Reflections from Taunton

Last week, I spent a couple of days in the Press Box at Taunton when Warwickshire were playing Somerset.
I wasn't there for the last day when there was an exciting finish - yes, in  cricket, a draw can be exciting.
Watching the two teams battling it out caused me to have some thoughts about the different ways they are run off the field.
Deep Extra Cover were sufficiently interested in my thoughts to publish them -see:
http://deepextracover.com/home/reflections-from-taunton/
Although I said at the end of the article that I wasn't passing any judgments, I guess the truth is that I am concerned about the rather abrasive style of management at Edgbaston compared with the more friendly style down at Taunton.
Maybe if I owed £20 million I might be a bit abrasive but when you're that much in debt, it's best to adopt a style that makes you friends rather than enemies.
Anyway, I wish both teams success on the pitch this season - and plenty of sunshine.

Dougie Brown

Cricket lovers will know that Dougie Brown has been appointed as Warwickshire County Cricket Club's new Director of Coaching.

Years ago, when he was at the height of his playing career, I interviewed him for The Cricketer magazine.  I was delighted, in the last few weeks, to have the opportunity to write another article on him.  I wasn't able to do the interview but I wrote it up for Deep Extra Cover website - see here

I remember that when I did the original interview, Dougie invited me to sit on the players' balcony at Edgbaston during a match whilst he talked to me.  As I sat there, I couldn't help but look across at what is now the Eric Hollies stand.  It used to be called the Rea Bank and was just an area of rather basic open wooden seating.  In my imagination, I could see a little 9 year old boy sitting there with his mother, enthralled at seeing his first ever proper game of cricket. The weather was cloudy, the cricket was slow but he didn't care. That little boy was, of course, me; and I concluded that, had he been able to see his older self sat on that balcony, he would have turned cartwheels with joy.

I'm looking forward to the coming cricket season and the opportunity to write more Warwickshire-based articles for Deep Extra Cover.  I just hope that, in doing so, I can, in my senior years, re-create at least a little of that sense of wonder and excitement that consumed me as I sat on the Rea Bank on that day so long ago.

My little mo

For those of you who doubted that I would truly grow a mo, here is the evidence of progress so far.
It's still not too late to donate here

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.