I went for an unusual and foodie menu for this match, partly because Alastair “Big Al DeLarge” Little was originally supposed to be part of our group, partly because I was also catering for the next day, when Daisy attended – click here for that report.
…and also of course King Cricket reports don’t talk about the cricket itself. So unless I insert a few points here you wouldn’t know that:
We saw Joe Root take his score from just over 100 to 200 – you don’t get to witness live many double-hundreds in your life. Charley and I were still shaking from the thought of having witnessed Ian Bell’s 199 at the same ground six years earlier;
Nigel “Jim Hawkins” Thorpe teased me when I suggested that Liam Plunkett could bat – I think Charley joined in the teasing, so I was very pleased when Plunkett demonstrated his batting skills with a nice cameo;
There were two players named Jayawardene playing for Sri Lanka that match. We tried to get a chant of “two Jayawardenes, there are only two Jayawardenes” going, but strangely that idea didn’t take off at Lord’s. Pity, really.
In case you can’t be bothered to click but can be bothered to read my scribblings, the plan was for me and Chas to go to Radlett to watch some cricket, after which we would retire to Noddyland where Dot, Chas’s wife would join Chas, me and Janie for dinner.
In the end it rained such that cricket made no sense but a very pleasant dinner still made sense.
I’ll leave the final word to Chas:
…we had a great time yesterday, the house and garden are both very beautiful, the area is gorgeous, you both have made a very good decision to live there.
I felt a little embarrassed as the food was everything thing I adore, and lovely wine too!
To my amazement Dot enjoyed the Salmon and really enjoyed the hospitality, even the singing and ‘metal’ playing!
Don’t forget the option for you to see cricket at Essex is still very much open – just let me know some possible dates and I will organise.
A working day, but I did have a pile of reading to do and a hope for good weather and an opportunity to go to Lord’s.
The match started inauspiciously for a gentleman in search of Day Four cricket at Lord’s, but Mick Hunt’s ability to produce tracks that end up lifeless knows no bounds sometimes.
At the time of writing (December 2016), there is much chat about Joe Root being lined up for the England captaincy – here is a very early example of him leading an almost unbeatable side to heroic defeat.
The other thing worth saying, absent from my King Cricket report as mentioning the cricket itself is prohibited there, is that I got to Lord’s just in time to witness Chris Rogers get to the 200 mark soon after lunch; I witnessed that from the Warner Stand before moving on to the sunshine elsewhere.
I rather like that write up in retrospect. I think you get a sense of the joy to be had just passing a day with a friend (or friends) watching cricket.
I had a funny feeling I skived the Middlesex AGM in 2014. My diary says “day off”, but by reviewing my electronic records, it seems that I took most of the day off, then went to the Middlesex AGM via a bit of work at the flat.
I don’t recall much/anything about that AGM, but I did exchange e-mails with Richard Goatley about it afterwards, setting up a lunch with him the following week (9th), so cannot deny that I was there.
I better recall the Seaxe Club AGM, which took place four days later. We were still in the old Middlesex Room that year. My memory of that event assisted by the report in an electronic version of the subsequent newsletter – a novel development for the Seaxe Club that season, partly as a result of “youngsters” such as me and Barmy Kev pushing the idea.
The Journey & The Night Before The Match; 8 August 2013
This adventure was very nearly stillborn for me and Janie, as she was very poorly in the couple of days leading up to our trip up to Durham for the fourth Ashes test of 2013. Indeed, Janie, who is normally very averse to taking antibiotics, had almost bullied her doctor into prescribing same, as her throat was so sore from whatever summer bug/flu she had caught.
Janie said she felt a bit better on the morning we were setting off; I agreed to do most if not all of the driving as long as we had breaks. Soon after we started our drive north, Janie started coughing like (in retrospect, writing this in 2022) a Covid-19 victim. I suggested that we turn around, but Janie insisted that we persevere.
I recall that I had bought/brought some Prefab Sprout and Kane Gang music to get us into the County Durham spirit and that we were listening to The King Of Rock ‘N’ Roll at that juncture.
But I digress.
