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For The Emigre

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Monday, July 13 1908
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A gold coin celebrating the assassination of Julius Caesar has been auctioned for more than $3m dollars.

50% of a man’s hair is gone before it becomes noticeable.

Good socialists need not refuse a good cigar if it is offered them.

Sri Lanka has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

The suspension of Jeremy Corbyn is a factional attack that has undermined the fight against antisemitism.

Esperanto was created by Doktoro Esperanto.

South Yorkshire Police Operations Complex is on Letsby Avenue.

A gun is 22 times more likely to be used on yourself or a family member than on a home invader.

Sweden has increased its military budget by 40%.

The Democrats are taking quite a lead all over.

Many Indians have arranged-cum-love marriages.

Oreo have built a doomsday vault to protect their cookies from an asteroid.

The boulder is the truth that great men know by instinct. The mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

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—
For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

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‘Remarkably few ‘keepers have become captains; and many of those who have have quickly given up the job.’
— Mike Brearley, The Art of Captaincy

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On strict assurance that he was about to leave the country, the Chairman, Selectors, and Life Members/Platinum Donors Circle of the Rain Men CC collegially thrust the almond-scented chalice of captaincy at your present correspondent, for his final, as it were, run-out. His first act was to press-gang a competent vice captain, N Pool.

This is the East Hants game that Marcus every year says will be played ‘in Bumble’s back garden’; which is completely true, except it’s more like his manorial lands, the whole place is entirely unsignposted and satnav-proof (‘Guy Burgess country’ ©A Doggett-Jones), the ‘garden’ is an impeccably-mown field, off a farm track off a private lane around the corner from a deeply private school (#XMen more like), and hidden even then behind the log piles, garages of classic cars and clubhouse big enough to host wood-burner, hunting trophies, vintage F1 kit, and bespoke toilet poetry. Oh, and said bloke ain’t the actual Bumble. But apart from all that…

We were on time. Almost. And even had a crowd – comprising Marcus, Sam, Amelia and Martha… to say nothing of the dog, who filled in at deep extra cover for the first few overs.

Overwhelmed by the responsibility, the captain promptly lost the toss, but White Hunters agreed to bat first, anyway: the format a match of 70 over total (and you thought you’d seen everything…!), enabling the declaration, draw, and all that jazz, plus local rule of not-out-first-ball which their captain said he was sometimes slightly embarrassed to offer opponents but which Smyth, mindful of how some people get a lot of golden ducks, said would suit us just fine thankyouverymuch.

D Brook, in his first appearance of the year, gamely let himself be volunteered to start the bowling, and plans hatched earlier in the week (gasp!) saw P Reidy stationed at mid-off, to which their opener promptly slapped the first ball. Initially appearing to pouch an absolute sitter, Reidy clearly then recalled the first-ball business, and dismissively allowed the ball to hit the ground.

Thus notified, their No.1 fell anyway to a comfortable catch by D Owen (the only kind he knows, apparently), all part of Brook’s extremely economical 7 overs for just 9 runs. The No.2 went to a sharp run-out (also from Owen). And thus strode to the crease the dark-haired Morgan-Grenville – the first of two or three handsome young spunkers in this team who like to spice things up by playing ‘Name That Tree’ before they heave their 6s into it.

Our would-be-nemesis began despatching it to all parts… and never stopped, Pool and S Sutton manfully absorbing the worst part of the onslaught. Our fielding was actually quite reasonable (above ground, at least), but M-G 1 needed no help to take his opportunities, and by the time he switched to left-hand just to be sure he could hit good clean boundaries that way too, Pool, at what was suddenly mid-off, felt he might as easily admire the strokeplay from the comfort of the grass.

Unbloodied and emphatically unbowed, Morgan-Grenville was graciously recalled to the dressing room on 51 (alas! we shall not see his like again, etc.), whereon one might have thought our luck would start to turn.

At this point, though, the oppo asked what might be ‘sensible’ to aim for, re ‘making a game of it’: 170? 180…? We said 150 might prove quite competitive – but, inexplicably, they did not seem convinced. They also raised the as-yet-undiscussed issue of bowlers being limited to 7 overs, which scoffers, naysayers and milquetoasts of all stripes had feared could pose a problem for us. Sensing our difficulty (ha!), they then withdrew this stipulation; but we agreed the only gentlemanly way though this slight awkwardness was now to demonstrate our veritable smorgasbord of strength in depth.

Step forth gallantly T Russell.
…….“Bowler’s name?”
…….“Russell!”
…….“Russell…?”
…….“As in ‘Bertrand’,” quoth he, rolling his Rs, his eyes, and his sleeves up. He took 3 wickets off his ‘allotted’ 7, including two steeplers which held up in the wind to the advantage of Sutton and a one-handed running grab from Pool at mid-wicket. Russell also took a catch off F Peckham, who was in turn relieved by Doggett-Jones (2 overs for only 7 runs), then joined in the attack (‘…’) by D Fenton, released at last from his grim posting downwind and at the bottom of the slope. He held the line with an extremely creditable 2-0-6-1 (caught behind), while Doggett-Jones relieved himself beneath the conker tree.

