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?
Violets & Fatt Pundit With Mark Ellicott, Simon Jacobs & John White, 17 October 2022
For some reason we were all being too grown up to take photos, but this was a special get together reuniting people who had all known each other at Keele for one reason or another.
In particular the musical aspects intrigued Simon Jacobs, who wondered out loud to me why I hadn’t set up a get-together with Mark.
Simon, in 2019, trying to make a silk purse out of my (then) sow’s ear voice
Actually, John said something similar when I shared my Mark correspondence with him when we met up in the summer. I had no excuse, so I felt duty bound to act.
John questioning my judgement with his eyes and body language, August 2022
I played tennis at Lord’s – a draw at singles seeing as you were going to ask – before hot-footing it (via the flat) to Soho.
I arrived at Violet’s, grabbing a table – just inside but suitably quasi-open to the street – about five minutes before Simon arrived. From that vantage point, we observed Mark walk straight past us and then four or five minutes later he returned having got as confused as everyone else by the Berwick Street door-numbering. John arrived fashionably but not ridiculously last.
We had a good chat and a drink at Violet’s before heading a block or two up the road to Fatt Pundit, where the food was excellent and the chat got even better.
A few comedy moments with the sweet waitress whose high-pitched voice is possibly in a register that none of us, given our advancing years, could hear. But the menu was pretty-much self-explanatory, so a mixture of sign language, reading the menu and common sense allowed us to order a cracking good meal.
It was a really enjoyable four-way catch up.
Goldmine With Rohan Candappa & David Wellbrook, 18 October 2022
It was basically a “barbeque meats challenge” based on my assertion that the Queensway specialists therein, especially Goldmine, are better than those in Chinatown.
It turned into a small-scale Alleyn’s School alum thing. David Wellbrook, being Wellbrook, needed to join in the challenge, not least because Queensway is an alma mater of his where he attended the University of Romance (his wife used to live there when they were courting).
We tucked into plenty of barbeque meats, diverting briefly at the start and end of the lunchtime feast for some dim sum, just in the interests of science.
At school Rohan Candappa was always known as Candy, so it was with great mirth and merriment that David spotted “Candy World” across the street.
For those who don’t like to click and/or who don’t want all the tennis detail – here is an extract:
“It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall,” said your intrepid reporter to Carl Snitcher, having braved the 3.5 mile high-pass journey from Notting to Primrose Hill in just over 35 minutes.
“There’s a bad moon on the rise,” agreed Carl, gnomically.
We arrived at a rain-soaked Hampton Court Palace in the nick of time; just as well, as your intemporal reporter was playing in the first rubber. Some might argue that our arrival was actually “worse than two”, but a more substantial discrepancy soon revealed itself; the marker’s sheet was showing a lesser handicap for the Dedanists than the sheet that James McDermott & I had been sent.
In order to avoid a major diplomatic incident, James & I acquiesced to the lesser handicap, yet still somehow contrived to win our rubber, albeit narrowly…
McDermott hitting, me watching
On finally staggering away from the court, your incognizant reporter picked up a message that the Prime Minister had resigned. “That’s the second Liz whose expiration has been announced while I was on the real tennis court in the space of six weeks”, I mused, having been informed of the late Queen’s demise by Tony Friend while I was on the Lord’s court.
I thought I might be the tidings-bringer this time, only to discover that most of the group had learnt the demise of Liz Truss some 45 minutes earlier.
Anyway, this was no time to ponder the fate of shambolic politicians – it was time to tuck into the pies before they too were to become a footnote in history. A positive footnote in the case of the pies of course – once again a delicious choice of • Chicken Ham & Leek; • Steak & Ale.
Bread and cheese (yes please) and two species of yummy desert that self-discipline allowed me to avoid, along with the jolly wines on offer…
Pictures by Tony Friend
There’s no better way to lift the spirits on a gloomy, worrisome day than a day of pastance with Dedanists and Hamsters. Symbolically, as the nation’s political shenanigans moved on to its new phase, the heavy clouds and rain of the morning had lifted to reveal a gorgeously bright, sunny evening as we all left.
“So foul and fair a day I have not seen”, said Carl, gnomically, as I dropped him home.
…I was acutely aware that we only have one actual relic of Grandpa Harris: the large certificate of honour depicted in the headline picture. We do not even have a surviving photograph of him – he died in the early 1940s – all such things were disposed of when Grandma moved out of the family home (104 Clapham Common Northside) in the 1960s.
I suspect that the certificate only survived because of its religious significance and the lingering, somewhat superstitious sense that such a thing should not simply be destroyed.
It lived at the back of my dad’s shop for at least a quarter of a century – then it lived in our Woodfield Avenue attic for another quarter of a century.
