The piece pretty much speaks for itself. It was a heartfelt, if slightly tongue in cheek, tribute to Richie Benaud, who died on the day I was preparing to go to the cricket with Charley “the Gent” Malloy for the first time in 2015.
In all seriousness, I asked Janie if she thought it was in bad taste. She used to treat Daphne Benaud and had met Richie several times. Janie thought that the piece would have appealed to Richie’s sense of humour. But she didn’t think that Richie would attempt to use self-service checkout machines in supermarkets.
Not only had the season flown by in a “lost time” manner, that day and evening similarly flew by.
There was a meet the players party in the evening which, if I recall correctly, was quite well attended by Durham guests as well as Middlesex players that year. Did Chas and I manage a quick chat with Colly at that one? Chas might remember.
And talking of remembrance of things past, the match turned out to be one to forget from a Middlesex point of view – see Cricinfo details here.
This piece is, in a way, the first part of a trilogy. It is linked to a couple of other pieces about Ged and Daisy encountering Mr Johnny Friendly, an MCC member, friend of the family and real tennis enthusiast. In reverse order:
This piece inadvertently became the first part of a trilogy because I misspelt Jane Austen as Jane Austin in this piece. King Cricket missed the error when he subbed; both of us metaphorically ate our own livers for the error in private, but I decided to milk the pun when we ran into Mr Johnny Friendly again.
The irony that I myself have subsequently taken up real tennis with gusto is not wasted on me.
To understand my King Cricket match reports you need to know that:
Ged and Daisy are nicknames/noms de plume for me and Janie. Friends are all referred to pseudonymously;
King Cricket match reports have strict rules: “If it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. If it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.”
It was not the most exciting day’s cricket we’ve ever seen. Daisy said the match was destined for a draw and of course she was right. Except that a nail-biter of a nine-down squeaky-bum draw is not the sort of draw Daisy probably had in mind. Of course the King Cricket report is silent on such details.
A working day, but I did have a pile of reading to do and a hope for good weather and an opportunity to go to Lord’s.
The match started inauspiciously for a gentleman in search of Day Four cricket at Lord’s, but Mick Hunt’s ability to produce tracks that end up lifeless knows no bounds sometimes.
At the time of writing (December 2016), there is much chat about Joe Root being lined up for the England captaincy – here is a very early example of him leading an almost unbeatable side to heroic defeat.
The other thing worth saying, absent from my King Cricket report as mentioning the cricket itself is prohibited there, is that I got to Lord’s just in time to witness Chris Rogers get to the 200 mark soon after lunch; I witnessed that from the Warner Stand before moving on to the sunshine elsewhere.
The Journey & The Night Before The Match; 8 August 2013
This adventure was very nearly stillborn for me and Janie, as she was very poorly in the couple of days leading up to our trip up to Durham for the fourth Ashes test of 2013. Indeed, Janie, who is normally very averse to taking antibiotics, had almost bullied her doctor into prescribing same, as her throat was so sore from whatever summer bug/flu she had caught.
Janie said she felt a bit better on the morning we were setting off; I agreed to do most if not all of the driving as long as we had breaks. Soon after we started our drive north, Janie started coughing like (in retrospect, writing this in 2022) a Covid-19 victim. I suggested that we turn around, but Janie insisted that we persevere.
I recall that I had bought/brought some Prefab Sprout and Kane Gang music to get us into the County Durham spirit and that we were listening to The King Of Rock ‘N’ Roll at that juncture.
But I digress.
It was a relatively small and diffuse gathering of Heavy Rollers that year. Nigel “Father Barry” Hinks had Viv (“Mrs Father Barry”) with him but she was seeing friends and didn’t want to join us for any cricket. They had arranged to stay in a “bijou but entirely satisfactory, and generously-equipped, terraced-cottage on Gilesgate”, in Durham, which is just a few miles away from Chester-le-Street.
Not wishing to be outdone by “bijou” in Durham, I had found a well-reviewed “boutique-style” place at a similar distance to the ground, in Seaham, The Seaton Lane Inn. In the end there were just the three of us staying there, me, Daisy and Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett; Dot (Mrs Malloy) originally planned to join us, but withdrew a few weeks before the event.
Chas was very kind and concerned about Daisy the night we arrived. She didn’t want to eat dinner – we had brought a few “easy to swallow snacks” with us. But in the end she did come down and join us for a while. Chas and I enjoyed a good meal at that place – Chas especially being taken with the Villa Wolf Riesling I well remember.
Chas took a picture of me and Daisy in the restaurant – I must say she looks healthier than me – but perhaps I had slightly overindulged in the Villa Wolf by then…or perhaps this picture was taken a little later in the trip, when Daisy was feeling much better.
