Dancing at Whitsun

(To fill a sad gap, I thought I’d revive this, which I originally published this time in 2010.  The blog was a rather different beast in those days …)

I realise that, with all the excitement of the start of the cricket season, I’ve almost allowed what are often thought of as two of the most poetical of months – April and May – to go by with hardly a poem or song.  So, as it’s Whit Sunday, here is a song which I think also works as a poem.  The lyrics to Dancing at Whitsun (or Whitsun Dance) were written by Austin John Marshall, the husband of Shirley Collins;  the tune is traditional.  The version I know best is by Silly Sisters (Maddy Prior and June Tabor), though there also recorded versions by Shirley Collins and Maddy Prior with Tim Hart.  I can’t find any of these on YouTube, so here is a version by “LiteGauge”, recorded as a tribute to Tim Hart.

The lyrics seem self-explanatory, but apparently had a slightly more specific context when they were written (the mid-1960s).  It seems that folk dancing had come to be seen as predominantly an activity for old ladies (and sometimes denigrated for that reason), and the song suggests one reason why this might have been so.

Dancing at Whitsun, by Austin John Marshall

It’s fifty-one springtimes since she was a bride
And still you may see her at each Whitsuntide
In a dress of white linen and ribbons of green
As green as her memories of loving

The feet that were nimble tread carefully now
As gentle a measure as age do allow
Through groves of white blossom, by fields of young corn
Where once she was pledged to her true love

The fields they stand empty, the hedges grow free
No young men to tend them, nor pastures to see
They have gone where the forests of oaktrees before
Had gone to be wasted in battle

Down from their green farmlands and from their loved ones
Marched husbands and brothers and fathers and sons
There’s a fine roll of honour where the Maypole once was
And the ladies go dancing at Whitsun

There’s a row of straight houses in these latter days
Are covering the Downs where the sheep used to graze
There’s a field of red poppies and a wreath from the Queen
But the ladies remember at Whitsun
And the ladies go dancing at Whitsun

(Apologies for any copyright violation.  Will remove if requested).

Look At The Harlequins! (Leicestershire v Middlesex)

Leicestershire v Middlesex, Grace Road, CB40, Sunday 20th May 2012

I’m surprised that no-one seems to have thought of including some footage of the John Player League in the current glut of programmes about the 1970s.  Funded by fags and dependant for its popularity on being a way to circumvent the Sunday licensing laws (where else could you spend all afternoon drinking Double Diamond from a dimpled tankard while getting stuck into a carton of complimentary JPS?) it seems to me as of its time as Choppers and Vic Feather.

But times change and – as of this season – smoking has now been banned from all the seated areas at Grace Road (apparently in response to requests from the Members). The 40 over game persists, though the Merchants of Death have been replaced as sponsors by a Bank.  A couple of seasons ago it had appeared doomed, used like grouting to plug gaps in the schedules (I think I remember seeing one on a Tuesday morning), but has now been restored – mostly – to Sunday afternoons.  I don’t know how seriously anyone takes it as a sporting contest, but – rather like one-day internationals – it generates income and provides a fun day out for all the family.

I’m not even sure how seriously the Counties take it (can anyone other than supporters of that County remember who won it last year?) .  Nor does it help that Leicestershire seem to be so puzzlingly bad at it (last year they won 2 out of 12 matches, and this season they’ve  lost 3, with 1 abandoned) so there isn’t generally much mystery about the likely result at Grace Road.  

What tends to stick in the mind, though, are individual performances  – from Jason Roy and Ben Stokes last season, for instance – and it does give those of us who usually watch Second Division cricket a chance to gawp at a few stars.  Although this  is hardly on a par with queueing up behind Gary Sobers to buy an ice-cream in the old days, Sunday’s main attractions were Steve Finn and Eion Morgan (arms folded, wearing no.7 in the middle of this group). 

Morgan was making his first appearance on a cricket field since February, since when he has trousered vast sums for not appearing in the Indian Premier League.  When he batted, in the course of an unspectacular but untroubled innings by Middlesex, he managed a couple of his trademark reverse sweeps – like a slightly out-of-practice three card trick merchant – before falling victim to Josh Cobb, whose mystery spin must have brought back troubling memories of Saeed Ajmal.  Perhaps.

When Leicestershire replied, Cobb did manage, as usual, to lift the ball over the ring, but only as far as the one fieldsman outside the ring.  Finn then – in murky light – removed in short order Sarwan, Boyce and Smith.  But when you’re facing the fastest bowler in county cricket in dim light I wonder if you see the ball very clearly. I wonder if you see the ball at all?