Mum nearly (accidentally) gave it away when dad died, but I managed to rescue it thanks to the good offices of Michael and Tessa Laikin who in any case hadn’t quite believed that I wanted shot of it, even if mum did.
It was in a pretty shocking state by the time I took it to Janie’s favourite picture framer in Bayswater, who declared the artefact to be on the verge of disintegration and recommended a specialist restorer to preserve it and bring it back to life before framing.
Several weeks and several hundred pounds later, it has pride of place on the hall wall in my flat.
The stunning, large certificate (60 x 45 cm unframed, 75 x 60 cm framed) commemorates my grandfather being honoured in the synagogue as Chatan Torah on the festival of Simchat Torah on 14/15 October 1922 – now 100 years ago. Or, in Hebrew calendar terms, 17/18 October 2022 is exactly 100 years after the event.
As it happens and by strange coincidence, Janie and I found ourselves on 15 October this year just around the corner from 14 Manette Street, which is the building which was, back then, the West End Talmud Torah & Bikkur Holim Synagogue.
I couldn’t resist the urge to walk around the corner and photograph the very building on the very 100th anniversary of Grandpa’s honour:
14 Manette Street, Soho as snapped by me, 15 October 2022
Religion isn’t my thing, but it was my grandparent’s thing and this honour would have been one of the most notable moments in my grandfather’s (relatively short) life.
That Soho synagogue – the West End Talmud Torah and Bikkur Holim was a rather fascinating and controversial thing, if Gerry Black’s Living Up West book is anything to go by (which it is…go buy it if you are interested). He describes it as an
orthodox and shtetl-like shule [synagogue, where comparatively] …the service, rabbi, and fervid atmosphere were more typical of the heim [the old country].
There are some wonderful passages in Living Up West about that Rabbi; I do remember my father talking about him as a formidable figure, even though my father was still quite small when the family moved away from Fitzrovia/Soho. Intriguingly also, the book reports that, by 1926, the congregation had grown so large that they needed to hire The Scala Theatre in Charlotte Street for overflow services.
Living Up West also has an astonishing, detailed account in it about the 1930 AGM and elections in that community that
…were on the point of coming to blows…
…Ultimately the meeting broke up in chaos and confusion.
I am minded to write more about that strange community, not least because those detailed accounts include the names that appear on Grandpa’s certificate.
But at the moment, 100 years on, we get more than enough such chaos and confusion from a more southerly part of Westminster. In any case my purpose today is really to commemorate my Grandpa’s big day in 1922.
It’s not every day that Janie and I go to the opening night of a west end run that is itself the opening night of a brand new theatre. In fact, @sohoplace is the first new build theatre to open in London’s West End in the last 50 years, making this quite possibly a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to attend such an event.
Marvellous is based on the true story of Neil Baldwin (click here for Wikipedia entry), an uncomplicated, happy soul who, in 1960, wandered through the gates of Keele University as a local teenager and found a safe space there to bring his dreams to reality. Those dreams mostly involve football and/or meeting famous people. As a result, Neil has been honoured with a British Empire Medal, freedom of the cities of Stoke-on-Trent & Newcastle-Under-Lyme, an honorary degree from Keele, plus, first (and possibly best) of all, since 1968, honorary life membership of Keele University Students’ Union.
Neil never had a formal role at Keele, neither staff nor student, whereas some of us actually did the “hard yards”…OK they weren’t all that hard…for our accolades. I arrived at Keele 20 years after Neil’s teenage adventure started and was still there five years later when we (by which I mean the Students’ Union) voted at a UGM to deem 1985 The Neil Baldwin Jubilee Year. I find myself juxtaposed with Neil in the Concourse article reporting that meeting:
Reading the above article, it seems that Mark Ellicott, who was the Speaker at that 1985 UGM, curtailed the discussion on the proposal to name 1985 “The Neil Baldwin Jubilee Year” at Keele, by suggesting that anyone who might vote against the proposal would be:
a nasty individual.
I suspect the proposal was approved by acclamation.
Mark might remember. Coincidentally, I am due to see Mark on 17 October (just two days after seeing the show) and additionally coincidentally he is now running the Outernet music venue just opposite @sohoplace.
Indeed, it is through my sustained Keele connections that Janie and I ended up @sohoplace on the opening night, having spotted on the Keele alumni FB postings that the show was transferring to the West End. I managed to grab a brace of good seats for the opening night, which felt like the right thing to do. Why wait any longer than that?
We got to @sohoplace ludicrously early. We wanted to have a look around this new theatre, which we did, but you don’t really need best part of an hour to do that.
