Category: Friends and Family Events

Long To Rain Over Us – Heavy Rollers Edgbaston Trip 2012 – Nigel Hinks’s Take, 6 to 8 June 2012

Nigel in full flow
Nigel in full flow, the following season, at Chester-le- Street

I am very grateful to Nigel for this wonderful, redolent submission in response to my piece, Long To Rain Over Us…

Long To Rain Over Us, England v West Indies, Edgbaston, Days One and Two, 7 & 8 June 2012

…about our most heavily rain-affected Edgbaston trip of all.

“The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened’ by Don Robertson is an evocative journey back to the early 1950s. Readers are introduced to a teenage Morris Bird III, considered by some to be one of the most endearing characters in contemporary American literature.

Our Edgbaston trip in 2012 was so lacking in memory that it is now, well, not memorable. Very little that was meant to take place actually did so.

It was as if we had been enticed to this sodden part of the UK to be teased with the promise of things that almost happened. Morris Bird may well have speculated?

Perhaps we were being tested on our resolve as real Heavy Rollers. Could we cut it when things were bad?

I recall my solitary mission to the nearby cricket ground in advance of the others. They were perhaps still somewhere on the M6 arguing about the relative merits of Delta and Detroit Blues genres, while a dozing Nick yearned for some early Metallica.

Knowing Charles’ detailed preparations before any pre match knockabout, the ‘cricket kit’ would have been checked (several times before being unpacked and repacked) in readiness for our long-awaited net. This was scheduled to take place at Harborne CC. To grace this attractive little ground, in leafy suburban Birmingham, was to be a privilege indeed. All a direct consequence of some emotional story- telling from Charles to some unaware individual who was to forever regret their selfless move to the ‘phone with, “I’ll get it”. Charles had become a master of spin. This had little to do with his ability to pick a ‘Doosra’.  Detailed and distressing tales would be discharged to whomever got the job of dealing with random emotive requests, mostly for tickets. Much was at stake this time. A chance to display limited abilities for a donation. It would be a wonderful prelude to the main course.

The scene, however, was a precursor to the forthcoming event. The said ground was deserted. The outfield resembled a small lake. If anything had been planned for this evening it had long been called off. Phone calls from office to office relaying the unhappy, but inevitable, news. I couldn’t avoid observing that the early season volunteers, allocated to small working groups tendering the ground, had failed miserably to:

  1. Clean around the area you want to repair with a wire brush to remove loose paint or rust.
  2. Use an old screwdriver to dig out any old jointing material.
  3. Put the nozzle of the sealant gun into the joint, and run a bead of roof and gutter sealant around the pipe.

One side of the pavilion’s guttering resembled a waterfall. Safe to say the kit wouldn’t be making an appearance this year.

I returned to Harborne Hall with heavy heart, but gratified by the familiarity of our accommodation, and its proximity to some decent restaurants on Harborne High Street for later. High quality Chinese food surely? At least we would be reunited and sustained by our past recollections of basic, but friendly, home-from-home accommodation. It was soon to be revealed that this just was a futile memory, unless your home was a Category C prison.

The corridors still echoed with the long past anticipation and apprehension of eager volunteers, about to make their way to various VSO outposts around the world. The evocative black and white photographs of some wiry young men with mullets, and women in cheesecloth skirts, dancing self-consciously with grateful African children, or in makeshift classrooms, adorned the stairways to our rooms. Such warm recollections were soon to be illusions, as the march of commercialism that had begun to engulf this little haven took shape. It was becoming transformed into something neither here, nor anywhere really. VSO were still present somehow, but surrounded by an impression of a low budget boarding house with an identity crisis.

The futile negotiations over extra breakfast toast rather summed up the whole affair. Jokes about when parole became due and “are you in Block H?” were tinged with reality. As Ian has described, we didn’t see any cricket either. Given that was the whole purpose it could be argued things were not going too well.

