Mid-January, and the cricket pitches of England lie fallow, as does this blog. There have been one or two rum goings-on here recently (bits dropping off, for instance, rather like its author) and a short period of closure for repair and refurbishment seems in order. I hope to be back soon.
Another instead-of-a-post post, I’m afraid.
This is the last week I shall (weather permitting) have no live cricket to write about. Leicestershire are beginning their season with a very “soft launch” involving a 2-day friendly against Northamptonshire on Tuesday and I hope to be there. This time next week I shall be having the novel (and not entirely welcome) experience of watching the first day of a Championship match on a Sunday. Whether I will find the time or inclination to write about these I know not. The prospects for Leicestershire, this blog and Yours Truly are uncertain at present and I don’t think I’ve ever approached a season (or a Spring) with lower expectations.
But perhaps that is for the best. I am conscious of expecting far too much from cricket and if I do happen to be Surprised by Joy at any point during the season that will be more than the sane man could reasonably expect.
Meanwhile, as the clocks go forward, a last look back at Winter and another view across the Cemetery at a tea-time post-match sunset (this time after a 6-0 home defeat by AFC Rushden and Diamonds). I don’t want to tempt fate, but I’m not sure even Leicestershire will be able to top that one in the ignominy stakes. But then they never fail to surprise me, one way or another.
No time for proper blogging today – alas! – but here is a snapshot of Winter passing into Spring (as I make other plans). This is the view of Market Harborough cemetery from Northampton Road on my way back from the Rugby, last Saturday and this. It will be Autumn before the sun is at this angle at that time again and the quality of the light will be quite different.
The inscription on the large headstone to the right of the picture is from Tennyson (Alfred, not Lionel) and reads
Then let wise Nature work her will,
And on my clay her darnels grow,
Come only when the days are still,
And at my head-stone whisper low,
And tell me if the woodbines blow.
I wonder how many passers-by have paused to read this over the years (and how many of them have been able to answer the question?).
How have the last two weeks been?
Like this (same as it ever was …)
Just before it melts, a couple of late entries in the snow scene category.
This is Wilfred Dudeney’s ‘Three Printers’, transformed into three jolly matelots on shore leave and looking for fun. I think Gene Kelly is the one on the left.
And this sad modern variant on the traditional lost dog notice. Lost in snow – White iPod Touch.
I bet the owner is regretting not having gone for the pink iPod option now.
A quick roundup of how the snow is affecting our region. First, the scene at Grace Road earlier in the day –
The sharp-eyed among you will have spotted that this is actually a painting (by Nick Turley) not a photograph and is taken from this year’s Christmas card sold in aid of the Friends of Grace Road.
We are lucky at Leicestershire in that foxes might realistically be seen in the outfield at Grace Road (we had problems with them digging it up a couple of years ago). A prancing horse at Canterbury might be vaguely plausible, but a bear in the outfield at Edgbaston would be straining credulity and a wyvern at Taunton would, frankly, be straying into the realms of fantasy.
On a homelier level, this is the pavilion at South Harborough’s ground (what Whistler, had he been familiar with Little Bowden, might have described as a Symphony in White and Green).
But then snowfall famously has the power to elevate the homeliest scene into the realms of fantasy. I saw a sign this afternoon saying that the Kelmarsh Tunnel (along the disused railway line to Northampton now known as the Brampton Valley Way) was shut and the Oxendon Tunnel was dangerous because of icicles and sheet ice. Inevitably, I had to have a look.
Without that information, where are we here? Narnia? Middle Earth?
I very rarely re-post anything I’ve written (in fact I rarely reread anything I’ve written). I see the last time I did it was also at the time of Epiphany, so in a way it’s reassuring that I can put my current low-spiritedness and lack of inspiration down to seasonal fluctuation.
This piece originally appeared in the first week of January 2011, which appears to confirm my theory. Unfortunately, it has a certain gloomy topicality.
Apart from poor CMJ, a few more to add to add to the list would be Alan Ross (died 14th February), Ian Peebles (28th February) and Tony Pawson (12th October last year).
Some of the morbidity of the piece was probably due to the bottle of whiskey that makes an appearance late on. I never normally touch the stuff and this one was a Christmas present. I’ve taken my own advice and steered clear of it ever since.
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The first faint intimations of this year’s cricket season have started to appear. The Wisden Cricketer have sent me a calendar, featuring “some of the U.K.’s loveliest cricket grounds” (including a couple – Sidmouth and Bourneville – I’ve visited).
Leicestershire have sent me last year’s annual report and financial statements – “The club has had what can only be described as a disastrous financial year …” – and the agenda for the A.G.M.. The main item is to “increase the age limit of a director from 70 to 80”.
But it is these little signs of life that keep us trudging on hopefully through the winter gloom.
E.V. Lucas put it nicely in his 1909 essay “Winter Solace”:
“During the snowstorm in which I write these lines the unlikelihood of the sun ever shining again on my flannelled limbs is peculiarly emphatic. It is a nightmare that pursues me through every autumn, winter, and early spring. How can there be another season? one asks one’s self; just as years ago, a fortnight before the holidays, one was convinced that the end of the world must intervene. The difference between the child and the middle-aged man merely is that the child expects the end of the world – the man the end of himself.”
