Tag: John Thirlwell

Reality Meets NewsRevue At Lord’s, 2 to 10 November 2022

Chris Rowe & Ian Harris At Lord’s, Photo by Nat Cherry

A plethora of real tennis at Lord’s in early November:

  • skills night, which I now “match manage”;
  • a match between the MCC and Middlesex University Real Tennis Club (MURTC), which I somehow found myself captaining/match managing for the MCC;
  • a long-in-the-planning “friendly” with fellow NewsRevue alum Chris Rowe.

Skills Night, 2 November 2022

I explained how I “inherited” responsibility for skills night from Johnny Whiting in my review of last year’s event, click here or below:

Back To Life, Back To Reality… Almost, November 2021

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.

MCC Members can read all about skills night and tennis generally here. Should anything ever go awry with that link, a scrape of my match report can be found here.

MCC v MURTC, 9 November 2022

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 Stanton: Absurdist & Realist, A Personal Tribute, 9 March 2020

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.

A Day Of World Cup Cricket, Pakistan v Bangladesh, At Lord’s, 5 July 2019

I wanted to see a world cup match from the wonderful vantage point of the Lord’s pavilion. I figured that this particular match would be a decent opportunity so to do and I was right; I scored a pavilion ticket on application.

Of course, the only thing about international matches and the pavilion is that only members are allowed. Strictly no guests. That’s why most of us choose not to go to the pavilion on a major match day even when we can – because we normally choose to go with partners, friends etc.

By coincidence, I had a conversation about this matter on the Tuesday, with John Thirlwell, with whom I play real tennis, normally at Lord’s but on this occasion, while we are in exile for the world cup, at Queen’s.

John Thirlwell to the left of me, this picture from a battle at Queen’s in 2018

John had similarly, uncharacteristically, bagged a pavilion place for the Pakistan v Bangladesh game. We hatched a plan to watch the match together.

This proved to be a great plan from my point of view, as John:

The rump ire strikes back – Middlesex v Durham match report

John kindly sent me a message describing the location of the seats and the precise look of the bagsying materials. I got to said seats about 25 minutes before the start of play – John got back from his breakfast about 5 minutes after I arrived.

I got this stunning picture of the anthems and the ground from our splendid seats

I very much enjoyed watching cricket with John, who is knowledgeable about the game and/but wears his cricket knowledge lightly. We also chatted a bit with the gentleman next to us, who is a member who now lives in New Zealand but is, coincidentally, like us, a real tennis tragic. Not much chance of feeding his real tennis addiction in Wellington. He was a little peeved that he couldn’t feed that addiction at Lord’s on this visit – he usually does when he comes over for cricket.

Despite the cushions, I have learnt my lesson and made sure to take several walks rather than sit through the whole match. In any case, those walks were a real treat because there was such a festival atmosphere around the ground. Noisy, but in a very good-spirited way, with the Pakistan and Bangladesh fans competing to make celebratory noise.

In particular, on my walk during the innings break, the heave of people taking advantage of the many Asian food stands in the food village and picnicing on the lawns was a wonderful mixture of sights, sounds and smells. I could only try to capture some of the sights:

During the Bangladesh innings, John came for one of the ground circuits with me, which I think he also enjoyed. On our way out of the pavilion, we spied a sample of a new-style pavilion bench made of a padded material that ought to reduce or even eliminate the worst excesses of rump ire.

Change…don’t want it…

…said John. I chimed in…

what’ll we do for aggravation if we have comfortable seats? The grumpy MCC member will lose his entire raison d’être on a comfy chair.

They’ll need to do a heck of a lot of persuading to get that idea through the members at a general meeting.

More seriously, I was very critical of the extraneous marketing drivel and noise in the England v Australia match – click here or below:

England v Australia, World Cup Round Robin Match, Lord’s, 25 June 2019

I’m pleased to report that the ICC seemed to have ironed out some of the worst excesses for this match, although I still found many of the marketing messages inappropriate and unhelpful within the ground, however much it might make sense for those advertisers to have their colours shown on the TV screens around the world. But at least we could see the score on the scoreboards most of the time during this match.

I was also really impressed by the MCC’s decision to allow 250 schoolkids to witness this match from the pavilion, as it had been under-subscribed. This was a wonderful opportunity for those schools and seemed to motivate MCC staff and members – at least certainly those I spoke to about it.