I recall walking back from the equally uninviting and playless Edgbaston in time for a planned tour of the local graveyard. This was advertised on a display outside the adjacent church amidst notices, it transpired, unchanged for many a decade. I should have twigged on reading the one with rusty drawing pins, congratulating the Mother’s Union for raising £7 19s 11d for Church upkeep. My children have often reiterated their displeasure when on holiday, mostly in France, when I would enthusiastically jump from the car and excitedly head off (alone) towards a remote cemetery or graveyard. This would make up a little for earlier non-events.

Wet through from my walk back, I just made the appointed time only to be met with a resounding silence, where I imagined the throng would now be congregating.

Just me then. The church was securely locked and, without a guide, any chance of an educational tour of the graves was out of the question. So, given I was staying one further night, I returned to the honesty bar at Harborne Hall before lock down and lights out. I left rather early the next morning, not stopping for toast.

This was to be the final ‘non-event’ of the 2012 gathering, so dominated by things that almost happened….

 

Long To Rain Over Us, England v West Indies, Edgbaston, Days One and Two, 7 & 8 June 2012

Photo, thanks to Charles Bartlett, probably unconnected…unless Chas was building an ark and starting to populate it during this trip

It rained.

There shouldn’t be much else to say.

It rained for the entirety of our visit.

When I started typing the headline of this piece, I typed “Wet Indies” rather than “West Indies” by mistake. Or was it a mistake? Spooky.

To add to the disappointment of this visit, Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett had, as usual, organised a blinder of a visit, including our front row seats in the Raglan Stand and nets early in the evening on the day before the test, at Harborne CC, just up the road from our residence at Harborne Hall.

We had a roadworks/lane closure filled journey up to Birmingham. Chas had kindly offered to give me a lift from the outer reaches of the Central Line (Redbridge? Gants Hill?), so the three of us (including Nick) had plenty of time to bicker about music choices in the car.

If I recall correctly, Chas and I were both on a bit of an electric blues odyssey at that time, so (two to one) we mostly settled on Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters for that journey. In any case, I’m listening to my playlist of those artistes to tweak my memory as I write.

We crawled through Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire in glorious sunshine, secure in the knowledge that we had allowed plenty of time to get to our net; we thought that we were merely losing “decompress” time between the journey and the net. Not quite Kim’s levels of ludicrously OCD “plenty of time” – see this write up in recent memory at the time of writing – but still plenty of time.

However, once we were on the M6 scooting through the West Midlands getting close to Birmingham, we saw some dark sky ahead. rather a lot of it. Rain clouds. Wet rain. Very wet rain. We arrived at Harborne Hall in what could only be described as a tropical-style storm. That storm passed pretty soon after we arrived, but we more or less knew that the soaking was bound to have put our nets at risk. We went down to Harborne CC in hope more than expectation, only to have our fears confirmed. Pools on the outfield and around the nets. No chance of a net.

We’d seen the gloomy weather forecast for the first two days of the test, of course, but still we hoped for a further 36 hours.

I remember little about our two evenings in Harborne that year. I think we went to Harborne’s very satisfactory Chinese restaurant, Henry Wong, one of the evenings, I think that first night. Perhaps the others can remember where else we went.

I remember a lot of sitting around at Harborne Hall. I remember the other three deciding to go down to the ground, despite the pouring rain and no sign of respite. I remember staying back, making some notes about Heavy Rollers visits from years gone by, which are now proving to be a most useful starting point for this blogging.

I also remember how much Harborne Hall had declined since our last visit. Not down to Beechwood Hotel levels – those depths would take some plumbing – but still decline. Harborne Hall had been the VSO conference centre, run along similar lines to The Children’s Society’s Wadderton. But it seemed that VSO had sold (or at least put under management and attempted to commercialise) Harborne Hall. The resulting approach had subtracted almost all of the friendly, folksy character of the place, leaving only the distressed gentility and a rather grasping approach to commercialism.

The nadir for our visit was on the final morning, when Nigel made the mistake of asking for an additional slice of toast with his breakfast and was informed that he would be charged extra for that extra slice. Did I see steam starting to come from Nigel’s ears? I don’t remember exactly how this matter was resolved. Nigel probably does recall.