This is no exaggeration – the fear of dying in the close season is a well founded one. At the beginning of every season at the county ground there is usually at least one familiar face missing, and, at the end, some of those who wish each other “winter well” know that they will not live to see the Spring.
The same appears to be true of more celebrated lovers of the game. The following all handed in their dinner pails in the dead of winter:
John Arlott – 4th December
Brian Johnston – 5th January
E.W. Swanton – 22nd January
Neville Cardus – 28th February
On a brighter note, E.H.D. Sewell dedicated his last book “Well hit! Sir” (1946) to “Professor de Wesselow and all the doctors and … Sisters and Nursing Staff of St Thomas’ Hospital who had charge of my case, without whom …” and, in it, said “if I am destined to see Donnelly scoring almost at will for Middlesex in 1947 I shall drink in the savour with as keen a relish as anybody”. He was not destined to see Donnelly, who did not play for Middlesex in 1947, but he did live to see the classic and glorious season of Compton and Edrich. He expired – presumably a happy man – on the 20th of September, three days after seeing Middlesex, as Champion County, defeat a Rest XI by an innings, with a century from Edrich and a double from Compton.
On a much darker one, R.C. Robertson-Glasgow cut his throat in a snowstorm on the 4th of March (if only he could have held out for another month …).
And then there’s Alan Gibson. Gibson died on the 10th of April 1997, the first day of that season (if you count University matches). But it’s doubtful how much interest he was taking by that stage.
But he too had once found the thought of a new season an incentive to pull himself out of a deep Slough of Despond. In 1985 he had, according his son Anthony* drunk himself into the Bristol Royal Infirmary (at the rate of at least a bottle of whiskey a day) and from there to “a hospital at Ham Green, which specialised in treating alcoholics on their last legs, as Alan was presumed to be.” He perked up enough to write a piece, unpublished at the time, which begins –
“Christmas in hospital (this was my fourth) is always a bit of a struggle … The most relaxed of my four Christmases was in a mental home: a case, I suppose, of sancta simplicitas.”
but moves on to regret that he had not received a game of OWZTHAT in his Christmas stocking and ends –
“For I am confident of being at the Bristol ground next summer and probably even more at Taunton and an assortment of other places as well. When I came into hospital, I was quite unable to walk, even to rise from a chair. But you should have seen me, after a week or two, dashing down the ward on my trusty zimmer. On Christmas Eve I graduated to a stick; muttering proudly to myself, OWZTHAT?”
The moral being, I suppose, don’t lose interest in cricket and go easy on the whiskey.
A bottle of Whiskey, this afternoon
* Quotations from “Of Didcot and the Demon”, a collection of Gibson’s writings with reminiscences from Anthony Gibson, published last year by Fairfield Books (available here).
So, what’s to say about the Stump this month? It’s still there, as am I. It keeps on buggering on, as do we all.
1: And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters asswaged;
2: The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;
3: And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.
21: And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.
22: While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
A little ahead of time, or a little behind it, given that most fireworks displays will have taken place over the weekend – I went to one at our local Rugby Club on Friday evening. The major change here from previous years was that there was no bonfire – presumably because the club is a hundred yards or so from a main road and I can see that having thick clouds of smoke suddenly blinding motorists could cause problems.
There is a long and fascinating history of November 5th celebrations on Wikipedia, from which I learned that health and safety concerns are nothing new. Fireworks were first banned on those grounds in the 1680s, ‘much mischief having been done by squibs’. The custom of children collected Pennies for the Guy has been the subject of controversy since it first arose in the late 18th century (in 1790 the The Times first complained about children ‘begging for money for Guy Faux‘). In 1802 a ‘set of idle fellows … with some horrid figure dressed up as Guy Faux‘ were convicted of begging and sent to prison as ‘idle and disorderly persons‘. Nowadays the respectable complaint is that children are too idle to make Guys, or that they are prevented from asking for money by paranoia about their safety.
David Cressy is quoted as saying that, by the 18th Century, Bonfire Night had become ‘a polysemous occasion, meaning all things to all men‘, which sounds about right. As an example, when I lived in London, I remember a friend (a Swedish Marxist academic and protoblogmartyr) and I taking our children to a display on one of London’s highest points. He looked around as fires raged all over London and explosions lit up the sky and said “I know why you English enjoy this – it reminds you of the Blitz“. I could see his point.
I confess to having a childlike fascination with fireworks and could look at them for hours – except that I think most small children are more likely to be frightened by fireworks than fascinated and looking at them for hours is precisely what you cannot do. I think – aside from the elemental quality of the fire – that part of the fascination lies in the purely abstract beauty of the fireworks (Whistler’s pot of paint flung in the face of the public was, of course, a painting of a fireworks display).
Having taken some photographs on Friday, I could now look at them for hours (if I had the time), and can read anything into them I choose to – a dying star, a palm tree, a coral reef, marigolds, fireflies, a Jackson Pollock, the birth of the Universe – or nothing.
The Crimson Rambler 