Brian Sharp presents the Mason Sharp Trophy To The A/B Category Winners at the end of the MCC weekend.
I played plenty of real tennis (and lawn come to that) in January, building up to the MCC Club Weekend, the last weekend of January, an event that I had either steered away from or had cruelly steered away from me until this year. I’m hooked on the idea of playing in it now, though – it was great fun.
MCC Tennis Chair, Guy Pemberton, applauds, as Graeme Marks presents
The Queen’s Club v The Dedanist’s Society At Queen’s, 3 February 2023
I have previously described the oddities of Dedanist’s Society matches, with many players being eligible for both teams and often not knowing who they are going to play for until the last minute.
But I broke yet more new ground in February 2023 in my role in the Queen’s Club match, “batting for the other side”, because I have, in theory, no right whatsoever to represent Queen’s.
…but I am not a member of Queen’s and not in truth eligible to represent. Further, there were several people listed who were members of both Queen’s and The Dedanist’s. But the timings and handicaps meant that it made sense for me (and one or two other people) to swap sides for this friendliest of friendly fixtures.
I partnered a really pleasant fellow in the first fixture of the day and we did well. I think we set the ball rolling for a Queen’s Club win, but it was hard to tell as we all kept having to look at the schedule to work out which pair was playing for which team.
I think it is fair to say that it REALLY didn’t matter. Nick Browne organised a really enjoyable afternoon and evening – the event was rounded off with a fine meal in the President’s Room – which, as usual, raised money for the Dedanist’s Society’s good causes as well as providing a really good time for us players/attendees.
The concert included an excerpt from a Bach Partita, folk music from Bengal & Assam and then a couple of Amjad Ali Khan’s ragas, both of which arranged beautifully for violin and sarod.
To give you a feel for Jennifer Pike’s wonderful interpretation of a Bach Partita, here is an excerpt from her performing a different Partita:
To give you a feel for the brothers Amaan & Ayaan Ali Bangash playing together, here is a duet recorded a few years ago. No Jennifer Pike of course and a different tabla player – we saw Anubrata Chatterjee.
The music was beautiful, but I must admit that we struggled a little to understand the ancient and modern connections as explained. For example, the notion that the sarod pieces were basically in the Lydian mode, although I think that term could only apply perhaps to the tuning of the strings, not how the music is composed or played. We could however hear wonderful relationships between the instruments and the notion (explained in the notes) that underlying melodies in the ragas are utilised in similar fashion to cantus firmus styles in late medieval, Renaissance and even Baroque music made sense.
Anyway, it was all beautiful music, deployed in virtuoso fashion, leaving us thrilled with our night out at The Wig, as is so often the case.
Image bot DALL-E imagining ChatGPT writing a cricket match report with me
I thought it would be an interesting wheeze to collaborate with ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot on everyone’s lips, to see what would happen if I trained it to write a whimsical cricket match report for the King Cricket website. Just in case you don’t know, my nom de plume for such things is Ged Ladd.
I chose the first match of the 2023 cricket season at Lord’s, which will, as it happens, be a County Championship match between Middlesex & Essex.
I trained ChatGPT with three examples of my previously submitted King Cricket match reports, two of which were about similar visits to Lord’s with my friend Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett. (The third is as yet unpublished). For those who like to delve, here are links to the two Charley The Gent ones:
I then provided the following instruction set for a piece named “The First Day Of The Cricket Season”:
comedy, 300 words, on no account mention the cricket itself.
That last instruction is a King Cricket website rule – match reports for professional matches should not mention the cricket itself, whereas reports on our own amateur efforts are encouraged to go in to excruciating detail.
Predictably hilarious results followed. I allowed ChatGPT a few tries, the best of which King Cricket published:
Click through and form your own view on the extent to which ChatGPT is ready to take over from human writers like me. Bert, a regular comment-provider on the King Cricket website was in no doubt:
“…Well, that’s that. Time to pack up and go home. We, as a species, are now redundant, completely replaceable with AI bots.
It was all there. Ged’s sense of the moment, his use of pathos, and of course his acute sense of humour. There is literally no reason for him to exist anymore. No reason. Literally…
I’d be genuinely interested to know what people think about this. But, just in case you were worrying/wondering, I’m not ready to “throw in the towel” and/or “hang up my keyboard” just yet.
…this year’s Crisis at Christmas experience was an unmasked affair.
The “needs must” experiment of using hotels rather than colleges for the residential centres had proved so successful in 2021, Crisis decided to repeat that model in 2022.
Thus Ged and Daisy returned to the “secret location near Hyde Park” where we did our volunteering last year.
