Not just one rainbow but four: a very special event
Still emerging from lockdown, I have not spent a great deal of time face-to-face with people for some while.
Indeed, apart from the regular volunteering Janie & I do with FoodCycle, it has only been my Trustee activities with the London Cricket Trust (LCT) – putting cricket back into London’s parks – that has got me out and about since the partial re-opening.
On 18 May, for example, I visited my friend Rohan Candappa in Crouch End…
… and then went on to meet Sophie Kent, one of the LCT Trustees, to take a look at Hornsey Cricket Club to discuss a prospective indoor cricket facility project (not an LCT one).
On 9 June we had a face-to-face LCT meeting at The Oval. Dumbo, my car, was very excited at the opportunity to park within the hallowed grounds of The Oval, adding to his bucket-list collection of “cricket grounds within which I have parked”:
But I digress.
Birchmere Park via New Zealand, Hendon & The Woolwich Ferry
I started the day in New Zealand. Not physically of course, but I did Zoom over to Wellington for a short meeting on Z/Yen business.
Then I set off for Hendon, to Middlesex University for a game of real tennis, in which a sixteen-year-old utterly took me to pieces. I had pretty much been able to keep up with him a couple of weeks ago, but his regular play post GCSEs and the rapid improvement available only to people 40 or more years younger than me means that he is at least 10 handicap points better than me now and shall soon sail off into the stratosphere of only wanting to play with serious sporty folk and pros.
Having allowed bags of time to get to Birchmere Park in Thamesmead, I trusted Waze to sat nav me there and was led to expect to arrive more than an hour before the event, via the Woolwich Ferry. Time for a wander around when I get there, I thought.
I had never attempted the Woolwich Ferry before. My only real knowledge of it, from my youth until this day, was traffic announcements on Capital Radio & Radio London saying that only one ferry was operating and that there were hour-long queues as a result.
I didn’t listen to the radio on my journey from North-West to South-East London. Why should I? The sat nav does that traffic guidance job these days…
…except that the sat nav clearly didn’t know that today, as in my radio-listening days of yore, the ferry was operating with just one boat and the queues were some 40 minutes long.
Still, it was another tick on my bucket-list and Dumbo was very excited to travel by boat again, for the first time since his trip to Ireland with us six years ago.
Fortunately I had allowed so much extra time for this journey, even with the long wait for the ferry, I still arrived at Birchmere Park about half-an-hour before the event.
New Zealanders have an expression for their weather – all four seasons in one day – which can apply to English weather too and certainly did apply on this day. In fact, I think I can safely say that I experienced all four seasons in one two-hour journey from Hendon to Thamesmead.
By the time I arrived at Birchmere Park it was unquestionably the rainy season. It was bucketing down.
My trusty weather app suggested that the rain would ease off after about 15 minutes and even suggested that it should stop completely to allow us a 45 minute event in dry weather.
And so it was. The weather smiled on us for our launch. Only the multiple rainbows in my picture present clues to the changeable weather on that afternoon.
As the Trustee of a cricket charity that is putting dozens of non-turf pitches into parks around London, I am glad to point out that only a non-turf pitch would be playable just a few minutes after the sort of deluge we experienced that afternoon.
These cricket pitch projects tend to need several organisations to come together. In this case, not only the LCT, the ECB and the local (Greenwich) council, but also Peabody and in particular its Thamesmead Regeneration arm. It was very interesting to meet the various dignitaries and activists from the area. I also sensed genuine interest in progressing more projects of this kind in that corner of Greater London.
I took my stroll around after the main event. Birchmere Park is a charming place with a lake and plenty of bird life on the far side of the park.
