My little mo

For those of you who doubted that I would truly grow a mo, here is the evidence of progress so far.
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Movember

Something very strange is happening right under my very nose.

It all began when my alter ego, Terry, had a bit of a health scare.  He had to go into hospital to have all sorts of tests that involved a camera going into strange places by an unusual and painful route.  Fortunately, they didn't try to get a cameraman in there too.  Or maybe they did try but no-one would volunteer.

Anyway, the end result was positive - the cause of the problem was benign.  Sighs of relief all round.

So when I heard about Movember, I thought that raising funds to help with the prevention, detection and treatment of prostate cancer was a good use of my time, especially since I didn't have to do too much, just sit around and let a "mo" grow.

I have to confess that the results so far are not impressive.  The general impression is of a small rodent having  died between my nose and my mouth. Either that or the 1970s have returned, bringing back memories of big collars and flared trousers.

I console myself with the thought that it's just a "mo" in progress.  By the end of the month, it will be in full bloom, eliciting gasps of admiration from all and sundry and winning prizes at Christmas fetes.  "Mo" of the year may well be within my reach if I really go for it.

If you can bear to look, I will post a picture of the end result before the big shave-off.  In the meantime, should you by any chance feel the urge to donate to this excellent cause, feel free to go here and click on the Donate button.

Go on, do it.  You might just help to save the life of someone who's been not quite as lucky as Terry.

Book Review – Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka

Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka is a novel set in Sri Lanka.  It is narrated by an ageing sportswriter who is slowly drinking himself to death.  Before his time is up, he wants to track down and interview Pradeep Mathew, a mystery spin bowler who might be anywhere in the world or possibly could be dead.  The chinaman of the title is Pradeep’s left-handed leg break, just one of his impressive bowling repertoire that includes a fabulous double bouncer that turns both ways!  It's also a somewhat politically incorrect reference to the Sinhalese saying that a Chinaman with a ponytail is the ultimate symbol of gullibility.  This gives us a clue that, in this story, truth is likely to be elusive and we should not take anything at face value.

Part of the pleasure of the novel is unravelling the mix of fact and fiction.  Many of the events, such as Sri Lanka winning the World Cup in 1996, certainly took place.  Some of the characters appear at least to have close parallels in real life.  Ex-England cricketer turned commentator Graham Snow is an obvious parody of Tony Greig, with his tendency to use the phrase “these little Shree Lankans”.  Sometimes characters are deliberately conflated – West Indians Alvin Rowe and Laurence Kallicharran get a brief mention. And then there is the unnamed Yorkshireman with the crooked grin who allegedly made enemies faster than he scored runs.  Who on earth could that be?

Of course, the key question throughout the book is whether the narrator (known as Wije) will get his man before the alcohol gets him.  We find the answer but, like facing a chinaman that proves to be a googly, we are left baffled by a late and unexpected series of events that involve a change of narrator and a new perspective on the nature of what we have been reading.  We are forced to question Wije’s reliability as a story teller.  What did he invent?  What did he leave out?

Whilst cricket dominates the novel, it is firmly set against the backdrop of a turbulent time in Sri Lankan history during the 1990s and beyond – Pradeep is a Tamil whose family has suffered persecution; and Wije himself is drawn into meeting the mysterious and dangerous Innocent Emmanuel Kugarajah, a possible terrorist who would not be out of place as a Bond villain.  Wije’s own take on the civil war tearing his country apart is simple – the differences between Sinhalese and Tamils are not significant enough to waste hundreds of months firing millions of bullets into thousands of bodies.

There is plenty of humour in the novel, much of it arising from the interplay between Wije and his friend and neighbour Ari as they seek to piece together a documentary about the aforesaid elusive Mathew.  There are also highly entertaining set pieces, like Wije’s visit to a group meeting for recovering alcoholics.  As he fights his losing battle against the creature that lurks inside him – the destructive addiction - he draws dark philosophical conclusions about life, often using sporting analogies.  As he says, real life is lived at two runs an over, with a dodgy lbw every decade.

