We visited mum on that Saturday afternoon and then took her to one of her favourite Italian restaurants, Vito’s, on Northcote Road.
This will have been, in theory, mum’s birthday treat to me.
In practice, Janie will have driven to Streatham, done mum’s feet (there are copious notes about that in Janie’s diary) and then we’d have chauffeured mum to Vito’s.
There, the waiters will have fawned over mum in their classic style (Janie deliberately malapropises that description to “fornicating waiters”) while mum will no doubt have proudly told the waiters that she was treating us to an evening out for my birthday.
We’re somehow getting by without treats like this now that mum has gone.
We went to Vito’s quite a lot with mum in those days. She had her favourite places and it was a lot easier to take her to one of those. We went again 1 November, I can see in the diary.
Still, the food at Vito’s was always satisfactory and that style of service certainly pleased people like my mum. Unfortunately, that generation of customer has been dying out for some years and Vito’s itself has bitten the dust, at some point in the second half of the teeny decade, I presume.
Turns out it was a fairly prescient report; not so in the matter of Adam London, but Messrs Robson, Malan and Compton certainly formed a nucleus for Middlesex’s improvement and success, following the dog days of the late noughties.
I recall a beautiful summer evening, enjoying drinks on the SBC terrace etc. I recall that the others liked the show more than I did. Of course it is clever and skillful, but I fins acrobatic/gymnastic performance only does so much for me.
Here’s a good snippet which gives you a reasonable idea:
I can’t for the life of me recall what we did afterwards. Janie and I both thought, at first, perhaps we went to Hix, but I’m now pretty sure that was another time, after we four went to a dance thing at the Barbican. Perhaps we decided not to eat afterwards on this occasion or just ate light on the South Bank.
Lord’s probably looked a bit like this on those days…
I spent a fair bit of time at Lord’s days 1, 2 and 4 for this match.
Days 1 & 2 I was marking Payroll Giving Awards applications; I was chairing those awards back then. My habit was to take the file down to Lord’s – find a relatively quiet spot and do the marking in the open air.
Day 4 (the Friday) I was supposed to have meetings in the middle of the day, but I think they got shifted to/combined with my Thursday meetings.
I don’t recall a great deal about the cricket, other than Middlesex making a very generous declaration on Day 4 (I think we were a bit desperate for wins at that stage of the season), which Essex gobbled up with relative ease. I recall that Fletch was fuming about the declaration when I ran into him towards the end of the match.
Interesting list of young playwrights collaborated on the piece, though; James Graham in particular having shot to playwright stardom relatively quickly since.
I don’t remember hating it – but I do recall that curates egg feeling about it. “Sounded better as an idea than it turned out to be as a play” was probably Daisy’s verdict.
I was the guest of Mark and Geoffrey Yeandle at Canterbury that day. We had a very enjoyable day – Canterbury is a charming place to watch county cricket.
Big Papa Zambezi Jeff Tye presenting me with my Heavy Roller shirt– thanks to Charley The Gent Malloy for the image – grabbed from his vid.
I have been encouraged to write up this particular Heavy Rollers visit now, in December 2021, as King Cricket and his partner in crime Dan Liebke have arrived at this test match in their podcast series, The Ridiculous Ashes. This test is Series Three, Episode Three – click here or below:
I haven’t listened to that podcast yet – my plan is to write up The Heavy Rollers experience and then listen.
For reasons I don’t quite understand, I have no photographs from 2009 in the “Charley The Gent” collection – just a video of Big Papa Zambezi Jeff Tye handing out the Heavy Rollers shirts on the morning of the first day:
It might just be that the photos from that year never reached me and therefore are omitted from what I thought was a canonical collection. If Charley furnishes me with photos in the fulness of time, have no fear, they will find there way to this piece.
