Industry
GETTING Personal...
Tim Lodge - if you are a slow payer, you’d best not read on!
Who are you? Tim Lodge, founder of Agrostis Sports Turf Consultancy.
Family status? Divorced. Two children; Emily (17) and Alice (15).
Who’s your hero and why? William Shakespeare for providing the raw material for most of my leisure time activities.
What would you change about yourself? Nothing.
What’s your guilty pleasure? Californian teen movies - Wayne’s World, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, etc.
What do you drop everything for? Theatre.
What’s been the highlight of your career so far? Forming Agrostis Turf Consultancy Ltd in 2005.
Glass half full or half empty? Depends how Agrostis is going.
Climate change - fact or fiction? Fact.
What’s your favourite season? Autumn.
What are your pet peeves? There is not enough space in this magazine to even scratch the surface.
If you could go anywhere right now, where would it be? Szechwan.
What’s the best part of your job? Taking intact soil core samples for soil structure analysis.
… and the worst? Chasing slow payers.
Do you have a lifetime ambition? No - the key to a happy life is to lose all ambitions. Enjoy and do everything to the best of your ability, full stop.
Who wouldn’t you like to be? There’s always someone worse off than yourself.
Favourite record, and why? Brandenburg 5, JS Bach. I can relate to Bach’s obsessional personality.
38 I PC FEBRUARY/MARCH 2015
Who would you choose to spend a romantic evening with? My girlfriend.
If you won the lottery, what is the first thing you would do? Expand Agrostis and build a theatre.
If you were to describe yourself as a musical instrument, what would you be and why? Harpsichord. I love the detailed, spidery and technical sound they make.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given? Honour good men and women. Be courteous to all. Bow down to none.
What’s your favourite smell? Not fit for publication in this sort of magazine.
What do you do in your spare time? Theatre.
What’s the daftest work related question you have ever been asked? Would you wait a year for payment pending the outcome of the case (Expert Witness).
What’s your favourite piece of kit? My Old Town Canadian canoe.
What three words would you use to describe yourself? Extraordinarily good looking.
What talent would you like to have? To do Liverpool accent better than I can.
What law/legislation would you like to see introduced? Ban SUVs driven by solo drivers.
players of the particular game in each case. What disturbs me, when a direct
comparison is required to be made with a comparable natural turf surface, is this pre-occupation with the experience of the player to the exclusion of all other possible users of the space. Considering most public open spaces, huge areas of natural turf are usually line marked for sports. But these areas are enjoyed in many more ways and by many more people than just those that actually take part in the specific and organised sports intended to be played upon them. Add to this the removal of access
due to the installation of fencing around an artificial installation and what you are doing by building an AGP or MUGA in a public open space is commodifying yet more of our open green areas and preventing a large number of people from enjoying them in their own way. We are urbanising and isolating more and more of our green space by doing this and, from a social and psychological perspective, this cannot be a good thing. Considering briefly multi use
games areas (MUGAs), their playing performance of course can only ever represent a compromise in relation to each of the several sports they are intended for. The highest standard of hockey cannot be played on an AGP (artificial grass) rugby pitch for example. The MUGA has yet to be developed that will serve as a cricket outfield and athletics facility for six months of the year and as two football pitches for the other six months. And, yet, there are thousands of such surfaces up and down our densely populated country that have been doing exactly this, and more, for decades. They are all natural turf and require only the periodic change of management in order to make the transition.
Another phenomenon, and one
that I think is on the rise, is the application of performance standards appropriate for artificial surfaces to natural turf. What this has given rise to is an expectation amongst some that improvement works carried out on natural turf surfaces should give rise to an improvement in performance equivalent to that of an artificial
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