Also making his/its season debut, T Russoff’s ‘broad church’ bowling (it’s where he practises?) was, in the circs, unlucky not to claim a wicket. There was the matter, too, of his blown run-out, Owen – having secured his own first, mind – genially offering that the wicketkeeper might have hit the sticks so hard that the ball was not in his gloves at the point of contact (Russoff himself levelly remarking that if the keeper had left the ball entirely alone the Arm of the Lord™ might well have flattened them directly).

At 140-ish for 8 it had seemed possible that we might hold them to a manageable total. Inevitably, though, the remaining gun bats now came in (M-G 2 and Schooler, remembered from his Dulwich College 1st XI kit last year), and proceeded to swash and buckle their way through approx. another 50 runs.

All but one White Hunter having reached double-figures, they declared, amid a few raised eyebrows (and after exactly half the overs), on 195-7. The tea included Skittles – which we chose not to interpret as some pass-agg mindgame.

The captain had but one instruction for his ten Rain Men and true: to smash a six off every first ball – if only, really, to see what might happen.

What happened is that no-one tried it.

Russell was clean-bowled (philosophically) in just the second over, and Doggett-Jones fell shortly after him. Both Davids were now at the crease, though, which boded well, especially once Owen started clipping casual maxima into the woods. His reward, alas, was some debilitating back pain, and he was stumped, most uncharacteristically, and on ‘only’ 29 runs (our second highest), taking a hefty swing at something that was – how to put it? – not there. Brook too was batting fluidly, until a “no-yes-no” mishap, remarkably reminiscent of this same fixture last year, sent him back to the pavilion on an unusually low score.

The Hon. Capt. was welcomed to the crease with a face-height no-ball that he had just enough time and survival instinct to flail over the slips for 4. (The bowler did concede that it was probably a 5.) But, a golden duck having been howsoever Jesuitically avoided, he thus opted for Set Menu B: the familiar series of near-edges, agricultural hoiks, and the essential dropped catch – in this case to the tune of “Oh, bollocks…!” as the ball carved gently and magnetically towards deep backward square… only for the poor fielder to be blinded by the early-evening sun at the right instant.

When Smyth was undone by – natch – a straight ball, we had well over half the runs required, and half our wickets in hand. Or, viewed another way, we had six batsmen left, and perhaps no more than six overs to trouble them.

But Rain Men aren’t renowned for riding out inevitable, boring draws without them getting just a *bit* exciting.

Sutton went for a duck, and Pool followed not long after with an edge to slip. Fenton chose this strategically crucial time to boost his averages, clubbing away a couple of healthy fours before obligingly taking on an unproblematic ball about a yard outside off stump and dinking it to M-G 1 at mid-on. And behold, suddenly blood was in the water, and White Hunters needed two wickets to win.

The opening attack returned – but sadly for them their efforts were, quite literally, misdirected, a dozen immaculate away-swingers coming down like the wolf upon the fold in first slip’s flannels. (If only they had thought to aim, er, at the stumps.) Under a barrage of ‘encouragement’ from the fielding side, Peckham displayed the sang froid of a Victorian statue, and Reidy – under categorically unambiguous direction from his teammate – was obliged to put the willow on the leather just once.

And then, with two balls to go, it was no longer possible for them to win. It’s not the done thing, I’m sure, for the square-leg umpire to be seen punching the air; but there we have it. With Russoff d.n.b., we’d clinched the ‘moral victory’* by a parson’s nose.

We repaired, all in good sporting humour, to the Thos. Lord pub, in West Meon, where, high on the fumes of having locked in a better all-time captaincy record than S Rose, I could have sworn I saw a diorama of dead woodland animals above the bar, playing a cricket match.

–
* We came joint second by exactly 60 runs. Or ten 6s, NB, in your old money

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Monday, July 13 1908
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The human population has almost doubled since we landed on the Moon.

Genital preferences are transphobic.

The third umpire will have the final say on the snatch.

It is against the rules to take a lamb to school.

The market for Argentinian chewing-gum manufacture is very hard to break into.

Greek philosophers were not always as wise as they claimed.

Josef Stalin trusted only one man: Adolf Hitler.

An average sentence in a German newspaper is a sublime and impressive curiosity.

Florence and Bertha aren’t among the top 10,000 girls’ names now.

There is no phone reception in West Sussex.

As many histories as possible should be written.

The going rate for one song at a funeral is approx. £150.