Rudolf spotted near that secret location near Hyde Park
A couple of days before our first shift, Daisy was excited to see our actual “secret location” on Breakfast TV:
ICYMI Charly and Matt talked to BBC Breakfast yesterday about why #CrisisAtChristmas is important for so many people and why our support is needed more than ever this year. pic.twitter.com/B63AgWiHrh
As in the past, we met some really interesting people over this period while doing our Crisis shifts – both guests and other volunteers.
Interesting characters, neither guests nor volunteers, seen near our location
This time, probably because we were returning to the same centre, we encountered several volunteers and team leaders that we had got to know the previous year, which was pleasing. Even more satisfying was the fact that we saw hardly any of the same faces among the guests, which hopefully helps to confirm the evidence that the majority of guests last year were helped back onto their feet.
Feeling Old – Feeling Useful!
When you get to our age, stuff happens that makes you realise how old you are. For example, the realisation that England cricket’s latest wunderkind, Rehan Ahmed, is younger than my cricket trousers, as reported recently on the King Cricket website:
But when volunteering at Crisis, sometimes our age comes in handy – especially as Daisy and I are as fit and able as most of the youngster volunteers.
On our first shift, Christmas Eve, a late arrival had possibly missed his slot and was at risk of being turned away. Our shift leader asked me and Daisy to look after him and keep him occupied while “Crisis central” tried to resolve the problem and find him a room.
An interesting character, we asked him a bit about his background. He told us he was born and raised in South-East London. Almost the same vintage as me. When I asked him where he went to school, he said, “oh, my school’s not there any more. I was a Billy Biro…”
…”oh yes, I know”, I said, “William Penn. I went to school around there too”.
We went on to discuss the relative merits of The Specials and UB40…the time flew by. He also took the opportunity to wipe the floor with me at chess. Twice. Bernard Rothbart would have been stunned – not so much at my rusty rubbish – but at how good this fella clearly was. Mr Rothbart would have approved of the matching up I did on subsequent shifts to help this guest and others who could play to get some good chess match-ups.
It’s not all serving food, chess and chewing the fat with guests
That “Billy Biro” was one of several really interesting characters we met this year. From some, we learnt how they had fallen on hard, crisis-ridden times. Some chose not to discuss such matters and left us wondering. In all cases, we just hoped that our small contribution would help them back on their feet.
Utilising Our Food Charity Skills
Daisy and I did dinner service a couple of times, utilising our FoodCycle skills, which we have been deploying on communal meals for the last 15 months, to good effect.
I particularly enjoyed getting the opportunity to do the washing up (yes really!) in a commercial hotel kitchen, never having had the opportunity to use machines and equipment on that scale before.
Dreaming of washing up
Some of the guests are overwhelmed by the experience of being in a hotel and being looked after by a team of kindly volunteers. One guest almost refused to let me take him to his table and serve him his food, because he felt that “wasn’t right”.
Some find it quite difficult to make a decision along the lines of “vegetarian or non-vegetarian pasta”, one guest seeming almost paralysed by indecision until I suggested that he might like a bit of both. “No thanks, I’ll have the meat please”.
It can be quite a leveller, though. When we were on the coffee stall, one particularly demanding guest came to me for a coffee three times during the 90 minutes or so we were on that duty and complained each time. The first time he complained about the coffee, the second time about the sugar and the third time about the angle from which I poured the milk (left-handed, from a full, large flagon, as I politely and smilingly pointed out). Another guest, when I asked him to repeat his order to be sure to make the coffee to his specification, told me off for not having listened properly the first time.
I was reminded of my father’s favourite put down, usually directed towards a politician of his loathing, that the person in question “couldn’t even run a coffee stall”. In less robust minds than mine and Daisy’s, the experience could induce a crisis of confidence.
But, joking apart, the experience is, on the whole, hugely rewarding and satisfying.
It won’t be the same secret location next year, but of course we plan to return to help Crisis next year; of course we do.
Postscript: Returning To Crisis Sooner Than We Expected
Actually we returned to do a couple of additional part-shifts during the final few days at that location. There were rail strikes on those days so we agreed to cover a few hours over the evening meal surge, utilising our FoodCycle skills.
We saw some of our volunteer colleagues from January last year whom we hadn’t seen earlier in the season, which was nice. It was also good to follow through with some of the guests towards the end of their stay.
The leveller motif was continued and even enhanced though, with one guest who seemed especially keen for me to serve him virtually clicking his fingers in my direction for “service”.
