"don't talk to me about cricket..."

Another truly AWFUL day for the England cricket team on the first day of the First Test against New Zealand in Auckland today (remember they lost 4-0 to Australia earlier this winter). England were bowled out for a meagre 58 (with five batsmen scored ducks!). BBC commentator Jonathan Agnew summed things up thus: “I don't think anyone who watched the play would claim England were bowled out for 58 because of tricky conditions. That was not the case and New Zealand's reply put the performance into context”.
At the end of last season, I blogged about the sad demise of English County Cricket – which is the closest format to playing Test cricket (they play 4-day games compared with 5-day Test matches). Agnew raised similar concerns in his report on the BBC website today: “Cricket's administrators are responsible for protecting the game and they seem keen to protect the 50 and 20 over formats - but the majority of people who love cricket want the same devotion to Test cricket. The administrators have to be extremely careful. If Test cricket gets squeezed, more and more the standard won't be what it should be”.

The number of Test matches played has remained roughly the same, but the huge difference is the number of One-Day International and Twenty20 games that now take place.

I’ve been comparing the forthcoming season’s County Cricket fixtures with those of, say, the 2000 season. In 2000, teams played 16 games; now, in 2018, they play 14 games. Here’s the comparison of when those County matches take place (with the figures in brackets denoting the number of fixtures in the respective months for the 2000 season):
April: 2 (1)
May: 2 (3)
June: 3 (3)
July: 1 (4)
August: 2 (2)
September: 4 (3)

In other words, it seems that cricket is no longer a “summer game” – unless you regard the 50 and 20 over formats as “proper cricket” (which, old codger that I am, I don’t!). ONE championship game in the whole of July for goodness sake!!

The County game is effectively the ‘nursery’ for young players and a stage for them to both ‘learn their trade’ and to attract the attention of the England team selectors.
The trouble is that cricket (or at least the County Championship element of it) has now been shunted towards the start and end of the season (the season now starts at least a week earlier and finishes a fortnight later than in 2000) in order to make ‘space’ in the fixture lists for the 50 and 20 over formats in the prime of the English summer – so that clubs can make some money from the dumbed down version of the game.
Not In My Name!

 

you were never really here…

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Watershed to see Lynne Ramsay’s “You Were Never Really Here” (Ramsay was the director of the acclaimed “We Need Talk About Kevin”).
Oh. My. Goodness (think: blood, guns and ball-peen hammers!).
Joaquin Phoenix (Joe) is a hired gun with a reputation for brutality – he’s ex-military and specialises in retrieving lost children. His task is to track down the teenage daughter (Nina, played by Ekaterina Samsonov) of a politician; she’s has been abducted, drugged and sold off into sexual slavery.
Joe himself is a shattered, fragile man. A combat-shocked veteran, he’s haunted by his past – his abusive, violent father… and the film is peppered with flashbacks and horrors from his past. Suicide never feels far away (plastic bag over head; dagger blade in mouth; looking at jumping from bridges; drowning – you get the picture!). But he also has obligations: caring for his aged mother and an apparent moral crusade to rescue Nina from her nightmare existence.
The soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood is excellent – and absolutely right for the film.

Even though the film only lasts for 90 minutes, it’s still pretty overwhelming. At times, it’s dream-like, at times it's surreal and disorientating… and exhausting.
Phoenix’s performance is spell-binding (you wouldn’t want to confront him in ANY way!).
On the face of it (ie. with all the blood and bodies), this really isn’t my kind of film… and yet, I was completely captivated by it.
I think you should see it – you might be pleasantly surprised (ok, well perhaps ‘pleasant’ might be the wrong word!).
PS: The film has very little dialogue, but (and you’re going to think these are merely the ramblings of a slightly-deaf, aged codger!) I actually found that the little there was was virtually incoherent. I definitely needed sub-titles!

