Somewheres East Of Suez Where The Best™ Is Like The Worst

Having been offline all week with a nasty bug (the computer, not me), I’ve  been following England’s performance East of Suez via TMS and the newspapers.  (Consequently, it wasn’t until I got back online that I realised that there were any doubts about the legality of Ajmal’s action).

I see that the Independent has signed up Ian Bell as a columnist (he previously graced the pages of the Evening Standard).  Belly appears with the tagline View From The Middle (the middle of the dressing room, mostly, in this match).

I don’t know whether Bell writes his own stuff  but, if not, his ghost has captured perfectly the tone of his interviews – resembling an American airman captured during the Korean War and subjected to fiendish Chinese brainwashing techniques.

Bell’s column only appears on the first day of the Test.  So what was on his mind?

“I was fortunate that wrist X-rays showed no fracture after I was hit right at the end of my final practice session before the first Test.

While at the hospital, I read an article about Saeed Ajmal, the Pakistan off-spinner, and his new delivery, which they’re calling the ‘teesra’.  We’d seen some footage of it in a recent one-day match against Sri Lanka.

If he has developed another delivery, though, brilliant.  Let’s take it on.  If he’s got three different deliveries and you still score runs against him, what a plus that is for the team.  He was the leading wicket-taker in Test cricket in 2011 and I know how good it feels to score runs against that class of bowler, so that’s our challenge in these three Tests.

Now that we are top of the ICC Test ranking, we still need to be there in  a year’s time.  If we could win this series and follow it by winning in Sri Lanka and India later in the year, it would be one of our biggest achievements.”  

Wouldn’t it just?

We shall have to wait until next week to see how Belly has reacted to this week’s events – (Bell c. A. Akmal b. Ajmal 0 & lbw Ajmal 4 –  Ajmal 10-97 in the match – Pakistan win by 10 wickets.)

Perhaps, under the heading “Why Ajmal Makes Me Want To Chuck!”, he will launch an amazing attack on the spinner and reveal how the stress led to him embarking on a drink-fuelled spree ending in a three-in-a-bed love romp involving the wife of the Emir of Abu Dhabi?  

Or perhaps they will have looked in the mirror, asked themselves some hard questions, decided to draw a line under it and found some positives to take out going forward? 

We shall have to see.

And what of the England Lions, who, a little further East, are touring Bangladesh (or, as they seem to refer to it, Bangladonkey?) Is Captain James Taylor managing to stamp his personality on the team?  Coverage is sparse in the English newspapers, so we shall have to look to Twitter for the answer, which I think is Yes.

Before leaving Taylor tweeted -

That day has come round again! Last few hours in england before we fly to bangladesh! Last bit of english food for a while.

 

But not to worry, once out there …

 

@alexhales count me in! I’ll be up in a bit bud after pizza!

 

And Alex Hales does seem to have bought into the Captain’s agenda, as a selection of his tweets demonstrates -

 

Steak and ale pie for the last meal before Bangladesh!! 

Cheers for the birthday messages people! Feel old at 23 so I had my party at pizza hut in Chittagong to rewind the years!

 6 quid a corona at the bar in Bangladesh?!!! #offensive #cheaperinthewestend

 I’ve seen some weird things before.. But @SMeaker18 breakfast is comfortably leading the way..

 nah banana and jelly on toast!! I could understand jam…

Think I might stick to the hotel grub if I’m honest!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Everyone off to the Aussie high commission in Dhaka for a feed and some brews.. 

 

 This is all very well, but what about the curries?  What about the cricket, indeed?

 

(n.b. The Number One Side in the World™ and The Best Team in the World™ are registered trademarks of the England Cricket Team.  Rankings can go down as well as up.)

Paul Verlaine : Colloque Sentimental

To continue – obliquely – the current Wicksteed Park season, here is the poem by Paul Verlaine  that I alluded to the other day.

I think the reason I had it in my head all those years ago was that it played a part in a late night film I’d seen on the TV.  I’ve never been able to find out what that film was, though I’ve an idea that it was pre-war and American rather than French.

Colloque sentimental

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux formes ont tout à l’heure passé.

Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles,
Et l’on entend à peine leurs paroles.

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.

–Te souvient-il de notre extase ancienne ?
–Pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu’il m’en souvienne ?

–Ton coeur bat-il toujours à mon seul nom ?
Toujours vois tu mon âme en rêve? –Non.

–Ah! les beaux jours de bonheur indicible
Où nous joignions nos bouches! –C’est possible.

Qu’il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l’espoir !
–L’espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir.

Tels ils marchaient dans les avoines folles,
Et la nuit seule entendit leurs paroles.

 

A rough literal translation might be -

In the old and frozen, lonely park / Two forms had just passed by.

Their eyes were dead, their lips were soft/ Their words could hardly be heard.