Colourful characters abound, including a six-fingered cricket bowling coach and a semi-mute dwarf who inhabits an underground network beneath a cricket ground.  And then there is Garfield, Wije’s errant son whose varying fortunes in Europe as a rock musician and husband we follow through his father’s despairing eyes.

The novel could be a cricketing Waiting for Godot, except that, in flashbacks at least, the elusive Mathew does appear briefly from time to time, unpredictable both on and off the cricket field.  In quality, it is very much in line with that other fine novel Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, about cricket in the United States. 

Surely it is time for an equally good novel about English cricket.  Maybe sagas like our Cricket Board’s flirtation with the criminal Allen Stanford or the contortions of the recent Kevin Pietersen affair have made English novelists give up in despair at being able to match the entertainment factor of such bizarre and unlikely events.

Whilst we await an English masterpiece, we must be content with this excellent novel from that pearl of the Indian ocean, Sri Lanka.  But prepare to keep your wits about you.  The story jumps backwards and forwards and snippets of information are quietly dropped into the story that prove to be more vital than they seem at the time. 

And above all, watch out for Pradeep’s deadly double-bouncer.

Strange Connections

Just recently, I’ve been making connections between the Olympic Games, a small corner of Warwickshire and a remote area of Siberia.  I’m sorry – that’s just how the Gerry Shedd brain works.  Here’s how:

Anyone tuned in to the Olympics will probably have heard mention of the previous Games held in London – the so-called austerity games of 1948 and the 1908 games when Great Britain won a record haul of 146 medals, including 56 golds.

It was the mention of the 1908 Olympics that reminded me of another momentous but largely forgotten event that took place in that year.

On 30 June 1908, in Tunguska, a remote area of Siberia, north-west of Lake Baikal, an enormous explosion occurred.  It was probably around 1000 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima at the end of World War 2; and it remains the largest explosion ever recorded on Earth. Had it occurred in London, it would have totally destroyed the city and killed the whole population (including, of course, the Olympic athletes assembled there).  As it is, there were no known human casualties.  Just a lot of dead reindeer.  As many as 80 million trees were uprooted.

Even now, no-one is completely sure of the cause of the explosion.  The most likely explanation is that it was a comet that entered our atmosphere and exploded.  There is no massive crater, which suggests that the explosion took place in the air before impact. 

What intrigues me especially about the Tunguska event is the effect it had further afield.  For days after the explosion, the night skies in Europe and Asia were aglow; and the sunsets were a spectacularly colourful salmon pink.  In England, so bright was the sky that there were midnight games of cricket and golf; and birds would start their dawn chorus at a ridiculously early hour.

Why am I interested in these strange phenomena?  The answer to that takes me to the Warwickshire hamlet of Darley Green near Dorridge. 

The day after the explosion, on 1 July, a baby was born to a working class couple there.  The proud father was the gardener and general odd-job man at nearby Packwood Hall.  The mother sometimes also worked (unpaid) at the Hall, because that was what her husband’s boss expected of her.  Those were different times.

No doubt the little baby, named Albert Ernest, was too preoccupied with the things that newborns do to be conscious of the strange phenomena around him.  But almost certainly his parents would have been aware of these odd happenings.  Maybe they wondered at the conjunction of a birth and unusual sights in the sky.

Don’t get me wrong.  There were no shepherds, no wise men and no star in the east.  Just an unnatural glow in the sky.  The baby wasn’t the only one born at that time and was no saviour of mankind. 

As it happens, though, he did grow up to be quite a special human being – kind, caring, funny and wise.  To me,  he was just my dad.

Tall tales

Talkeetna is a small Alaskan town (population around 900). There is very little to distinguish it from other similar remote places.  Its main claim to fame ended in 2009 when the annual Moose Dropping Festival erupted into chaos and violence. 

