TIME TO GET OUT THE ENGLAND FLAG

I take it all back. England CAN play One day Cricket.

Sometimes Life moves in circles far too mysterious for me to understand. Over the summer, our cricket team (just) managed to win back the Ashes against Australia – the most intensely contested set of games any England Cricket team ever plays. But if you strip away the media hype that surrounded it, what we saw was a Third rate England team just scraping home over a Second rate Australian team. Over the Five game series, we watched 25 days of 8 hours a day where the thing that turned the series England’s way was about 5 or 6 hours of absolutely marvellous periods of play, with Flintoff, Broad, Anderson and, God help us, Panesar doing the honours on England's behalf.

England can thank their lucky stars that Mitchell Johnson didn’t fire on all cylinders until well into the matches, and Brett Lee, Australia’s best bowler, missed out through injury. I suppose England would counter that by saying that Flintoff was a developing injury train wreck as the series went on, and Pietersen missed most of it as well, and that counterbalanced the Aussie problems, but it was a close run thing.

But, we did it.

The we went on to play what to me was the most pointless series of cricket games I’ve ever watched – a 7 match set of One day International games which dredged the bottom as far as I was concerned in terms of excitement and pleasure, and provided a perfect definition of the word “Anticlimax”. The team managed to lose the series 6-1, winning the last match almost as a consolation. Both teams palpably did not want to be there, and it showed in the cricket and the attitude and demeanour of both sides.

You couldn’t help but conclude from their dismal showing that, from a One day Cricket perspective, England were a team of No Hopers. Panic set in immediately after the end of the 6-1 drubbing, with England hopping straight onto a plane to South Africa to take part in a short Knock-Out ODI World competition against the seven best sides on the Planet. South Africa, India, Pakistan, Australia and Sri Lanka stared us in the face, and with most of that lot being expected to beat Australia, let alone England, it was hard to see how we weren’t going to be anything other than slaughtered, taken apart, smashed and beaten very conclusively and very embarrassingly.

Oh Ye, of little faith. Tonight, we are two matches into the series and have played what to me are the two best sides in the world, Sri Lanka and South Africa. And we have beaten them both. Not just beaten them, but imposed ourselves on them in a manner I can’t recall an England One day side ever managing before. They played quite superbly.

What on earth was in the meal on the plane over to South Africa? The batsmen who let the side down, actually and metaphorically, during the ODI matches against the Australians have come to the party in a way that borders on the unreal. We’ve just seen, against South Africa, the host nation and favourite for the Championship, Owais Shah smash a fabulous 98, Collingwood, playing at 4, hitting a very responsible and exciting 70-odd, and Eoin Morgan finishing it all of with a stupendous 67 off 34 balls. It was a glittering performance, and I go to bed tonight with my chest puffed out on their behalf more than a little bit!

Almost the best bit for me however occurred in the first match against Sri Lanka, my favourite team in the whole tournament. England were playing them in their first match after the Australian debacle, and can have had no idea what sort of outcome awaited them. They must have had a real feeling of foreboding at the start of the match, having just watched Sri Lanka thrash South Africa, the favourites.

During the Sri Lankan innings, there was a mix up in the middle which resulted in one of the Sri Lankan batsmen losing his wicket after an accidental collision. The England Captain called him back to the wicket when he was walking off, a move which will endear Strauss to me, at least, for a very long time.

He didn’t have to do it, most of his colleagues didn’t agree with what he’d done, and it sounds like after the match he had more than a bit of a bollocking from Andy Flowers, the England Team Manager. But, as a real demonstration of old fashioned fair play, at a time when the consequences were potentially fatal to England’s cause, and when it would have been far easier to let the guy leave the field and accept the wicket gratefully, it takes some beating in my view.

Good on you Mr Strauss. And what’s more, the cricketing Gods must have agreed with him, because the batsman was immediately out in the next over.

And then England won the match.

And tonight, they’ve just won the next one against South Africa.

So perhaps there are mystical things afoot here – things about which we know not. It does make a very pleasant change from people on a rugby field trying to gain an unfair advantage by chewing on fake blood capsules to get a late substitution onto the field, or Formula 1 Team Managers plotting to get one of the racing drivers in their team to crash deliberately into a wall to gain an unfair advantage.

These things should not go unrecognised, and I hold up my glass to Andrew Strauss for having the balls to do what he believed was right.

CHESS IS A FUNNY GAME

25 years ago, the world watched for something like 5 months as two Russians played innumerable chess games until they’d both got frazzled and worn out. Kasparov and Karpov – one the old, solid player, and the other a young fleet footed (in chess terms) pretender.

In so far as chess ever took centre stage in the world, this must have been its Finest Hour. I almost became enthralled with what was going on.

THE COMBATANTS

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The passion soon went away for me and the only other time the flame has ever really reflickered since then is when, in 1997, IBM built a computer called “Deep Blue” to play Garry Kasparov. Rather surprisingly, the PC Blue beat Kasparov 2-1 in a Six match series.

I don’t suppose I’ve thought anymore about Chess until this morning when I read that the two Russians are starting a rematch. Given the way the world has changed over the last quarter century, it's not surprising that the format of the current duel is very different. The contest now is 12 matches only - four semi-rapid and eight rapid games — over one week. I have to say that I’d never even heard of these Chess equivalents of Cricket’s Fifty Over One Day International or 20-20 style of game. But the way it works is a semi-rapid game last 25 minutes, with five seconds for each move, while a rapid games runs for only five minutes, with two seconds for moves. It seems a million miles from Chess as they played it in 1984, but life moves on, and even Chess players today are blessed with a reduced attention span.

Now, fast forward, with a bit of a jerk, to the subject of cartoons. I have said before that, on balance, Cartoonists seem to me to be the sanest class of people on the planet, and that a Government fronted by them would probably run the world more effectively than the mob we've got now. I suspect the cartoonists vent their prejudice and anger on the blank piece of paper which becomes tomorrow’s bit of humour in the newspapers, and this results in a clearer mind afterwards.

As soon as I remembered the Man vs machine Chess game of Kasparov vs the IBM PC, a picture came into my mind of a cartoon I saw at the time. It was in the Daily Telegraph by that genius of the genre – Matt.

This man consistently produces the best cartoons I know. Always understated, he bases them on seemingly gentle drawings of a middle class, rather grumpy and somewhat down-trodden and weary English couple facing the absurdities of life in a semi-resigned way. Except he hits the absolute bulls-eye in a situation, or a combination of concurrent but different issues, in a way that amazes me. He never seems to have a off day - always On the Money. So I started to look around for this one from about 12 years ago. It has stuck in mind over all that time.

Good, isn't it?

THE INCOMPARABLE MATT'S VIEW OF DEEP BLUE

... AND SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

It comes to us all – watching our parents decline and die. I know it’s the Order of Things that one generation is taken over inexorably by the next, but it’s still one of the more depressing things about life when it happens. Sometimes the end is brutal, and quick. Sometimes, it’s still brutal, but long drawn out.

In my mother’s case last February, aged 91, she finally succumbed to Dementia which had been gradually destroying her for the best part of 13 years. Anyone who has been through this situation will know the problems all too well - the guilts and the fears we face as these diseases take their grip and extend their hold, turning someone you knew into someone you don’t know, and into someone who doesn’t know you, or anyone else for that matter.

In this country, it’s not made any easier by the obstacles which people have to overcome to get the State, in this case, the local Primary Care Trust Hospital to accept its obligations and fund the hospitalisation/Nursing Home costs which are an inevitable result of the way the disease takes its toll. When she died she had just about used all her money paying to keep herself alive – a quite inappropriate situation to be put in when you’re in the state she was in.

A couple of weeks ago, we ended up in the National Newspapers, and giving interviews to local Radio and Regional Television. We are fighting our (or more accurately) my mother’s corner to try to recover costs from our local Primary Care Trust Hospital for Nursing Home fees which my Mother spent as the Dementia which blighted the last 13 years of her life turned her into someone needing 24 hour Intensive nursing care.

When you strip out the smoke and mirrors, the rules are simple – if you end up in a Nursing Home because medically, rather than socially, you need the sort of care only they can provide, then it is, or should be, funded by the State. That seems to be the simple position. Except, of course, the State does not always seem to stand up and recognise its liabilities. It certainly didn’t in my mother’s case, or at least it hasn’t yet.

