—
For The Critic

The opposition, Rain Men, were captained by my friend and usual team-mate Simon, whose excuse was that he’d only played the game 263 times previously. The other captain was, er, me.

I staffed it out (to my younger and more-gifted brother, specifically). For Simon’s part, I gather he was cruelly sent a copy of Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy. But what we could really both have used, perhaps, was the Bluffer’s Guide to Cricket.

‘Only a fool will start bluffing without a basic knowledge of how to play the game,’ say James Trollope and Nick Yapp, authors of this revised and updated 126 pages of ‘instant wit and wisdom’™.

But as anyone who has ever even heard of cricket is aware, there is nothing remotely basic about it, a sport so intellectually and emotionally discombobulating – not to say physically demanding – that players have to stop repeatedly for food and, at the highest levels of the game, sleep. The laws of cricket, per se, may only take up 30 pages, but they are mostly small print. (‘You’d be better off learning irregular verbs in Serbo-Croat.’) So, pretty soon, we are clarifying vital minutiae such as the Duckworth Lewis Method (‘not a form of birth control’), how you should never bluff around a man holding a scorebook, and why no-one ever thinks he’s caught a ‘dolly’.

All these things – it goes without saying – are entirely uproarious for those who’ve actually played some cricket. (Americans need not write in.)

Of course, a lot of rubbish is talked around and indeed within the boundary of a cricket match, not least because there is so much time available, especially when – hypothetically speaking – one has been sent back to the dressing room by an unplayable left-arm inswinging first-ball yorker. And as even the most otherworldly amateur cricketing gentleman will confirm, there is no surer test of one’s relationship than bringing an uninitiated girlfriend along to a full day’s village cricket. On this, readers may wish to take with a pinch of salt the suggestion that ‘you might be surprised (and relieved) to discover that a lot of talk at a cricket match doesn’t actually involve cricket.’ And only a certifiable lunatic would repeat within earshot the opinion that ‘rather like the offside rule in football, nobody is quite sure how [the lbw ‘rule’] works.’

But for those plucky chaps (and chapesses) brave enough to want to hold their own on or near the field of glory, there are sub-sections on ‘bodyline’, Test Match Special, and the importance of ‘the protection’; tips on what to say about the national side (‘Pretending to be an Englishman if you’re actually a South African is bluffing of the highest order’); mini-biographies of the great and good (incl. Fuller Pilch, 1803–1870, who played, cut grass, and tended bar for what is now my village club); and a glossary of Johnsonian-type definitions (‘Beamer: … Bowlers always pretend they didn’t mean to’). There’s even – gasp – a bit on women’s cricket.

Still, ‘there’s no point in pretending that you know everything about cricket – nobody does’ (Trollope and Yapp have not met Marcus Berkmann, obviously…). But having riffled – and/or ROFLd – through their waggish pages, you could at least consider yourself ‘a bona fide expert in the art of bluffing about the world’s most puzzling and incomprehensible game’.

A word of warning, though: ‘An extreme bluffer may even take the dangerous step of accepting an invitation to play. This is not recommended.’

Witty, mischievous, and above all thoroughly genial, The Bluffer’s Guide to Cricket is among Haynes Publishing’s (they of the car manuals) ‘refreshed’ line-up of 16 Bluffer’s Guides, spanning – and occasionally cross-referencing – such typical pre-, post- and even intra-prandial conversational ‘opportunities’ as fishing, beer, golf, cats, cycling, and management.

With the series now well into its sixth decade, discerning Oldie readers might also enjoy the classic Keith Hann volume on opera (Kiri Te Kanawa is related to Sir Arthur Sullivan, by adoption), William Hanson’s drippingly snotty guide to etiquette (please don’t stack the Sèvres china…), Susie Boniface’s implacable run-down of social media, and Jonathan Goodall and Harry Eyres on that holiest of all bullshitter’s – I, I… I mean ‘bluffer’s’ – holy grails: talking about (rather than simply getting on and drinking) wine.

There is, obviously, a bluff (a double-bluff?) inherent in the Bluffer’s Guides – which is that no-one’s ever going to come to these for explanations. The market, surely, is people who already understand a thing and would like some cheerful British humour on the subject. By way of Christmas presents, probably. This only works, of course, if the information in the books is broadly accurate. All the same, a good few authors bluff on their relative unfitness to write authoritatively about their chosen topics.

The latest in the series is The Bluffer’s Guide to Brexit.

DO SAY
‘Keep calm and negotiate.’

