Yesterday, the spinning plates stopped, even if only for five hours.
It was the poet, Edmund Blunden, who came out with the truest description I know of my relationship with the game of cricket. ‘Cricket,’ he said, ‘to us was more than play; it was a worship in the summer sun.’
Sometimes, when I am really very, very bad, which is quite often, I temper that notion, but I think I can say that I have not for the last 44 years, been anything other than hopelessly in love with that most beautiful, most enigmatic and most frustrating of games. Like a tempestuous marriage, we may have our differences, but we will always end up snuggling up to each other by the end of the day.
Covid did its best to kill the season but yesterday, 73 days late, and 34 years to the day from the day the White Hunter Cricket Club shuffled its engagingly incompetent way into the middle for the first time, we started it. Cricketers, by and large, love numbers, so I could point out that it was our 401st match, (my 329th), our 200th defeat (of course), our 92nd venue (Great Tew, in Oxfordshire) against one of our 101 oppositions over the years (the Bodleian Library). Doug became our 353rd player and, rather fittingly for this eclectic bunch, arrived in a light aeroplane that he had ‘borrowed from my mum.’
Did we blink more childlike into the bright sunshine of a new season? Probably. Did our hearts beat that tiny bit faster at the sight of the close mown strip with the six 28 inch ash stumps catching the light in the middle? They did, unless we had no heart at all. Did some of us, most of us perhaps, believe at some point in the last three months that this would never happen, that this would simply be a lost season, like in the Great War? We did. Were we grateful? Yes, very.
And, like the remake of a familiar old film, ‘Covid’ cricket managed in the event to be at once identical to, and radically different from, the game we were used to.
Some things we could do embarrassingly easily, such as not fist pumping or hugging; at our age, we never went in for much of that anyway. Some things were nigh on impossible: when you are 60, and your arm has long gone, you are very unlikely to be able to get the ball back from the boundary directly to the bowler without the help of at least one other relaying fielder. So we just didn’t. And some things, like the umpire announcing at the end of every sixth over ‘Over…and Sanitise’, just became another strange thing that we found ourselves doing in a year of strange things, like having a Zoom meeting, or driving past a closed pub. (Besides, we discovered, in a further demonstration of why man rose to be top animal, that if you sanitised only one side of the ball, it swung like a pendulum for an over or two.) Some things we ended up disregarding, like batsmen running up and down two painted strips to keep them away from each other. It’s not that we were being obstreperous, it’s just that we kept forgetting.
So much has happened in the 311 days since our match against the Parsees at Lurgashall last August, the last time I happen to have played any cricket. Any sense of familiarity and predictability has absented itself, and the plates have been spinning, many of them now broken.
But, as I mentioned in another blog after that match, that was the day that I finally caught myself living in the moment, appreciating the exact beauty of the here and now rather than waiting for the next thing. This is the great El Dorado for people like me with the restlessness of a mayfly, and it is ‘gifted’ to us by Attention Deficit Disorder. I have spent many of those 311 days wondering if I can ever repeat the trick.
Yesterday, I did, and I now know I can.
It makes me ridiculously happy.
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