Still, we got to chat with some of the lovely staff at this new theatre who were “beyond excited” about their opening night and some of them were even more excited than that when they learnt that I had known Neil at Keele all those years ago. I told them to expect a fair number of Keele alums during the run, because Keele alums are a bit like that.
We really were ludicrously early
We enjoyed our ludicrously earliness in the charming new space, until the theatre bell went. At that point, of course, our carefully chosen end seats (we’re seasoned theatre-in-the-round types, me and Janie, e.g. at The Orange Tree Theatre, so we know to go for those) meant that we had to make way for more or less everyone.
The place seemed pretty full, possibly completely full, as the show was about to begin. I think I spotted Malcolm Clarke himself in the audience (he’s a big fella) but other than that I didn’t recognise any Keele alums, although I’d guess there were a few others there.
What should I say about the play and production itself?
The play is, in a way, an adaptation of the BAFTA-Award-winning film Marvellous (2014), which was itself a post-modern biopic about Neil’s extraordinary life, in which Toby Jones played the part of Neil, while Neil himself also appeared in the film.
The conceit of the play is that six actors have gathered to workshop/depict Neil’s life, only to be interrupted by “the real Neil” (actor Mike Hugo, whose voice was unerringly Neil-like). Some of the actors are seeking meaning and metaphor from Neil’s story, threatening at times to declaim profound monologues, while “the real Neil” finds ways to steer the telling as a rollicking, fun-packed yarn.
Thus the Keele graduate (along with my broad-based-foundation-year-underpinned education) in me would describe the piece as a post-postmodern (or perhaps I should say metamodern) bildungsroman exploring the life and times of Neil Baldwin…
…whereas Neil would no doubt describe it as:
a funny play about me, to make people happy.
There are no shocks or unexpected plot twists in this play. Indeed the play version has straightened out the time-line of Neil’s life, whereas the film was deliberately vague about time-lines, darting back and forth in time on occasion. This “story straightening” makes the play much easier to follow but in some ways over-simplifies.
For example, the play’s timeline implies that Neil went off to the circus in 1980 and returned to North Staffordshire at the end of the 1980s. The truth of the matter is that his circus career, which the play rightly depicts as an environment in which Neil was repeatedly subjected to mistreatment, must have been a stop-start career with quite lengthy periods of return to his family home and Keele throughout the 1980s – certainly the early to mid 1980s when I was at Keele.
But that is detail.
Most importantly, the play tells its mostly heart-warming, comedic tale with verve and light-hearted spirit. The production is excellent and the performances were mostly pitch-perfect (did you see what I did there with a football pun?).
I was especially taken with Suzanne Ahmet’s depiction of Neil’s mum (Gemma Jones’s film shoes being hard ones to fill) and I commend Gareth Cassidy’s comedy timing, in particular when depicting characters with a huge variety of accents, sometimes having to change articulatory-tack at alarming speed.
Yes, some of the comedy tended towards slapstick or pantomime style, but this is the story of Neil Baldwin, a man who spent much of his career as a clown. The sillier aspects of the play were well-bounded and skilfully delivered. Oh yes they were. Oh yes they were.
Best of all, the audience was absolutely carried by Marvellous on that opening night and I sense that almost everyone left @sohoplace feeling happier than they felt on arrival. As the man himself would say,
…which seems to be unresolved despite my pleas. The publicity material for The Gesualdo Six regularly shows seven people.
I’m not really one to talk, having recently been part of a six-person works-outing winning quiz combo known as “The FS Club 7”. But readers, many of whom are early music lovers, will surely know that the name is not a numerical claim, but a pun on the early music (i.e. some of it released even before the turn of the 21st century) pop combo, S Club 7.
But it is not my purpose in this piece to “bring it all back” in the matter of S Club 7’s ancient exploits, but rather to assess the wonderful world of Josquin’s Legacy, as sung by The Gesualdo Six.
While Josquin’s mostly late 15th century music formed the core of the concert, there were also pieces by his contemporaries, Jean Mouton & Antoine Brumel, plus several works by lesser known composers who followed a generation or so later.
It was a mixture of sacred music (both new and old testament liturgy) plus several regret/deploration pieces commemorating the death of fellow composers or patrons.
Here is a link to The Gesualdo’s promo vid for the album which this concert was surely (in part) aiming to help promulgate.
The concert was a BBC Lunchtime concert, which, if you are reading this within a month of the broadcast, can still be heard on the BBC Sounds App – here.
We attended this very tasty lunchtime concert and pre-concert discussion.
The noon-time discussion was between Patrick Allies, the artistic director of Siglo De Oro and Dr Daniel Trocmé-Latter, the academic whose work on the context and musical transcription of this “Mysterious Motet Book of 1539″initiated the project.
