A Couple Of Late Season Half-Days At Lord’s, Plus Queen’s And The LSE, 18 to 20 September 2018

A slightly strange chain of events and connections led to me being invited to give a video interview at the London School of Economics (LSE) for the LSE100 course, which is an interdisciplinary course for all undergraduates. The theme of the course this year is quite “Price of Fishy”.

Ahead of that 20 September interview, I thought I owed it to myself and to 1,600 new LSE undergraduates, to mug up a bit on The Price Of Fish – not least because it is a good few years since we last promoted it and longer still since we wrote it.

The interviewers also wanted to talk about predictive analytics and data visualisation. I felt on top of the stuff we’ve been doing lately on that topic, but also thought about the pitfalls of analytics and the graphical representation of statistics, which took my mind back to the wonderful little book How To Lie With Statistics, which I also decided to skim by way of revision.

And if you are going to skim-read books on sunny afternoons during the last home Middlesex match of the season, one might as well do that skimming at Lord’s.

Tuesday 18 September 2018

I got my other work bits and pieces out of the way, but at a slightly slower pace than I had intended, while keeping half an eye on the cricket score.

When I left home, Sam Robson was in the eighties. When I arrived at Lord’s he was on 96. I ran into Richard Goatley and Rob Lynch, who were in the Harris (no relation) Garden. They soon came and joined me in the Allen Stand gap to watch Sam clock up his first century for a while.

Feeling a bit sheepish about reading my own book in public, I decided to sit in the sort-of sun trap end of the Grandstand, where that stand meets the Compo, which is always very sparsely populated and does not seem to attract the usual suspects.

I wrote up this surreptitious Price Of Fish experience in a King Cricket stylee, which was eventually published by KC in February 2019 – click here for a link.

Just in case anything ever happens to King Cricket, I have scraped the piece to here.

By the time I had delved through those bits of The Price Of Fish that I needed to recall, it was getting very cold so I took sanctuary in the Pavilion Writing Room, where I chatted with a gentleman who looked mightily familiar to me although not in a Lord’s context. Turns out he lives around my way.

Wednesday 19 September 2018

I played tennis at The Queen’s Club that morning and had been asked to return that evening. The Lord’s tennis court is being refurbished this October so we have very kindly been granted real tennis refugee status at other nearby courts, including Queen’s.

I worked out that, between those real tennis gigs, I could get a few hours of cricket watching and book skimming done.

I felt a similar queasiness about being seen reading How To Lie With Statistics as I did about being seen reading my own book. Of course, I am drawing attention to the pitfalls and the ways that bad people might deliberately lie or mislead…not advocating the use of deceit, but that might take a bit of explaining.

My King Cricket piece on this reading day, published November 2018, can be found here.

If by chance anything ever happens to King Cricket, you can see a scrape of that piece here.

So I returned to the Grandstand/Compo corner and again saw/was seen by hardly anybody – certainly no-one I know.

Horrific traffic the last few hundred yards of the journey back to Queen’s, but I got there just in time…which is a little more than can be said for my opponent.

Thursday 20 September 2018

I did my LSE interview in the morning, which seemed to go well.

In fact I could have gone to Lord’s that afternoon for a while, as my afternoon client meeting had to be postponed. But it was well cold on the Thursday and in any case I could think of a zillion things I ought to get done with the unexpected few hours, so I went home and did those things instead, keeping at least one eye on the cricket score.

The match ended up looking like this – click here for scorecard and other resources.