Three Days Of Cricket At Chester-le-Street, 9 to 11 August 2013
The cricket was excellent throughout the match, as of course was the company. Chas had secured us front row seats in a temporary stand, which turned out to be a good location with an excellent view.
We felt safe/”protected”, for much of the match, by a fairly sizeable group of “Knights Templar”, who got louder and more tipsy as each day went on. It’s just as well they were never called upon to defend our lives towards the end of the day.
Daisy was still not feeling very well on the first morning, but I persuaded her to join us on the basis that we could always get her cabbed home within 15-20 minutes if she felt she needed to lie down. Access to and from that Chester-le-Street ground is excellent, despite it being a little out of town.
Fortunately the fresh air, good weather and good cricket started to make Daisy feel better pretty quickly.
One of the evenings (I think possibly the evening after the second day’s play) all five of us (including Viv) dined, I think it was at Oldfields in Durham – pretty good but now gone.
If anything ever goes awry with the King Cricket website, click here for a scrape of that piece. The tale of Nigel’s interaction with Jonathan Agnew for a personally-signed book and Chas’s attempt to obtain similar for no good reason is worth the price of admission alone. (There is no price of admission, btw). To quote Nigel reflecting, nearly 10 years later, on his visit to that shop with Chas…
Most [memorable]: “Boycott bingo “ and protestations to some innocent shop staff, possibly seeking a little supplementation to mounting student loans? I am certain I heard one say something along the lines of “that induction morning had precious little about this sort of thing, did it?” The other one appeared to slowly mouth “stick-of-rhubarb?” as she sought the exit.
Day Four – The Journey Home And Witnessing The Denouement On The TV
A small tinge of regret that we hadn’t booked to see four days, but still Janie and I enjoyed the last day as “driving home entertainment” on the radio and we were fortunate enough to get home in time to see the ending on the telly.
I wrote the following in an e-mail to the lads to summarise that day and the experience:
Janie really enjoyed the experience, despite her bad luck getting poorly a few days before the off. She is feeling so much better now.
What a win. We listened to the thrilling morning session and much of the frustrating afternoon session on the road.
Hippity points out that England didn’t get a wicket until he and Monkey-Face had been placed in front of the TV again, along with Hippity’s lucky ball.
Broad’s bowling once he got his hackles up again was extraordinary, especially as he did the damage with the old ball. And Bresnan’s ball to nip out Warner was possibly his finest yet.
2014 we host Sri Lanka and India. Too soon to start thinking seriously about it, I know!!
Thanks to you especially, Charles, for organising those amazing seats.
As the Kane Gang put it – “…this could be the closest thing to heaven…”
But back to our Midlands and the North trip. We started with a couple of nights in Nottingham, in order to enjoy the second day of the county cricket season as guests of Nottinghamshire CCC. I wrote up our Nottinghamshire day, 11 April, for King Cricket – click here for that King Cricket (cricket-free) report.
Then on the 12th to the village of Wormleighton, in Warwickshire the spiritual home of Janie’s family. No-one knows how the family came to have that name. Probably because someone in the dim and distant past came from there and probably not because Janie is descended from the Spencer family (which pretty-much owned the village), despite the Churchillian and Princess Diana resemblances in Janie’s family.
For the uninitiated, Ged and Daisy are our pet names for each other and have been so for over 20 years.
We stayed at Wormleighton Hall, which is a rather grand farm house just outside the village – formerly the squires residence I shouldn’t wonder and now the home of the tenant farmers who make the whole thing work commercially by running the place as a small hotel as well as a farm. Lovely family; into all the local countryside stuff. We visited the Mollington point-to-point which they were attending on the 13th and took some excellent pictures of the local tribes at leisure.
Sighting of local tribesfolk at the Mollington point-to-point
On 14th we went to Chipping Norton to visit brother-in-law Tony and his lovely second wife Liz.
Hockney says you cannot properly photograph these Wolds scenes
On 15th, off to North Yorkshire, driving the eastern-side to see and photograph Hockney country before reaching The Star, where we stayed and ate in great style for a few days.
Farndale, the lower, less visited part
On 16th we went on a Farndale walk in search of daffodils, surprisingly successfully as the cold start to the spring had delayed the daffs, but they were just starting to show well our day – good fortune.
17th we drove South-West to Saltaire and had a look at the town and some art gallery-style Hockney stuff. 18th we spent at leisure and walking around the Star’s vicinity (Harome).