During his spell at the IPL, Morgan would, of course, have become used to a certain amount of razamattaz – music, dancing girls and so on.  We did our best to smooth his passage back into the domestic season by arranging a performance by the Wigston Enterprise Brass Band in the tea interval.    

Morgan did essay a brief shimmy to ‘Hey Jude’, but it was Finn who seemed most affected, being inspired to a demonstration of interpretative dancing before taking the field.  

.

.

Perhaps we really shouldn’t have provoked him.

Dancing at Whitsun

I realise that, with all the excitement of the start of the cricket season, I’ve almost allowed what are often thought of as two of the most poetical of months – April and May – to go by with hardly a poem or song.  So, as it’s Whit Sunday, here is a song which I think also works as a poem.  The lyrics to Dancing at Whitsun (or Whitsun Dance) were written by Austin John Marshall, the husband of Shirley Collins;  the tune is traditional.  The version I know best is by Silly Sisters (Maddy Prior and June Tabor), though there also recorded versions by Shirley Collins and Maddy Prior with Tim Hart.  I can’t find any of these on YouTube, so here is a version by “LiteGauge”, recorded as a tribute to Tim Hart.

The lyrics seem self-explanatory, but apparently had a slightly more specific context when they were written (the mid-1960s).  It seems that folk dancing had come to be seen as predominantly an activity for old ladies (and sometimes denigrated for that reason), and the song suggests one reason why this might have been so. 

Dancing at Whitsun, by Austin John Marshall

It’s fifty-one springtimes since she was a bride
And still you may see her at each Whitsuntide
In a dress of white linen and ribbons of green
As green as her memories of loving

The feet that were nimble tread carefully now
As gentle a measure as age do allow
Through groves of white blossom, by fields of young corn
Where once she was pledged to her true love

The fields they stand empty, the hedges grow free
No young men to tend them, nor pastures to see
They have gone where the forests of oaktrees before
Had gone to be wasted in battle

Down from their green farmlands and from their loved ones
Marched husbands and brothers and fathers and sons
There’s a fine roll of honour where the Maypole once was
And the ladies go dancing at Whitsun

There’s a row of straight houses in these latter days
Are covering the Downs where the sheep used to graze
There’s a field of red poppies and a wreath from the Queen
But the ladies remember at Whitsun
And the ladies go dancing at Whitsun

(Apologies for any copyright violation.  Will remove if requested).

A passage which I did not take … into the rose-garden

MMCU Cambridge v Sussex, Fenner’s, 14th May

This may come as a surprise, but there was a time when I took little interest in cricket.  Rather like a drunk who’s had a blackout, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when this period started and ended, but my memory of events in the cricketing world becomes fuzzy around 1979 (when I would have been 18) and only starts to come back into focus in about 1984, when some twitch upon the thread (an old Playfair?) began to draw me inexorably back.  (This was not, I hasten to add, because I was permanently drunk during this time).

This period coincided (not co-incidentally, really) with my time at University, which is why my visit to Fenner’s yesterday was the first time I had set foot in the ground.  Why it never occurred to me, whenever I was wracked with Angst, Ennui and Weltschmerz (worse, even, than Emerson, Lake and Palmer), that the solution lay so close at hand, I cannot say.  But there we are.

Like much of Cambridge, Fenner’s is actually rather less leafy and olde-worlde than one might imagine.  Pretty, yes, but not much more so than, say, Harborough’s Fairfield Road ground.  The pavilion, which is not unpleasant, but clearly designed with function rather than aesthetics in mind, dates from 1972, and replaces an older, wooden structure.  Overlooking one side of the pitch – and this is where they are ahead of the game – is some, recently built,  part of Hughes Hall, a graduate college, which no doubt also generates a decent amount of income by doubling up as a Conference Centre and suchlike.  One day all grounds will be like this, indeed, many already are.  Facts have to be faced, of course, and it’s no use me a whinin’ an’ a pinin’, but I can’t help wondering what was there before this structure. Trees, I imagine.

Anyway, enough of this and down to the match.  It was the third and final day between Cambridge and Sussex.  Cambridge required an improbable total to win in the second innings.  I say Cambridge, but only three members of the side were from the University, the others from what used to be Sea-Cat, but is now Anglia Ruskin University.  I suppose the great hope in watching a match like this would be to see, all unknowing, some great player in his sporting infancy.  I don’t know whether I saw that, but I did see a couple of quite decent innings.  One was from an opener, untroubled by the (admittedly innocuous) seamers and judiciously aggressive against the spinners.  While I was watching I was under the impression that this was Akbar Ansari (reading Social Anthropology at Trinity Hall), but I see from Cricinfo that it was, in fact, one Philip Hughes – not the inventive Australian who shot briefly across our horizon last year – but an 18 year old from Downing, making his debut. A name to bear in mind, conceivably.  