On the other side of that coin though, one guest with whom I had chatted several times over the weeks came up to me to shake my hand as he left after his last evening meal. One other regular, whom I had judged to be painfully shy, quietly said to me as he left the restaurant area on the last evening, “thank you for serving me”.
Gresham Professors Singing The Gresham Professors’ Song, With Thanks To Basil Bezuidenhout for the pictures and the “live music” video
Was it really three years ago that we last enjoyed one of these soirées? Yup. Last year’s event had to be postponed at the last minute.
The only good news about that delay was that the Gresham music professor, Jeremy Summerly, who was unavailable to attend in person last year, was available this year. Splendid news in particular because his deep knowledge about and insights into early music were especially welcome in the matter of the piece that I had “uncovered in autograph manuscript form”, just before the pandemic.
Long lost medieval canticle? We’ll return to this later
Fortunately for all concerned, we had professional musicians to entertain us for the first half of the show, before we Greshamistas got the opportunity to ruin everything.
Actually, before the professionals got the chance to entertain us, the noisiest amateur of us all, Michael Mainelli, piped us in to Barnard’s Inn Hall in the now traditional style.
Michael at full blast. Thoir an aire yer cluasan, folks
Someone once asked me if I ever duet with Michael. My reply:
What would be the point? You’d only hear Michael.
Mercifully for all our ears, the professional team of David Jones and Sofia Kirwan-Baez soon established a pleasant tone to proceedings, both treating us to their fine keyboard skills as well as their excellent voices, with Part 1 of the show.
Sofia has a fine operatic voice, which really came to the fore when she sang the Massenet and the Puccini. David always entertains, not least with his “party piece”, Lehrer’s Elements Song, in which he subtly switches from “Harvard” to “Barnard’s” for the punchline. Also a lovely rendition of Misty, although I can never hear that song any more without thinking of the Gresham Society visit to the London Mithraeum and my resulting Mithras version of that song:
Part 2 of the programme was a different affair, of course, with some regular and irregular antics.
Tim Connell updated a couple of literary standards, deliberately lowering our intellectual and linguistic standards in so doing, aided and abetted by Frank Cox & Mike DudgeonMaths Professors Wilson & Hart taught us how to sing numerical carols. Turns out, it’s as easy as 1-2-3…as long as 4-5-6-7 and 8 are also in your repertoire, naturally. Tristis opus non est beatus, as PC Wilson might put it.
As for my little offering, Þe Fair Weather Canticle, it had been long in the process between “rediscovering” and performing.
I supplied Professor Jeremy Summerly with a copy of the “autograph” and a demo recording, the latter you can see below:
Professor Summerly very kindly gave this opus more than its fair share of scholarly attention, helping the audience to understand the historical significance of my “discovery” with a professorial dissertation on the piece. Unfortunately, that mini-lecture, a masterpiece in its own right, was not recorded for posterity on the night, but I do have some of Jeremy’s notes, which I can share with readers:
Of necessity, discoveries of new sources in the field of early music are less and less frequent as time goes on. All musicologists dream of finding a source of forgotten music, even more so a fragment that might fill in significant holes in our understanding of music history.
Yet such a discovery has been made recently. It is hardly surprising that such a fragment might turn up on the site of a medieval coaching inn, and even less surprising that this inn should be located in Middle England.
The musico-poetic gem þe Fair Weather Canticle, like much early music, surprises us through its apparent modernity. Like the brightly-coloured decoration of a medieval ceiling, or the dissonant harmonies and boldly-contrasting texts of a medieval motet, there is something shockingly modern about this ancient canticle.
Scholars will need time to consider the implications of this newly-found piece within the pre-Baroque jigsaw.
Meanwhile, the words and music should be enjoyed for what they represent: a perplexingly polystylistic mesh of jumbled ideologies and opaque thinking.
Professor Summerly then went on to examine the words of the canticle, noticing some astounding…in some cases shocking…similarities between those words and the words of subsequently well-known songs from periods ranging from the 12th to 17th centuries. In one case, even the 20th.
Finally, Professor Summerly, being an expert on early music, provided some historical context to my performance on an original instrument, which he kindly described as:
a rare and fascinating example of a gittern-ulele, an instrument probably of similar vintage to the canticle.
The instrument has an exceptionally sweet sound in the hands of an appropriate musician…or so we are led to believe, if only such a virtuoso performer could be found.
In the right hands, this gittern-ulele would quite possibly be, to the guitar-family, what Paganini’s Il Cannone Guarnerius is to the violin.
As for the gittern-ulele performance you are about to hear, many of you will surely be moved to tears when listening to the sound of this extraordinary old git?”