The other occupants of Harborne Hall were now mostly peripatetic tradesmen. We played some pool and I think darts with some of them, at least one of the evenings, during that stay. We more or less held our own. Perhaps they were more inebriated or had failed to mis-spend their youths playing those games any more than we had.

I also don’t remember when we bailed out of this hopeless situation. I don’t think we stuck around too deep into the second day. I don’t even remember whether Chas gave me a lift back to the Essex borders or whether I stuck with my original plan to take the train home after the game.

It was the first time that the first two days of a test match had been entirely rained off in England since 1964. Not even the modern drainage could save play from that type of relentless rain. This telegraph piece has a lovely photo.

Despite the fact that we saw precisely nothing of this match live, it still counts as one of our Heavy Rollers matches in my view, so here is the scorecard. No surprises that the match was a draw, but there was a surprising stand between Dinesh Ramdin and Tino “mind the windows” Best who put on nearly 150 for the last wicket, Tino managing a batting-career-defining 95 of them.

Crickey, I have generated some 900 words, merely to elaborate on the main point, which I managed to get across in the first two words.

It rained.

Postscript: Nigel kindly submitted a wonderful guest piece with his own take on this particular (non) event:

Long To Rain Over Us – Heavy Rollers Edgbaston Trip 2012 – Nigel Hinks’s Take, 6 to 8 June 2012

Eulogy At Uncle Michael’s Funeral, 29 March 2012

Michael “wheeling out” my mum, Brighton, many, many years ago

I have explained the background to my being asked to write and deliver Uncle Michael’s eulogy in my piece describing the preceding evening – click here or below:

A Concert With Cousins Angela & John, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, 28 March 2012

I have scanned my hand-written cards which contain the entirety of the eulogy, including the crossed out bits that were edited out in the interests of flow and sticking to time. I hope interested folk can read my writing. If not, any half-useful Large Language Model worth its salt should be able to take the images and turn them into clear font text for you to read…well, in any case, you can enlarge the images yourself to scrutinise any bits that look interesting yet hard to read.

Any Old Iron With Vocal Cadenza, Performed At The Gresham Society Soirée, 14 December 2011

Professor Tim Connell had no idea what he was unleashing when he asked me to produce a party piece for the nascent Gresham Society Soirée.

I had no idea what sort of audience we might have, although Tim suggested that he was encouraging Gresham Society members to bring youngsters with them to give the event an age-diverse, party feel. That year, there were a few youngsters in the end.

Unaccustomed as I was to putting on party pieces at that time…a dozen or more years later I am far more seasoned at it…I fell back on material I had prepared or used in the past.

As a youngster myself, I had often used Any Old Iron as a party piece for entertaining old folk, as the old folk at the time that I was a young person were steeped in music hall material.

I had prepared a version of Any Old Iron with a rap break a couple of years earlier…for the life of me I cannot remember quite why…I think I had intended to use it at a Long Finance conference, as Brian Eno had been recommending that we break up the serious s*** with some musical audience participation. Hilariously predictable results ensued, not least a roasting in the Evening Standard…

Inaugural Long Finance Conference, Singing, Talking, Dinner And BASIC Event, 1 February 2010

…but I digress, other than to clarify that my Any Old Iron with a rap break (aka a vocal cadenza) remained on the e-jotter unused in 2009, until the Gresham Society Soirée of 2011. Here’s the very piece:

I decided to dress up in my most spivy outfit (see headline picture from the Lingfield races a few months earlier), including a Rolex-like watch and chain which I had given to my father in the 1990s and then re-inherited on his passing.

I also took a clutch of old pennies from my childhood old pennies collection, as I figured that the youngsters present wouldn’t appreciate what a weighty and princely-looking sum “tuppence” might seem unless they received some coin of the appropriate era.

I also decided, with the benefit of hindsight, unwisely, to involve the pianist, David Jones, not only in playing the piece for me (which of course he was able to do with ease and aplomb). Unbeknown to me at the time, David is a master of the party piece in which you sing faster and faster – in his case the far more difficult Elements Song by Tom Lehrer…

…I am digressing again…

…anyway, I asked David also to join in some business, which occurred to me as we practiced ahead of the show, where I would approach the piano and say:

Hit me!

