fiona and Ken on 19 points while the net winner was Deemo with 20 points.
It only remained for the presentations of the gleaming trophies to be made by El Presidente to the lucky winners. Here special mention must be made about the Kettle which was in the most pristine state anyone had seen in years – last time’s winner, Colin, said his wife had polished it with a toothbrush! That is going to be a hard act to follow.
Holyrood Curling Club 