The real discovery, though, was a very strong front runner for the coveted award for the most distracting fieldsman of the year.  Step forward one WAT Beer, of Sussex.  Sub editors throughout the land must be hoping that this diminutive 22 year old  leg spinner hits the big time – Beer gives Aussies headache, We want Beer! say selectors – the headlines will write themselves.  Many players pass the long hours in the field by practising their repertoire of strokes in slow motion, or their bowling actions.  The pint-sized Beer did both incessantly, but also showed us his golf swing and at one point seemed to be playing darts.  He entertained us with a range of silly walks (Crouch-style robot dancing, moonwalking, David Brent as gibbon and so on). He whistled the theme tune to the Archers, tried to peer through the windows of the students’ accommodation, read a few notices that had been tacked onto some scaffolding and, when he couldn’t find anything else to do, rummaged vigorously in his jockstrap.  A great favourite with the crowds in the years to come, I’m sure, though I feel his leg spin needs a bit more work (though he does begin his run up with what looks like a Johnny Wilkinson-style prayer).

Anyway, as illustration, here is the new pavilion, yesterday –

New pavilion at Fenner's

Here is the old one, shortly before it collapsed, from the look of it.  (The great Majid Khan at the non-striker’s end, possibly?) –

Old pavilion at Fenner's

And here – in the middle of the picture – is WAT Beer, doing his Peter Crouch –

Silly walker

David Hockney 1960-1968 : a marriage of styles

On Friday this hamster managed to escape from his treadmill for the day and went up to Nottingham to take a squint at the new Nottingham Contemporary art gallery, and its opening exhibition David Hockney 1960-1968 : a marriage of styles.

The building itself gets more attractive the closer you get to it – from a distance a corrugated iron warehouse, close-to decorated with an intricate lace pattern (the gallery is in the old Lace Market district) – but it is an attractive space (dread word!) with four large airy exhibition rooms, a cinema and a cafe/bar on three different floors. I imagine that, if I lived in Nottingham, I’d be spending a fair amount of time there.

As far as the exhibition goes, writing about art isn’t really my forte, so I won’t make too much effort in that direction.  If you are at all interested in Hockney you will know the pictures already, even if you haven’t actually seen them all.  The earliest are, as Hockney said 

“Partly propaganda of something I felt hadn’t been propagandised … as a subject: homosexuality.”

though it is an oblique kind of propaganda, composed of hints, coded references and visual innuendoes.  Moving on and out to Los Angeles the artist and the paintings bloom into something overtly beautiful, though the obliqueness remains (we don’t see who it is who made the bigger splash, just the traces).  My favourite in the exhibition is The lawn sprinkler, which I could sit and look at for hours.

The early paintings don’t suggest to me that Hockney was having a great deal of fun at that point in his life, but this little film rather suggests the opposite.  It’s an extract from Ken Russell’s 1962 BBC documentary Pop Goes the Easel and features Hockney and various other young British artists twistin’ the night away.  Peter Blake looks rather like John Peel doing that funny little dance he used to do on Top of the Pops, Pauline Boty (who’s in there somewhere) has got the hang of it rather better.  Hockney himself seems to have invented slam dancing.   All of this ought to look quaint, but somehow doesn’t – in fact it’s hard not to feel a little envious.

Apart from inventing slam dancing, Hockney also – if you look closely at this picture – seems to have invented the i-pod (Leonardo, eat your heart out).

i-pods in Bedlam

White tie and tails : C.B. Fry comes dancing

Talking of ballroom dancing, I see that Philip Tufnell is attempting to follow in the fleet footsteps of Ramprakash and Gough and compete in Strictly Come Dancing (a programme I must confess I’ve never actually seen, but I’m told it’s very good).

Inevitably, this is causing him some anxiety, as he has eloquently expressed via Twitter Tufnell\’s anxiety.

A cricketer who would have taken all this in his elegant stride, and been a shoo-in for the title, was C.B. Fry.  I think it’s widely known, even to the non-cricketing public, that Fry claimed to have turned down the throne of Albania, but his skill as a dancer is perhaps less well-known.  Over to Denzil Batchelor, from his 1951 monograph about the great man.