The thing that’s best if you’re feeling glum is coconut water with a little rum.
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Colombo. The Galle and Pallakele matches lately over, the series lost, and the selectors falling back on Maitland Place in hopes of inspiration for the third and final test.

The last of the erratic rains now gone, the water in the half-uncovered sewers stagnant, rank with garbage. One might not be surprised to see a starving crocodile shamble desperately inland from the Beira Lake. Sea-misted smog drapes, sulkily, along the coast, the Chinese dock work hurling dust into the air as it claws land back from the ocean’s warm insistence.

The sun still harshly present, if hardly visible. The town about its routine business. Stray dogs, all indistinguishable pariahs, lying panting on the pavements; the beggars scarcely better, heat-blasted, all-too-grateful for the slightest splash of generosity. Foot passengers in moistened Bata slippers, keeping extremities beyond the reach of swerving auto-rickshaws and on-rushing omnibuses; office secretaries in saris, umbrellas jostling with a cordial lack of urgency; clerks in unsympathetically-soled city shoes, tripping occasionally on broken paving slabs and buckled tree roots, like thousands of their countrymen before them. Leather-faced, rough-stubbled sweepers fighting valiantly to remove the day’s detritus (if indeed this day is distinct from the one before it), crows, bats and other fauna adding new deposits to the crust, the compound interest of existence.

But cricket – everywhere. Cricket from the high Anglican environs of Mount Lavinia to the long-venerable sports clubs of Havelock Town and Cinnamon Gardens; cricket at the well-kempt forces grounds across Slave Island, and on north to the Premadasa stadium, which casts its shadows on the shunting yards. Cricket up the Galle Road, in narrow lanes and private driveways, and over empty strips of road at poya; cricket down the Baseline Road, at union workers’ grounds and prison yards, in the college and the vidyalaya sports facilities, and on the hardened dirt tracks of the public playing fields.

Cricket drifting in and out of windows on the airwaves; cricket dressing building sites, on half-torn fliers; cricket wrapping short eats in stapled newsprint. Cricket in the ears of the bus conductor as he counts out change; cricket in the day-dreams of white-bearded elders as they journey homeward; cricket in the oversize bags of tiny schoolboys, conveniently kitted out in pristine white.

Cricket in the afternoon on Galle Face Green, and in the lobbies of two- and three-star boarding houses. Illicit early-evening cricket in the temple courtyard, played by the young monks, after duties. Night cricket on the roofs and in the gardens round the international schools. Cricket the length and breadth of this sprawled, and sport-obsessive city.

Come rain or shine, defeat or victory, cricket on billboards, bus shelters, projector screens in pool halls. Cricket in bookies’ shops (the formal and the more informal kind), cricket on telephones, cricket in conversations at the grills of bottle stores, and in communications outlets. Cricket as a base commodity – as film, as hardware, as ritual vestment – in commercial streets, department stores and markets. And cricket peddling in its turn: the heroes of the bygone age, their names and faces writ large on the sweetshop hoardings, street signs, walls of emporia, viaducts, lending their lustre to the jewellery trade, assurance firms, vendors of soft drinks, chain stores, and providers of sundry other services.

But when the hot afternoon is at its hottest, and the bright glare is brightest, and the thirsty cricket-loving gentleman is at his thirstiest, there is, in truth, but one appropriate destination. Here, hard by the Bambalapitiya Junction – well-served by railway and stagecoach, equipped with automobile spaces, and known to every hansom driver – just across from the stately, vaulting dignity of the British Council, on Queen’s Road, at the very beating heart of all this cricket – here sits The Cricket Club Café.

Never can there come a cricketing occasion too big, never can there be a match too early or too late, which The Cricket Club, this primary temple to the gods of cricket – itself pre-eminent among the sports – is not ten times more than a match.

On such a day, as on so many like it, the Proprietress will herself be bustling about – as indeed she is now – within her avocado-painted palisade, in the garden beneath the flowering frangipani, or inside the white-walled, red-roofed bungalow, endeavouring to attend to the administration of her establishment without being drawn into a conversation with a journeyman of the enthusiastic class, who thinks – and talks, need it be said – of nothing but the cricket. On such a day – as here they are – some twenty or so members of an English village touring side will be dining at one agglomerate, unwieldy table, attempting to trip one another up over technicalia, reminiscing, in detail, on their own and international lifetime batting figures, feigning ignorance of their own grosser misdemeanors in preceding seasons, and all in all pretending to a comradeship that might be even less sincere than it is mutual. On such a day – as are they not? – at least one large Sri Lankan family birthday party will be in progress, some two or three perhaps contending to take on the business from their father, who made a fortune by it, ranged in a line, discussing legal and financial quandaries, the aptness of their academic training, headmasters’ reports, their mountainous expenditure on tuition classes, their swimming certificates… the younger offspring keeping their eyes on the unfolding innings – or folding up, as might too often be the case.