The really bizarre situation however is that, if we lived in Scotland, this would not be a problem. Care there for the over 65s is free, and not means tested, in Scotland. If she had lived over the border, then all the financial issues she has suffered would not exist. Weird, but true.

It’s only when you start to delve into this seemingly divisive state of affairs that you realise just how much difference there is between people in Scotland and people in England when it comes to the availability of what to most of us would seem mainstream social benefits to which all of us, or none of us, should have access.

My simple, untutored mind says that we live, like it or not, in Great Britain, a Union – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Monies are allocated annually by Parliament to cover social needs and you would like to imagine that the allocation of this vast amount of money each year would be controlled and dispersed by our elected representatives in a fair and equitable manner across the four countries in the Union. But when you start to poke and prod, what you come up with is not what I imagined I’d find.

I am not an expert on all this, but a little delving throws up a disturbing set of anomalies –

The British (not Scottish, British) Government allocates somewhere around £2,000 per head more to everyone who lives in Scotland compared to an English person. Given that there are about 5 million people in Scotland, this means a total of £10 Billion EXTRA given to Scotland.

Presumably because of this, the Scots are able to have a far more relaxed approach to the provision of expensive life-saving drugs than the English. Drugs which are available through the National Health in Scotland, can only be made available in England if you buy them yourselves. Unfair? You decide.

Scottish university students get free education, whereas in England, you have to pay your tuition fees. This applies even if the Scottish student is studying at an English university. Unfair? You decide.

Nursing Home care for the elderly in Scotland is free, whereas, as in my mother’s case, she has up until now, had to pay her own fees. Unfair? You decide.

If you look at State spending in Scotland, it represents almost 60% of all spending, a figure which is at the top of the list in Europe. And who pays disproportionately for it all – yours truly and 50 million other English people.

Now I have no quarrel with State spending as a concept, although I think overall it is way too high. But I can see no reason why a deprived area of English cities like Bradford, Manchester or Liverpool (and trust me there are some very deprived areas in those cities) has less of a claim on the public purse than Glasgow. But that’s how it is.

I also don’t think this leads to me being branded as a racist. I love Scotland. I am married to a Scot, and half of my family for the last 45 years have been from North of the Border. Mind you, just to balance it up, I think their cricket team is even worse than England’s, and also their cooking is not high up my list of World Class Cuisine. I mean when was the last time, apart from being in Scotland, that you voluntarily went into a restaurant specialising in Scottish cooking? Exactly.

The English and the Scots however, have always had a love/hate relationship with each other. Maybe it’s the fact that the Scots think they lost out in running the country in the 16th and 17th Century by the James/Mary Queen of Scots episodes, and like the Irish they’ve never forgotten it. It is an unpleasant fact that England perpetrated some dastardly deeds to all of them in the following two hundred years, but we’re 200 years further on now, and you’d like to think that the “Look what you did to us in 1745” style of argument was something that could be moved on from, sitting here in 2009. But it seems not.

So the devolution thing, particularly in Scotland, rolls merrily along. Since 1997, they have had their own parliament, (built, I suspect, at a 10 times cost over-run, using English money). The issue of “Scottish Oil” being the salvation of the Scottish economy seems to be the battle-cry of the Nationalists up there, but it seems that the maths just doesn’t make sense. If you hypothetically “give” them all the revenues from the oil – and you shouldn’t, because a proportion is in English territory – then they still would run an enormous deficit, which would require a severe cut in Scottish state spending to start to balance the books. And anyway, who paid for all the enormous investment to extract the stuff in the first place?

But why is it like that? This whole issue ends up back at what is known in UK politics as the “West Lothian Question”. To my untutored mind, this is a major political issue which seems never to get any significant airplay in the political life of England, and, for the life of me, I can’t see why. First asked by Tam Dalyell in Parliament in 1977 it simply, but rather devastatingly wonders -

“For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate... at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?”

If that’s not a good question, I don’t know what is.

The situation is actually worse that that for the following reasons.

It takes about 15% fewer votes to elect a Member of Parliament (to Westminster, London remember, not Edinburgh) for any Scottish constituency than it does for an English one. So the Scots probably have about 15 more MPs than they should be entitled to.

The Scottish MPs can vote on everything in the UK Parliament, whether the issue at hand affects Scotland at all. There have been serious and large issues, Foundation Hospitals being one, which only affect England where, if you stripped the Scottish MPs votes out, would have not been approved by Parliament. That’s a serious issue.

You might have thought that the Scottish MPs would at least have had the decency to abstain in such a situation. A few did and do, but many don’t.

We have two Scotsmen running the UK, and by inference, English affairs - Messrs Brown and Darling, both of whom are MPs for Scottish Constituencies. If it was to be decided that Scottish MPs should abstain from voting on purely English affairs, which seems eminently reasonable to me, then we would have the quaint situation where the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer of Great Britain had no say on these matters. Perhaps the simple answer is not to have a Scottish Prime Minister or Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Oh, and just as a by-the-way, you might also like to check on the ancestry of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, the UK’s Prime Minister from 1997 until 2007. He talks with an English accent, but don’t let that fool you.

It strikes me that the Scots are quite happy sitting on their hands on this issue, since I’m sure they feel they’re getting a great deal form the 50 odd Million people South of the Border.

One of the most telling answers to this debate came from Lord Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, in 1998. He said apparently that the best answer to the West Lothian Question was to stop asking it.

Just to understand where this particular gentleman is coming from, his full title is Lord Irvine of Lairg. Lairg is a small village in the county of Sutherland in the very north of Scotland.

So, in the hallowed words of Mandy Rice-Davies – “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he.”

I’m not too sure how I’ve got round to this point – chewing over the structure of the UK Parliament, and, to me, the unbalanced and inappropriate power that Scottish people and Scottish MPs have over purely English affairs, and the way that no-one seems even to consider it to be an issue worth a decent debate at a political level.

Perhaps I should have moved to Scotland and then the issues my mother has had to face would simply not have existed.

TWO LOOSE CANNONS SILENCED

Occasionally, the Obituaries in the newspapers trigger me off – most of the people who are rewarded with a half page or so tend tomake an interesting read, but once in a while I’m brought up with a bit of a start, when someone who’s made a real impact on me throws off this mortal coil.

A day or so ago, there were two – Keith Floyd and Patrick Swayze – who hit the headlines, for all the wrong reasons. Floyd was definitely one of my favourites, but hidden behind the two full pages on each of these two guys was another full page about someone much less well known, but someone whose output had left its indelible mark on me – Troy Kennedy Martin.

Keith Floyd was one of those people who you always expected would not make his “three score and ten” – alcohol and tobacco playing a very central role in his life. He was a “bit of a lad” before the idea of a “bit of a lad” had been coined, but, at the same time, this was balanced by his fabulous incompetence with money, which proved his undoing all too frequently.

Via his cookery programmes, he single-handedly turned me into someone who looks on cooking as one of the real pleasures in life. His series “Floyd on France” hit all the right spots with me – the location, the food, and his exciting, irreverent, chaotic and witty style of delivery masking a wide and deep knowledge of his subject. Yes, there were others before him, Delia, the Craddocks, the Galloping Gourmet (Graham Kerr), but Floyd resonated with me like no others.

KEITH FLOYD AND THE DRAGON MAKE A MUSHROOM OMELETTE

I suspect he was a bit of a bugger to live with – he got through four wives, one to whom he proposed within a few hours of meeting her. Definitely his own man, how can you not like someone who irritated masses of Scandinavians when he was doing a series on their cuisine, by whipping up a meal of Flambéed Puffins, a protected species in Norway.

And the clincher for me was his lifestyle in Kinsale, Ireland. Most of us make do with a dog or two. He apparently had four dogs, five cats, 58 rare Breed chickens, 12 geese, a pair of swans, two Jacob Sheep. one pony, six beehives, 77 goldfish (why 77?) and 12 Vietmanese potbellied piglets.

A real Maverick.

Now, Troy Kennedy Martin – who he?