The festival comprised a two-day celebration held each July.  The highlight was a lottery where participants would place bets on numbered, varnished pieces of moose droppings that were dropped from a helicopter onto a target.  Sadly, according to the Anchorage Daily News, the 2009 festival turned into a "weekend of mayhem" with "a lot of drunken, high, stupid people doing stupid things."  Worst of all, the manager of Nagley's General Store had his bike stolen.  Mayhem, indeed.  Unsurprisingly, the festival has not been repeated since 2009.  The Daily News is silent on whether the inhabitants are still polishing their moose turds and what they do with them now that they can't do the obvious and drop them from a helicopter.

So, since 2009, there has been nothing more to say about life in Talkeetna.   Until, that is, the story of Mayor Stubbs hit the international headlines.

As politicians go, Mayor Stubbs of Talkeetna takes some beating.  He’s celebrating 15 years in office, has an almost 100% approval rating and has never raised taxes at any time. He is totally untainted by scandal.  There are no suggestions of financial impropriety, no sex scandals and no accusations of lucrative contracts being awarded to close friends and associates.  He is a clean, decent citizen who goes about his daily tasks with a quiet dignity almost unknown in the sometimes grubby world of politics where pride and inflated egos often flourish.

There are only two things wrong with this story.  The first is that Mayor Stubbs is actually a cat.  The story is that he was initially put forward as a joke candidate for mayor but easily beat the two human candidates.

The second is that the story isn’t true. 

The false feline tale was launched by an Alaskan TV station and rapidly spread around the world.  Headline writers couldn’t resist references to the cat’s pyjamas; and the non-word “purrfect” appeared many times.  What everyone had missed in the original piece were the words “as the story goes”.

Apparently, Talkeetna doesn’t actually have a mayor and the district mayor who covers Talkeetna is a man. 

All is not lost, however.  The feline Mayor Stubbs does actually exist, resides at the aforesaid Nagley’s General Store and is unofficially regarded as the honorary mayor of the town, though he has never been elected.  All that has happened is that, by accident or design, Mayor Stubbs has been turned into an international tourist attraction.

So maybe the story isn’t such a catastrophe (sorry!) after all.  Having someone in office who doesn’t actually do any harm but attracts tourists and revenue doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.  

I pause here for someone to say “don’t we already have a more expensive version of that with our monarchy?” but I’d rather not go there.

What the whole episode maybe demonstrates is how open we are to the idea that no political leadership is better than the bad leadership of cynical, self-interested politicians, whatever their political complexion.  It seems that we might prefer our politicians to be not red, blue, yellow or even green but tabby. 

After all, a couple of years ago, Belgium managed to go 541 days with no government at all without too many negative consequences.  If only the unimaginative Belgians had thought of appointing a handsome Belgian Shepherd dog as prime minister, they might have lived off the tourist influx for years.  And if they had launched a lottery based on collecting his turds, polishing them and dropping them from a helicopter, the whole Euro crisis might have been averted. 

Frau Merkel, remember that you read it here first – and give due credit to Mayor Stubbs and the good citizens of Talkeetna. 

KP, John Terry, the Ferdinands - and Arthur Worsley

KP, John Terry, the Ferdinands  – and Arthur Worsley

It’s not been a good week for sports.  There has been the unseemly John Terry case that has made us all aware that fbc doesn’t just mean full blood count and a choc-ice may not come from Mr Whippy. And at a much lower level of offensiveness but equally demonstrating emotional illiteracy is our old friend Kevin Pietersen’s latest utterance.

Having recently announced his retirement from one-day international cricket, Kevin has now signalled his readiness to return.  Fair enough, you might think.  But he accompanied it with the observation that he had never been looked after by the England management.  This was like a man leaving his wife, then asking to be taken back but throwing in: “By the way, I think you’re a complete b*tch.”

And so my thoughts have drifted to the great Arthur Worsley.  Who was he, I hear you ask. 

