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.

Jack Hobbs - England's Greatest Cricketer

One of the current mysteries of cricket is how Sachin Tendulkar, the Little Master who for 20 years has scored centuries almost at will has struggled to go from 99 to 100 international hundreds.  Is it bad luck, nerves, some hidden character flaw or a combination of all of these factors that have made that last 100 so elusive? 

A look into the past may be instructive.  The man known in the period after the First World War simply as The Master suffered a similar agony.  By mid-1925, Jack Hobbs needed just one more century to equal W. G. Grace's record of 126 first-class hundreds.  Then the runs dried up.  The newspaper stories strayed from the back to the front pages.  Photographers –and even a film crew - followed him everywhere.  Crowds flocked to matches with the sole purpose of seeing him reach the elusive three figures.  “I felt that every eye in England was focused on me, and I began to get harassed,” Hobbs later recalled.  The pressure overwhelmed him. Half-centuries produced headlines declaring that "Hobbs Fails Again".  Finally, after many failures and near-successes, he equalled and then exceeded the record with a century in each innings at Taunton in August.  And, as no doubt will happen with Tendulkar, the runs then flowed freely again.

All of this and much more comes to life in the pages of a new and definitive biography of Hobbs by Leo McKinstry who has  previously written a "warts and all" life of Geoff Boycott as well as books on Sir Alf Ramsey and the Charlton brothers.  Aside from all that, he writes regularly for the Daily Express and has been described by a fellow blogger as "a nasty, intolerant man who gets paid to churn out deeply unpleasant, utterly charmless and endlessly repetitive rants on the Express op-ed page twice a week".

Those not deterred by such a negative endorsement will find that McKinstry has belied this reputation by writing a well-researched book of considerable charm.  He clearly has a great fondness for his subject, who comes across as a thoroughly decent human being.  He was also a model professional cricketer, the mainstay of England's batting for over 20 years either side of the First World War. ending his career with a tally of 197 first-class hundreds.

Even when, as with the Boycott book, McKinstry  is describing the warts, he is inclined to excuse them.  Thus, Hobbs was a reluctant warrior in the First World War, preferring to work in a munitions factory and be paid for playing Bradford League cricket.  But, as McKinstry points out, he was a married man with four young children; and at the beginning of the War, no-one really understood what the conflict was really going to be like.  Nevertheless, his failure to join the forces until he was conscripted in 1916 caused family ill-feeling and disputes when others had already served their King and country for two years.

Similarly, McKinstry describes how Hobbs failed to blow the whistle on the Bodyline tactics when, shortly after his retirement from Test cricket, he was the one figure of any stature in the English cricketing world reporting on the 1932/3 series in Australia.  But he quickly rushes to Hobbs's defence. Yes, his reports were lily-livered and bland but he was an inexperienced journalist, known to be naturally diffident and, in any event, how could he criticise Douglas Jardine, who was his county captain at Surrey?

The majority of the book’s 400 pages tell the story of a successful career and a largely happy life.  McKinstry has done his homework, bringing to life both his  subject and the era in which he lived.  Mistakes are hard to find.  South African googly bowler Ernie Vogler several times becomes Ernie Volger; and the photo of Hobbs driving into Lord's in 1930 suggests either that he had a left-hand drive vehicle or, more likely, that the image is reversed.

Overall, however, this is a book strongly recommended to anyone who doesn’t believe that cricket history began in 1981 with Botham’s Ashes.  Readable, well-researched, wide-ranging in its scope, it is one of the best biographies of its kind.

What's in a name?

All over the world, parents devote enormous time and effort to choosing just the right names for their children.  Sometimes they don't quite get it right.  Allegedly, a Mr. and Mrs. Kart were so impressed by the star of the film Citizen Kane that they named their son Orson. And please don't get me started on the absurd names celebrities give to their privileged but unfortunate offspring.  I dread to think what happened to Sage Moonblood Stallone and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen Zappa when the playground bullies got wind of their names.
And then, of course, there is Gerry Shedd.  Maybe I should change the subject.
On a more serious note, however, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, many girls are called Nakusha.  A pretty enough name, you may think, until you realise that, in the Marathi language, Nakusha means "unwanted".
This is just one manifestation of the problem of gender discrimination in India.  Many parents prefer a male child as a future wage earner.Female foeticide is common in India.  The gender imbalance has grown every decade for the last 60 years.  So you could argue that the girls called Unwanted are lucky in that at least they weren't aborted.
Fortunately, there are moves to change the situation.  Recently in Satara, an area noted as having one of the country's lowest female populations, 285 girls named Nakusha took part in a mass renaming ceremony attended by many wanting to combat gender discrimination.  Let us hope that their new names give them renewed hope and that at least some of the parents who inflicted such a name have had cause to regret their cruel thoughtlessness.