It was hard for me to follow that introduction, but I tried, after a subdued start. Basil recorded the moment for posterity – for which I am grateful. It is not every day that my work is professorially conducted, but the triumphant chorus at the end benefitted greatly from Professor Summerly’s expertise, as I had my hands full at the time:
For those who would like to study the words or are crazy enough to try singing along with the vids, here are the words:
Sumer is icumen in, þe nymphs and shepherds dance Bryd one brere, groweth sed and bloweth med And don’t you know, amarylis dance in green–ee-ee-een.
Lightly whipping o’er þe dales, with wreaths of rose and laurel, Fair nymphs tipping, with fauns and satyrs tripping Mister Blue Sky is living here today hey, hey hey.
Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light.
Hey you with þe angels face, bright, arise, awake, awake! About her charret, with all admiring strains as today, all creatures now are merry… (…merry merry merry, merry merry merry merry, merry merry, merry, merry merry merry merry merry merry minded.)
Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light.
Hey there mister blue, who likes to love, lhude sing cuccu, Nauer nu, ne swik thu, sing hey nonny nonny nu.
Mirie it is while sumer ilast, in darkness let me fast, Flow my tears, fairwell all joys for years, Never mind, I joy not in early, I joy not in early bliss.
Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light. Ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba, ba x2
After the show, there was plenty of time for eating, drinking, chatting and making merry, as is the case at any good soirée. The Gresham Society Soirée is certainly always a good one.
With thanks to John Random for several pictures, not least this one: me with Noel Christopher– Caroline is also there, trying to hide in the corner of this picture
Given that Ivan Shakespeare Memorial dinners are principally gatherings of comedy writers, they have not been much of a laughing matter of late, with many of our number having departed permanently. Indeed John Random pondered various re-namings this time:
Ivan Shakespeare Debbie Barham Nick R. Thomas Gerry Goddin Mike Hodd Chris Stanton Memorial Dinner
or
“Ivan to Stanton Memorial Dinner”
Yet plenty of us still survive to dine, chat and play silly quizzes. A dozen or so of us gathered this time.
Random gets busy with his camera phone while Barry looks on and……Hugh Ryecroft shows off the new trophy: The Hoddy
Following the departure of Mike Hodd, we toasted our patriarch and played an extra quiz for the above magnificent new trophy: The Hoddy, provided by Mark Keegan, who set the seminal Hoddy Quiz. Professional quiz dude Hugh Ryecroft took that trophy.
Hugh couldn’t win the regular annual Ivan Shakespeare Trophy, as he won it last year and set that quiz this year. Bit of a busman’s holiday for Hugh, setting quizzes for Ivan Shakespeare dinners. Still, it was Keith Wickham who took that magnificent prize, which will no doubt grace his trophy cabinet for most of 2023:
Wickham lands the big one
I was close, but no cigar on both quizzes, in particular one of them on which i only missed out by a couple of points.
But of course all were winners, as it was such a heart-warming and convivial evening, as indeed it always is.
Was that Keith’s classic James Mason impression making me laugh?
Back in mid September, I sat next to Amal at a 50th anniversary bash for Saddlers’ Scholars. Amal had been part of the very first batch of such scholars, while I had been part of the very second batch.
If you look very hard, you can see me just to the left of the tree
Naturally conversation got around to cricket and naturally Amal and I ended up arranging to have a net at Lord’s for old-times sake a couple of months later.
Everything I want to say about that evening was captured in a King Cricket report on the matter, published soon after. (Less than a year is “soon after” in King Cricket terms):
If something ever befalls the King Cricket site, you might click this scrape instead to read that report.
Amal’s recollection was pretty spot on, if this extract from the Alleyn’s Scribblerus 1974 is anything to go by. For some reason, Colin Page doesn’t mention Amal carrying his bat for 0* -can’t imagine why not. But apart from that…
This year’s event was no less exceptional, with fun and fabulous prizes on offer, ranging from a half-exploded can of Irn Brew (don’t ask) to a most valuable player award of $500,000,000. The winners got proper bottles of Pol Roger (other fizzy drinks are available) and chocolates. The wooden spoon has now been emblazoned in the form of the coveted Hinds Trophy.
Those who know me well from school etc. know that I am unaccustomed to being a sports team captain. I was more likely to be the chap waving his hand wildly at the captain saying, “me, me, me” in the hope of being spotted and picked. But Carl Snitcher, the MCC captain for this match, needed to be elsewhere and I got the call about 10 days before the match to step in and “lead”.
Leadership in this instance merely comprised turning up, badgering people into paying their match fees and shouting “come on MCC” at regular intervals during the match.
