So, what was Ian Bell’s View From The Middle, going forward into the Second Test?  The edited highlights were these …

“absolutely gutted … the dressing room really hurt afterwards … bit of a shake-up … we’re going to have to work very hard if we want to keep winning Test Matches … have to try to stay level and not to dwell on it … the key is to have time in the middle … have to raise our game … must not get too carried away with thinking about what happened there … stick together through good times and bad times … enjoy the challenge … chance to bounce back quickly …”

Meanwhile, in an interview in the Metro, Alastair Cook took a similar view (“England moving swiftly on : We have put Dubai to bed“)

“We discussed what we needed to do and we put it to bed … learned from mistakes … all about thinking how we can win this game … always managed to bounce back … characters in the side who do like those sort of challenges … runs are just around the corner …”

But, of course, flagging this up is churlish stuff on my part – shooting ducks and duck-makers in a barrel.  If you had a twelve year old whose side had just lost heavily and unexpectedly, this is exactly what you’d be telling them.  And it’s not as though the feeble column with a cricketer’s name attached is a new phenomenon.

This is from Bruce Hamilton’s novel Pro, set in the 1920s.  Jim Revill (a sort of Sutcliffe-Woolley figure) is explaining where his money comes from -

“And those articles in the Gazette – there’s a lot of money in them”

“Do you really write them?”

“Not on your life.  They let me have the proofs though, and if there’s anything too damn silly I cross it out.”

What irks me is not so much the thought that the newspapers are palming off some PR fluff as an insight into the minds of Test cricketers as the suspicion that this watery stew of management theory and self-helpisms really is all that Cook, Bell et al. have in their heads and that to be successful, to be, indeed, the Number One Side in the World™, that is necessarily so. 

The deep thinkers (the Smiths, Roebucks and Jameses) can think themselves to the edges of international cricket and then think themselves back out again, the happy animals are sailing off unsteadily into the sunset on their pedaloes, but those who sincerely believe that whatever achieves results is right will inherit the earth (or at least the No. 1 spot in the ICC rankings).

But then again, perhaps it was ever more-or-less thus, and that the reason the players of the past are – to those of us who rely on the written and spoken word for our knowledge of Test cricket – more vivid and three-dimensional than those of the present is that the Woolleys and Rhodeses exist and persist as the creations of writers who really could write, and newspapers that preferred to give space to their writing over the unmediated thoughts of the players.  Rhodes had Neville Cardus to write his lines for him, poor Bell has to write his own (though he could, I suppose, just let his bat do the talking).

Mind you there is one player who can elevate self-help speak to an almost mystical level.  This is Kevin Pietersen, from an interview in this week’s Sport magazine -

“We don’t look backwards and we don’t look forwards, because that’s got nothing to do with what’s happening right now – and I think that’s what Andy Flower and Strauss have brought to the party … what’s magnificent about this squad is the longevity of its happiness.  Off the field, all our doors are open throughout the hotel, the boys are in and out of each other’s rooms playing FIFA, playing cards and talking nonsense …”

Allowing a little hindsight to creep in, though, I wonder whether, now that Dubai seems to have leapt back out of bed – leaving poor Geoffrey Boycott homeless – the longevity of Andrew Strauss’s happiness is likely to be increased by having Kevin Pietersen, locked into his beatific vision of the eternal now, wandering in and out of his room, talking nonsense.

We shall have to see.

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 -

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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