In the old and frozen, lonely park / Two spectres had recalled the past.

Do you remember our old ecstasy? / Why would you want me to remember it?

 Your heart stills beats at my name only? / Still see my soul in dreams? No.

Ah! Those fine days of unspeakable joy/ When we two joined our lips! Perhaps.

How blue the sky, how high our hopes! / Defeated, hope fled to the black sky.

So they walked on through the wild oats / The night alone could hear their words. 

The worlds of Paul Verlaine and Wicksteed Park aren’t quite as distant as you might think.  The later paintings of Thomas Cooper Gotch, the brother of the Gotch whose firm was responsible for the Park’s buildings, have been described as Symbolist (as was Verlaine’s poetry) and Verlaine lived for some time in Lincolnshire, in Boston and Stickney.

We have no evidence that he ever visited Kettering, but I like to think that he might have passed through on his way to Boston, and might have dropped into the George for a quick pint or two of absinthe.

Two Pints Of Absinthe And A Packet Of Crisps Please

This frozen park is not, in fact, Wicksteed’s itself, but the Waterworks Field, home to Desborough Town Football Club, where I happened to be yesterday afternoon to catch their unexpected 5-1 trouncing of Deeping Rangers.  I’m sure Verlaine would have found the scene inspiring.

Wicksteed Park Again : The Boating Lake In Winter

Let us continue this sentimental journey back to Wicksteed Park (Oh Goody! – The Readership), down past the station for the miniature railway to the boating lake.

The lake was created  by Charles Wicksteed rather high-handedly (by today’s standards) diverting the Ise Brook.  It is said that, when the lake was first opened to the public, Wicksteed walked across it, his hat left  bobbing in his wake (walking on the bed, not the surface, I should add).

It covers a vast expanse of 30 acres.  Proper rowing boats (as well as Flintoff-style pedaloes) are available for hire, and the best time to come is on a weekday in Summer (outside the school holidays), when it is possible to have the lake to yourself and do some proper rowing.  A full circuit of the lake - taken at a decent lick, and with a detour to investigate the mysterious island in the middle, with its nesting swans – takes about 45 minutes (the cost of the cheapest period of hire).

The second best time to go, though, is in the dead of Winter.  If you’re very lucky, the lake will be frozen, and you will be able to watch the swans and ducks skidding over its surface.  If you are very daring – and not afraid of sinking up to your nose in ice – you could try walking on it yourself.

If you are slightly less lucky, you will find that the lake is in the process of being drained – apparently so that it can be deepened to prevent the accumulation of weed that often clogs it – and that it is drizzling.  If so, however, you might be able to shelter from the rain in some carriages from the recently decommissioned miniature train Cheyenne that have – unaccountably – been left standing by the lakeside, while the willows weep around you.

 

What more could you ask for?

In Memoriam : The Memorial Garden at Wicksteed Park, Kettering

I don’t know whether you’ve ever visited Wicksteed Park in Kettering?  Perhaps you have.

If not, it is an amusement park, sometimes claimed to be the oldest in England, which contains the largest free playground in Europe.

It was founded by Charles Wicksteed, a wealthy philanthropist, who seems to have been a sort of cross between Andrew Carnegie and Wallace (as in Wallace and Gromit).  His inventions included a bread buttering machine that could butter up to 400 slices an hour (apparently used in the park cafe), and an early version of the automatic gearbox, but also included various types of playground equipment.  Have a look the next time you find yourself in a playground, and you are still likely to find his name on the swings and roundabouts.

Wicksteed’s original idea was to build a model village for local workers, set in spacious grounds.  He abandoned the village concept after the invention of council housing, but kept the grounds and added a playground.

Nowadays it’s very much a park of two halves – half Alton Towers and half Hatfield House – and, like a seaside resort, quite different in Summer and Winter.  In Summer it’s a Bedlam of rollercoasters and chips, in Winter a haven of damp and frozen melancholy.

I suppose – now that the Poppies’ ground has been repossessed by the bailiffs – it is the place that I’ve visited over the longest period of time, and has acquired at least three coats of nostalgic gloss. 

 I remember being taken there by my grandparents as a child (they remembered it opening and used to walk out there when they were courting).  A very early memory is of writing a “What I Did In My Holidays” essay, saying that I’d been to Wicksteed Park.  The teacher insisted that I must mean Whipsnade (“There were lions there, weren’t there?” “Lions at Wicksteed, you silly old bat?”).  My mother would reminisce about a holiday job she’d had there in the ‘fifties, serving knickerbocker glories as Kettering’s answer to Gina Lollobrigida.    

As a student, long of overcoat and fringe, I would walk up there in the Christmas holidays, muttering Verlaine’s “Two ghosts in a frozen park passed by …”.  When my daughter was young enough to enjoy such things, I took her there in my turn.