Well, he was possibly the world’s finest ventriloquist, an English music hall performer who became a major hit in the States via the Ed Sullivan Show.  He had a brilliant technique and a very simple and powerful gimmick.  On stage, he never spoke.  His dummy, Charlie Brown, did all the talking, haranguing and abusing the always impassive ventriloquist.  “Look at me when I’m talking to you, son” Charlie would say, gradually becoming more and more enraged by the impassivity of the stony-faced Arthur.

What has brought Arthur into my mind? It isn’t that John Terry and young Mr. Ferdinand might have avoided a lot of trouble if they had hurled abuse without moving their lips. As the other Ferdinand proved, Twitter is an ever-present aid for idiots. My point is that, maybe, sportsmen should rely on the instruments of their trade rather than their voices or their Twitter account.  Just as Arthur let Charlie do the talking, KP should rely on his bat, John Terry on the football at his feet, tennis players on their rackets, golfers on their clubs – and so on.  It’s just unfortunate that, the more famous sportsmen become, the more they want to be heard.  They are encouraged by the media and the media are urged on by us, because, stupidly, we are an all-too willing audience.

So a bit of a forlorn rant, I fear.  But at least the mention of Arthur Worsley gives me the opportunity to re-tell my favourite story about him.  When he retired, he consigned Charlie Brown to the attic.  Arthur’s son recalls that, when Arthur died aged 80 in 2000, after the funeral, everyone returned to the family home.  Before they started the wake, Arthur’s son went upstairs, came back with Charlie and put him in the armchair.  Surely, Arthur would have approved.

Quite a story

Here's the amazing story of Albert Moss, a man I would have loved to have met.

Albert was born near Gloucester in 1863 and emigrated to New Zealand as a young man. He was a talented cricketer and on his first-class cricket debut for Canterbury against Wellington in 1889, took all ten wickets for 28 runs, still easily the best bowling performance ever on debut. The ball with which he accomplished this was mounted, inscribed and presented to him.

Sadly, his life and cricket career went downhill very quickly from there. He took to drinking heavily, tried to kill his wife Mary and spent five years in prison. Not surprisingly, she left him (taking the precious ball with her) and later divorced him.

By 1909, having moved to South Africa, he was at his lowest ebb and about to drown himself in Cape Town docks. On an impulse, he called into a Salvation Army hostel. They helped him to turn his life around; and he devoted the rest of his time to working for the Salvation Army.

 
Now comes the incredible bit. In 1914, Mary Moss, his ex-wife, was on a walking holiday on the North Island of New Zealand. A piece of newspaper blew up against her leg. Picking it up to throw it away, she noticed the name 'Moss'. The paper was a fragment of the War Cry published in South Africa and the article was about the salvationist work of one Captain Albert Moss.
If she was surprised, imagine Albert’s shock when a parcel was delivered to him in Rondebosch and, on opening it, he found the precious inscribed ball, together with a note in Mary’s familiar handwriting, just saying: "I thought you would like this." 

Three years later, they re-married and had ten happy years together both in South Africa and England until Mary died (or in Salvationist terms, was promoted to Glory) in 1928. Albert lived to the age of 82, a loyal and hard-working Salvationist to the end.

If someone made that story into a film, you would say it was a bit far-fetched but it is vouched for by articles in the Cricket Statistician (a great journal if you ignore the statistics) and in the Salvationist newspaper.

A rose is a rose is a rose

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose - so said Gertrude Stein.

This is the story of a rose.

When my Dad was a boy, just at the end of the First World War, he used to walk to school. It was about a 4 mile walk, from his home in Darley Green in Warwickshire to Hockley Heath School. Nothing unusual about that.  In those days, shanks’ pony was the only transport available to most of the population.