It was a relatively small and diffuse gathering of Heavy Rollers that year. Nigel “Father Barry” Hinks had Viv (“Mrs Father Barry”) with him but she was seeing friends and didn’t want to join us for any cricket. They had arranged to stay in a “bijou but entirely satisfactory, and generously-equipped, terraced-cottage on Gilesgate”, in Durham, which is just a few miles away from Chester-le-Street.
Not wishing to be outdone by “bijou” in Durham, I had found a well-reviewed “boutique-style” place at a similar distance to the ground, in Seaham, The Seaton Lane Inn. In the end there were just the three of us staying there, me, Daisy and Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett; Dot (Mrs Malloy) originally planned to join us, but withdrew a few weeks before the event.
Chas was very kind and concerned about Daisy the night we arrived. She didn’t want to eat dinner – we had brought a few “easy to swallow snacks” with us. But in the end she did come down and join us for a while. Chas and I enjoyed a good meal at that place – Chas especially being taken with the Villa Wolf Riesling I well remember.
Chas took a picture of me and Daisy in the restaurant – I must say she looks healthier than me – but perhaps I had slightly overindulged in the Villa Wolf by then…or perhaps this picture was taken a little later in the trip, when Daisy was feeling much better.
Three Days Of Cricket At Chester-le-Street, 9 to 11 August 2013
The cricket was excellent throughout the match, as of course was the company. Chas had secured us front row seats in a temporary stand, which turned out to be a good location with an excellent view.
We felt safe/”protected”, for much of the match, by a fairly sizeable group of “Knights Templar”, who got louder and more tipsy as each day went on. It’s just as well they were never called upon to defend our lives towards the end of the day.
Daisy was still not feeling very well on the first morning, but I persuaded her to join us on the basis that we could always get her cabbed home within 15-20 minutes if she felt she needed to lie down. Access to and from that Chester-le-Street ground is excellent, despite it being a little out of town.
Fortunately the fresh air, good weather and good cricket started to make Daisy feel better pretty quickly.
One of the evenings (I think possibly the evening after the second day’s play) all five of us (including Viv) dined, I think it was at Oldfields in Durham – pretty good but now gone.
If anything ever goes awry with the King Cricket website, click here for a scrape of that piece. The tale of Nigel’s interaction with Jonathan Agnew for a personally-signed book and Chas’s attempt to obtain similar for no good reason is worth the price of admission alone. (There is no price of admission, btw). To quote Nigel reflecting, nearly 10 years later, on his visit to that shop with Chas…
Most [memorable]: “Boycott bingo “ and protestations to some innocent shop staff, possibly seeking a little supplementation to mounting student loans? I am certain I heard one say something along the lines of “that induction morning had precious little about this sort of thing, did it?” The other one appeared to slowly mouth “stick-of-rhubarb?” as she sought the exit.
Day Four – The Journey Home And Witnessing The Denouement On The TV
A small tinge of regret that we hadn’t booked to see four days, but still Janie and I enjoyed the last day as “driving home entertainment” on the radio and we were fortunate enough to get home in time to see the ending on the telly.
I wrote the following in an e-mail to the lads to summarise that day and the experience:
Janie really enjoyed the experience, despite her bad luck getting poorly a few days before the off. She is feeling so much better now.
What a win. We listened to the thrilling morning session and much of the frustrating afternoon session on the road.
Hippity points out that England didn’t get a wicket until he and Monkey-Face had been placed in front of the TV again, along with Hippity’s lucky ball.
Broad’s bowling once he got his hackles up again was extraordinary, especially as he did the damage with the old ball. And Bresnan’s ball to nip out Warner was possibly his finest yet.
2014 we host Sri Lanka and India. Too soon to start thinking seriously about it, I know!!
Thanks to you especially, Charles, for organising those amazing seats.
As the Kane Gang put it – “…this could be the closest thing to heaven…”
Except, of course, that King Cricket match reports cannot talk about the cricket itself.
Whereas King Cricket himself is allowed to waffle on, with his mates, for hours, in excruciating detail about the ridiculous aspect of cricket matches – and three cheers for that ability, because The Ridiculous Ashes is a fun listen.