Another maverick, I’m afraid. A scriptwriter for film and TV who in 1962 started the police series “Z-Cars”, which singlehandedly destroyed the cosy mould of the “Dixon of Dock Green” style of cop show we had been watching up until then. He introduced the policeman as a fallible individual, one who did not always behave impeccably towards his family, and who often broke the rules on the job. He wrote the screenplay for the Michael Caine film “The Italian Job”, and as the author of that perfect line “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off”, then he could go to heaven on those few words alone.

But the reason he’s getting a send off and a doff of the cap from me is a TV series he wrote in 1986 – “Edge of Darkness” – a 6 part thriller about the messy mix of government, the politics of Plutonium and the nuclear waste industry, and faceless multinational corporations. I’ve waxed lyrical about it here before, but suffice to say it’s dark, dense, atmospheric, enigmatic and very, very imaginative. Even the music, written and played searingly by Eric Clapton still haunts me.

ERIC CLAPTON PLAYING THE THEME MUSIC - HOW ABOUT THE HAIR?

One of the best TV series I’ve ever seen. After “Edge of Darkness” his life descended into family and financial chaos. And after it, he hardly wrote anything of note again, although apparently, just before he died he had just finished a 6 part series for my favourite American channel, HBO, on Global Warning and called “Broken Light”. Let’s hope.

For anyone interested, I’ve just noticed that early in 2010, there’s a film of the series coming out. Mel Gibson and Ray Winstone starring. Mmmm.

“Edge of Darkness”, “Tutti Frutti”, “This Life”, “The West Wing”, “The Wire”, and coming up on the rails “The Sopranos”. Forty years of fitful viewing throws that lot up as my “Best Ever” list. The order moves around a bit, and the odd new one arrives, but none of them disappear.

CHEATS NEVER PROSPER

It’s odd how one single action can make you realise just how starkly something has changed from how it used to be to how it is now.

Formula 1 Motor Racing - is it a Sport or a Business?

Discuss.

Well, after yesterday’s explosive meeting in which three high ups in the French Renault F1 team (Nelson Piquet Jnr, the driver, Flavio Briatore, Renault Team Principal and Pat Symonds the Renault Engineering Director) were found guilty of deliberately causing a crash so that team driver Fernando Alonso could win a Grand Prix in 2007 tells you (or at least me) absolutely that the days of it being a sport have gone for ever. I’d suspected that Business had triumphed over Sport in F1 circles for many years, but this removes all shadow of doubt.

The power of Money, the pursuit of Power, and the pursuit of the Ego have won and once again the corrosive destruction of something you thought may still have had a whiff of residual purity in it, leaves a pretty nasty taste in my mouth at least.

I suspect that all sports push at least some of its participants to test where the start point of the Unfair Advantage lies. Sometimes an injection of money buys it. Better training facilities, more aerodynamic swimsuits, more powerful engines, the time to spend more hours at the sport, and less earning the money to pay for the improvement, lighter bikes, more coaching and support skills – the list is pretty endless. The drugs issue is another side of this, where personal improvement is bought at who knows what cost to the body or the mind of the participant. Yes, these people get the immediate accolade, although it must feel to them, on the inside, like cheating at Patience or Solitaire.

Yet they still do it.

Motor Racing has always had the issue of Cheating/Unfair Advantage sitting under the surface fighting against the genuinely Great Driver or the Genius Car Designer, and it has often been very difficult to work out who sits where. As far back as 1952, the French firm Gordini neatly solved the power deficit problem they had by putting a 2.5 litre engine in their car at Reims in France in the Grand Prix Race wher the maximum engine size was 2 litres, and promptly won.

Racing teams used to regularly swap the numbers on their cars to ensure both team drivers qualified for the race using the best car available. Teams have been known to poke out a pit board from their pit to break the timing beam in front of their car during Practice to move them up the grid a few places.

It all seemed a bit of a joke then. But, nowadays, there is so much money involved in the sport, the “fun” bit is long gone, and to my eyes, so has much of the sport. It’s all deadly serious and, very definitely, not played for laughs anymore.

But although there are a few occasions where people put their hands up and do the “Fair Cop, Guv” bit, I am left with the suspicion that the cheating and “advantage taking” remains not far under the skin. I am nowhere near the sport, but even I am aware of a few examples over the last 15 years or so where my eyebrows were raised (to varying levels) at what individuals and organisations seemed to be prepared to do in the name of winning a race.

Such situations, fairly or unfairly, seemed to follow Michael Schumacher about, one reason why, great driver though he undoubtedly was, he does not qualify in my eyes as a great human being. In 1994, his Benetton team broke the rules in the electronic systems on his car. A few lines of deftly hidden code in the software controlling his traction control system seemed to bestow an amazing power to get his car off the start line better than all the others. Benneton also apparently had an amazing way to get fuel into the cars more quickly in pit stops, by using an illegal tubing system which gave them a few seconds advantage. His Team Manager in those days – Flavio Briatore.

When under pressure to win World Championships, Schumacher was not above running his rivals off the road. He did it in 1994 by driving Damon Hill off the road, and did it again in 1997 with Jacques Villeneuve, both of whom would have won the World Championship had he not done so. He did something similar in 2006 at Monaco, where, on a narrow circuit, Pole position is critical, by the simple expedient of stopping his car in the middle of the track to prevent Alonso from having the chance of matching his own time.

Honda, in 2005, (now Brawn – and leading the World Championship as this is written) were caught with a secret fuel tank built into their car, allowing them a weight advantage to be used during the races. None of the other teams made much of a fuss about this, and the suspicion is that several of them were doing the same thing, and a bit of frantic redesign was the immediate order of the day in several Grand Prix Design Offices.

In the last couple of years, spying to get hold of data about opponent’s cars has raised its head on a few occasions. Trusted individuals, high up in Team A, have been found extorting crucial data about next year’s cars from members of Team B. McLaren were fined $100 million (not a misprint) in 2007 for allegedly extracting technical secrets from Ferrari via a design dossier passed over on a couple of CDs. There are strong rumours that Toyota, a Japanese team who has spent fabulous sums of money in Formula 1 with singular lack of success to date, was involved in something very similar, although that seems to have died a death.

None of this is nice, but none of it puts lives at risk. It is a statement of the blindingly obvious that Motor Racing is dangerous. No-one would watch it if it was totally safe. When cars crash, physics and maths take over, and the human element in it all gives away total control of the outcome to fate, sometimes with fatal results.

People try to make it as safe as possible, but “as safe as possible” is not “Safe”. Even this year, the son of John Surtees who won the World Championship in 1964, was killed racing when a tyre came off another car and hit him on the head. In Formula 1 this year, Felippe Massa had his skull broken and hasn’t raced since, by a spring which broke off another car he was following. Accidents happen, and happen unpredictably.

Here, with Nelson Piquet Jnr, we have a driver, apparently offering to crash his car at the most opportune point in a race to allow his teammate, Alonso, to modify his race strategy, and win the Grand Prix. On the basis that Renault are formally not contesting the issue, and the fact that the Team Boss and its Engineering Director have parted company with the French firm, as of today, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that they all colluded to arrange a crash in the race, presumably for financial and “glory” benefits. The fact that Piquet’s actions could have resulted in a major accident involving himself, the other drivers and the spectators at the venue seems not to have worried them. Terrifying.

He seems to have done it to try to curry favour with Renault. He is the son of a previous World Champion, also named Nelson, who was a seriously good driver in his time, and you can imagine the parental pressure to live a father’s life again through his son here. Nelson Jnr had definitely not been a success, and was fighting for his racing life with Renault when the alleged incident took place. Unfortunately, Nelson Jnr was not a great driver – he wasn’t even a good one as Grand Prix drivers go, so presumably panic took over.

He has now totally destroyed any driver credibility he may have had, and two of the Great and the Good in the sport, Briatore and Symonds have also been destroyed. No-one, I imagine will feel much sorrow about Briatore, but I am genuinely surprised and amazed that someone like Pat Symonds would have got involved in such a thing. He came across on TV as an honest and upstanding individual with a considerable degree of integrity about him. Perhaps it was the pressure from the Corporate bosses to succeed, or perhaps he wasn’t quite as straight as his TV persona suggested. I simply don’t know.