DON’T SAY
‘Let’s hold another referendum on whether to hold another referendum.’

Possessors of strong views on the elephant in the room de nos jours will be pleased (or displeased…?) to find that Boris Starling’s primer tells you what to say – and with the aid of 54 footnotes, what is more – but it doesn’t tell you what to think. Starling’s back-page biog maintains ‘he determinedly keeps his own counsel about Brexit… refusing to be drawn on his views about something so fraught with imponderables’. (Elsewhere he claims he asked his editor to guess at his position on the matter.)

For the rest of us, though, on this, as on so many topics, would-be bluffers can console themselves with Starling’s fundamental theme: ‘Only one thing can be said with certainty about Brexit: nobody knows anything.’

The Bluffer’s Guides are (re)published today

—
For The Oldie, in a different edit

My relationship with G&S had started early, specifically the argument in Three Men in a Boat over which song Harris is trying to sing (I remain confused to this day). Block-booked family cheap-seats at the ENO fed this enthusiasm through my adolescence, until at secondary school I played the part of Nanki Poo in a local girls’ concert performance of The Mikado (fitting punishment for any teenager who think he’s an heroic tenor). During my A Levels, I sang ‘He who shies’ from Iolanthe with two fellow 6th-formers – at which point I realised I was not a tenor and made us all swap roles before we went on stage.

At Oxford, I found the collegiate choral life a little stultifying, and a turn as Florian in Princess Ida provided one way out.

They were a weird and wonderful bunch, the G&S Society – from the otherworldly to the decidedly worldly. A dapper junior law lecturer rubbed shoulders with a chap who worked behind the counter at the local Barclays. Young ladies with evident social prospects duetted with slightly-less-young ladies on 10-year PhD courses. The Fellow of All Souls who’d performed with the Kazakh National Opera (or somesuch) could routinely be found wolfing down a fry-up in St Giles beside the first-year undergrad who’d turned up once for Cox & Box to turn the pages, in a yellow tracksuit.

Sometimes there was even the odd (‘Tzing! Boom!’) musician.

The OUGSS get through about three shows a year, and so it was with many of these fine folks I found myself performing Iolanthe at the Holywell Music Room, in Michaelmas (that’s autumn) term, 2002.

Gilbert and Sullivan’s fourth consecutive smash hit, premiered simultaneously in the UK and the US in 1882 (the first new show to do this, in an effort to prevent piracy), was also the first production to open at D’Oyly Carte’s purpose-built Savoy Theatre, and the first therefore to be lit entirely by electric lighting.

In every other respect, though, it was a formulaic G&S gig. Iolanthe is a fairy banished from Fairyland for marrying a mortal. She has a son, Strephon – ‘an Arcadian shepherd’ – who is in love with Phyllis, which would be fine except that a) he’s a bit of a fairy himself, and b) Phyllis is a Ward of Chancery, and not only the Lord Chancellor but also every other member of the House of Lords had been rather hoping to marry her himself. Still, everything is going swimmingly until young Strephon is caught embracing his suspiciously attractive mother who, for reasons too theologically complicated to go into here, is eight years younger than him (‘Oh, fie! Our Strephon is a rogue!’). The fairies go to war against the upper house, returning Strephon to Parliament ‘carrying every bill he may wish’ and opening the peerage to – gasp! – ‘competitive examination.’

I was cast as George, Earl of Mountararat (Wikipedia: ‘See also: “Mount Ararat” and “Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act 1907”’), a peer who barely has a line before the second act. (Wikipedia also has the Lord Chancellor down as ‘comic baritone’, where Mountararat is staunchly ‘baritone’. Hear, hear.)

I remember learning my lines in a single late-night bus trip back from London – almost successfully. But that’s about the only thing I do remember. This was a ‘busy’ time for me (‘Faint heart never won fair lady,’ and all that). The flyer in my copy says we did a night in Bletchingdon Church. Well, I suppose it must have happened.

But I do know G&S is not as easy to pull off as one might think. Gilbert’s trademark (and bestselling) socio-political satire – ‘If you ask us distinctly to say / What Party we claim to belong to, / We reply, without doubt or delay, / The Party we’re singing this song to!’ – and panto ribaldry – ‘I heard the minx remark / she’d meet him after dark / inside St James’s Park / and give him one!’ – are often finely balanced. Sullivan’s music, meanwhile, treads a thin line between pastiche (of Wagner, e.g.) and a desperate desire to be taken seriously. (He was going to break it off with Gilbert after Iolanthe, until his finances went down the drain.)