If that is too much clicking for you but you are desperate for some vids, here is Geoff Lemon’s seminal vlog rant about Shane Watson from the Lord’s East Gate (now renamed the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Gate. One of the things I love about it is the passers by noticing and/or feigning not to notice this ranting Aussie holding forth. I recognise several of the faces as Lord’s regulars:
Or, if seeing Chris Rogers’s freak dismissal is more your bag, the following vid will feed your desirous eyeballs:
I remember being especially taken with THAT ball from Graeme Swann, not least because I did once take a hat trick with balls that were not too dissimilar to that one…except that at least two of mine were definitely hitting the stumps:
If you actually want to know about the actual score in the match (by which I mean Lord’s Ashes Test 2013, not Alleyn’s 9 July 1975) and the sort of details that official professional sites publish about matches of this kind, then click here.
The thing that stands out the most about all this for me, in reflective Ogblog mode, is the enormity of the picnic that I took for just me and Daisy (Janie) for one day at Lord’s. I’m sure King Cricket won’t mind me scraping my own words:
Naturally, I had prepared the picnic. We made early headway into assorted delights of my picnic bag – some mini croissants from the artisanal bakery that kindly opened a couple of years ago no more than 50 yards from my front door. Then on to the smoked trout bagels I had lovingly made, with my own special recipe horseradish butter and lemon. The fishy delight needed white wine; I brought a very interesting little Austrian Riesling. Some readers might already know that Ged and Daisy abstain from all forms of Australian wine for the duration of Ashes series. I thought the choice of Austrian was a little edgy, but safe enough.
After the smoked trout, smoked eel bagels – embellished in similar fashion to the trout. Daisy found the eel a little rich for her taste. Bags of pork scratchings and some portions of soft fruit kept the afternoon interesting enough in the food department…
…home made shortbread (not home made by me, you understand)…
…later, the ham sandwiches on tomato bread encouraged us to launch into the bottle of red – a jolly little Tuscan number.
But back to our Midlands and the North trip. We started with a couple of nights in Nottingham, in order to enjoy the second day of the county cricket season as guests of Nottinghamshire CCC. I wrote up our Nottinghamshire day, 11 April, for King Cricket – click here for that King Cricket (cricket-free) report.
Then on the 12th to the village of Wormleighton, in Warwickshire the spiritual home of Janie’s family. No-one knows how the family came to have that name. Probably because someone in the dim and distant past came from there and probably not because Janie is descended from the Spencer family (which pretty-much owned the village), despite the Churchillian and Princess Diana resemblances in Janie’s family.
For the uninitiated, Ged and Daisy are our pet names for each other and have been so for over 20 years.
We stayed at Wormleighton Hall, which is a rather grand farm house just outside the village – formerly the squires residence I shouldn’t wonder and now the home of the tenant farmers who make the whole thing work commercially by running the place as a small hotel as well as a farm. Lovely family; into all the local countryside stuff. We visited the Mollington point-to-point which they were attending on the 13th and took some excellent pictures of the local tribes at leisure.
Sighting of local tribesfolk at the Mollington point-to-point
On 14th we went to Chipping Norton to visit brother-in-law Tony and his lovely second wife Liz.
Hockney says you cannot properly photograph these Wolds scenes
On 15th, off to North Yorkshire, driving the eastern-side to see and photograph Hockney country before reaching The Star, where we stayed and ate in great style for a few days.
Farndale, the lower, less visited part
On 16th we went on a Farndale walk in search of daffodils, surprisingly successfully as the cold start to the spring had delayed the daffs, but they were just starting to show well our day – good fortune.
17th we drove South-West to Saltaire and had a look at the town and some art gallery-style Hockney stuff. 18th we spent at leisure and walking around the Star’s vicinity (Harome).
19th we drove home. Middlesex were again in action against Derbyshire (Day 3) and as we drove home we realised that an improbable early result to the match was on the cards. After stopping off at the house, I went on (alone) in the car to catch the end of the match and witness a Middlesex win – here’s the card. Quite a week for us and for Middlesex.