…in the time honoured fashion to encourage a musician to play. The joke was that David was to feign misunderstanding the entreaty and pretend to throw a punch at me.

We practiced the manoeuvre a couple of times. My final note to David was that he would need to put more effort into the fake-punch and I would have to put more motion into the fake receipt of the punch to make the device look realistic.

But in the heat of show, as it were, David possibly over-enthused…or I under-dodged…such that I really did receive a punch from David, which made me stop for a moment and say:

Ow, that really did hurt

…before carrying on. I think the audience thought it was all part of the show, so they laughed just as we had wanted them to. The song went down well. The bruise wasn’t too bad. David is still talking to me…just about…but perhaps not so open to my last minute bright ideas for performance tweaks any more.

Just try that again, piano dude.

Two Wheels On My Roller, But I Keep Rolling Along…England v India Days One and Two, Edgbaston, 10 & 11 August 2011

king-cricket-logo copy
Pretty much everything I want to say about this event, has been said at King Cricket, click the link below.

I think it is fair to say that matters did not go according to plan in 2011, especially as far as Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett was concerned, for reasons explained in sufficient gory detail in the King Cricket piece I wrote about our 2011 visit to the Edgbaston test – click here or below:

England v India, Edgbaston Test match report

If anything ever happens to the King Cricket website, I have scraped the piece to Ogblog and you can click and read all about it here instead…

…except, of course, you can’t read ALL about it at King Cricket, because of that site’s reporting rules…

…so here is the scorecard if you want to know how the match turned out.

Also there was the backdrop of the riots that summer, which were unfolding as we arrived and during our stay, although leafy Harborne seemed unaware of or at least untouched by them.

Naturally Nigel and I made the most of it without Chas. It would be cruel to harp on about the extent to which we were nevertheless able to enjoy ourselves despite Chas’s indisposition. In any case, I doubtless harped sufficiently when I saw Charles again a bit later that season.

It must have been especially galling for Chas as I seem to recall he had gone to a great deal of trouble that year to secure our “honorary” front row seats, book nets, book rooms, book an Indian feast…oy!

I believe that I drove up that year having booked the extra night after the second day’s play. That might have been Nobby’s only visit to Harborne Hall.

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Nobby never really acquired a taste for cricket…unlike Dumbo subsequently...but I digress.

 

Three Nights In Buxton & The Importance Of Being Frank, 11 To 14 July 2011

Janie and I were struggling to remember all the details of this short break in Buxton with Chris and Hilary, in part to take in the Buxton Festival Fringe. Strangely, no photos.

I think we intended to walk but I don’t think we walked much, if at all. Perhaps the weather failed to smile on us.

Janie remembers speaking quite a lot with Todd at Nat’s Kitchen, before we stayed and also while we were there – he was helpful and full of advice. Perhaps I’ll be able to expand this entry when we do some archaeology on Janie’s diary.

I’m pretty sure there were one or two things that Hil and Chris were interested in seeing that we really didn’t want to do.

I have a feeling Janie and I went to see a folky-fusiony outfit in a basement bar type place one evening while Hil and Chris went to see a naff-sounding show which even they admitted afterwards had not been worth the candle.

The Importance Of Being Frank was a bit of a compromise choice which I’m pretty sure we all went to see and found funny in parts.

Here is a link to the relevant fringe preview.

That link is scraped to here, if the above link no longer works.

Quirky place but we liked it. Nat’s Kitchen reviewed – click here…

…or if that link has gone, scraped to here.

We also dined at the Old Hall Hotel one time – I think Hil and Chris were staying there and I think that was the first night…but our memories on this one are not great.

The only other thing I remember is the backdrop of the trip supposedly being an opportunity for the workmen to finish off snagging Noddyland (Janie had moved in a few weeks previously).

We returned to find only a couple of items from the list done; the rest of the time they had no doubt spent, as they had spent most of the preceding weeks, giving priority to the next big job. It took tears to invoke enough shame and sympathy to get them back in to finish off in the following few days.

