Lots of Worm activity (i.e. Janie’s “Wormleighton” family and friends) during August 2008 if my diary is to be believed, but no photographic evidence. For more detail on some of these activities, we might need to ransack the attic and retrieve Janie’s diaries.
Saturday 2 August – Phillie.
My diary also has “Anth” crossed out, so I think the original idea was for Anthea and Mitchell to visit when Phillie was with us, but I think they came the following week and Phillie alone stayed with us at the maisonette and had dinner. Tony was away on business if I recall correctly/
Monday 4 August – Middlesex v Somerset floodlit.
I took Paul (Belmonte) that evening and gave him the pavilion experience for some of the game and also I recall watching a fair bit from the Upper Edrich Stand. I think this was only the second floodlit game at Lord’s; at least only my second experience of it. Here is a link to the scorecard.
Saturday 9 August – Anth
Not sure what we did but quite possibly Anthea and Mitchell came over for dinner. I think my diary would have more detail if it had been a bigger adventure than that.
Sunday 24 August – Worms
The Monday was a bank holiday of course. This will almost certainly be Hil and Chris; I think we might have all have gathered at their place in Bristol – i.e. including Phillie, Tony and Charlie. I think this was the year that Janie and I went down just for the day – a late lunch barbecue – then drove home. Quite a success I seem to recall.
Correction/update: It is clear from Janie’s diary that she and I stayed at the Hotel Du Vin in Bristol that time – possibly our first stay in that place. We stayed in Berringer and at that time they parked us at the hotel. Still a success though, as described.
…you’d have thought that I had enough real work to do.
Which I probably did.
But still I wrote the editorial contained in the following link, to encourage people to vote wisely in the forthcoming Middlesex CCC no confidence vote/Special General Meeting.
The irony of course was that Middlesex had got to finals day of the T20 competition and the SGM was scheduled for the Tuesday before the big day. Not ideal.
Tour matches between county sides and visiting international teams used to be a major part of the first class cricket summer. Now they are simply warm up matches, occasionally good for the county coffers but (in Middlesex’s case) usually a break-even proposition at best at outgrounds.
But from the cricket-lover’s point of view, a delightful day of first class cricket can ensue, as it did when the South Africans visited Uxbridge in 2008.
I do remember that Friday being a lovely day. I especially remember seeing Amla live for the first time. At first i couldn’t work out what the fuss was about, but once he got set, he looked top notch.
Not that such matches matter, but for completist enthusiasts who don’t want to have to do too much clicking…here’s a link to the scorecard. Sadly the weather turned sour on the match over the weekend.
The photo is from a year earlier in September 2005; the day England won the Ashes at the Oval, with thanks to Charley “The Gent” Malloy (also pictured, as are Uncail Marcas, Me and Daisy) – Jeff is the big fella in red.
The most noteworthy thing that happened that day (other than Nottinghamshire batting Middlesex out of the game), was a stray plastic bag that blew from the Upper Compton onto the pitch to temporarily hold up proceedings.
Other coincidences with this week in 2019 include:
Nick Compton being the player who rescued the bag – I am honoured as Ged to have my spotting of Nick Compton as the very first “Cricketer Spotted” submission this week, in the newly named King Cricket’s Edge – you can sign up for that e-mail newsletter by clicking here. (But you don’t need to do that if you were already a Cricket Badger subscriber);
I am going to see Middlesex play Nottinghamshire again this very day (5 September 2019) – at Trent Bridge this time and in the T20 format this time. Hopefully Middlesex will do a bit better today than they did in September 2006. Postscript: impossible though it might seem, Middlesex was even more comprehensively thrashed in the T20 September 2019 encounter than the September 2006 County Championship jobbie.
Nano Banana 2.1 (AI) Depiction Of Surrey v Kent, Midweek, Oval, 1976. (My “small crowd, plenty of kids” description has been taken too literally – I love it!)
Saturday 10 July 1976 – went to A[nil] Biltoo for afternoon. TV Joan Crawford film [probably The Command, which was Joan Weldon, not Joan Crawford!].
Monday 12 July 1976 – went to Oval: members seats!! TV Star Trek, Get Some In.
This is Anil Biltoo’s first mention in my diary. In truth, I don’t remember our friendship forming until the following academic year, but clearly we had initiated our friendship towards the end of the 3rd year and saw each other more than once during the holidays that summer.
This photo of Anil from the summer of 1979, in Mauritius. The stick he is wielding is sugar cane.
Not a mystery, just one of those temporal slips that my memory tends to make.
The main memory slip mystery item from those first few days of the summer holidays is the visit to The Oval.
I most certainly remember the visit and I remember being shown around the pavilion, walking around no doubt open-mouthed at the pictures of great players and events from days of yore.
So stuck in my brain was the memory of being shown around, that it returned to me by way of a dream the night before my next visit to that pavilion – 21 September 2005.
Of course I had been to The Oval many times between those visits – not least nine days earlier, to see the magical 5th day of the 5th test of 2005. Other Ogblog pieces will/already do cover such other visits.
But the night before my visit to see Surrey v Middlesex, secure in the knowledge that my reciprocal member’s rights would enable me to use the pavilion, I dreamt of walking through that building. When I awoke, I wondered whether my dream had been an accurate representation of the place or just a dream-like replica. But when I got to the Oval and actually started walking around the pavilion, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, as I realised that my memory, in sleep, had accurately dredged almost every permanent detail of that building. It wasn’t a sense of deja vu – because I HAD been there before; more than 29 years before. If you had asked me 24 hours before that second visit to describe the inside of the building, I could not even faintly have done so.
The memory really is a weird thing.
Irritatingly, my memory has entirely suppressed…
…and my diary is no help with this…
…the answers to the following two questions:
WHY did I have members’ access on Monday 12 July 1976?
Who was I with for that visit?
My gut feeling is that it was a sort-of end of term Alleyn’s School field trip, organised a few days after the end of term to coincide with a match that was worth visiting. That sort of field trip has Colin Page’s fingerprints all over it.
Micky Stewart – after whom that pavilion is now named, is, of course, an Alleyn’s School alum. He might have been a helpful conduit for such a visit.
But in truth I don’t recall. I just remember the open-mouthed pavilion tour and watching what I thought to be some very good cricket. It cemented my view that I wanted to bowl like Intikhab Alum, if only I could work out for myself how to deploy leg (wrist) spin. Spoiler alert: I NEVER worked out how to deploy leg spin.