But it’s yet another example of the erosion of the simple belief in sport that what you are seeing is people striving to their utmost within a given set of rules to be the best there is. It’s very corrosive, to me at least, and the next time I see something magical happen on the Sports TV screen, I will find it difficult to avoid the nasty little cynical thought niggling in the back of my mind that someone has pulled a fast one here.

And I really don’t want that.

WE’VE LOST A MEMBER OF OUR FAMILY

What is it about dieting? It’s now classified as an infectious disease in our family. One member started about 6 months ago, and over the last few months, everyone in a position to do so, ie one of my daughters (the other is 4 weeks away from giving birth), both of my Sons in Law, my wife and myself have had the weight reduction bit between our teeth.

In total, we’ve lost a little over 10 stones, ie 140 pounds – the weight of one of us. Hence the title of this piece.

It’s weird how it all takes hold. I’ve been around 12 stones (156 pounds for those living in the far flung outposts of the Empire) for most of my life, but, over the last year or so, it has gradually crept up, evidenced by that imperceptibly increasing but very real amount by which one needs to breathe in to allow the various zips and buttons to be secured. There comes a point where another meal of the current size and calorie content will cost a fortune, because it will entail a visit to the shops to buy a complete new wardrobe one size larger.

And that for me was the final straw. Take yourself in hand boy, get a grip and stop troughing.

If you go on at someone to lose weight, it simply doesn’t work. It has to come from within. If you go on one of these fancy diets, that is only a temporary measure. As soon as you reach your desired weight, you revert to the previous regime, and off you go, or more accurately on it goes again.

I’m very much not a diet expert, never having subjected myself to the strictures of one during my life. So I use simple logic - at least that’s what I think it is. The fewer calories you take in, given a constant rate of metabolism, the more you will use your internal store of energy, and the more weight you will lose. I have no desire to eat Cabbage soup, and fart like a trooper for the rest of my life, and a diet of strict protein, like an Atkins one, would set me hallucinating for a warm, buttery croissant within days.

I have almost zero self control in these things, so it had to be something my weak-willed-ness could cope with. Anyone who can eat a complete packet of biscuits at a sitting the way I could, needs everything on their side to make it work.

So, try to cut out the mid morning “this”, and the mid afternoon “that” (if you're into Winnie the Pooh (and you should be), the "Little Smackerels"), try not to go too mad with the clotted cream and strawberry jam scones (with butter of course) and keep to around 1900-2000 calories a day. You can even get away with a couple of glasses of wine in that if you do a bit of advanced calorific planning.

It seems totally unfair that, metabolically speaking, as you get older, your body needs fewer and fewer calories to maintain any given weight. What spoilsport thought that one up? As the years roll on, our minds start to go (Why am I standing with the fridge door open and a toilet roll in my hand?), our skin gets more rugged (not good for the fairer sex), our joints stiffen up at the same rate as other parts get less stiff (for my sense of self esteem, I put that one down to the medication!), and generally it all gently unravels. You’d think that, as a little bite sized consolation, the Great Dietician in the Sky would allow you to consume more calories each day. But No.

So my infernally clever Japanese weighing machine, which instantly calculates my Body Mass Index, whatever that is, and my optimum calorie intake tells me that I need something around 2,700 per day to stay as overweight as I am, and gives me a target. I don't think the Japanese have a sense of humour. Since each pound of weight loss needs 3,500 calories NOT to be injested, then, the maths tells me, aiming at 2,000 per day will result in a loss of a bit more than 1 pound per week.

10 or so weeks later, I am 13 (actually 13.4 – to me, the 0.4 is quite important here) pounds less heavy. My clothes now fit, and actually the ones which you use as a last resort as the weight creeps up, now fall off me with a very satisfying “splott” on the carpet. So Memo to Self - don’t wear those when you go to the supermarket, as the other customers might get the wrong idea when you’re bending over in the veg section selecting a cucumber.

I feel significantly better as a result of all this. Some of it is psychological, the result of setting out to do something I didn’t quite know I could keep up. And some of it simply physical. Just lift a large bag up that weighs 14 pounds, and imagine having to carry it around all the time. You really shouldn’t be surprised, but I was.

And I now feel I can manage to stay on the regime I’ve come up with. Last night, I even had a gargantuan portion of Daughter-cooked (and hence excellent) Shepherds Pie last night, and went to bed thinking that, as I leapfrogged onto the scales this morning, I would be in for a rude awakening. I weighed less that I’d ever done this year. Perhaps there are no calories in a meal cooked by someone else.

My confusion is immense, but I don’t care. I was going to say that "The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating", but you'd probably think I was going for a cheap laugh, so I won't.

ISN'T SHAMPOO A FUNNY WORD?

The Kangaroo Paw flower is a very attractive plant. It has even been selected as the floral representative for Western Australia, so emblematic is it. It is so named because in its unopened form it looks, surprise, surprise, like a Kangaroo’s Paw. Simple really. Except that I’ve never studied the paw of a Kangaroo.

Its medicinal benefits, I have to say even at my advanced age, have bypassed my attention and awareness for greater than 60 years. Still you live and learn.

I was showering away this morning, and grabbed the bottle of shampoo to wash my hair. Purchased, I submit in my defence, by the other person who lives in my house, it was called “Aussie – Mega Shampoo”. No, I don’t understand either.

The small writing on the front of the bottle soothes me with the vital information that it “cleanses without the build up that causes the hair to droop.” That will be very handy, since, following a session with Shirley, my hairdresser late last week, there isn’t one hair on my head longer than a quarter of an inch. The longer we talk, the more she cuts my hair, and we had a very long conversation last Saturday about me being on the television and radio during the week. And as I kept talking, she kept cutting. Hence the virtual baldness.

The front of the bottle goes on – “Hair will be bouncy and clean”. Mmmmm, I think not. Clean, perhaps, Bouncy – no bloody chance. It looks like a less frenetic Shane Warne, and I don’t think that’s much of a compliment, since I last described his hair as looking like an explosion in a Mattress Factory.

Anyway, off we go. We squeeze some out. I have to say this is the first time I’ve had a really good look at it. I know this is a family website, but the only way I can describe it uses an analogy that involves the description of the colour, texture, and, I suspect, feel of the contents of a well used condom. Ugh!

And I’m just about to rub it vigorously into my beautiful recently coiffured follicles! And then, even worse, into those hairs about 30 inches nearer the ground which don’t see the light of day quite so often. Yikes.

And I’ve got it all on my hand.

Things are going from bad to worse now.

So I turn the bottle round to see what’s on the back. Something, I idly anticipate, about the tender process where nubile Australian lasses gently masticate the Kangaroo Paw flowers between their toes to extract the delicate juices, mix it with rare and beautiful herbs and spices, and add a touch of soft soapy something or other, so they can then ship it all off to a gratefully waiting collection of ardent customers on the other side of the world?

Ah well, you know there had to be a problem didn’t you?

The really small print on the other side tells you what’s inside the bottle. Now, call me old fashioned, but this lot sounds like something that would result from Macbeth’s Witches being seconded to the Development branch of the Iranian Nuclear Bomb Team.

I did Chemistry to a reasonably high level when I was at school, but none of the names (alright, I agree not “Aqua” or “Sodium Chloride” – why in heaven’s name do I need Salt in my shampoo?) meant anything to me. There were 31 substances – that’s the only word I can think of here – in the bottle apart from the “Aqua”. And two of the really scary ones were not even allowed a name using alphabetic characters.

We had CI 19140, and CI 14700. Shades of Agent Orange here. Actually that’s nearly right, because when later you Google them, you find they are colourants which as far as I am aware can be dangerous if injested, ones we try really hard to avoid our children getting anywhere near. And I’m about to smear the stuff all over my most sensitive parts.

So I’m standing there wondering what to do and thinking evil thoughts about the Australians. Is this a subversive act by some miserable Australian gits to get back at those Pommie Bastards who sent them over to the other side of the world as penalties for their crimes two hundred years ago, as well as, at the same time, anticipating a 2-1 England win in the Ashes at the Oval?

And then you read the even smaller print, and down to earth we come. This potion – Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog etc. is actually produced in England by a company whose Head Office is in Weybridge in Surrey, a sleepy town where I spent three years of my education learning about aeroplanes.

