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They do so in both
prints and slides: in effect there are two parallel competitions.
This season our club won both the print and slide sections of
league 2, beating Reigate, Dorking and Woking clubs. The winners
of the leagues then meet in quarter-final competitions: we won
with our prints, but lost (by only one and a half points) to
Kingston in slides.
Formerly there
was always a semi final and a final stage. But this year these
two stages were run together. Thus in prints we were competing
against three other clubs, Cheam, Eastbourne and Molesey. Finals
night was on Saturday 8th May. The judge, a man from the Midlands
federation, was concise, entertaining and swift. He could also
be quite brutal, giving low marks where he felt the picture was
lacking in some important respect. But while he was dishing out
5s and 6s quite liberally, we received a stream of 8s and 9s,
with a couple put by - a sign that we could expect 9 or even
10 for them when marked at the end. (They did indeed).We began
to have high hopes! Alas, our last two prints - which had in
earlier competitions done very well - received only 6 each, and
our aggregate score was 83 out of the possible 100. When the
scores for the other clubs were read out, however, only Molesey
had more- 86. Cheam and Eastbourne were down in the 70's. So
we were second overall and a very close second at that. While
it's a bit like coming 4th in the Olympics - no medal, and no-one
remembers you afterwards, we feel very well pleased. We are quite
a small club, not stuffed full of FRPS's, and to have had such
a measure of success is something we have not enjoyed for years.
The brightest part of the story was yet to come, however. One
of our set of prints, "The Flatiron In A Snowstorm",
by Peter Lordan, was selected as the BEST PRINT of the evening,
for which he receives a trophy to hold for a year. (It was also
chosen as the best print in the Association's exhibition in Guildford
House earlier in the year). Together with prints by Mike Whelan
(The City) and Rob Smith ( Old Man Of Brixham), Peter's print
has been chosen by the Association's committee as part of a set
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