Just before he reached the school, my Dad passed a patch of land.  It was on the corner of School Road and the main road that ran between Stratford-upon-Avon and Birmingham.  On this patch of land was a rose bush.  My Dad remembered it because one of his school friends picked a bunch of the pink roses to take home to his mother.  The owner of the land contacted the police and my Dad’s friend was arrested.  I don’t think anything too serious happened to him – he wasn’t transported to the colonies or even sent to the nearest Borstal Institution.  Probably he got a clip round the ear from the local bobby or maybe a good hiding from his father. 

Of course, it has occurred to me that maybe my Dad modified the story and it was actually him rather than a “friend” who took the roses.  He’s not here for me to ask; but he was probably the most honest man I’ve ever known so I’ve long since dismissed the idea.

Anyway, we move forward now to the 1950s when my parents bought that same piece of land.  It was part of a larger parcel of land on which they built a house in which we all lived happily throughout the 1960s. The rose bush still grew there and every year when it flowered, it no doubt brought back childhood memories for my Dad.  When my parents retired and moved house, they took a cutting from the rose bush with them.  They moved several times and on each occasion took another cutting.  When they finally settled down in a bungalow in Hockley Heath just half a mile from the original rose bush, they planted another cutting that flourished up against the wall of their home.  Which reminds me of Eleanor Roosevelt once saying how flattered she was to have a rose named after her.  She was not so pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall

Let’s wind forward again, to the mid 1980s.  My mother gave a rose cutting each to me and my brother.  I planted mine in my garden and it flourished, growing to a good height in just a couple of years.  There was only one problem.  It didn’t produce any flowers – not a single one.

After three or four years, my wife and I agreed that we’d give the rose bush just one more chance.  If it didn’t flower that year (1989), we would dig it up and plant another bush.  Sure enough, it failed again.  Time to get out the spade. But sadly, that autumn, my mother passed away, a victim of leukaemia.  Somehow, digging up the rose she had given me didn’t seem the right thing to do so I left it in place.

Maybe you can guess the next bit of the story.  Yes, the next summer, the rose bush was absolutely covered in flowers; and the same happened just about every year after that until I, too, moved on about ten years ago.

When I did so, I took a cutting in a pot; and it stayed with me until I arrived in my present home and was able to plant it at the front of my house.  And I have continued to take cuttings.  My brother’s rose didn’t survive but he now has a cutting taken from mine.  Also, my next door neighbour has just taken a cutting to plant at her other house in France.  The next set of cuttings will go to each of my three children.  So the descendants of that humble Warwickshire rose bush live on and will continue their travels.

As for my rose, right now, it is in full bloom, reminding me of my parents – my Dad and his schooldays and my Mum who gave me the cutting. Maybe a rose is just a rose.  But I hope I can be forgiven for thinking that mine is special.

Hansie Cronje Ten Years On

It is ten years since former South African cricket captain died when his plane crashed into Cradock Peak in South Africa’s Outeniqua mountain range.  Newspapers, radio and television have all marked the anniversary.  BBC Radio Five devoted two hours to a review of his life.

Instead of providing clarity, all of this renewed publicity has merely served to increase the pile of unanswered questions, both about Cronje the man and the match-fixing scandal that has forever tainted his name.  Are there others equally guilty who managed not to get caught?  Was he a good Christian man who succumbed to temptation or a psychopath?  Was the plane crash an accident or the outcome of a plot to get rid of him in case he decided to tell everything that he knew?  Is there a link with the death of Bob Woolmer in Jamaica several years later?  Who was on the alleged list of 62 players with secret off shore bank accounts?

It’s quite likely we will never know the definitive answers to these questions.  There are those such as South African journalist and broadcaster Neil Manthorpe who could, if they chose, tell more of what they know; and ex-cricketer Paul Smith has apparently been asked to write a book about the whole match-fixing affair.  If it gets past the lawyers, it will make riveting reading but I’m not holding my breath.