An Evening With Charlie & Chris at MyHotel & Barrica, 10 June 2011

Scene of the “crime” – SMJ / Bayley Street (Wikimedia Commons)

The main plan was to have a tapas meal at Barrica. Janie and I were perhaps inspired by the tapas at Providores a few weeks earlier, perhaps we were all inspired by Charlie’s suggestion that some of us might be eating more than others of us due to various lunchtime arrangements.

Anyway, we met for a drink first of all at the trendy MyHotel just the other side of Tottenham Court Road. It is now (2022) called MyBloomsbury. I went with some trepidation as, some months earlier, I had taken coffee there with Mary, debriefing after a meeting nearby. A miscommunication meant that both of us thought the other had paid and we had both walked out without paying. I discovered the inadvertent wrongdoing only come expense claim time at the end of that month.

I thought openness and transparency would be the best approach, so on arrival I informed the waiter of the mistake on the previous occasion and said that I owed the place for a couple of cups of coffee.

The waiter laughed nervously and told me not to worry about it. I think he thought I might be a dangerous lunatic.

Still, the place is indeed trendy so cocktail hour had the right buzz and the right sorts of drinks. I enjoyed a dry white wine as per usual.

Barrica’s food was pretty good, authentic Spanish tapas, although it seemed a bit crowded and noisy (I guess it was a Friday evening) compared with the other excellent tapas places I had previously tried around that area.

We had a very enjoyable evening.

Shakespeare & Noddyland, April To Mid May 2011

Noddyland…latterly

Very soon after Janie and I returned from India and Sri Lanka, Janie said that she wanted to start looking for a house.

Kim was a very helpful friend in the early stages of that process, spending time going around with Janie looking at quite a lot of unsuitable properties which helped also to sharpen the mind on what might be suitable. I would not have been a patient friend for that part of the process.

I had my first sighting of the house that was to become our Noddyland home on 2 April. Janie and Kim had seen it a couple of weeks earlier, I think, but it was not so easy for the agency to get us access via the tenants, so my visit with Janie took some organising. I recall seeing a couple of other properties ahead of seeing the actual Noddyland house that we bought.

I have described the process of seeing and falling love with that house in a 2019 ThreadMash piece .

(Where Do I Begin?) Love Story – A Performance Piece For TheadMash 3, 7 May 2019

We made an offer on the house within minutes of seeing it (2 April) and I realise, looking at the diary for the next few weeks, that we managed to get the trnasaction completed remarkably quickly. At the time, it seemed to be taking for ever, but that’s “impatient me” for you.

14 April 2011 – Yet More Mock Tudor – An Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinner

Ivan Shakespeare

Ivan Shakespeare was the first of our NewsRevue gang to shuffle off this mortal coil [did you see what I did there?], in February 2000. We’ve been holding gatherings in his name, usually three or four times a year, ever since.

I have little on the record about the 14 April 2011 gathering. For certain it happened, as John Random, as usual, sent out reminders and I had correspondence with him before and after the event. Not least, John thanked me for a plethora of Indian language newspapers for him to use as teaching aids.

John’s post dinner round robin note did not name names of those who attended, nor of any who did not, so it would have been some but not all of the usual suspects. In those days, we still gathered at Cafe Rouge, Clifton Road…now long gone.

23 April 2011 – Return To Noddyland

That morning we met the charming Saffari couple who were selling us the house. Janie also arranged for someone (presumably Johnny Carpet) to come and measure up so I think we all sort-of knew for sure that the deal was going through by then, although there were still some i’s to dot and t’s to cross.

There was some peculiar business about a ransom strip in front of the gate that had been put there for conservation estate purposes but which had landed itself in some sort of legal limbo which meant that, technically speaking, The Queen might have inherited the right to squat outside and deny us access to our own house.

“One is so happy to be here in Noddyland”

We didn’t discuss that technicality with the Saffari couple that day; we mostly talked about what a lovely house it is…which it is.

The next day we went to Kim & Micky’s for lunch, primarily to help Kim celebrate her birthday a few days early. I should imagine they went off to St Trop for the birthday proper. We also almost felt that we were celebrating our house purchase, but not quite, because you don’t celebrate that sort of thing until the ink is on the contracts.

