I had recently acquired my first iPod – a gift from Kim and Micky, so this was my first party playlist and by gosh I did it the hard way.
Had to do it the hard way, really, as my music collection was all CDs and vinyl, so I ripped (in the case of CDs) or specifically digitised through a sound box/Audacity (in the case of vinyl) every single track I wanted for this party.
Not quite as onerous as the old cassette and reel-to-reel compilation tapes, but hardly the “quick search and click” ability I now have, as my whole collection is digitised and in the cloud on iTunes (other cloud music services are available.
Here’s the CD Box Style thing that iTunes does for you, but it only shows the first 22 tracks…
I made the first hour or more solidly Arabian style to go with the theme of the party – click here for a link to the story of the party and more besides. Then a more conventional party playlist, with the mandatory Barry White for Phillie and plenty of dance music for Janie.
There’s some seriously good stuff on there, though I say so myself. Janie and I still listen to that list reasonably often, even though I have better digital recordings of many of those tracks now.
Like King Cricket, I first saw Tom Smith play in the summer of 2006, but in my case it was June and the weather was lovely.
My diary simply has a line through the Friday daytime and the word “Lord’s”. That means I went to Lord’s with me, myself and a heap of reading.
By the start of Day 3 (the Friday), the result of the match was barely in doubt; it was really only a question of whether Middlesex could salvage some pride and bat for a day on the road we call the Lord’s pitch.
I remember that day at Lord’s primarily for one silly thing, which, as it happens, did involve Tom Smith.
I chose to follow the sun (top up the tan for tomorrow’s party), so by the afternoon I had plonked myself in the front row of the Mound Stand, closer to the Edrich than the Tavern.
Scott Styris in particular was batting well; with some aggression as well as for survival. On one occasion Styris lofted the ball into vacant space, in my direction; a couple of bounces, then the ball bounced up and pretty much landed on my lap. To this day it is the only time I can recall the ball absolutely coming to me, personally, while watching a professional match.
I had on my lap at that juncture not only the book I was reading but also an apple I was about to munch by way of light lunch.
Tom Smith arrived to gather the ball. I considered throwing him the apple rather than the ball but momentarily thought better of it and simply threw him the ball. I then spent the rest of the afternoon regretting that I hadn’t played that practical joke on Tom Smith.
Smith looked very sharp as a pace bowler back then. I remember being very impressed with him, even though his figures for the day don’t look special. He looked “the lad most likely” that afternoon on a very flat track and I remember carrying high hopes for him as an England bowling prospect for a few years.
Saturday 24 June 2006
There is a line through Saturday which reads “party”, as it was the day of the famous “Arabian Nights/Moroccan Den” party at Daisy’s old maisonette in Sandall Close.
Tony (downstairs) let us use his garden as well as ours (in return for an invitation). Kim and DJ’s company, Theme Traders, themed the gardens up for the party (see picture above).
The weather was glorious for that one and the party really was a huge success. I struggled to take photographs on the night (enjoying myself too much and then couldn’t get the flash to flash) but perhaps some better pictures will emerge from friends.
I can just about make out Bobbie and John-Boy in the background. Tony in the foreground and a few members of the family.
There were quite a lot of people at the party; a few dozen anyway. I’m pretty sure I recall Bobbie, her Dave, Andrea and one or two others hanging around with us until very late indeed; it was one of those parties that people didn’t want to end.
I had just acquired my first iPod and I made up a good playlist for this party. I’ll dump the playlist in a file and attach it as an aside later.
Daisy (Janie) might well want to chip in with some memories of this party too.
One additional point that I missed from the King Cricket piece, in the interests of brevity, is to describe where I was sitting and where Michael Vaughan was fielding that day at The Walker Ground, Southgate.
I was seated at the opposite end to The Waterfall Road end; The Barnet & Southgate College end, I should imagine it is called. Michael Vaughan was fielding at Fine Leg or “Fine Barnet” as that position is known at that ground.
Aggers: It’s going to be a close run thing deciding the “fine barnet of the match” today; it’s got to be down to either Alec Stewart or Michael Vaughan. Frankly they’ve both put in stunning performances, both superb exponents of the late cut…
The Beechwood Garden and Roller. With thanks to Charles Bartlett for this picture.
It relates to a conversation I had with my next door neighbour.
The door to the next room was wide open. At first I thought my neighbour was engaged in conversation with someone – perhaps in the room but unseen by me, perhaps on his mobile phone. As I put the key into the lock of my door, he yelled out, unmistakably at me, “hello young fella. We’re neighbours, mate”.
