Month: September 2019

Taking Positives, Mostly Nottinghamshire v Middlesex, T20 Quarter Final, Trent Bridge, 5 September 2019

Trent Bridge looked an absolute picture under lights

Regular Ogblog readers sometimes comment on the relentlessly positive light Ogblog sheds on life.

Some days make that task a little difficult. Take this day, for example. On the face of it, the focal point of the day was a trip to Nottingham and back to see my beloved Middlesex team being utterly thrashed in a quarter final cup tie. Soon after we set off for Nottingham, Janie called me to tell me she’d had her purse snatched with some cash and all of her credit cards stolen/ransacked. Meanwhile and throughout the day, England were having a pretty rotten second day in the Old Trafford Ashes test; a match England cannot lose if it is to retain hope of regaining the Ashes.

So, how do I take positives from such a day? I’ll try to draw up a list.

  • I played a good 90 minutes of real tennis doubles ahead of setting off for Nottingham. Unlike the day of Middlesex’s previous ill-fated quarter-final three years ago, I didn’t injure myself playing – in fact it was a very good game;
  • Also unlike last time, I didn’t need to drive to the match – Middlesex organised a coach trip for this fixture, which spared me a longer drive than I fancied and at least meant that I was in good company throughout the day;
  • We got to Trent Bridge some two hours ahead of the match. We strolled around that lovely ground making a close to full circuit (part outside, part inside) to our Radcliffe Road end hospitality. On the way, I met Mark Butcher and Rob Key who were kicking their heels prior to their commentary duties. King Cricket aficionados will be especially excited about the Rob Key encounter, I suspect;
  • The Trent Bridge hospitality was superb, as always. Several familiar Nottinghamshire faces and quite a substantial contingent from Middlesex. I met new Middlesex board member Edward Lord for the first time and Marilyn Smith, whom Janie and I met at Hove and whose son Ramon used to play tennis as an infant at Boston Manor, brought “little Ramon” with her, which showed that “little Ramon” ain’t so little any more. I had very enjoyable chats with all those people and plenty of others;
  • Clive Radley went back to the coach early, once the result was no longer in doubt, to finish off reading his book, which was about Auschwitz. As Clive and I agreed, that rather puts the idea of “having a bad day” into perspective;
  • Did I mention that Trent Bridge, which looks a picture at all times, looks especially so under lights? Worth saying and depicting again.

My Name Is Why, A Memoir, In Conversation With Lemn Sissay, Royal Court Theatre, 3 September 2019

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Lemn Sissay – from Wikipedia Commons – click pic for attribution

This sounded like a fascinating true story – which it is. Celebrated poet and dramatist, Lemn Sissay, spent his formative years as a foster child and in care where he experienced almost-unimaginable emotional cruelty and neglect.

He has spent much of his adult life working to uncover his true identity (he is of Ethiopian descent), together with a quest to understand his origins and unusually bleak early life.

The problem Janie and I had with this event – a cross between a book launch and a rehearsed reading and an interview – here is a link to the Royal Court blurb – was the sycophantic nature of the audience. The audience/atmosphere encouraged Sissay to freewheel and jump around through his material so much that it was difficult to get to the nub of many of the excellent points he was trying to make.

It didn’t help when his lectern collapsed right at the start. Miranda Sawyer as Chair didn’t really help either as she, bless her, was almost as “all over the place” with the buzz of the fans as was Lemn Sissay.

The nadir came during the limited time for questions at the end, when a friend of Lemn Sissay’s took up a question slot in order to blurt out that she loved him. Even Lemn responded to that one by saying to her, “why don’t you just give me a call to tell me that” and Miranda said, “that’s a comment, can someone else please ask a question?”

Actually the questions were quite good and did help to cover many of the gaps from the preceding hour.

If you want to learn as much about this fascinating book/story in 10 minutes as we learnt in the 90 minute sycophant-fest event, then I highly commend this Guardian article/book review published a few days earlier – click here.

Are we glad we went? On balance, yes. Lemn Sissay is an engaging personality and he has such a troubling-but-interesting story to tell. I’d really like to have a quiet chat with him one day; I suspect he comes across better when he doesn’t have a mob of fans to please.