The sorry-not-sorry paeans to duty (as was pointed out in an early West Wing episode, “they’re all about dooty”) and the mock-ponderous ‘Blue blood’ and guardsman’s songs are tricky to get right when you’re a callow 20-something. We laughed too easily at ‘vulgar plebs’ and roared ‘Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes!’ more than was entirely genteel. And while the call-and-response ‘One Latin word, one Greek remark, / And one that’s French!’ is audaciously witty and self-deprecating, I always thought ‘as the ancient Romans said, festina lente’ was just plain bad – at least until I heard of Jacob Rees-Mogg. A lot of Iolanthe now seems glumly prescient for our bull-headed times. ‘When Britain really ruled the waves’ is the perfect piss-take Brexit anthem.

I came back hard in my (positively) finals term, as a snarling Lord High Executioner. And then, of course, we went our ways. The law, academia, journalism, post-modernist French clown school. Phyllis is now a high-flying mathematical analyst. Lord Tolloller experiments with ketamine, while working on a novel about rescue donkeys. Private Willis, the embodiment of stolid manly virtue, is now called Sally.

Another alumna spent the Saturday before last assuring teenagers at a schools’ workshop that ENO had not concocted most of the entendres in their new production. True, director Cal McCrystal has missed no opportunity for smut; but nothing could (or need!) be dirtier than these two lines from the original: ‘Why did five-and-twenty Liberal peers come down to shoot over your grass-plot last autumn? … Why did five-and-twenty Conservative peers come down to fish in your pond?’ As undergraduates, we gave these full attention.

G&S is not admitted as the peak of anybody’s musical ambition, and my G. Schirmer scores have lain untouched for 15 years. Flipping through them now, though, I find with pleased relief that I still chuckle at the cheek of the librettos, and my feet tap ingenuously through the finales.

—
For The Oldie, in a different version

—
For The Oldie

— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 6 1909
.

In LA there is a chess set designed for the East India Company, featuring Sikh soldiers vs Afghans.

Among a certain kind of people, being ‘passionate about Israel/Palestine’ is usually a substitute for having any actual political thought.

During WWII, in Germany, a Django Reinhardt record was worth 2kgs of butter on the black market.

A sailor has a tattoo of a swallow for every 5,000 nautical miles he has travelled.

Sam Lewis Craft has been named the Rain Men Player of the Year.

Alfred the Great of England believed that a thorough grounding in the liberal arts was essential for those called to exercise judgement and authority.

A South Benfleet millionaire has revealed how she earns £1,472/hr.

A town in Iceland has painted 3D zebra crossings in an attempt to slow down speeding cars.

Bobby Kennedy had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, then had her killed by Communists.

Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more.

Brett Dean’s new opera, Hamlet, contains precisely zero tunes.

The Fuegian word ‘mamihlapintafoi’ means ‘(two people) looking at each other, hoping that either will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do’.

In 2017 over half the people living in absolute poverty work for a living.
.

— The Nelson Evening Mail, September 8 1908

.
Ben Stokes is the sixth Englishman to have his name on the honours boards at Lord’s for both batting and bowling.

The smell of hot food is not very common on building sites.

Annalise was stunning in Neighbours. But what she looks like now is insane.

Irish people ended up in Kilburn because the Holyhead train came into Euston and the Fishguard train came into Paddington.

The bite of a tarantula can be cured by musick.

The National Health Service will be £350m better off per week after Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.

In South Africa there is a town called Nilstrom, because the Afrikans voortrekkers thought that they had found the Nile.

Sebastian Faulks takes his own alcohol to Iceland.

The first American performance of Peter Grimes was conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

A man in Reading is celebrating after his penis is confirmed as being the longest in the world.

The Chinese invented gunpowder while searching for the elixir of life.

Big hair don’t care.

The paraphrast draws only from the Book of Daniel.

If you really wanna dance
then I’ll dig out the banjo.
Why not? I’ll play along with you.

If you wanna learn how
I’ll even show you the moves:
I could teach you a thing or two.

I will,
I will –
I promise!

But gently now…
I’ll keep my thoughts to myself,
the better to expose your little secrets.

The art of concealing,
the trick to grafting;
pricking here,

and quipping there.
So help me,
I’ll destroy your every plan.

So if you wanna dance,
you little count,
if you really wanna dance

well then sure, I’ll play along with you.
Of course
I’ll play along.

—
For theartsdesk