Just to make my day, I suppose someone will now write in to say that Father Christmas doesn’t exist. Perhaps I should do what the manufacturers ask in the smallest print on the bottle.

"... Put pen to paper. We like getting letters, no-one does it these days, and it makes us feel special."

Yeah, Right.

ONE HUMANITY .... ONE JUSTICE.

I sat on the sofa late last night just before heading off to bed, idly flicking through the TV programmes we had recorded on the Sky Box. A Mark Knopfler concert caught my attention from the list. Now Mr Knopfler, and his band, Dire Straits have been one of my three favourite bands through most of my adult life. I’ve got all of their CDs, and have seen them in concert several times. He is one of the greatest guitar players ever, as well as writing some of the most distinctive and evocative pop songs I know.

Private Investigations, Tobacco Road, Tunnel of Love, Romeo and Juliet, Walk of Life, Money for Nothing – what a collection, two of which are in my all time favourite Top ten Songs.

The concert was recorded recently in Basel in Switzerland, and, I have to say, was a bit of a disappointment to me. Too laid back, no passion, and too many new songs, which didn’t seem to mean that much.

Now it must be a real pain if you are a singer/songwriter, when you play your latest set of songs, and get polite applause, only to see the difference when you bring back one of the Oldies, which the audience has really come to hear. You must feel a sense of utter frustration, standing up there thinking “Listen to this one, you miserable lot. I’ve just written it and This is Me. Here and Now. Those old songs have gone. They’re the past, and I’m sick of singing them.”

Of course the audience doesn’t think like this, and so goes mad when the Old Songs make their appearance. And so it was here. “Brothers in Arms” with its deceptively gentle introduction floated into existence, and the audience changed from polite applause to Full Attention.

I have to say that, to these ears, Knopfler’s rendition of the song was not that great. It was so laid back, it was untrue. This is a serious song, with an important message, and a gentle feeling to it does it no favours at all. Knopfler had his 60th Birthday 3 days ago (Happy Birthday, Mark!), and you have to wonder whether, like all performers, whether he will ever recapture the power and passion he had when he was younger. Maybe it’s me, because I’m not getting any younger, or maybe it’s him, because he’s got less to say today than he had 20 years ago. Probably a bit of both. I just don’t know.

But just listening to him, my mind flashed back over 20 years. Nelson Mandela was still in jail, and the pop world had got together in London to pay their own tribute to this remarkable man. It took place in front of 75,000 people on 11th June 1988 at Wembley in London, and was the most political pop concert ever staged up to that time. The aim was to raise the world’s awareness of Mandela’s plight, and to put pressure on South Africa to release him, which they did 18 months later.

The concert included many of the more politically aware pop singers, with Peter Gabriel, Sting, Simple Minds, Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, and – Dire Straits.

Dire Straits were last to perform, and their 45 minute set was the work of genius. I’ve never seen or heard them play better than that night.

It was filmed very atmospherically and movingly and I still watch it with great affection and admiration. Two of the songs on it, Romeo and Juliet and Brothers in Arms will live in my mind for ever. It is this performance of Brothers in Arms which lasted some 9 minutes, and had Knopfler at the peak of his powers which jumped into my mind last night, in comparison to the one which he gave on the TV recording. I’ve dug it out on YouTube, so you can watch it. The atmosphere that night was electric, and you can get that feeling coming across even though the video is not of the best quality. You can feel the power, feeling and conviction pulsing through Knopfler’s body and pouring out through his hands as his fingers played the guitar. He’s literally in another world, and it brings me up in goose bumps every time I hear it.

Such a simple song. Simple words, hardly any clever chord sequences, just a pure, straightforward message put over so poetically and powerfully. Perhaps that’s the key to such great pieces of music.

Off goes my mind again. Devotees of this blog (please tell me there is one out there!!) will know of my love of “The West Wing”. One of the best series television has ever produced. Each series ends with a cliff-hanger, and the one in Series 2 is an absolute blinder. I won’t give the game away if you’ve not seen it, but the last few minutes are simply TV drama at its very best.

And guess what music they choose to use for the closing action. Mark Knopfler singing “Brothers in Arms”. It is as good a mix of drama and music as you will ever find, in film or anywhere else.

The shots of Bartlet striding through the West Wing to the critical Press Conference, the Storm, Charlie taking his coat off to match the President, the shot of the perfectly and very theatrically lit Negro janitor cleaning the Cathedral up after the President to the line in the song “… There’s so many different worlds …” (Don’t even try to tell me that wasn’t deliberate), the way Martin Sheen puts his hands in his pockets (flashback to the younger Mrs Landingham), Leo’s whispered “Watch this …”, and CJ’s deliberately ignored “Front Row on Your right” aside as Bartlet strides past her. And just look at the last shot, with Bartlet framed against the Union Flag. Wow.

It’s pure Wagner with leitmotivs galore and allusions threaded through it all.

And to end it all, the bastards who produced the show cutting you off 1 second before you hear Bartlet’s reply to the question that’s set all this up over the last dozen or so episodes, so you’ve got to wait 6 months to find out how he replied. Thank God for the Box Set DVDs.

To my simple mind, 5 minutes of the most utterly perfect drama I’ve ever seen. Every time I watch it, I get a lump in my throat. And playing in the background – Brothers in Arms. Whoever chose that song for that moment will go to heaven.

Perfect.

Tags:

west wing,
dire straits,
mark knopfler

PLAYING AS ENGLAND SELECTOR FOR A DAY

In spite of what you may think, this is not a Cricket Blog, although it does seem to crop up more often than it should if a sensible balance is what’s expected. Put it down to England playing Australia in England as we speak – something that only happens every 4 years. The Ashes are, to this Englishman at least, the Olympics in this, my favourite of sports.

And, forgetting how the England team got where it is over the last couple of weeks, it’s all down to a "Must Win" last Test at the Oval starting next Thursday. That, at least, must be good for the moneymen at the Oval, but not, I think, for my nerves. You can’t help but wonder, however, at the state of England’s game as we come into the most important match we’ve played since 2005, and there are so many loose ends surrounding the home side.

I don’t know how we’ve got where we’ve got to, but, with the Australians seeming to improve and settle their side as the series goes on, the English sporting press has been scribbling at immense lengths over the last 10 days, over this and that, especially who should be in the team.

You can’t help but wonder at the way the sport is run in this country. There is a continuously expanding raft of very highly paid individuals who run English Cricket, and you can only ask yourself who, among the whole lot of them, has actually done the business at the sharp end for England over the last 20 years. Someone who understands and can respond to the special pressures which an Ashes Test Series puts on the players.

The answer, almost inevitably, is None of them.

As a contrast, on TV, we have Michael Atherton, who, in my simple view, has the best strategic brain on English Cricket today. We also have Nasser Hussain and even David Lloyd, who between them, seem to me to talk so much sense that you wonder why their views on being there and doing that are not seen as fundamental to the future success of the team. But they seem to be kept on the outside by the powers that be, when they are the guys who have the most meaningful experience available. Very, very odd!

So, call me old fashioned, but the skill and knowledge of recent England players should be fundamental to getting the team into the best possible shape. Their views are vital, but we simply don’t use them. At this level, it’s only so much about cricketing skills. The key issues beyond and above basic skills are attitude, confidence, mental toughness, resilience to pressure and being able to deliver under an almost intolerable load on an individual. Character, for want of a better word.

I remember, in another sport, watching the players in the Piccadilly World Match Play Golf Tournament at Wentworth in 1966 or so. On the practice ground, every player could hit the ball perfectly , with their caddies catching the golf-balls metronomically, almost without moving their feet, at a distance of 250 yards. But that was practice, and the real way the “Greats” showed why they were so good, is when they had to do exactly the same thing on the last 9 holes of the tournament on the Sunday afternoon. When you had one chance at the shot, and only perfection would be good enough. When your hands were shaking, your mind was scrambled but you still had to deliver. How different that was. Step forward the Jack Nicklauses and the Gary Players of this world.

The same is true of cricket at the highest level. Only the absolute best players make it happen in these hugely stressful situations. And quite frankly most of the England team is just not at that level.

So what should England do, having been thrashed by the Aussies in the last game? It needs strong nerves if you are a selector at this time, given the range of problems facing them.