13 May 2011 – Sealing The Deal With Ink & Tapas

The diary note says:

5.00 Brian Fraiman => tapas

Janie and I went to Brian’s office to scribble on various pieces of paper to make the house purchase happen. Brian declined to join us across the way at The Providores & Tapa Room, where Janie and I celebrated properly on a glorious spring evening by eating some tasty tapas and enjoying a couple of glasses of wine. The tapas int his place was a sort-of Kiwi fusion with Spanish tapas style and was very good indeed. I think Johnboy and I went there to try the restaurant proper some months or possibly more than a year later.

Very sorry to learn that landmark place closed down a year or so before the pandemic. Click this link to read about it if the above link has gone.

Anyway, Noddyland was no flash in the pan purchase – we’re still here!

Gresham Society Visit To The Royal College Of Music, Followed By A Tribute To Ken Campbell At The Royal Court Theatre, Followed By Dinner At The Henry Root With Charlie & Chris, 8 April 2011

Photo by Richard Adams, Wingspeed at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

Gresham Society Visit To The Royal College Of Music

Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0

This visit to the Royal College of Music (RCM) was my first proper excursion visit with The Gresham Society, following my initial singalong taster session at Wilton’s Music Hall a few weeks earlier.

For me, it was especially fascinating to see the fine collection of musical instruments, some very early, not least because Janie and I listen to a lot of early music. Subsequently I have become a (very amateur) practitioner of early music myself, although only with my voice and my mock Tudor instrument.

My mock Tudor baroquelele – strangely not in the RCM collection

I think the Gresham Society crowd went on to enjoy libations somewhere near the RCM, whereas I had other fish to fry that evening.

A Tribute To Ken Campbell

I was a long-time fan of Ken Campbell and his superb comedy work. Janie less so.

This early evening round table discussion at The Royal Court worked out very well for me, as I was able to fit it in between the Gresham Society Visit To The Royal College Of Music and our dinner engagement with Charlie & Chris.

Chris had said that he would be unable to get to The Henry Root in South Kensington for dinner until about 7:30. Janie was keen to have a drink and a chat with Charlie “before the boys get here”, so the plans were well set.

For those who wish they had been there to hear Daisy Campbell, Nina Conti, Jim Broadbent, John Sessions, Richard Eyre and Michael Coveney pay tribute to the great man – fear not. The event was recorded and has been placed in the public domain here…

Or, if that link ever fails, here is an upload of the download, as it were:

ROYAL COURT ROUNDTABLE TRIBUTE TO KEN CAMPBELL

Dinner With Janie, Charlie & Chris At the Henry Root

Unfortunately there was no recording, upload or download of the sparkling conversation in The Henry Root when Janie, Charlie, Chris and I gathered there later that evening.

The Henry Root, which was a rather jolly bistro restaurant named after William Donaldson’s wonderful letter-writing character, is now long gone. It was Ok; Janie and I dined there more than once in those heady days of the early teenies.

That particular evening with Charlie and Chris was an especially good one, as I remember it.

“Here’s a pound”

A Few Notes About Things, Late March To 1 April 2011

The Lamb by Ewan Munro from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0

Monday 14 March 2011 – Roger Hough Lamb @18:00

Roger was a Director of Miller Technologies and a Keele alum as it happens. We met for a drink to discuss mutual commercial interests.

Thursday 17 March 2011 – FMI End Of Project Party Tattershall Castle

I only vaguely remember this small client do on the embankment.

26-27 March 2011 – Hotel Du Vin (Hil & Chris) Sergio’s

A trip to Bristol to see the in-laws (and possibly their boys). We stayed at the Hotel Du Vin – which we liked in its earlier days, when the staff were friendly and they would park our car. Sergio’s is an Italian Restaurant in Bristol which was well located for our choice of hotel.

28 March 2011 – Seaxe Club AGM.

No doubt there will have also been an excellent discussion forum with a couple of young Middlesex CCC players and some of the coaching staff that evening – as was/is usually the way with the Seaxe Club.

1 April 2011 – Kim & Micky dinner

It looks like we went to their place on this occasion.