19th we drove home. Middlesex were again in action against Derbyshire (Day 3) and as we drove home we realised that an improbable early result to the match was on the cards. After stopping off at the house, I went on (alone) in the car to catch the end of the match and witness a Middlesex win – here’s the card. Quite a week for us and for Middlesex.
Also there was the backdrop of the riots that summer, which were unfolding as we arrived and during our stay, although leafy Harborne seemed unaware of or at least untouched by them.
Naturally Nigel and I made the most of it without Chas. It would be cruel to harp on about the extent to which we were nevertheless able to enjoy ourselves despite Chas’s indisposition. In any case, I doubtless harped sufficiently when I saw Charles again a bit later that season.
It must have been especially galling for Chas as I seem to recall he had gone to a great deal of trouble that year to secure our “honorary” front row seats, book nets, book rooms, book an Indian feast…oy!
I believe that I drove up that year having booked the extra night after the second day’s play. That might have been Nobby’s only visit to Harborne Hall.
For those who have the stomach to look (i.e. most often neutrals and Surrey fans for these occasions), actually it looks as thought his was a pretty good match, despite the fact that I must have missed quite a fair chunk of it – click here for the scorecard and reports.
One extra bit of evidence on who, from “Ged Ladd & Co”, attended that time, in addition to “The Tiberellis”, comes from Jez’s e-mail to me a few week’s before the match:
Mark
Monique
Steph
Ben
Rich
David
Simon Strez would also like to come as it’s his last chance to see a cricket game in England before returning home to New Zealand. I also have 3 friends that will be coming to the game.
We needed a long and complete break after the loss of Phillie, Janie’s twin, in December. But this holiday was a long and ambitious one by any measure.
We were planning it at very short notice, by our standards, of course, but fortune smiled upon us in that planning. The Central Plains of India; Chhattisgarh and Orissa (Odisha) can be quite politically volatile, Foreign Office advice yo-yos between “no problem” and “only go if need be”, due to Naxalite/Maoist activity. But what a fascinating tribal part of India it is.
Anyway, it was a safe time to go at that time and the plan, through Steppes East who were excellent on this one, was to use the family of the Maharajah of Kanker as our guides in that region. This was a great idea; Jolly Deo, the Maharajkumar, was the perfect host and guide. We learnt lots and had fun along the way.
We were also fortunate in the Sri Lanka leg of the trip; an opportunity to have a large villa in Galle Old Town all to ourselves for the price of a hotel room came up, by virtue of the villa only recently coming back onto the holiday market following a long-term family stay. I suppose our experience there was a bit like a cross between AirBnB (except without making life hell for the neighbours) and Lastminute.com.
In short, there were loads of adventures to write up from this holiday – pages and pages and pages of the stuff….
…and they are all up there now – pretty much one posting per day. The posting for the first day of the holiday can be seen by clicking here or below:
Here are links to the photo albums, which I divided up into six short albums, one for each “leg” of the trip:
If you are really keen to explore my hand-written notes, just to make sure I have written them up properly, here they are in pdf form and good luck to you:
Here is the Steppes East itinerary, also available for download – at least you’ll be able to read this one: Itinerary-Wormleighton.
Finally, there are photo albums on flickr of the pictures that didn’t make the cut for the main albums – there are some gems in there nonetheless for picture lovers:
Here is a link to the King Cricket piece, which relates to one of several games of garden cricket on that holiday – this one at the Frangipani Tree, near Galle, on 19 February:
Frankly, some of the comments are better than my report – it is worth reading for them. King Cricket can be like that.
Lord’s isn’t the only place where cricket and tennis intertwine
Here is my contemporaneous journal record for the whole day:
Very heavy overnight rain – some of Daisy’s things get wet – no point in even considering tennis this morning at seven – Daisy does hair drying instead.
We invent our own exercise regime.
Breakfast, reading (Kalooki Nights), lunch of grilled calamari, chips and bread! With beer.
World Cup [cricket] 2011 starts but we play our own garden version.
Five aside, Wojciech refuses to play but tennis ball cricket enables Daisy to have a go.
We make a respectable 89 for three of eight (I scored 15 in an open stand of 40 odd). We meet “Major General” Richard and his sporty son Chris (my opening partner) and daughter Millie and who knows we might meet the wife (Rosie?).
Our side loses as big fella Sanjay takes advantage of asymmetric field which helps left-hander with big hitting ability.
Even Daisy scores a run off my bowling.
More reading afterwards, followed by dinner of lamb tajine followed by chocolate ice cream washed down with a Spanish Crianza
Tough day.
Our album of Galle photos, all 31 of them, can be seen through the flickr album below:
Our other Sri Lanka photos- 79 excluded from the album – can be found through the link below:
