If you prefer to read the typed up journals illustrated with pictures, these shall be going up during November 2020, starting with Day Zero below.
Having taken a tumble on the way home from Michael’s [Gresham] lecture the night before, Ged [I] had more work still to do then had planned, plus a freezer to defrost.
Gosh yes I remember taking that tumble near Chancery Lane tube. Michael had delivered this lecture at Barnards Inn Hall. We’d have hosted a drinks reception in the “Headmaster’s Study” after the lecture, during which at least one person will have sidled up to me, pointed at the Chandos Portrait and said, “has anyone ever told you…”
But I digress. In my hurry to get home, I lost my footing and went face first, luckily breaking my fall without injury. A very kind, strong young chap picked me up, checked that I hadn’t concussed myself and then went on his way with his mates. Lucky escape.
Ended up rushing.
Meanwhile Daisy’s [Janie’s] packing is also far from a problem free activity. I got to Daisy’s place around 14:00 which gave us time (just) to get her car in for bodywork, have a snack lunch, get the packing finished, 15 to 20 winks and then off to Heathrow.
The highlight of that fraught morning have been the discovery that we’ve been upgraded to club by our fairy godmother [Toni Friend]. So, we had the benefit of the club lounge once we got through airport formalities.
Toni (a client/friend of Janie’s) worked for BA and often ways to get us upgraded, sometimes far enough ahead of time to get us airport as well as aircraft hospitality. Gosh we were lucky. Thanks Toni.
The flight was pretty much on time and the club class hospitality was good. We tasted the beef dish despite both fancying the chicken dish as the latter had proved enormously popular. Winters Drift Chardonnay and a very jolly burgundy.
Breakfast was okay too. In between we both slept well, partly the bed like sitting in club but mostly the sheer exhaustion probably.
While disembarking [at Johannesburg], the safety procedures announcement started again, humorously.
An engaging play at the Bush with an excellent cast, not least Kenneth Cranham and Amanda Root. This must have been Rory Kinnear’s first go as a playwright. Howard Davies directed.
We found it witty as well as moving – basically about a birthday party for a young man with severe learning difficulties.
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.
Not normally our type of show, but we loved the idea of this one – performed cabaret style and about Josephine Baker, who had such an interesting life.
Cush Jumbo, who wrote and performed this show, is clearly a very talented young person.
We enjoyed our unusual evening at the Bush. In truth, though, we thought the show a victory of style over substance – we wanted to learn a lot more about Josephine Baker and or experience more drama. We were there very early in the run – in effect at a preview – so the show might have matured/improved after we saw it.
The show got a transfer to New York too, so our relative indifference towards the show wasn’t shared by the critics nor the producers.
Janie and I also recall running into our theatre friends John and Linda at this show – this is a couple we often see at the theatre – but because of the nature of this show we got a chance to have a proper chat with them in this cabaret-style setting of the Bush.
But there were clearly going to be breaks in the weather too, so I suggested a meet up time to Janie based on the forecast, which Janie felt was overly-optimistic…
…the upshot being that we missed the first 30-40 minutes or so of the first match on our court.
Still, in the end we got to see a surprising amount of tennis, not least the remainder of the second round match between David Ferrer and Roberto Bautista Agut. Below is the highlights reel from that game:
Then we saw most of the third round match between Petra Kvitova and Ekaterina Makarova. Below is the highlights reel for that game:
We’d done surprisingly well, tennis-wise. Also picnic-wise – I laid on a Big Al special picnic which pleased Janie no end.
Janie and I are partial to a bit of Conor McPherson. We absolutely loved The Weir, but then you can’t expect a playwright to achieve such giddy heights every time.
So I suppose this particular evening was all set up for disappointment.
A wonderful cast, especially Ciarán Hinds and Caoilfhionn Dunne, plus a good script, provided plenty of entertainment for the evening – so in that sense we were not disappointed. It just wasn’t quite the jaw-dropping, mouth-watering night of theatre we had hoped for when we booked it. Greedy pair, we are, me and Janie.
…including this production of The Night Alive, which I have uploaded and which you can specifically click here. Excellent resources – well done Donmar.
Below is a Donmar trailer, mostly talking about the music – interesting to hear and see Conor McPherson talking about his own work:
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