I found the information about the development of part books as printing became widespread in the Renaissance and the distinction between Protestant and Catholic liturgical music at the time of the Reformation fascinating.
Less convincing, to me, was the “mystery” aspect of the project, the conceit of which is, if I might paraphrase, “why might a publisher such as Peter Schöffer the Younger choose to publish a music book of Latin liturgical songs from Milan…in Strasbourg, which was, by 1539, a strongly Protestant town?”
Much like his illustrious Burgundian ancestors, Ferdinand seems to have been interested in tennis as well as music. Ferdinand was also evidently impressed by Milanese cultural style in several ways, not just liturgical music. He was also, reputationally, a conciliator between Protestants and the Catholics in his lands.
Still, if the purpose of promoting this music as “a mysterious publication” is as conduit for wonderful concerts and premier recordings of several of the pieces form the motet book…bring it on! It’s a thriller.
The music in the concert was lovely. Janie and I both loved it. They mixed and matched between motets from that 1539 book and some more familiar, later pieces, e.g. by Byrd and Tallis, by way of contrast and comparison, which worked well musically.
Siglo de Oro don’t put much in the public domain, but the sample below is downloadable from the website plugging the album, so you might as well hear Johannes Lupi: Apparens Christus below before you click through and buy the almum.
To Southwark Park – not to queue for a Royal view, but for the London Cricket Trust Awards 2022.
The event was held four weeks later than intended; not deferred for the Royal mourning, but because 6 September, the original date for the event, was a rare “cats and dogs rainy day” in the 2022 London summer.
We now have 62 live cricket facilities in London parks, with 15 more on the schedule to be ready for the start of the 2023 season.
We had a planning meeting in the Southwark Park Pavilion before the public event.
Ed Griffiths and his team had produced a glorious carrot cake for the awards event, emblazoned with 62 flags to represent the 62 sites already implemented.
Ian Moore of the ECB looks happy, but Arfan Akram of Essex looks concerned
I spotted Arfan’s concerned look and realise that the cake was oriented 45 degrees askew from the direction in which the symbolic Middlesex, Essex, Kent, Surrey flags were pointing.
I reoriented the cake, much to everyone’s relief.
We also discussed our plans for expanding the London Cricket Trust universe over the next couple of years, including a fairly major incursion into Crawley, Sussex (at Sussex and the ECB’s request I hasten to add).
Crawley is the 33rd London Borough – remember where you heard it first.
Then to the awards evening and some exhibition cricket on the Southwark Park pitch – a six-a-side match between Southwark Park Cricket Club and Southwark Park Cricket Club – the clever money was on Southwark Park to win.
This particular batsman was a “six or out” sort of character, who heaved a couple of big shots our way and then missed a deceptively straight ball and got cleaned up. The bowler was so surprised by his own achievement, he even looked to the umpire for “the finger” on a clean bowled
Then Ed Griffiths initiated the awards ceremony, in some ways apologising for the lack of “Grosvenor Hotel / Dorchester Hotel” glitz and glamour, while at the same time celebrating our more down to earth style and purpose.
I am delighted to report that the emblematic carrot cake was properly oriented in the refreshments tent by this stage of the evening.
Then the awards.
Chris Whitaker, the Kent Trustee, presented an activation award to Richard O’Sullivan of Teach Cricket, in particular for his work with Bexley Grammar School.
Then Sophie Kent (our Surrey Trustee…just to avoid confusion) presented a Local Authority activation award to the Royal Borough of Kingston-Upon Thames for activating five sites in 2022:
Cricketer-ambassador Bryony Smith picked up the award on Kingston’s behalf
Then Jawar Ali, our Essex Trustee, presented a site award to Grassroots Trust for their work at Seven Kings Park – a site that has gone from strength to strength since we had our first launch there, exactly four years ago:
Finally, it was down to me to award the Local Authority of the Year Award to Enfield, for the superb cluster of four sites implemented in the spring of 2022 in the Edmonton (south-eastern) corner of Enfield – Pymmes Park, Jubilee Park, Ponders End Park and Church Street Rec – neighbourhoods with many people but (until now) almost no public cricket facilities:
Tim Harrison collecting his award from your truly
Given the 14th century origins of Pymmes Park, I did consider bursting into 14th century song, but at the vital moment I felt a wave of pre-minstrel tension, thus sparing the ears of the audience.
The evening was a great opportunity to meet up with those we see regularly as part of our cricket charity work along with some of the (usually) unsung heroes whose hard work actually makes the stuff we plan happen.
62 sites is great news, but we aim at least to double that figure, which will mean lots more work, as well as more enjoyable events like this one, over the next few years.