‘Young fella’ is an endearing moniker once you get to my age. (These days only stewards at Lord’s and front of house staff at the Wigmore Hall still seem to use it for me.)
I took a couple of steps back and greeted my neighbour. He was certainly alone in the room and as far as I could tell had not been talking to anyone other than himself before I arrived.
He was bare chested – a strange sight in an old Victorian house/hotel in that Midlands City in spring – indeed I was going to my room to get an extra layer for the evening. He was drinking a can of lager.
“Sorry mate, I’m a bit pissed”, he said. It was 18:30 – probably par for his course.
“No problem”, I replied, “why not? You enjoy yourself.”
“That’s the spirit”, said my neighbour, “you going out for the evening?”
“That’s right”, I said.
“Well you have a good time, mate”, said my neighbour.
“And you have a good evening too”, I replied.
“That’s the spirit, mate”, he hollered after me as I scuttled the few steps along the corridor, quickly opened up the door to my room, grabbed my jersey, locked up again and fled for the evening.
The Beechwood Hotel Garden and Roller. With thanks to Charles Bartlett for this picture.
How did our regular Edgbaston (and occasionally other grounds) visiting group, the Heavy Rollers, end up staying at possibly the worst hotel of all time? After all, we comprise a bunch of reasonably discerning, sensible people.
The very worst hotels only happen to stupid people, right? Wrong.
But this event does needs some context and explanation in our defence before the exposition.
Context
For several years, our excursion was based around the Wadderton Conference Centre, which was the Children’s Society place in rural Worcestershire, just outside Birmingham. David Steed, who was one of our number in the Heavy Rollers, ran the place and lived on site. The Children’s Society was pleased for a bit of income from guests in the quiet summer period and it was mighty convenient and pleasant for us, with a suitable garden for pre-match cricket antics.
But Wadderton had closed down permanently in the 2004/2005 winter.
In 2005 we spent one splendid night, before the match, at Tye Towers. We then spent on night at Harbourne Hall – VSO’s equivalent place to The Children’s Society’s Wadderton – a place to which we returned subsequently several times before it declined.
But for some reason people, after that first stay, wanted an alternative. It was perhaps perceived as too far from the ground (although it was much closer than Wadderton). Perhaps people felt it reminded them too much of Wadderton without “being” Wadderton.
David Steed, living locally, said he’d sort something out.
Now David Steed, bless him, ran Wadderton wonderfully and was subsequently a superb host at his Birmingham house. But he possibly wasn’t the best judge of a hotel. Cheap and near the ground seemed sufficient criteria for him. His e-mail a few weeks before the match:
Accommodation is confirmed as previously written about and subsequent telephone chat at Beechwood Hotel on the Bristol Road approx. 200 yards from the main entrance at Edgbaston…
…No deposits required and as we have spoken – do people want to come early enough on the Wednesday to perform on our local green followed by supper at ours with a meal out locally or in Brum on the Thurs. night. Any thoughts ?
That “subsequent telephone chat” was not with me. Anyone dare to confess?
Of course, in a more modern era we might have looked at TripAdvisor or one of its competitor/predecessor sites to check the Beechwood Hotel, but back then those web sites didn’t exist, or barely existed.
Nigel recalls that the main light in Adam’s room didn’t work because the light bulb had blown. When Adam approached Tom for a replacement light bulb, he was told to fill in a form to apply for a replacement – the replacement was thus not forthcoming during our stay.
Although David had promised us that the rooms came
“each with private bathroom”…
…I seem to recall having to toddle down the corridor to get to said bathroom. “Private”, I suppose, does not necessarily mean “en suite” in this Beechwood world. I also recall some very inappropriate jokes about Zyklon B from my companions during conversations about those ghastly showers.
But the most bizarre conversations were with Tom, who tended to sidle up to us in the bar/common parts areas of the hotel and bend our ears with tales of his roller-coaster and/or imagined past. I made some fragmented notes:
“I was a millionaire at 21…a multi-millionaire at 24…lost it all at 33. I’ve been out with Miss Jamaica, Miss Bromsgrove, the lot. I had an Aston Martin – would cost about £125,000 today. Do fast cars while you’re young, young man, you won’t fancy it once you are your dad’s age. I made a million when a million was real money. When a million was really a million…”
The company that owned the property was only struck off a few months ago at the time of writing, December 2015, so I imagine the property is now in the hands of the Mortgage provider, Nat West, who surely could find some property developer somewhere who might adapt the premises into some jolly useful affordable housing in leafy Edgbaston.
