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

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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.

 

England v India At Lord’s Days One And Two, 21 & 22 July 2011

I needed to do some archaeology in my e-mail system for this match to work out who I went with on which days.

Turns out I went with Graham Stedman …latterly known as Iain Insteadman…:

Three Days At The Lord’s Test, England v West Indies, 7 to 9 September 2017

…on the Thursday, then with Janie on the Friday.

I hadn’t thought about this before, but Graham seems to be a bit of a rainmaker, if the story of his 2011 and 2017 visits to Lord’s might be deemed to be a reasonably-sized sample.

We only got just over half a day’s play on the Thursday; quite slow stuff at that.

Whereas Janie and I got a giant-sized day of cricket on the Friday, with fair weather and a Kevin Petersen double-hundred.

Here is a link to the match scorecard.

Still, Graham seemed to enjoy his day out:

Thank you very much indeed for an excellent day at the cricket. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it was a very welcome distraction from the office. I am only sorry our enjoyment was cut short by the rain.

I will follow the remainder of the match with extra interest.

I replied to his message by saying:

It was a pleasure and was good to see you.  Janie felt badly on Friday that she and I did so much better weatherwise that day!

I am pretty sure this was the first of the occasions that Janie and I had our ears bent by a pair of retired Reuters journalists who told us exactly the same anecdotes, more or less word for word, both times.

But you do get a decent type of bore at Lord’s, you really do.

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.

Middlesex v Surrey At Lord’s Twenty20 Match, King Cricket Report, 7 July 2011

At some point in the future I might…just might…be able to provide a multi-faceted piece on this particular evening at Lord’s.

At the time of writing (January 2018), only my King Cricket piece, published October 2011, survives to tell the tale.

Yet tell the tale it does, I think – certainly from my perspective. Internationalism, scandal and some improbable, impromptu games…not bad.

Middlesex v Surrey Twenty20 match report

Just in case anything ever happens to the King Cricket site, I have also scraped that report to here.

For those who have the stomach to look (i.e. most often neutrals and Surrey fans for these occasions), actually it looks as thought his was a pretty good match, despite the fact that I must have missed quite a fair chunk of it – click here for the scorecard and reports.

One extra bit of evidence on who, from “Ged Ladd & Co”, attended that time, in addition to “The Tiberellis”, comes from Jez’s e-mail to me a few week’s before the match:

Mark

Monique

Steph

Ben

Rich

David

 

Simon Strez would also like to come as it’s his last chance to see a cricket game in England before returning home to New Zealand. I also have 3 friends that will be coming to the game.

The Village Bike by Penelope Skinner, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 25 June 2011

We really enjoyed this play and production upstairs at the Royal Court.

Here is the Royal Court resource on this play/production.

This was a really entertaining and thought-provoking play by the very promising playwright Penelope Skinner. I think this was our first sight of one of hers; Linda at the Royal Court a few years later – click here or below – confirmed our suspicions that she is a special talent.

Linda by Penelope Skinner, Royal Court Theatre, 28 November 2015

The Village Bike had a very fine cast for an upstairs production, not least Dominic Rowan and Romola Garai, both excellent. Indeed the whole cast was excellent, as was the set, directing, the lot.

Most but not all of the reviews rated it excellent – here is a search term that finds reviews and the other resources you might want.

Lunch At Lambeth Palace, Followed By The School For Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Barbican Theatre, 15 June 2011

A rare visit to the theatre on my own and on a Wednesday. No point trying to get Janie to a Georgian comedy; she doesn’t do classics and she doesn’t do farcical comedy of any kind.

But for reasons of my own – I still have some distantly related ideas for a comedy play on a jotter – I very much wanted to see this show, which had but a short run at the Barbican before going on to the Holland Festival.

As it happens, I had been invited that day to Lambeth Palace for lunch by the Church Commissioners (as Ian Theodoreson’s guest), so it seemed a suitable day for me to take the rest of the day off and therefore be free to spend the early part of a midweek evening at the theatre.

While suitable in practical terms, it was perhaps not quite such a suitable cultural switch from a dignified Lambeth Palace lunch under the auspices of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to a bawdy Georgian comedy under the auspices of Deborah Warner, the radical stage director. Neither the irony nor the culture shock of the switch seemed to affect me unduly on the day.

The Lambeth Palace lunch was delightful, btw. I met several interesting new people (this was the only occasion I met Rowan Williams) as well as getting a chance to chat with Ian T and the people I know in that Church of England circle. I was particularly impressed with the dignified informality and grandeur with a tasteful lack of ostentation to the whole Lambeth Palace event.

Afterwards I had plenty of time to do some reading at the Barbican Centre over a coffee or two in the afternoon before seeing the play.