My log records that it was a bumper year for Heavy Rollers, attendance-wise. Ashes years tended to be like that. Here is the Heavy Roll call (did you see what I did there?):
Big “Papa Zambezi” Jeff Tye;
Nigel “Father Barry”;
Charley The Gent Malloy;
The Boy Malloy;
Harsha Ghoble;
Biff;
Tufty Geoff Young;
David “Peel” Steed;
Dan “Peel” Steed;
Ged Ladd.
Others might well be able to chip in with additional memories, but my recollections of this one are slight and a bit idiosyncratic.
The Night Before – 29 July 2009
On arrival the night before (29th July), I recall that there was a bit of a scramble for the “better rooms” at Harborne Hall, although by that year (our second at the venue) I had concluded that the larger rooms at the top of the old building had some disadvantages to them such that my own preference was for a well-located slightly smaller room. I thus avoided the potentially contentious debate by deferring to my elders while still getting what I wanted.
I’m fairly sure it was this year, 2009, when I ran into my friend Maz (Marianne Tudor-Craig) at Harborne Hall, which, at that time, was still a VSO training & conference venue and Maz was still a VSO-nik at that time. It was strange seeing her in that setting while I was having a cricket break with my mates.
Day One – 30 July 2009
Obviously the single most important event of the day is captured on video for all to see – here’s the link again if you missed it above:
The rest of Day One was a bit of an anti-climax, certainly cricket-wise, as it rained for much of the day. I’m pretty sure that The Steeds would have smuggled in some wine boxes disguised as picnic-bag chillers and a fine picnic to go with it too.
I recall that nephew Paul “Belmonte” was at the ground that day and joined us for a while during one of the many rain breaks.
I also recall that, at one point, I was so “mentally unoccupied” while wandering around in a rain break that I allowed a young blond Npower saleswoman persuade me to change energy suppliers on a promise of, I blush to admit it, £200 off my energy bills for switching. Npower retained my business for several years after that.
In the absence of a 2009 photo in our maroon-coloured shirts, here is a picture of eight of us (only Biff and Tufty Geoff missing) from the previous year in the same place (Priory Stand front row) in our dark-coloured shirts:
Day Two – 31 July 2009 – Ridiculous Moment Of The Match
Forget whatever Alex “King Cricket” Bowden and Dan Liebke tell you in Series 3, Episode 3 of The Ridiculous Ashes, the most ridiculous moment of the match was around our seats at the start of Day Two.
By this stage of our proceedings, Charley “The Gent” was curating a fair bit of the Day Two picnic. As is Chas’s way, he was busying himself sorting out the contents of several bags of goodies at the start of play.
Despite several of us saying to Chas that the day’s play was about to begin, Chas was looking down in his bags when Graham Onions took a wicket with the first ball of the day.
Chas was disappointed missing that ball, but then returned to busying himself with his bags.
Despite several of us warning Chas that Onions was running up to bowl his second delivery, Chas continued busying himself, eyes down inside the bags…
…missing the fall of Michael Hussey for a primary – the second ball of the day.
Naturally Chas then gave the game his undivided attention for the attempted hat-trick ball and several subsequent deliveries of the ordinary variety.
We got plenty of play to see on the second day, although the mood of excitement was lessened because the weather forecast for Day Three was shocking, so (even during the exciting Day Two) there was a sense that the match was inevitably destined to be a draw.
I do hope I can supplement this piece with memories from other Heavy Rollers.
Where did we eat the night before the match? And the evening after Day One? I don’t think we played at all that year, but maybe we did. Hopefully the hive mind of the Heavy Rollers will help.
For several years now I have written occasional pieces about cricket for the King Cricket website, under my nom de plume, Ged Ladd. Janie and I have called each other Ged and Daisy since the mid 1990s.
The King Cricket website has very strict rules about match reports: “If it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. If it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.”
This particular day was a rather important one; this was the day that England defeated Australia at Lord’s for the first time for 75 years, but none of that is apparent in my King Cricket Match Report, click here.