Two Nights and Two Days of Cricket
Why were we there? Oh yes, cricket.
We had a net at Edgbaston itself on the Wednesday evening. I’m not entirely sure how our evening panned out, but – having now also seen an e-mail from Nigel sent to us ahead of the trip – I suspect that the net was late afternoon – Nigel’s e-mail suggests 17:00 start – and that the game on David’s local green was therefore a that same evening at, say, 19:00.
Anyway, the muck-about game on David’s local green, the night before the test match started, did not go well for me, as evidenced by this page of my jotter.
Nigel “Father Barry” and son did well, as did a local lad, Craig, who wandered along and asked if he could play with us.
Harish (Harsha Ghoble) also had a good go, although I do recall bowling him on one occasion with one of my moon balls which descended vertically onto the stumps. “How are you supposed to play a ball like that?”, complained Harish. Nigel then dispatched my next, similar ball for six. “Like that”, said Nigel.
I also recall lots of bites on my legs afterwards, although whether those were from the green or the hotel is a matter of some conjecture. Perhaps a bit of both.
Postscript March 2017 – the scorecard relic and narrative about the park muckabout game is a false memory from 2006 – that happened in 2008 and the text is transposed to that piece, together with a link to Charles Bartlett’s wonderful 2008 photographs that helped me to disambiguate. It seemed a ridiculous idea, that we had a net AND a muckabout in the park the same evening…it was ridiculous – didn’t happen.
The dinner at David’s on the Wednesday evening was typically delicious and (equally typically) the wine flowed plentifully. We had a great evening, that Wednesday before the game.
Heavy Rollers 2006 With thanks to Charles Bartlett for this picture.
Light Rollers 2006 With thanks to Charles Bartlett for this picture.
I’m not 100% sure where we ate on the Thursday night, but I think it was that year we went to a local Indian place near Steed Towers. Others might recall better. I think I was in “Beechwood Hotel shock” by then. It really was not a place for the faint-hearted.
Or, as Charley the Gent Malloy would put it, “that hotel was no place for a wuss.”
Michael Mainelli and I had formed a tradition – I think 2006 was the third instance of it – that I would take Michael as my guest to a day of county cricket early season, before the crowds get larger and (most importantly) before the days get hotter.
Some like it hot, but Michael REALLY doesn’t like it hot.
So, Day 3, Friday, first county championship match of the season seemed just the ticket. In many ways it was. Middlesex v Kent. Good fixture. April.
The match was well advanced by the start of Day 3 but not too well advanced.
As tradition would have it…this sort of thing IS a tradition by the third time, possibly even by the second time…we watched the first session from the pavilion. Then, at lunch, as tradition would also have it, we perambulated on the outfield (smaller crowd than Middlesex’s glorious September 2016 match depicted above), then retired to Harry Morgan to grab some takeaway New York deli-style food – probably a chopped liver sandwich to share plus a salt beef sandwich each plus some pickled cucumbers.
We took our feast back to Lord’s in time to munch, drink some fine red wine and watch the second session of cricket from the Compton Stand.
The Compton Stand offered a rather binary choice; absolutely exposed to the elements in the upper tier, or caged in away from the elements in the lower tier. As I write in September 2019, that stand is being demolished, together with its smaller twin, the Edrich, to be replaced by more modern facilities.
Anyway, in April we opted for the upper and the sunshine while we ate our hot food, rather than the wind-tunnel cooling effect of the shady, cagey lower tier.
We finished our grub around about the time that Nick Compton’s fine innings for Middlesex entered the nervous nineties. I explained to Michael that the lad had been on Middlesex’s books for some years but this was, hopefully, to be his breakthrough season. He had just scored a big hundred in a University warm-up match but this might be his first County Championship hundred.
Shouldn’t we move now to a shady spot? Perhaps the pavilion again or the Warner?
I asked Michael, noticing a few beads of sweat and a slight reddening of the face. It was proper sunshine that day and by mid afternoon it was really quite warm.
Let’s wait and see Compton get his hundred. We should see Compton get his first hundred from the Compton Stand,
Michael replied; a cricket aficionado in the making.
Michael’s early effort in 1998; a Z/Yen & Barnardo’s & The Children’s Society match
We could go down to the lower tier and get some shade…that’s still the Compton Stand…
I suggested.