As for Cronje, it is hard not to marvel at his hypocrisy.  Here was someone who wore a WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) wristband whilst lying and cheating for personal gain.  He received not just the infamous leather jacket but also the $140,000 that he admitted to the King Commission and maybe much more.   It’s a long time since I was an attentive Sunday School pupil so I’ve forgotten some of what I learnt.  Maybe there is a passage in the New Testament where John the Baptist says to Jesus: “Hey, Jesus, that’s a cool jacket.  What did you have to do to get that?”

Possibly the key to the hypocrisy is that, in Hansie’s mind, the answer to the question “what would Jesus do?” was simple: “He’d forgive me.” After all, when Frans Cronje, Hansie’s brother, was asked if he thought Hansie had gone to heaven, his answer was an unequivocal “yes”.

It’s one thing to do wrong, regret it and seek forgiveness from those you have wronged and/or from your God.  It’s an entirely different matter to do wrong because you believe in advance that your God will forgive you. In Hansie’s case, he may have expressed his regrets to the King Commission but he never apologised to Henry Williams and Herschelle Gibbs , his fellow cricketers whom he drew into his match-fixing net.

Had he lived, Hansie Cronje might have been able to reach a point of true repentance and might have rehabilitated himself by both his words and his actions.  Instead, a mountain got in the way.  So maybe the obligation to be charitable passes to us and we should feel compassion for a man who was, like all of us, a fallible human being.  Ok, underneath a pious surface, Hansie was probably not a nice man. But in that, he’s not alone.  As someone once observed, there are more horse’s a*ses around than there are horses. And possibly, just possibly, in his last moments as the mountain loomed, he faced his God, sought true forgiveness and found it.

In praise of half-empty

As a way of establishing your attitude to life, it’s become a bit of a cliché.  Is your glass half full or half empty? 

If it’s half full, you’re an optimist, an enthusiast, always seeing the positive side of things.  You’re a can-do person who won’t be put off by the fact that the going looks tough.  If your glass is half-empty, you always look on the negative side of things.  You’re a pessimist, a wet blanket, a party pooper, a prophet of doom and a real sourpuss.  Go away, Mr. or Ms. Half Empty!

Of course, there is, as always, a third way of looking at these things: http://www.lolroflmao.com/2011/07/30/half-full-half-empty-i-think-this-is-piss/

Or maybe not. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently and have come to the conclusion that sometimes (but not always) it’s important to view life from the half-full perspective.  The negative side of being an optimist is that you may be inclined to ignore the imperfections in the status quo and take the attitude that it will be all right on the night. Or, as they say Down Under, “She’ll be apples, mate!”

I realise, of course, that highlighting the disadvantages of being an optimist is a very half-empty thing to do.  But my point is that there is also an upside to being a half-empty person.  When the menace of Hitler was growing in Europe, dear old Neville Chamberlain’s upbeat speech about peace in our time on his return from meeting the Fuhrer in Munich was the 1930s equivalent of “she’ll be apples, mate”.  It was Winston Churchill whose glass was half empty.  Well, actually, his drinking habits were such that it was probably quite difficult to keep pace with the state of his glass.  But, metaphorically speaking, he took the half empty approach as he warned anyone who would listen that Hitler wasn’t a harmless Charlie Chaplin lookalike.

A hundred years earlier, it was Charles Dickens who saw beneath the surface of Victorian life and did battle with what he called “the infamous record of small official inhumanity”, recognising that an apparently decorous and righteous society’s glass was definitely half-empty.

To be fair, maybe the real heroes are those who can see things both ways.  They are constructively dissatisfied.  They have enough divine discontent to see that the status quo has to change and enough positive energy and vision to believe that they can make the change happen.  Or, as Robert Kennedy famously said: “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

So let’s celebrate those who, like Robert Kennedy, are able to see the reality that if your glass is half full, it is also half empty. I’ll raise a (full) glass to that!

When Cricket was Cricket

By a long way the most disappointing book I’ve read recently is a pictorial review of the game of cricket, entitled When Cricket was Cricket, with the appealing sub-title A Nostalgic Look at a Century of the Greatest Game.

