The above logo used with the kind permission of King Cricket
For many years I have written occasional guest pieces for the amusing cricket website, King Cricket. Most pieces are written by webmeister Alex Bowden; a fine writer and good bloke.
My contributions tend to be in the following, especially whimsical, King Cricket categories:
- Cricket paraphernalia in unusual places;
- Animals being conspicuously indifferent to cricket;
- Cricket match reports, which must meet one of two strict criteria:
- if it’s a professional match, on no account can the writer mention the cricket itself,
- if it’s an amateur match, the author is expected to go into excruciating detail about the cricket.
I realise that I have just generated a small list; a list of King Cricket categories.
But that is not the list I want to talk about today. No.
I keep a list of my submissions; I call it my King Cricket Article Log.
That’s the list I want to talk about. There are 83 articles on the list at present; 75 published and eight pieces awaiting publication.
I could simply cut, paste and read all the article titles…but I don’t think that would be much fun for you, or me.
Instead, I have written a highlights list, with explanations, which might be an entertaining story in its own right:
- An early piece was a picture of a Buddhist Monk at Rumtek Monastery in Sikkhim brandishing a cricket bat, with a short explanation of how I came to take that picture;
- A more recent paraphernalia piece is entitled “Stumps In A Salford Toilet”; a more “salubrious” story than it sounds;
- A rare submission in the animals category came when I spotted, at Lord’s, a cricket being conspicuously indifferent to the Home of Cricket;
- I have my own mini categories for book reviews, including:
- cricket books read in unusual places – I reviewed one classic cricket book on a bullet train to Kyoto;
- books you might not expect to read at a cricket match; I read Iphigenia Among The Taurians, at Southgate, while watching a county match.
- I often describe the food I have prepared for the cricket as the centrepiece of the match report. One proud recipe is my bacon-studded oat cookie, named The Lord’s Throdkin, in honour of the Fylde Coast dish upon which the cookie is based;
- Occasional mini-series, such as a fictionalised trilogy about encounters with a real tennis enthusiast friend at Lord’s, written before I became a “realers” nut myself;
- My anthropomorphic artefacts sometimes guest write. In one, Dumbo, my car, tells of the day he was subjected to a “random” stop and search on the All Saints Road while on the way to Lord’s with me & my cricket coffin in his capacious rear. Dumbo remains convinced that he was only stopped because he is black;
- Anthropomorphism reached its authorship extreme with a 2016 trip to Birmingham for business and cricket, written up in the form of The Sound & The Fury by William Faulkner, with Benjy the Baritone Ukulele as Benjy Compson, Ivan Meagreheart The Smartphone as Quintin Compson, Dumbo as Jason Compson and me, Ged, as the narrator. You need to know that I am Ged and Janie is Daisy in King Cricket’s world…otherwise The Sound, Fury and much else will not make sense;
- Most recently, nom de plume Ged has been trashed by my old Keele nom de plume, Herbert Ackgrass, damning Ged’s entire Keele cricket “career” in 400 words and one diagram;
- Rarely, I write a serious piece for King Cricket, such as the 2019 launch of cricket facilities in Deptford Park by my cricket charity, The London Cricket Trust;
- Many pieces are travel adventures, such as:
- the day England (me), took on Tibet in a high altitude game of cricket, with zho dung, sods of earth or pine cones as balls;
- the occasion in Chhattisgarh, Central India, when our guide wisely avoided a Naxalite hostage crisis in Narayanpur, diverting us to Jagdalpur, where I got press-ganged into commentating live to thousands of people at an Interstate cricket match – landing me & Daisy on TV and in newspapers;
- But my favourites are simple tales of cricket as an excuse for eating and drinking with friends, such as:
- my first piece for King Cricket, in 2008, reporting a day with Charles Bartlett, aka “Charley The Gent Malloy”, spending much of the day eating dim sum in Royal China on Queensway, rather than watching the rain at Lord’s;
- a recently published piece about the hottest day of 2014, when Ian Theodoreson, aka Iain Spellwright, and I almost fried to death in the exposed Compton Stand.
Alex Bowden often publishes my pieces “fashionably late”; not knowing when they’ll be released is part of the fun for me. That’s why I keep a canonical list of my King Cricket submissions.
Review Of The Evening
As the brief for this ThreadZoomMash was to write a story based on a list, I think I owe it to the evening’s central conceit to review the evening in the form of a list:
- Rohan introduced the evening with some thoughts on what lists are in the grander scheme of things and how they might become central to our stories;
- Julie read a truly brilliant short story about a very short-lived romance in the form of a series of daily do-lists;
- Geraldine had us in stitches with story named Stitches, about a trip long ago with her baby and an infeasibly long packing list for an activities weekend;
- Then I performed my King Cricket piece;
- Ian Theodoreson then recited a very poignant and thought-provoking piece about to do lists with items crossed off, which was in some ways a stroll through the different types of to do lists that have been relevant throughout his life. Ian has upped his piece, The List, to his own website, Living In Hope – click here ;
- Jill’s list story was very imaginative; based on the idea that all the things she (or her character in the story) had done to escape an unsatisfactory employment were in the form of theme park activities, which she explored as a list of such things;
- Jan talked about her love of lists, discussing several different types of list before settling on her “Grumpy List”, a surprisingly short list of highly amusing bugbears. So, we then moved on to…;
- …Kay, who opened with a Dorothy Parker quote, which led in to her list of the men/boys for whom she has strong and poignant memories of why she was attracted to them. It was a wonderful mixture of charming, funny and dark;
- Terry’s piece was called The Gratitude List. It mostly comprised a list of the people he’s been closest to and to whom Terry is perennially grateful. It was a very touching piece.
We had a great chat about each other’s pieces after the readings, which made for a very enjoyable gathering, as always.
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