Most importantly and specifically, we have a middle order (Nos. 3, 4 and 5) who amassed (if that’s the right word here) 16 runs between them in the six innings in the game. They should have scored nearer 300, which goes a long way to explain the current England predicament.

Everyone with an interest in Cricket in this country has their own view of what should be done, because it’s the sort of game which gets people talking. The first thing to accept is that SOMETHING must be done. But it would be too easy to make wholesale changes, to put up a brand new team which has then got to play brilliantly straight out of the box. It simply doesn’t work like that. So, here’s my four pennyworth.

Strauss and Cook are the best we’ve got as openers. Strauss has held the England batting together this year, and is the key wicket the Australians want to get each time England bats. And he's the captain.

Cook always looks as if he’s going to go next ball to me. It’s really wishful thinking, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if Trescothick felt he was in a situation where he could return to Test Cricket and be part of the team? I’ve just watched him single-handedly demolish Gloucestershire in a 40 over game, scoring 80 out of 112 to win the game. A man in a different class from every other player on the field. Immense power, huge presence, with a simple but utterly solid batting technique.

You could cry about his mental problems, it seems such a shame. I’ll bet if you asked the Australians who they least wanted to have batting against them, they’d say Trescothick, maybe even above Pietersen. But he’s thought about it, and said No. How sad. So we’re stuck with Cook, including his flaws – waft outside the off-stump, get a snick, caught in the slips. Thank you and Good night.

Number 3 needs to be changed. It has been a bit unfair on Bopara during the Ashes. He came out of the West Indies tour having hit three centuries off them, and looking for all the world like he owned the spot. But Number 3 against the Australians is a massively different and difficult batting position. The West Indian bowlers, apart from Fidel Edwards are not world class, so perhaps Bopara flattered to deceive. No-one of his age, to my knowledge has ever managed to make it work at Number 3. And, in the last four games, he hasn’t. At his present state, he’s more like a decent No 5 or 6, but you can’t drop him down there for the Oval, that just looks like weakness, so he has to be dropped for a while. He’ll come back, because he’s a good player, but not for the next game.

So, is it Trott, or Key? Or both? Or someone else? I’m not sure if someone like Trott will be able to withstand the pressure of a Must Win game at the end of an Ashes Series. But he has scored a pile of runs and, with no England baggage, he must fancy his chances. Robert Key must deserve a go. He’s got the arrogance, the wisdom and his captaincy skills would be a real added benefit to Strauss who often looks very lonely out there. Also, just ask yourself who, currently playing in English Cricket has ever scored a double hundred against the Australians. Answer - Collingwood, and … Key. Robert Key, to coin a phrase is the key. I’d put him in.

With no Pietersen, the other alternative you’ve got is Ian Bell. To my mind, he’s a good stylist, but his mental make-up always seems to me to be too introverted for such a position. He’s definitely not the man you’d get out of bed for knowing he’s going to bat, and he’s also definitely not one of those players who can change a game single handedly. He has a fatal flaw, in that he gets his front leg across the line, and then can’t get the bat round it when he gets an inswinger. The Aussies have got this down to a T, and look how he’s been dismissed so far this year by them. So why should you keep on with him? I wouldn't.

My view is we should go with Trott and Key at 3 and 4. Key has the swagger which will irritate the Aussies and the maturity, and Trott is a man in great form, albeit at County level. It’s not an ideal situation, ie the selectors should not have got us into this position, but in the words of an ex Boss of mine – “We are where we are.”

But it’s a hell of a risk, and it could be the downfall of the team if neither of them get their act together. But, just keep reminding yourself of the 16 runs the current Nos. 3, 4 and 5 got in the last game. Anything has got to be better than that.

Collingwood deserves to keep his place at 5. He’s a gritty, workmanlike player. Remember, if it hadn’t have been for his Atherton-like defensive innings earlier this year, we’d have lost the Ashes already.

Prior has been the great success of the series for England in my eyes. He’s kept wicket well, and has now, against one of the best teams in the world, proved himself with his batting to be a genuine all rounder. He selects himself, so thank Goodness he at least doesn’t present a problem.

Number 7. Flintoff, fitness willing, returns for his last ever match playing for England. His figures, seen in the cold light of day, are not of the highest quality, but that doesn’t tell the story at all. His physical presence, his ability to inspire, and occasionally his ability, on his own, to turn the game England’s way in a couple of hours is unparalleled in the game. Even if he is only 80-odd % fit, he will make the other players feel better. They will feel more comfortable that, if they get out, Freddy is there later in the order to pick up the bits. So they feel more secure, so they play better.

Apart from being a lethal bowler like at Lords, or a fantastic batsman, as in Edgbaston, he looms over the game like few others. He is the last player the Aussies want to see in the side, which is a perfect reason for him playing, whether fully fit or not. His ability as an all-rounder makes the team selection so much easier. Play Flintoff, and with four other proper bowlers, you can play 6 recognised batsmen. It’s like playing with 12 men. And sometimes, that’s all you need.

So what about the bowlers?

Apart from Lords, they haven’t covered themselves in glory. And to win the game, it's very simple - you’ve got to take 20 wickets.

James Anderson, on his day, is the best bowler in the world. Give him a bit of swing in the air, and he can be unplayable now he’s developed the ability to swing it both ways. It’s just that, somedays, it’s just not his day, or the ball isn't swinging. His batting though continues to amaze. No-one in the history of Test Cricket, has had more consecutive innings without scoring a Duck. I think he’s up to 54. For a Number 10 batsman, that is simply the most ridiculously endearing record.

Steve Harmison. Now, here’s an intriguing player. Mercurial might be the word coined especially to describe him. He’s just as likely to destroy the opposition with his high bouncing vicious ball, as he is to send it careering towards Second Slip. The problem is you don’t know which of the two Harmisons is going to be on the field on any given day. He must be the most frustrating player to have under you, never quite knowing if he’s with you or with the fairies at any given moment. But, my own gut feeling is that, without him, you aren’t going to do the business, and with him you might, not will – Might. So put him in. You’ve got to take 20 wickets.

Broad is, as far as the Ashes this year are concerned, the least effective of the fast bowlers, but he’s still pretty decent, and you've still got to think of someone better. He got a 6 wicket haul in the last match, but that was only because the others were so poor. He’s still young, and is turning into a decent batsman, and I can’t think of a better bowler instead of him (which is a bit of a worry) so let’s include him.

And we need a spinner. Panesar can’t buy a wicket at the moment, he’s a liability as a fielder, and, Cardiff apart, his batting is non existent. Swann to me is better in every facet of the game, and therefore gets my vote. He’s a chirpy, extrovert individual who is capable of giving the Aussies a bit of their own medicine. They don’t like that – another good reason to have him there. He can bowl well, turns the ball a lot, and is a very handy bat. There’s no-one in the country to touch him in the spinner role at present.

So that’s it. My team is – Strauss (Captain), Cook, Key, Trott, Collingwood, Prior, Flintoff, Broad, Swann, Anderson and Harmison.

Let’s see what the selectors do.

OH, I DO LIKE TO BE BESIDE THE SEA-SIDE .... No.1

Enough of moaning about life’s problems. It’s summer, and summer means long evenings and (for some of the time at least in England!) warm days.

Over in Norfolk, we’ve just spent a few months rebuilding a bit of our little house to give us a better sized kitchen. At least, that’s how it started. It turned out to be a real personal demonstration of “Mission Creep”, the way what starts out as a little project surreptitiously turns into a much larger one. The “better sized kitchen” ended up with all the downstairs tiled floors being replaced, most of the furniture being changed, and the whole house, inside and out being repainted, recarpeted and recurtained. Oh, and we had a new Front Door. Oh, and the front courtyard was regravelled, as well.

So, with it all finished, we’ve finally managed to spend a couple of weeks over there just pottering around, doing not very much. I’ve managed to get out for a couple of photographic jaunts, so, in my unpaid capacity as North Norfolk Council’s Marketing Consultant, I’ll show a few of the pictures of the area here on the blog. Not the cleverest idea I’ve ever had actually, because one of the place’s great benefits is the lack of people around, even in high season. If you want to get away from it all, come here!