Here is a link to the Cricinfo resource for this match.

It wasn’t the best or most exciting match I have ever seen, but it was a great advert for the game and for the ability of a place like Lord’s to stage a glorious day out for all manner of people who don’t normally get a chance to enjoy the Lord’s experience. I thought it was a great success and was so glad to have been there on this day.

Thanks once again, John, for your company, the choice of seats and the pain-diminishing cushions.

A Day Of Coincidences At Lord’s And The Wigmore Hall, 6 July 2018

Several coincidences today, all revolving around a certain Mr John Thirlwell. Let me explain.

John plays real tennis at Lord’s. He and I have previous:

MCC v The Dedanists’ Society, Lord’s, 10 February 2018

I turned up to play him in the morning. On arrival he greets me with the phrase:

I ran into someone who knows you the other day. Knows you from the gym or something. When real tennis came up in the conversation, he asked if I knew you.

But the really strange coincidence about that encounter was that, John told me, it was at Grace Road, Leicester, at a Cricket Society bash…

…do you mean day two of the Leicestershire v Middlesex match?…

…I asked, explaining that I was actually in the next room (the Committee Room) all day while they were in the function suites:

Three Days In Leicester Mostly For Cricket, 20 to 22 June 2018

Yes. Now that IS a weird coincidence.

John and I fought out a tough, some would say bitter, battle, which ended in a draw, once the nonagenarians, who were next on court, separated us combatants who, by that time, were (naturally) screaming, punching, wrestling and biting. It’s a gentleman’s game, real tennis. In fact, I stayed on for the nonagenarian doubles that day and almost managed to keep up with the oppo for an additional hour.

Later that day, once I had recovered from two hours of combat (and done a spot of work), Janie and I took dinner at Delamina in Marylebone, ahead of a rather unusual-looking late night concert at the Wigmore Hall.

We thought the food in Delamina was superb – I had a seriously posh kofta dish while Janie had a seriously posh take on turkey shawarma – but the place was very noisy on a Friday evening and the service, while admittedly delivered by universally sweet staff, was poor.

We stretched our legs and got a chance to have a conversation that we both could hear, by walking the long way round to the Wigmore Hall. While strolling, I told Janie about the strange coincidence that John Thirlwell (whom she had met at the Middlesex University Real Tennis match) had been in the next room to me all day at Leicester.

Before entering the concert hall itself, I popped to the Wigmore Hall loo. There I saw a gentleman who looked remarkably like John Thirlwell. No, he wasn’t a gentleman who looked a lot like John Thirlwell; it WAS John Thirlwell.

“This is bonkers”, I said, “you’re blooming everywhere” – to which John could only smile and agree. Thus Janie and I chatted with John and his charming companion Maggie before and briefly after the concert. John is not a Wigmore Hall regular – he had simply seen this concert listed and thought it looked interesting and different.

I often say that Lord’s and the Wigmore Hall are the last remaining places where I get addressed as “young man”. I wonder whether that sort of thing was the causal link for John Thirlwell visiting both places on the same day as me. Joking apart about fierce combat; it turns out that John is actually jolly good company, both on the tennis court (which I knew already) and also in the concert hall.

Anyway, the concert was the David Orlowsky Trio, described as jazz meets world music meets klezmer – click here for the Wigmore Hall resource on the concert.

Click here for a general link to resources on The David Orlowsky Trio.

Here’s a snippet from a promo for an early album:

Here is one from a collaboration with Avi Avatal, whom we saw saw at one of these Wigmore Hall late concerts last year:

Avital Meets Avital, Wigmore Hall Lates, 23 June 2017

A collaboration much like the fusions in Delamina’s food, now I come to think of it.

Here is one of the pieces, from the latest David Orlowsky Trio album, which they played for us at the Wig:

Or try this tiddler, which the Wig used to promote the concert we attended:

We thought the music was wonderful fun; a mixture of smooth jazz and the sort of dance rhythms that central and eastern European music does so well, not least when klezmerised.

Janie and I sat next to an aficionado of the group who told us, sadly, that the trio is due to split soon after a mere 20 years together. Perhaps they feel it is time to pursue other projects. They are all virtuoso musicians; David Orlowsky himself utterly exceptional  on the clarinet but really all three were excellent.

Quite a day; I hope John Thrilwell enjoyed his day as much as I enjoyed mine.