For my visit to Birmingham to see best part of three days of the Warwickshire v Middlesex match at Edgbaston (early September 2015) and to get some business visits in to boot, I decided to go for short versions of the same story told from four different perspectives, starting with Benjy the Baritone Ukulele and ending with Ged himself.
Then I set off by tube for a mixed day of peripatetic work and leisure. First stop; Lord’s for a game of real tennis. I thought I played well again today; perhaps starting to get my head round some of the tactics needed to win big points and close out games.
I didn’t hang around too long at Lord’s, as I wanted to visit Lock and Co. before meeting Chris Harrison for lunch. My beaten up old Chepstow trilby really had become an embarrassment and yet was still a favourite hat; I probably wanted a direct replacement. I tried a few different ones, but basically concluded that in the Chepstow “I look like me” so went for it.
About 150 yards down the road, as I was walking past St James’s Palace, I walked past two young American women, one of whom said to me (without pausing for breath in the middle of her conversational sentence with her friend), “I really like your hat”, which I felt endorsed my buying decision.
Another 150 yards towards Chris’s offices, I am crossing The Mall at the pelican crossing there and I see a cyclist, who has stopped for me at the lights, who looked the spitting image of Boris Johnson. On closer inspection, I realised that it WAS Boris. “You’ve made a really bad call to go for Brexit, Boris”, I said, “a shocking and dangerous decision. Think about the geopolitics of it. Think about the world”.
“No I haven’t, no it isn’t” mumbled Boris as we parted company. I wonder whether I made him think at all? I wonder whether he liked my hat?
Postscript: November 2018
I realise, in retrospect, that my intervention with Boris might be considered to be a microaggression, or even a macro-aggression, frankly.
Imagine the scene; a be-suited gentleman in a sharp Paul Smith suit and a brand new Chepstow from Lock & Co, carrying a rather peculiar looking bag, which happens to contain nothing more than a real tennis racket, waving the bag in anger at a stationery Boris on a bike:
…the young professionals there were convinced that my real tennis bag contained a sawn-off shotgun rather than a tennis racket…
…which is a bit odd at one of a handful of places in the world where there is more than one real tennis court.
Coincidentally, one of those young professionals, Jack Clifton, transferred to Lord’s when it reopened in October and spotted straight away that one of the real tennis exhibits in the reception is a very similar bag; that which belonged to the late, great actor, Sir Ralph Richardson:
The inscription in part reads, “Although not a very gifted player, Sir Ralph was a real tennis devotee…” Sounds like my kind of guy.
Anyway, point is, I did not intend my intervention with Boris Johnson to be quite as aggressive as it might have seemed. Further, I apologise unequivocally for my unintended aggression towards Boris. I should, to use language that lawyers and Boris understand, have aligned my mens rea with my actus reus.
Back To the Original 2016 Piece
A delightful lunch with Chris, at which I handed over his ticket for Friday at the test. A small family-run Italian place near his offices; I had a very tasty seafood pasta. Good strong coffee afterwards too. I had texted Janie to let her know that I had accosted Boris in the street, so she phoned to make sure that I wasn’t joking and/or hadn’t had a psychotic episode. Chris and I wondered why Boris was cycling away from the Commons at lunchtime and where he might have been going.
After lunch, a tube ride to Hammersmith and time to do a spot more on the Brexit paper before my one client meeting of the day, which went very well. Then a simple tube ride back to North Ealing, beating Janie back to the house by a good few minutes.
After clearing my e-mails, it was time for a little ukulele practice with Benjy the Baritone Ukulele, who thus photo-bombed the above picture of me sporting my new hat.
Janie and I then enjoyed an unusually early Persian food supper from Boof, a very good local Persian place.
The trip was simply three days in Edgbaston, staying at the Eaton Hotel (first visit there). Straight to the ground day one, walking in to short business meetings in Birmingham proper on each of days two and three before returning to London early on day four for one last business meeting of the week.
Simples. Until Benjy, Ivan, Dumbo and Ged got their teeth into it.
Click here to read my four-part literary report on a visit to Birmingham/Edgbaston in September 2015; The Sound and the Fury, as published on King Cricket.