No, said Michael, we shouldn’t move. He’s in the nineties.
Now anyone who knows Michael surely knows that he is one of the least superstitious people you are ever likely to meet. He’s logical. He’s rational.
But cricket seems to get all of us…yes, even Michael, with quirky superstitions. Perhaps all sport does this to some extent, but cricket has superstition in spades.
And of course Michael had enough exposure to cricket through our charity matches and stuff to really understand that a century is a big achievement and a maiden century a really big thing…
…Nick Compton also knew the importance of making a ton, of course…
…so Nick’s nervous 90s went on for rather a long time…it seemed like a very, very long time…
…while Michael got hotter and hotter; ruddier and ruddier. I asked him a couple more times if he wanted to move, but Michael was glued to the cricket and absolutely intent on not jinxing Nick Compton’s century quest.
Within moments of Nick achieving his hundred, Michael was up and we were away in the direction of the shade. I think we went back to the pavilion for the rest of that very pleasant spring day.
I kept a detailed journal and shall Ogblog the whole adventure in some detail in the fullness of time. But for now, the itinerary above and photo album links below will have to suffice.
The photos are well labelled in those albums, so should serve as a pretty useful travel log in their own right.
Below are the links to all of the labelled photos, divided into half-a-dozen conveniently sized albums.
First up, Addis To Jinka:
The second set, below: The South Omo Valley. Possibly the most eye-catching photos, especially if you like tribal photography.
Third up: Axum To Lalibela – below:
Fourth: Lalibela to Gonder
Fifth up: Bahir Dar to Addis
Last but not least – Zanzibar – below:
If you are crazy enough to want to wade through my hand-written journals before I transcribe/translate/write up from them, here they are in three batches:
The 2005 event was very special. Jeremy had suggested that we do “something Soho” and Janie had been very keen to try the Marco-Pierre White/Damian Hurst arty-combo restaurant, Quo Vadis. When Linda and I discovered that the palce had a private room the right size for Z/Yen (it wasn’t a club back then), the plans were well and truly hatched.
Drinks before dinner were in De Hems, in Macclesfield Street, across the road from one of my favourite Chinese haunts, Lee Ho Fook No 2 (actually the original Soho Lee Ho Fook)…
The art work and the food in Quo Vadis was excellent, as was the atmosphere among the team, as the business was doing increasingly well and the fun events were becoming increasingly good fun.
The song that year was a genuinely joint effort between me and Michael, as evidenced by the document exchange between us and the tell-tale “v1.1” in the title of the version we used.
Jeremy The Red-Toed Banker
(sung to the tune of “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”)
When reviewing the 2005 Ashes series, the great commentator, Richie Benaud, would relate tales from letters he had received from senior people, captains of industry even, describing hiding behind the sofa unable to watch the denouement of some of the tighter matches, such was the level of emotion invested in these incredible multiple-day sporting events that we call test matches in cricket.
The Edgbaston test, which several of us fortunate folk known as the Heavy Rollers experienced live in part, was such a match. While our live experience, which started so brilliantly for us the night before…
…was over as a live experience for us at stumps on Day Two, of course it continued for us as a television and radio experience for the next couple of days.
Before that, someone (often it was Nigel), will have helped me get at least part of the way, if not all the way, to Birmingham New Street for my train and I probably got to Janie’s place around 9:30/10:00 at night for a shower and then some deep sleep.
No doubt Janie and I played tennis in the morning, ahead of hunkering down with the radio and/or television for most of the Saturday.
It was a seesaw of a cricketing day if ever there was one. England looked to have surrendered their second innings for too little, then Australia similarly found it difficult to avoid frequent dismissals.
But Janie and I could not stay at home all day and watch cricket – we had tickets for a dinner and show at The Kings Head, Islington: Who’s The Daddy, a satirical farce. Not the sort of show that Janie would normally want to see, except that this show was largely about a larger than life journalist/editor named Boris Johnson and his affair with fellow Spectator journalist Petronella Wyatt. Without reaching to breach any professional confidences here, Janie had professional reasons (as well as idle curiosity) to see this show.
Janie and I set off for Islington quite early, with England in a good but not yet totally secure position. Michael Clarke & Shane Warne were at the crease together albeit seven down but accumulating runs. I think the only reason that the match was still going on at that hour was because England had taken the extra half hour to try and finish the match, but that idea didn’t seem to be working. I’m pretty sure Janie did the driving, thank goodness. We were listening intently. We parked up near the theatre and sat listening to the last couple of overs. Then Steve Harmison bowled THAT ball to remove Clarke on the stroke of stumps.
That Steve Harmison ball at the end of Day Three is at c22’30”.
Janie and I were in celebratory mode as we entered The Kings Head. Australia still more than 100 behind, just two wickets left…what could possibly go wrong?
No matter, we were in a great mood. England were on the verge of a vital win…
…or were they?
I’m pretty sure we played tennis again, early, on the Sunday morning. Then we hunkered down in the near-expectation that England would quickly take a couple of wickets and we could relax for the rest of the day.
It didn’t quite work out that way
I must say that I personally never got to the “hiding behind the sofa” stage, but there was a lot of oohing and aahing, that’s for sure. I started off watching in the living room, then migrated to the bedroom so I could put my feet up and await what I thought was the inevitable win…then I wasn’t so sure…then I starting to think it was an inevitable “yet again” loss on the way.
Janie kept insisting that it would all come good in the end, but once the lead had been reduced to 20-30 runs, she couldn’t sit still nor could she bear to watch.
By the time the England victory came, I was, by then, absolutely convinced that England were about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
But in the end we celebrated, Janie reminding me that she had been insisting that it would come good for England all along. Yeh, right.
I had , in a moment of extreme lucidity disguised as madness, procured, the previous autumn, six tickets for Day Five of The Oval test, just in case England were able to take the 2005 Ashes series to the wire. I had kept very quiet about this purchase, just in case the social workers of The Children Society, on learning of this purchase, conspired with a couple of doctors and had me put away for gross insanity.
A coupe of hours after the Edgbaston victory, it felt like the right moment to fess up to this purchase. I called Chas, who was in one of those “trembling voiced Chas” states, but he did make some informed comments on the outcome of the match and immediately said yes to the idea of joining me and Daisy at Day Five of the Oval test, should the series come to that.
I told Chas that I intended to call Nigel next.
Chas told me that it might be best to leave it another couple of hours or more. “I called him a few minutes ago and he still could barely speak”, explained Chas.
Nigel in full flow
Nigel doesn’t lose his voice lightly.
I did speak with Nigel later that day, who was still somewhat of a quiver. It is a shame he wasn’t able to join us at the Oval, but still that Oval story will make for another excellent Ogblog piece, not least because it will be awash with Charles Bartlett’s colourful pictures.
We all stayed at Tye Towers. Janie recalls that I sent her a lengthy SMS message (now lost in the mists of time and/or recoverable only by the security services) waxing lyrical about the wonderful time we were having.
Charles got up early the next morning and took a stroll around “the estate” with his camera, taking all the following pictures before 7:00 am.
We thought we had allowed bags of time to get to Edgbaston & into the ground for the first ball. We were used to going to Edgbaston for the first day of the test match. But we hadn’t accounted for the massive early queues (previously unprecedented at Edgbaston – at least in then recent times) and the additional security required, as there had been a major terrorist incident on London transport only a few weeks earlier. Indeed, Nigel’s son, Adam – himself an occasional Heavy Roller and guest star in our charity cricket matches – had been on one of the bombed trains; mercifully Adam far enough away from the explosion not to be injured.
Adam Hinks – rolling with us the following year
Returning to the queue on the morning of 4 August 2005, our mood regarding the match to come was one of great hope but diminished expectation, on the back of England having played a poor game at Lord’s leaving England 1-0 down in the five match series. I had spent a couple of days at that Lord’s test…
…a link to my Ogblog postings on that match will appear here in the fullness of time…once those postings are writ…
…we all knew that England would need to up its game considerably to catch up and overtake Australia in the series. This Edgbaston test was crucual.
Then, suddenly, one of our number (I think it was Charles but it might have been Harish) took a call from Kyle Bullock, who was working at The Children’s Society HQ at that time.
Kyle had played in the annual Z/Yen v Children’s Society cricket match in Regents Park a few weeks earlier. Kyle had cruelly dismissed me in that match with an off-spinning delivery that bounced and spun even more than I had anticipated, clipping my glove and thus yielding a catch. To add to the cruelty of that dismissal, the spitting cobra of a spinning ball had clipped a joint on one of my fingers which, despite the so-called protection of a glove and the relative slowness of the ball, had led to trigger finger pain that was sustained for several months. Kyle simply thought this was funny whenever I mentioned it to him.
On the positive side, Kyle had played an important part in one of the most exciting cricket matches I have ever played, click here or below) just a few days before we set off for Bedfordshire and Edgbaston.
At the time, we thought of Kyle as “an Aussie”. In fact, he is, like many people, someone whose nationality and sporting allegiance is somewhat divided between Australia and England. In fact, Kyle’s allegiance for those Ashes leant towards England, we subsequently discovered.
The reason I labour all of this seemingly superfluous material, is the fact that Kyle informed us, by telephone, that Glenn McGrath, Australia’s most reliable bowler at that time, had injured himself in warm-ups and was out of the match, possibly out of the series.
At first we all thought this was a wind up. I had already suffered that summer at the hands of Kyle’s spin and was not going to buy this unlikely-sounding story easily.
But within moments a whisper started to go through the queue and the ground, as plenty of people around us were listening to radios and/or taking calls from friends. The truth of this perhaps-series-defining story was confirmed.
We soon also learned that Australia had nevertheless elected to bowl having won the toss.
Our hope (and that of England fans everywhere) was well and truly restored.
Intriguingly, Nigel’s recollection of the McGrath incident is quite different from mine, as he, Jeff Tye and The Steeds came in separate cars from me, Chas, Nick and Harish. They were entering the ground at a different (probably slightly earlier) time. Nigel writes:
It was the amiable Brummie steward [Paul Guppy] who informed me/us of the ‘unfortunate’ McGrath accident…[Paul] appeared joyful in the sense of “ I know summink amazing that you don’t”. He sensed our doubts as he had, until then, had a tendency to enjoy the odd wind up, to put it kindly. “I should know, I helped put him into the back of a car”. His insights may have been shared elsewhere, but we self importantly formed the impression he had made a beeline for us! Word started to spread as a result…hopes began to escalate.
Paul Guppy a couple of years earlier winding me up
Here is a link to a match highlights video that, like this article, covers the first two days of the match. You’ll need to survive some adverts before you see just over 30 minutes of footage.
The video shows the queue of people entering the ground through the Pershore Road entrance, which is the entrance we use, but the queue was much longer than that shown when we arrived in it.
The video highlights for the first two days of this great match also include an infeasibly large number of shots showing us Heavy Rollers in the crowd – especially shots from the first session of the match. I suppose we stood out for the cameras that year, being lined up in our red Heavy Rollers shirts.
Here’s an example screen grab from the above video. Don’t ask how much fiddling around it has taken to grab that. It is c4’36” into the film.
Lunch was a typically wonderful picnic (see Heavy Rollers reports passim), I think a joint effort provided by the Steeds supplemented by the Tyes – not least Liz Tye’s iconic scotch eggs, which Nigel recalls her contributing on several occasions…surely this being one of them… and Samina’s samosas – Samina being a colleague of Nigel and especially Jeff’s from the Bedford office of The Childrens’ Society. Samina contributed samosas for our trip on several occasions.
Chas, Nigel & Jeff were still star struck from their previous exploits blagging their way into the old Edgbaston pavilion – see Heavy Rollers write ups passim, in particular the 2003 one linked here and below…
In 2005 they did it again, with Chas taking several photos including the following:
Kevin Pietersen, taken while wandering at or just after lunch
The following ones from within the pavilion on the stroke of tea Day One…don’t ask!
And one just after tea, proving that Chas, at least, hung around for the whole of the tea interval.
You were a bit obsessed with KP at that time, Chas. Pinning hopes…
The evening meal was at an Indian Restaurant (or should I call it a Balti House in Birmingham?) on the recommendation of the Steeds (“Peels”) and a jolly good recommendation it was too, as evidenced by the following sole photo of the evening.
Some faces and arms almost as red as the red curries
Another mystery is why Chas took one…but only one…picture on Day Two of the match.
Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff
I can only imagine that Chas felt that he had failed to catch an image of his favourite player on Day One, so returned with his camera determined to put matters right on Day Two…which he certainly did with the above image.
We had a great time on Day Two, much as we had on Day One. David Steed once again did the honours with a splendid picnic and all seemed well with the world as we left the ground at the end of that day.
Shane Warne’s dismissal of Andrew Strauss towards the end of Day Two kept us all thinking that, despite England’s healthy-looking lead, the game was far from over…
The wonderful Daily Motion highlights reel (repeated below) shows an insightful view of those two days of unforgettable cricket. Top viewing for Heavy Rollers and non-Rollers alike. For The Heavy Rollers, it was an unforgettable, life-affirming gathering over three days as well as an unforgettable match.