Now that she has set aside childish things, I don’t have much reason to visit, but, finding myself at something of a loose end one day after Christmas, I thought I would revisit my old haunt for auld lang syne. 

Not much has changed (in fact not that much has changed since 1921) but a few things have.

This is the Memorial Garden, where the stately home aspect begins to take over from the fun fair.

Picture yourself, if you will, as Lord (or Lady) Snooty, taking the air on the terrace after breakfast and enjoying the view down to the lake.  The garden was originally known as the Rose Garden, but has always contained a few memorials.  The central pillar commemorates Wicksteed himself, there is a statue of his faithful dog Jerry - 

and there are some long-established memorial benches, such as this one for Laurence Maxwell Gotch.  This Gotch was the nephew of the better-known architect, John Alfred Gotch ”the man who built Kettering”.  Their firm built most of the buildings in the park , including the Pavilion.

Lately, though, the benches have multiplied, and the garden has been officially redesignated as a Memorial Garden.  As you will see, if you look closely at the first photograph, there are bunches of flowers left on most of the benches, and the memorials have begun to spread outside the garden itself.

There are memorial saplings, with small plaques at the base, and this one has been decorated for Christmas -

I suppose the practical reason for the proliferation of these alternative memorials is simply that the graveyards are all full up, but (like the pathetic heaps of flowers and teddy bears that are left at the scene of road accidents) they seem to me to suggest some kind of barely conscious folk memory of traditions that were extinguished in England at the Reformation – in this case the wayside shrine and tree-dressing.  Whatever need they satisfy must be a very deep-rooted one.

Folk Customs Of Old Leicestershire : Sprout Hanging

I happened to be waiting at the bus stop in the village of Foxton on New Year’s Eve, when I noticed this string of Brussels sprouts hanging from an adjacent hedge.    

As I nibbled abstractedly on a sprout to sustain me through my long vigil, I spotted a passing folklorist going about his business and questioned him about the origins of this custom. 

Knocking the dottle from his pipe out on a nearby dog-waste bin, he informed me that the villagers traditionally hang any spare sprouts they may have left over after Christmas in the hedge as a propitiatory offering to Arriva, the Goddess of public transport, to ensure a reliable bus service over the coming year.

And they’d be Damned Fools if they didn’t.

Spotters Spotted

There were no trains today between Bedford and East Midlands Parkway, due to “essential engineering works”.  Instead there was a complex web of “replacement bus services”.  Arriving at Leicester Station, I spotted a man taking photographs of the replacement buses.  Waiting for the bus back to Harborough, I saw another man writing the registration numbers of the buses down in a little notebook.  He seemed to be having the time of his life, bantering excitedly with the station staff “That’s the second one to East Midlands Parkway in a row!”.  Back at Harborough – another man, another notebook.      

Perhaps this is what trainspotters do when there are no trains to spot?

The Old Year’s Gone Away To Nothingness And Night

Let us end the holiday season (mine, anyway) as we began it, with some verses from John Clare, together with a wish for a trouble-free New Year (faint hope!) to all our readers.

 

The Old Year

The Old Year’s gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbour’s face,
In this he’s known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they’re here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall –
A guest to every heart’s desire,
And now he’s nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
All things identified;
But times once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year’s Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.

 

And to see the New Year in, a view of Leicestershire from one of its highest (and breeziest) points, the Iron Age hill fort at Borough Hill.  I popped up there this morning to sacrifice a goat.

 

 

Stump Watch For December 2011

As the year draws to a close, it’s time for the last Stump Watch of 2011.  It seems fairly inactive at the moment, but then so am I.  Note that someone has tied a white plastic ribbon round the old chestnut tree to the rear (folkloric significance, if any, unknown).  

Welcome To Melton Mowbray …

So, James Taylor, what was it that first attracted you to Melton Mowbray …

And very good they are too.  More top reporting from Melton coming soon …

Best Illuminated House Award For Christmas 2011

And this year’s winner in the Privately Owned  Listed Building category goes to the Tower House, Lubenham.

You don’t get the full effect from a still photograph, but the pink light shoots upwards like mercury in a thermometer, then ends with a starburst effect at the top.

The Tower House was originally an 18th century farmhouse.  The tower was added by racing enthusiast Jack “Cherry” Angell to commemorate his horse “Alcibade” winning the Grand National in 1865.  Alcibade is buried in a mound nearby (though, not, I think, in the adjacent churchyard).

A later owner, the Rev. Graham Dilley (no relation, as far as I know) used it as his vicarage.  The ballroom is said to contain a section of the ceiling from Lamport Hall, which the Rev. Dilley – also a sporting man – had won in a bet.  How very different to the home life of our own dear clergy.

Some local residents have commented that “it’s just like the Blackpool Illuminations”.  Well, it’s not that good, obviously, but still a very commendable effort.