Well may the back bar be ill lit, and pervaded with the stale fug of cigarettes; well may the propinquity of the front parlour be so cheek-by-jowl that one’s conversation is clearly audible to every man, woman and child seated therein; well may the chilly, over-punkah-wallah’d family room, on the East side, be deleterious for anyone not drinking hot soup; well may each and every room have conflicting journalistic coverage (present or archival) of two or more unrelated sporting contests performed at any given time; and well, indeed, as the hours wear on, may the assembled drivers, vagabonds and passers-by out on Queen’s Road be decidedly deterred from entrance by the hearty chuntering of much-contented, moneyed folk.

But this is The Cricket Club, which has its signposts directing travellers to Newlands, Lord’s and Eden Gardens; which has its vitrines stocked with Botham’s bat, Greg Chappell’s shoes, Wasim Akram’s shirt, and caps from every franchise on the subcontinent; which has long-sleeved jumpers worn through yeoman innings; which has its signed photographs of youthful Indian legends and hard, West Indian enforcers; which has its telegrams from national premiers to their leading batsmen; which has its clocks telling the time in cricketing capitals (sometimes as much as twice a day); which has its framed newspapers celebrating Sri Lanka’s World Cup victory; which has virtual shrines to Bradman, Warne and Muralitharan; which has its punning menus, randomly apostrophised and intermittently updated, but never – like the laws of the great game – changing too radically in the fundamentals; which has its ‘slash outside the off stump’ mural in the gents; which even has that tea towel explaining cricket to ‘a foreign visitor’ (though who has given that a second glance?). From floor to ceiling, North to South, and port to starboard, these are the glories – howsoever intangible and fleeting – of cricket, the whole cricket, and nothing but the cricket, which among lesser men exhausts the finances, patience, courage, and hope, but which among heroes so overflows the brain and impassions the heart that there is not an one among the patrons here who would not – does not – hasten in and cry, with heedless confidence: “I’ll have the ‘Punters’ Pepper Chicken, please. And a pint of Lion Larger.”

—
Also published at The Oldie

— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 24 1907
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There is an injury called ‘tennis elbow of the heel’.

The rocks in the Sultanate of Oman are special.

Hitler only started all the Nazi bollocks because he was such a godawful painter.

There is no necessary connection between the poetic vocation on the one hand, and on the other exhibitionism, egoism, and licence.

Too much pudding will choak a dog.

In Tibetan there is no word for a mountain summit.

Stephen Merchant’s dad is stingy.

In June 2009 Edwin Rist stole 299 stuffed birds from the Natural History Museum in Tring, worth $1 million.

Francis Urquhart MP was a lieutenant in the Scots Guards.

Whether our first parent, Adam, had any pretensions to the art of pugilism, is involved in too great obscurity, at this remote period, for us to penetrate into with any possibility of success.

Only four US states require police officers to exhaust alternatives before resorting to deadly force.

The London International Palaeography Summer School offers over 25 courses in palaeography, codicology, and manuscript studies.

Samaritans answer 6000 calls a day in the UK. A further 15,000 phone-calls go unanswered.
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—
For The Spectator

— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 23 1907
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The first pedestrian has been killed by a self-driving car.

Starbucks employees do not capitalise their As.

The sound of the bagpipe fattens the sheep and lambs of all Arabia.

125 academic papers mention Adam Smyth.

At 53 one is too old for Everest.

Moldiv Smooth Skin will make your skin flawless.

Babies learn the practicalities of distance by repeatedly punching themselves in the face.

Gustav Mahler put the word ‘schwer‘ beside certain passages in his musical scores.

In a fundraising speech, American president Donald Trump has said he made up facts during a meeting with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Cutlery should always be kept in the top drawer.

Easter Island – or ‘Rapa Nui’ – belongs to Chile.

Poetry readings are the worst form of entertainment that has ever been invented.

A five-star review is a five-star review.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, October 4 1906
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The beheading of the sperm whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves.

Great lips take hydration and balls.

Pease pudding has been flagged up by airport security on more than one occasion.

There is a place in China called Asbestos County.

At 35, 139, Labour MP Diane Abbott’s majority in 2017 was greater than the total number of General Election votes Nigel Farage has received in his entire career.

Zmas rushes towards us like a slavering one-eyed hell-hound.

A suspected thief in Mumbai has been fed 36 bananas in an attempt to recover stolen property.

The Celler can rock. Yes.

House, M.D. is the most popular TV show worldwide.

A young man from Torbay has, on a long boat trip to the Far East, found himself the object of the amorous intentions of a gorilla.

Richard II was a Free Brother.

The Swedish have no verb for ‘to bowl a cricket ball’.

Bognor’s ‘wrong Theresa May’ is awaiting an apology from Donald Trump.
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