“Then there were the jovial nights, when stumps were drawn … the nights were the signal for white tie and tails, and dancing from ten o’clock till three in the morning.  For Charles might (and did) say that polo was probably a better game than cricket, and that Rugby was a better game than soccer, but the one opinion that he stood fast on was that the beginning and the end of all the games he respected was dancing.  The Greeks knew the secret … Cricket was a dance with a bat in your hand, or with the encumbrance of a ball …

In the dance itself there were no such ignoble impediments … On with the white tie and tails, and let the evening be given over to abandonment to the graces of movement! … Make no mistake about it, Charles Fry has pondered the reason for his pre-eminence as an all-round sportsman.  At the end of all his ruminations on the subject, he has no doubt whatsoever that if a man will consent to become an expert dancer first, all these accomplishments shall be added unto him.  And almost as a matter of course.” 

(Three in the morning?   Duncan Fletcher would not have approved.) 

Lounge suits and cocktail frocks : Northamptonshire v Glamorgan, Wantage Road, 28 August

I was afraid I might have jinxed young Taylor with my excitable predictions, but, no – I see that he scored another unbeaten century yesterday at Chelmsford.  Unfortunately he’ll probably need to do the same thing again today if we (Leicestershire) are to avoid a hefty defeat.

I wasn’t there (not easy to get to Chelmsford by train)  but at the exciting middle-of-the-table clash between Northants and Glamorgan at Wantage Road.

A few highlights of the day –

The moving video screen that sits where I think the old scoreboard used to be was advertising the club’s end of season do – a 3 course dinner, dancing and disco apparently, and all for £40.00 to members, £45.00 non-members. The dress code is ” lounge suits and cocktail frocks” – might be worth going, if only to see how some of the members interpret the dress code.  Also the possibility of seeing  Monty Panesar doing the military two-step.

A pugnacious fifty from James Allenby.  Until last month JA was a Leicestershire player, and something of a stalwart, particularly in one-day cricket.  Unfortunately the wantaway all-rounder then issued a come-and -get- me- plea (saying that he wanted to improve his chances of playing for England).  Leicestershire told him that if he felt that way about it his services were no longer required, and Glamorgan have apparently come-and-got-him.  Little chance of him playing test cricket whoever he’s playing for, I’d say, though an outside bet for a one-dayer or two.

The high winds blew down half of an advertising hoarding on to the head of a spectator, to general hilarity.  The hoarding had originally read Hot brands – in its reduced state it then read Rands – a useful reminder to the massed Kolpacks of what they’re playing for (a jaundiced observer might say).

The chance to observe poor Monty Panesar (who must feel that he’s been very ill-used recently) grazing in the outfield.  For a man who is alleged to have no cricket brain, he did seem sunk very deep in thought about something- perhaps what he was going to wear to the end of season dinner dance.  He did take three wickets, though, and seemed to have got some of his Tiggerish bounce back.

A wonderful selection of secondhand books in the “signal box” – the supporters’ club bookshop : I replenished my supplies. A slightly melancholy aspect of this, though, is that I always suspect that I’m looking at a dead man’s (or indeed woman’s) library, lovingly assembled and now scattered to the winds.

Displeased to see that the advertisement for Weetabix, that fine Northamptonshire product, that’s graced the pavilion for as long as I can remember, has been replaced by one for some firm who claim to be Creating energy solutions.  Bah!

A delicious Eccles cake with my tea.

I could have danced all night – GCSE results : the debate rages

The annual publication of this year’s exam results has, as always,  provoked a great deal of interest and debate.  Happily, in Kettering in the thirties, things were rather different.

For instance, in his 1932 speech to the Prize Day at the Central School, Mr. A.H. Whipple, Director of Education for Nottingham (and the originator of the idea for Central Schools) had the following to say –

“There are more important things to be considered [than exams] … I am glad your local employers are not asking for matriculation certificates.  I wish all employers would pay no attention to them.”

Margaret Haseldine [later of Leicester} recalled: “You took no written exams unless you or your parents wished it.  If you were bright enough you could take the Oxford, but in those days exam results were not a fetish with Kettering employers.  Most of us took advantage of the wonderful all-round education.  From the beginning we were taught ballroom dancing, and at the end of term held school parties where we wore our first ball gowns and put our dancing lessons into practice. We danced, not to some tinny gramophone, but to the school band which Mr. Braithwaite had formed  … the instrumentalists were boys, but their names have faded.  We even had a mirror-bowl.

… Constant dancing practice stood us in good stead later in life at such functions as the marvellous parties held by the Co-Op at the Central Hall.  We  had tremendous fun doing the Lancers and all the old fashioned dances as well as the 1930s modern ones.”

Food for thought here for today’s educationalists, I feel.

(Thanks for the substance of this to the late Tony Ireson – from “Old Kettering – a view from the 1930s : book 2” (published 1990).