Anyway, firstly, two miles down the road from where we live - an evening out in Wells. Or to give it its proper name, Wells-Next-the-Sea. Note no “to” in the name, just to confuse you. And of course, because this is Norfolk, it’s not next to the sea, or even next the sea. It was, when it was named a few hundred years ago, but the gradual silting up of the coast around here now means that the sea is around a mile north of the centre of the town. You can still get boats up to the quay in the middle of the town, but if it’s a sandy beach you want, you walk or get in your car, or climb aboard a little narrow gauge railway if you want to get into the holiday spirit.

The beach at Wells, like most of the coast in this part of Norfolk, faces North, so the sun sets all along it during the summer. It’s lined with one of those most English of seaside pleasures – Beach Huts. They’re all different colours, and, to my eyes, they make a perfect holiday image.

THIS ONE'S CALLED "DOLLY MIXTURES"

YOU CAN'T GET AWAY FROM THE GRAFITTI

ALL SHAPES AND SIZES

WELLS BEACH

LOOKING FOR BAIT

DOESN'T SHE LOOK NICE

CHILLING OUT

ALFRESCO SUPPER

THE THINGS BOYS GET UP TO

YACHTS AND BEACH-HUTS

BEHIND THE WIND BREAK

OUT AT SEA

ENGLAND'S GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND

Much Wenlock is one of those lovely little English towns for which the adjective “sleepy” could well have been specifically coined. It sits at the edge of an escarpment at the end of the Welsh Mountains, and nestles quite beautifully in the ups and downs of the Shropshire Landscape. 3,000 people live there, and it has a history which stretches back almost 1,500 years.

A few hundred yards outside the town is Wenlock Edge, from the top of which vast tracts of the beautiful Shropshire countryside are laid out before you. This has been the inspiration for some of Vaughan Williams’s music and AE Houseman’s poetry. You only have to be there to understand why.

It’s where I take my dogs to walk most days, and I never fail to be affected by its calm and peaceful atmosphere.

The town’s Priory was founded in 680 AD, and, although it was almost destroyed by Henry VIII in the Middle Ages, it still remains a most impressive place. Over 100 meters long, you can’t fail to imagine what life there would have been like when you walk around the remains.

William Penny-Brookes, who was one of the main instigators of the current Olympic Games Movement, lived as a GP in the town in the late Nineteenth century, and every year, Much Wenlock’s version of the games, much truer, I think, to the Olympian ideals than Beijing, are held in July. Paddy Ryan, who runs a marvellous butcher’s shop in the High Street and sponsors the Clay Pigeon shooting event gets it spot on – “Beijing has Coca-Cola, Wenlock has me”.

I live about 3 miles from the town, and it never fails to please and satisfy me when I’m there. It’s one of these narrow street-ed, Black and White Building-ed places where the road names reek of Times Past.

The motor car doesn’t quite fit, and none of the roads are quite wide enough for today’s world. But what the hell. People are still polite and still talk to you and help you there, and many of the Olde Worlde courtesies are still practiced. Shops still shut over lunchtime, and the local car park costs 20 p per hour.

Try that in London or Birmingham.

Here’s a few pictures of the place to give a feel of what it’s like.

THE MAIN CHURCH IN THE TOWN

ONE OF THE ROAD NAMES

HIGH STREET ARCHITECTURE

THE GUILDHALL

THE ROLLING HILLS JUST OUTSIDE THE TOWN

ODD NAMES FOR TWO OF THE LOCAL VILLAGES -

WENLOCK EDGE IN THE BACKGROUND

MISTY VIEW OFF WENLOCK EDGE LAST NOVEMBER

YOURS TRULY BEING VERY CHILDISH IN THE PRIORY

VIEW OF THE PRIORY REMAINS

I DON'T LIKE GAWPING - BUT SOMETIMES YOU CAN'T HELP IT

The last few days have not been at all pleasant for our family. Senior Dog collapsed on the floor in front of us following a visit to the vet mid week. We rushed back (at somewhat illegal speed I might add) to find that she had a tumour on her spleen, and this had just burst, necessitating a 3 hour emergency operation. Her life held by a thread for a couple of days, and it is only now, five days on that she’s showing decent signs of recovery.

Now, the world is divided into two parts – those who love dogs and those who don’t. To us, they’re a bit like children, and we love them to bits. Seeing them like we have over the last few days stops you dead in your tracks, and you have to look around for something to take your mind off the waiting.

Ah, methinks – the 4th Ashes Test is on at Headingley – I’ll watch that, and see England beat the hell out of the Australians. That will make me feel better.

Oh dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear.

Over the last three days I’ve been gawping, and that is the word, at the television in what I can only describe as morbid fascination. Rabbits in Headlights, in the way you can’t take your eyes off it all. The car smash on the other side of the Motorway. A performance from England of consummate and award winning ineptitude and spinelessness, with long periods of chicken livered, yellow bellied incompetence thrown in. Batsmen who give up the ghost – 9 of the 11 players (let’s excuse Cook and Prior here) made 18 runs between them in the first innings. None of the 9 even got into double figures and they all languished way behind Extras who, in comparison with the 9, played an absolute blinder.

And then the bowling. At least, they would have seen at first, very close hand precisely how to get a side out on this pitch. In a 34 over masterclass, the Aussies had shown them exactly how to do it. Tight line, off-stump, fullish length bowling. Get it there, give it time to swing a bit in either direction, get the batsman coming forward, get the snick into the slips or gully, and Bob’s your Uncle, they’ll be out for 100 or so as well. Nine of the England wickets fell like that.

So, what do we get? Short pitched deliveries, all over the place with bags of width for people like Ricky Ponting to have an absolute field day with. If you’d asked Ponting where precisely he would love you to bowl at him he’d have said “Keep it exactly where you are at the moment, Old Son. That’s just about perfect”.

So they did. The Australians must have thought it was Christmas, and all their birthdays, all at once. Anderson, at least could say he’d got an injury, but I seriously wanted someone to hit Harmison over the head with a bat, and a very heavy one at that. His gormless stare, with an inane, quizzical look on his face, as the ball disappeared yet again to the boundary made you wonder if his brain was actually capable of functioning.

England have recovered a bit of face this morning, with Broad and Swann showing a bit of skill and balls in facing up to what is still one of the least good Australian sides we’ve had here for a couple of decades. But they are England’s Nos. 7 and 8. What were the rest doing? Try Bopara 0, Bell 3 and Collingwood 4. Another non existent middle order performance. Yes, I know Flintoff and Pietersen are injured, but England need to get used to the idea that one of those is never coming back.

But I keep gawping at the endlessly repeated replays, not quite believing what I’ve seen, willing it to be different.

Gawp göp, (colloq) verb intransitive to gape in astonishment …

That’s what I’ve been doing, except in my particular case there’s another meaning of the word which is not in the Dictionary. This one’s GAWP – the Generalised Ashes Watching Position. For explanation, see the pictures below.

The first is GAWP 1, the basic position adopted in this match whenever England are at the crease –

GAWP 1

And GAWP 2 – the specialised Advanced version, only to be used when Ravi Bopara comes out to bat at No.3 – (you have to be very quick here, it doesn’t last very long), or when Steve Harmison gets the ball in his hand.

GAWP 2

Not, I suspect though, for too much longer.

LOVE HURTS .........

Well, I’ve watched it twice now. Quite pathetic, really. I promise that this will positively be the last time I put pen to paper on this subject, but, here we go ......

A few days ago, I was worrying that 22 years after seeing “Tutti Frutti”, I might have changed so that, what I found hysterically funny in 1987, was no more than ordinary now.

Oh Ye, of little faith.

Once again, in 2009 I found myself laughing uncontrollably at the antics of The Majestics. It’s probably a decent interval, 22 years, so that you can completely forget some of the key twists in the story line. I could watch most of it as if I was seeing it for the first time. And strangely, unlike some programmes you watch on TV, this one seemed as up to date as you could imagine. Alright, they were watching CRT televisions, they drove around in a Morris Minor Estate and a first generation Transit and they used those old telephones with the dial that you put your finger in to dial the number, but the essence of the story is as “Today” as you could want.

The thing that I don’t remember so much from 1987, was the sexual chemistry which Robbie Coltrane and Emma Thompson wove between each other. She’s not classically particularly beautiful, although I have to admit I find her disturbingly attractive (it must be my age!), and he’s a 280 lb rotund guy, who at first sight, you can’t imagine anyone falling for.