Here is an explanatory vid with Deborah Warner talking about her production of the School For Scandal:

In truth I wasn’t bowled over by this production, which had received mixed reviews. This search term – click here – will find you reviews and other resources on the production.

It had some super people in the cast and I thought some of the modernising ideas were quite interesting. But on the whole I thought it was a pretty standard production of a Georgian play with a few nods to modern touches.

Of course it isn’t easy to refresh ideas that have been around for centuries and get their relevance across to modern audiences…

…perhaps the two halves of my unusual day had more in common than I thought about at the time.

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.

England v Sri Lanka Day Four, Lord’s, 6 June 2011

This match had unusually started on the Friday, so the plan was for me to go on the Friday and the Monday. The Friday went like this:

England v Sri Lanka Day One, Lord’s, 3 June 2011

Janie and I were supposed to go with Hari and Mawju, both Sri Lankan people we know, Hari from the Lloyd’s bank in Ealing and Mawju from the Atari-Ya Japanese fishmongers (long story, don’t ask).

Also don’t ask why Mawju didn’t turn up and didn’t call to excuse himself or return his ticket.

Anyway, we had a very pleasant day at the cricket with Hari, who loved our picnic and we loved the cake he brought from home as his offering. It all sounds a bit TMS commentary box, doesn’t it? In some ways it was.

The match had been badly rain-affected the day before so we got an elongated day on the Monday. England did very well to turn a seemingly nailed-on draw into a possible winning position by the end of the day, although we had a sneaking suspicion that it would end up a draw anyway.

Spoiler alert – the scorecard – click here- will tell you what happened.

Paco Peña, Wigmore Hall Late Night Series, 3 June 2011

After a day watching test match cricket at Lord’s with friends…

England v Sri Lanka Day One, Lord’s, 3 June 2011

…what could be a more fitting conclusion than a late night concert at the Wigmore Hall?

Back then, I used to describe Lord’s and the Wigmore Hall as the last two places on the planet where stewards refer to me as “young man”.

Now (as I write in late 2017) I’m afraid that not even the stewards at those two places call me “young man” any more.

But I digress.

This was a lovely short concert of Paco Peña and friends making glorious music together.

I’m pretty sure that Janie picked me up and whisked me back to Sandall Close after the concert – this was our penultimate weekend there. Another story.

England v Sri Lanka Day One, Lord’s, 3 June 2011

Unusually the first day of a Lord’s test match on a Friday.

That day I went with Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett, Ian “Iain Spellright” Theodoreson and Mark “Uncail Marcas” Yeandle.

The following extract from my e-mail to Mark and Chas the day before reveals the expectation of a very hot day:

Weather looks set fair for tomorrow.

Please could you both bring plenty of water with you.  I’ll have my hands full and Ian T was muttering about “fancy juices” as his contribution to the soft drink side of things, but I think we might all need good old fashioned (still) H2O.  Especially given the weather and the picnic I have planned.

Don’t forget your booze rations also – as if I had to remind you about that!…

Mark threatened (and saw through his threat) to bring some Frittenden strawberries with him. His strawberry offering the previous year had gone down an absolute treat. If you look closely at the picture of Charles below from that report, you can make out the colour and shape of a Frittenden strawberry. The 2011 batch was delicious, but I believe the 2010 batch was “peak strawberry”.

Click the photo or the link below to see that May 2010 match reported in full

England v Bangladesh Day 2, Lord’s, 28 May 2010

A few years later there was a potentially ugly fruit incident, as Ian and Mark were reunited with me at the test on the same day. Mark brought famous Frittenden strawberries while Ian brought a giant bag of plump cherries that he had been unable to resist en route. This competitive soft fruit showdown could have been very bloody indeed, but it mercifully led only to MAD (mutually assured delectation):

England v Sri Lanka, 3rd Test Days Two, Three and Five, Lord’s, 10, 11 & 13 June 2016

But I digress.

Back to planning for a very hot June day in 2011. Chas wrote back threatening to soak me in factor 30 sunscreen.

I don’t recall the exact nature of Ian T’s fancy juices, but I think they might have been the flavoured water variety, which does work rather well on a ludicrously hot day.

Ian T seems to specialise in weather extremes when he comes to Lord’s with me. Our 2014 visit (which will eventually be published on King Cricket, I believe) was one of the hottest days I ever remember at Lord’s and Ian nearly melted.

The scorecard suggests that we saw England have a very good day – click here.

I suspect that I was quite careful with the booze, because I was going to see a late night concert of Paco Peña at the Wigmore Hall after stumps. I suspect that all of us were a bit careful with the booze, partly because it was a very hot day.

I do recall this one, despite the heat, being an especially enjoyable, dreamy day at Lord’s. England were hot off the back of an away Ashes win and had even won the first test of the summer the previous week. What could ever, possibly go wrong again for the England test team?