It was also still my role to play in the fourth rubber of this five rubber match, renewing my partnership with John Thirlwell, whom I hadn’t partnered since before the pandemic.
Thirlwell and Harris snapped in the dedans on a previous match evening
John and I tried to get back into practice together by playing singles against each other the week before (a superb, close bout) and a practice doubles as a pair the day before the MURTC fixture. But all that was to no avail in the matter of winning our rubber on the big night. Still, we made a close match of it and the fixture as a whole was won by the MCC, albeit by the narrowest of margins in the final rubber, to take the match 3-2.
Those interested enough can watch the entire match – all six hours of it – on the MCC Real Tennis YouTube channel through the link below. Compelling is not the word for this viewing.
As Walt Whitman put it, no doubt thinking of match managing a real tennis match, not Abe Lincoln or anything of that sort:
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won…
NewsRevue Inspired Comedy Singles: Chris Rowe v Ian Harris, 9 November 2022
Soon after taking up real tennis in 2016, I ran into Chris Stanton in the dedans gallery at Lord’s. I had known Chris from NewsRevue since 1992, when I started writing for that show and John Random chose one of my pieces for Chris Stanton to perform, making “Stanny” the first professional actor to perform my material on stage. That, together with the connection with fellow NewsRevue alum Chris Rowe, is explained in my Chris Stanton obituary piece click here or below:
Chris Rowe was a good friend of Stanny’s but a little before my time in NewsRevue…
Stanny & Rowy, 1991 NewsRevue Edinburgh Run
…as I understand it, Chris Rowe introduced Chris Stanton to real tennis at Lord’s, although they had rarely played together in recent years; indeed Chris Rowe had/has played hardly at all for several years.
When Chris Rowe and I communicated and eventually met after Stanny’s sad demise, we resolved that we really should have a game of tennis together.
Eventually that idea came to fruition this very day. It was to be Chris Rowe’s first proper game of singles for some considerable time, although he made sure to have a hit with one of the pros by way of preparation.
Despite Chris’s handicap on paper being far better than mine, the pros thought that, taking dormancy into account, we should play level and see what happens.
It was actually a very good match playing level, with deuces galore and lots of good rests (which is real tennis speak for rallies).
Unfortunately, the CCTV cameras wee not recording our match for posterity, so I cannot show you any clips from the actual singles bout in question, but I can assure you that the level was much higher than my doubles level the day before…
…but I would say that, wouldn’t I?
In the absence of footage from the actual match, I thought the following highlights reel is as close as I can get to illustrating the sort of skills on show that day. Below is a six minute thrillathon, which you might prefer to the six hour marathon of the MCC v MURTC match above:
Actually, there were probably elements of the Rowe v Harris match that might be seen as comedy tennis, in particular when one of us (usually me) got caught in an “it’s behind you” position, unable to call my own chase.
We also both managed an array of “characters” correcting the chase calls and devising arcane etiquette on the fly…
…since you last played here, my good fellow, the MCC Committee has deemed it to be ungentlemanly conduct to make a chap run around the court like that and then take the point from him…
…that sort of thing.
But then, as I said when I first met Chris Stanton at Lord’s:
If John Random were to consider inventing an ancient game with bizarre, arcane rules, for comedy purposes, he need look no further than the actual laws of real tennis.
Joking apart, it was such a pleasure finally to play tennis with Chris Rowe having plotted to do so for so long. I hope we’ll do it again. Although, if he gets back into practice, Chris will need to be giving me quite a few handicap points for sure.
We do like a bit of Renaissance music at the Wig. This lunchtime concert seemed just the ticket when we booked it months ago and still seemed like a coveted ticket come the day.
We thought it was an excellent concert. This size of ensemble and style of music works perfectly, to our ears, in The Wigmore Hall. The Tallis in particular was a memorably wonderful sound.
Janie and I have seen rather a lot of Martin Crimp’s work over the years. This opportunity, to see Martin Crimp’s latest thing performed by the man himself, seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.
Which indeed it was.
Crimp can range from “weird but utterly gripping” to “so weird it is utterly impenetrable”. This piece was somewhere in the middle of that range.
We found the piece fascinating, we enjoyed many of the vignettes and it got us talking about the piece and the issues raised by the 299 characters afterwards, all of which is a good thing. But within that whirlpool of ideas, while it was interesting theatre, there wasn’t any gripping drama.
As always with Crimp, there is some superb writing in there. Janie and I will carry some of the one-liners with us for a long time…
…although the one along the lines of, “a man over the age of 40 wearing a leather jacket – alarm bells start ringing” was a bit near the mark, don’t you think?