True, there are some stunning and fascinating photographs in the book – the very upper-class crowds perambulating the outfield at Lord’s during an interval of the University match in 1914, Don Bradman strolling with the King at Balmoral, cricket on Blackpool beach in 1946 and plenty more covering most aspects of the game in the last 100 years or so.

The problem lies not with the photographs but with the commentary and captions that accompany them.  These are the work of Adam Powley.  The clue is to be found in the biographical end-paper.   Powley is a journalist and author who has previously written mainly about football.  Presumably, his publishers, Haynes Publishing, thought that a book on cricket would be a good follow-up to Powley’s When Football was Football.

Unfortunately, Powley doesn’t seem to know a massive amount about the game, so cricketing solecisms abound.  Frederick Toone not only becomes C. Toone but is made manager of the 1947 England team, which would have been tricky since he died in 1930.  Warwickshire groundsman Bernard Flack is bizarrely translated into a scientist from the University of Wales; and it is arguable whether Don Bradman was “by common consent the greatest cricketer of all time” – the greatest batsman, maybe but a better overall cricketer than, say, W.G. Grace or Garfield Sobers?

 My favourite inept comment concerns Jack Hobbs who, according to the hapless Powley, “would have scored many more centuries had he not surrendered his wicket so often once he passed three figures.”  Oh, really?!

It is not just the lack of cricketing knowledge that spoils the book.  It’s also the shoddy way in which the background to many of the photographs has not been properly researched.  Why was a match being played at Richmond in 1908 in top hats?  There must be story there, but it remains untold, as does the tale behind the touching picture of children on crutches playing cricket, watched by other children in what appear to be hospital beds.  Possibly it relates to the outbreaks of polio in the 1950s but Mr. Powley for sure isn’t sufficiently curious to find out, so we are left to wonder.

All in all, then, an opportunity missed.  It is, I suppose, an OK book to buy if you are content just to look at the photographs and make up your own stories behind them.  Otherwise, best to save your money for one of the many well-researched books about the summer game.

Dinner for One

Different countries have their own traditions of seeing in the New Year. Most combine the same elements - a mix of alcohol, fireworks and revelry.  In other ways, traditions can diverge wildly.  In Holland, they burn Christmas trees, in Spain they eat 12 grapes while the midnight clock strikes twelve whilst in Denmark, people throw dishes at each others’ doors as a symbol of friendship.

One of the more remarkable New Year traditions is that, every year on New Year’s Eve, around half the German population watches a comedy sketch recorded in 1963 by a couple of long-dead English performers. 

Even stranger is the fact that it is also shown and enjoyed in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and many other countries in Europe.  And strangest of all, it has never been shown in full on TV in the United Kingdom.

The sketch is called Dinner for One – or The 90th Birthday (in German, Der 90).  It was written by British author Lauri Wylie in the 1920s and was often performed by music hall comic Freddie Frinton who eventually acquired the rights to it.  The German television station NDR recorded Frinton and May Warden performing the sketch in 1963 and it took off from there. Whilst Frinton found fleeting UK fame in the sitcom Meet the Wife, it is through the 10 minutes or so of Dinner for One that he has achieved TV immortality across continental Europe.

Of course, with the advent of YouTube, we can now view it in the UK any time we like, so here it is. 

OK, it’s more likely to give you pause for thought about the German psyche than leave you helpless with laughter.  At best, it’s mildly amusing; and there’s no doubting Freddie Frinton’s excellent comic timing.  But, but, but.....why????

I'm struggling to explain the appeal.  My best guess is that the sketch enables Germans to confirm their stereotyped views of us British – aristocratic, dotty and drunk.  At the same time, we can chuckle back in an equally superior way at the bizarre sense of humour (or lack of it) of our friends across the Channel.

If you can think of a better explanation, I’d like to hear it.  Or maybe, like most Germans, you find the catch phrase “Same procedure as every year” utterly hilarious.  Do let me know.