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When a club gets a new clubhouse, all sorts of issues come to a head that the committee and membership never had to worry about before. It can be a stiff learning curve. Oh Yes… This being particularly the case if the previous club house consisted of a couple of old prefab buildings moving past their sell by date.

In the case of our club these prefab structures look rather forlornly up the  hill at the bright shiny new white edifice that has newly opened. But with the opening has come ongoing discussion of a whole range of ‘issues’ that  no-one ever thought of before.

Take the issue of cleaning the toilets. The club caters for everyone from under eight players, their mammies, some yummy some not, who also bring with them other bairns in need of nappies changed, bottles heated and so on. Right through to the occasional elderly chap or lady who is holding back the waves as best they can. The bladder in them is a bit like them bags you use to hold footballs -  elastic but subject to spilling the whole show if it gets too full.

The view in the club is that these facilities need to be cleaned and maintained to a high level. Some members are less squemish than others about cleaning up after other people and their children. Wouldn’t be my thing like. . .

Most wee lads I know think they are tackling a blaze when they are in the urinal, hosing everything in sight. It gets worse when there’s a bowl involved. So the outcome was that some club members would become part of the cleaning rota to keep the place nice and white and shiny and smelling of Pine.

One other issue that came up was the filling of soap dispensers and the restocking of toilet rolls and paper towels. Believe it or not, this became a matter of major discussion in a committee meeting and then another one as some of the flat earthers took a rejectionist stance at the thought of an outsider doing this job when we could do it ourselves. It almost led to a bit of a walk out.

In the end, the motion to retain a supplier was voted through unanimously, as was a sister proposal that the same contractor should be taken up on their offer to empty the sanitary bins. And, as no-one expected to see that on the Clár, the men on the committee looked distinctly uncomfortable as this subject reared itself, with the few girls there either blushing pink or slightly irate that these items should be aired in public.

That was the end of that until another long standing club member and stalwart of the club buttonholed yours truly one day about the whole matter, particularly one matter in particular.

I replied to him, “I do enough about the club and I have no intention of cleaning the toilets after everyone else. I am perfectly happy to pay for it.” Like a dog with a bone he said “But what about the sanitary bins I mean do we need to pay someone to do that, could we not do that ourselves and save some money. Why do we need to pay for that.” And so on. He wasn’t being funny but taking a particularly straight line. My attitude to that was simple, there’s some things money can’t buy, for other things there’s Mastercard. And for the emptying of sanitary bins I’m happy to let the experts get on with it. if I wanted to do it, I would have studied it at University.

Here endeth the lesson. If you’re opening your own facilities, these are some of the pitfalls and some of the shite you have to listen to. Remember, not to bow to insanity, or insanitary.