But, how wrong can you be. Their relationship is the centrepiece of the series, and their exquisite acting, exploring the way a real and proper relationship can develop is quite wonderful. They play the development from their first meeting with great skill, true acting. The gradual erosion of the typically male Scottish defence mechanisms is played out perfectly by Robbie Coltrane. He does not move on from any emotional base without a clear hand on the next one along the line, just in case his advances do not meet with the response he wants. He is always looking for slight, however slight, and rejection where none should be found.

Just like real life, actually. To these eyes, the final scene between them is a piece of acting, writing and filming perfection. I loved it to bits.

When you look back, the whole programme was a bit of a watershed. I can’t recall seeing anything that I’d categorise as a “Black” comedy on TV before this. It’s the sort of programme that has you laughing completely without control at one moment, but a few seconds later you find yourself among moments of great sadness, death and disillusionment. You can be forgiven for wondering if these two polarised emotional states should be found together in what is called a comedy drama.

The answer, to me, is that it just seems so true to life. The people, their relationships, the misunderstandings that occur to us all and the consequences that follow on from these, the way we share part of our lives with, and protect other bits of the same life from, those around us, is captured so well by John Byrne, the writer. And he keeps a constant stream of great One Liners going, which you can just imagine coming out of the mouths of the Scottish people you’re watching. Just think what Billy Connolly must have been like 20 years ago, when he was still a welder in a Glasgow Shipyard, and you start to get on the board.

I’ve no idea what it could possibly be like to be in a (very) Second Rate Rock and Roll Band, whose success, such as it was, has clearly been many years in the past, and for whom the future looms depressingly downwards in front of them, but, I can well believe that this 6 hour series gets it spot on.

As I said at the beginning, I’ve watched it twice over the last few days, and I’m sitting here wondering whether to get Disc 1 out again to see it for a third time. I know there are many more important things in life that a TV series, but sometimes you just have to follow your heart.

FLINTOFF - CAUGHT FOR EVER

What makes a good photograph into a great one?

Most pictures that get published today are good photographs. They have to be otherwise Picture Editors would lose their jobs. The equipment that’s available today helps an awful lot, what with Autofocus, sophisticated auto exposure systems, machine gun like continuous shooting, and storage cards whose memories are almost infinite. The quality of the lenses are better than ever. What’s not to like?

But the art of turning out a “great” picture is something else. You can’t manufacture them, and that’s where the art comes in. Greatness, in almost all walks of life, is a very elusive thing, and no different in the realms of the photograph. They happen almost randomly, and I suspect that the author of the image probably doesn’t know at the time he’s taking it, just what a gem he may just have created.

As one of my little pleasures in life, I sporadically visit Photographic Societies to talk about this. Camera Clubs can be a bit narrow in their view of the photograph. Many people there like a set of “Rules” to govern the “good” photograph, the formulaic, churn it out type of approach which can result in lots of good pictures, but very few “great” ones. So, I worked up a lecture entitled “The Best Photograph Ever Taken”, where I selected 100 famous images starting from the first time Daguerre and Fox-Talbot created the photographic image (around 1830) until the present day. Most people will recall many of the images – they’re the sort to which the word “iconic” is applied. It proved quite popular, so I did a follow up, which covered the “Best Sports Photograph Ever Taken”.

When you look at all these pictures, intriguingly, the first thing that hits you is that many of them do not “obey” the “Good Photograph” rules. They are not pin sharp, they do not necessarily have the subject in the “right” place. Bits of the subject are cut-off in the frame. Often the subject is dead centre. And, and, and. All of which “break” the rules. But it’s still “great”.

So there’s something else which attracts us to these images – which makes us want to have them on our walls, and look at them over and over again. In my humble view, it’s little to do with the quality of the equipment, and it’s all to do with the individual behind the camera, deciding where to point the lens, and when to press the shutter. It’s so often, the emotion that the picture captures which makes it so good. The photographer needs to have that in his mind all the time he’s snapping away. You need to be an artist, in the same way that Turner, or Monet were. They saw what was in front of them, but then turned it into something special and individual – a personal shaft of light onto something we’d all probably seen before, but never trapped it in the way they did.

The same applies to the great photograph. Sometimes these images stand on their own, and sometimes they need a bit of explanation – this one I’ve chosen needs a few words.

You may have gleaned from this blog that I am partial to cricket, and cricket provides here one of the very best sporting pictures ever taken. The reason it gets mentioned now is that, 4 years on to the day, we’ve just finished the 3rd Ashes Test match against Australia in Birmingham, and my mind can’t help but flash back to that Sunday in 2005 when the picture was taken. We had the best Ashes Series ever here in that year, and there is one image from it, which sums it all up for me, and is as perfect as it gets.

It was the nail biting-est finish you could ever imagine. Both teams had been going at it, hammer and tongs, and on the last day, Australia had what seemed like the forlorn chase of around 100 runs to win the match, with only 2 bottom of the order wickets left to fall. Except the Cricketing Gods had other ideas.

It was going to be the matter of a few minutes work that morning, a couple of decent balls and there you go. Bang, bang, job done. Only, of course, it didn’t turn out like that. Shane Warne, and Brett Lee, the Australian batsmen remorselessly hit their way towards the target, until Warne was out, bizarrely Hit Wicket, to be replaced by Kasprovich, the last Aussie batsman standing. Now Kasprovich is NOT a batsman. But, snicks here, a dropped catch there, and the deficit was reduced to less than 20, then down to single figures. The crowd was so quiet, you could have been in church.

There were people in the crowd with their heads in their hands. A colleague, who was there, and works in the next office to me, tells of grown men, who had paid good money to see England thrash the Aussies that day, sitting resolutely facing the outer wall of the ground, completely unable to watch what was going on. The deficit came down and down, until they needed just 2 runs to win, and then Kasprovich nicked one off his gloves from Harmison, clearly going for 4, down the leg side, and Jones, the Wicket Keeper held on to it brilliantly. The crowd, according to the commentator, went “ballistic”, and, to a man (at least all the English ones!) they rose up as one, exultantly. The England team were in a state of utter shock, one running aimlessly round in circles on the boundary, and the rest of them jumping on top of each other completely out of control.

The two Australian Batsmen were totally distraught. So, so near that they’d both probably come to believe in the final few moments of the game that they were going to pull off the greatest “against the tide” win ever, and yet, at the last gasp, the merest touch of a glove on the ball meant that they’d failed. Brett Lee was crouched down on the pitch in tears, and Andrew Flintoff, who’s not normally known for his sensitivity, broke off from his personal celebrations. He went over and crouched down beside Lee, put his arm round him, one fast bowler to another, and spent a few priceless seconds commiserating with him. A beautiful, emotional and very moving sporting moment.

Someone had his camera at the ready, was in exactly the right place, realised the significance of the moment, pressed the shutter exactly at the right time and captured it to perfection. Here you have the culmination of a great sporting event, one of the greatest I ever expect to see, frozen for ever in one single image. One picture which, every time I look at it, brings me out in goosebumps.

Just to build on that, who was it that did exactly the same to the Australians after they had lost another exiting test. Yes - Andrew Flintoff.

A MAGICAL MOMENT

In reality of course, there’s no such thing as the Greatest “anything” if it all comes down to a subjective judgement. If we’re talking about running the 100 yards, then Usain Bolt gets it, no argument. The clock says so. But, if it comes down to one person’s opinion, well that’s it, a matter of simple personal, subjective judgement. You may be very knowledgeable and have a degree on the subject, and a lot of people may either agree with you or be persuaded by you, but that doesn’t make you “right”. You can explain until the cows come home why you think that Bethoven’s Eroica or the Sex Pistol’s “God Save the Queen” is the greatest piece of music ever written. But if I think it’s Rolf Harris singing “Jake the Peg”, your opinion, to me, is quite irrelevant. Jake The Peg gets it.

And it’s the same with these pictures. On the basis that, if you gave me a choice of one, and one only, sporting image I’d like to have hanging on my wall at home, this is the one I’d pick, then that’s good enough for me. End of story.

The Greatest Sports picture ever – unless you know differently!