march 2018 books…

The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (Alexander McCall Smith): I think I started reading this book about ten years ago, but didn’t get very far with it at the time. (As you probably already knew) Precious Ramotswe sets up a detective agency in a small Botswanan town (the only lady private detective in the country) with the proceeds of the sale of her father’s cattle and duly enters the mysterious world of wayward daughters, missing husbands, curious conmen and the like. Miss Marple she is not… but I found it all delightfully different: gentle and even joyful in Ramotswe’s attitudes and her approach to life, people and circumstances. Beautifully written and a rare pleasure.
Six Weeks (John Lewis-Stempel): This is a brilliantly-researched, powerful book about young officers in WW1 who, as the book’s title suggests, had an average six-week life expectancy on the front line. These very young officers were invariably public school-educated (or occasionally from grammar schools). I found myself feeling quite prejudiced against this world of privilege and class whilst reading the book… but ultimately had to acknowledge that, with a need to form a huge army from scratch, this was probably the only practical option. Nevertheless, comments such as these from Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Hamilton (written in 1874) still rankled: “The soldier in his hour of need and danger will ever be more ready to follow the officer and gentleman whom education, position in life, and accident of birth point out to be his natural leader… than the man who, by dint of study and brain work, has raised himself (much to his own credit, certainly) from the plough or anvil”. But, having said this, Lewis-Stepel’s book is quite brilliant – containing, as it does, numerous, poignant extracts from letters written from the Western Front (often, they proved to have been the last words written by these soldiers before their deaths) - and skilfully conveys some of the harrowing, unimaginable reality of life in the trenches and all its horror and its dignity (and sometimes its humour, despite everything). A memorable book which provided further insight into the bleak experiences my grandfather Frank went through on the Somme and elsewhere.   
note: Somewhat strangely, the book also reminded me of my own experience as a working class, grammar school boy in the early 1960s. The school had its own Service Corps - complete with shooting bunker/mini-firing range(?) and armoury - which was taken VERY seriously (I well remember one of the ‘old’ teachers dressed in his full Army uniform riding a white horse on the Corps Annual Parade day!). I was in the ‘Remove’ stream at school - fast-tracking boys to sit O-Levels in 4 years instead of 5 - and the school clearly saw us as potential officers of the Corps. Given this background, you can imagine their utter disbelief when only a couple of boys out of the entire class indicated that they wanted to join the Corps. The school hierarchy was horrified by our actions (but, hey man, this was the swinging 60s!)… the powers-that-be even came to lecture us about our ‘duty and obligation to the school’. Even so, we dug in our heels and resisted!
The Full Cupboard Of Life (Alexander McCall Smith): Another book about the life of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency… and, once again, I found reading it a hugely pleasurable experience – gentle, kind, funny and beautifully written.
Inside The Wave (Helen Dunmore): Helen Dunmore died last year, aged 65. This book of poems is her final collection… they’re concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead. They relate to her interest in landscape and the sea but, crucially, about her personal experience of dying (she knew she was dying of cancer)… “To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone”. I found them both eloquent and moving (there’s something rather powerful about poets writing in the knowledge that there life is coming to an end – although he’s still alive, but ailing, Clive James’s “Sentenced To Life” comes to mind). A lovely book that I’ll re-visit on a regular basis. Dunmore and I shared two connections: living in Bristol and loving St Ives. This short interview with her children is rather nice.   
Weather: A Very Short Introduction (Storm Dunlop): I originally thought that any book that describes itself as a “very short introduction” to a subject implied that it would brief, but also relatively straightforward. I was wrong… this book is FULL of complex information! I ended up feeling hugely inadequate intellectually. Typically, I’d read a page full of complicated terminology (which I didn’t really understand), only to be told that “obviously, this is just a very simplified explanation”! And all this coming from an author by the name of Storm Dunlop – anyone called “Storm” who writes a book about the weather doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously! Having said that, I feel sure that I’ll be consulting the book at various times over the coming years (Dunlop obviously knows his stuff!) and, maybe, it’ll all start to make complete sense?

oneweek100people…

My friend Charlotte posted a recent link about this ‘challenge’. Essentially, it involved sketching 100 people between Monday-Friday 5-9 March… anything goes: quick scribbles to more detailed drawings; any medium; ideally, drawn ‘out on location’, but copying from postcards/photos is fine too.
So, I decided to give it a go.
From the outset (and given the time constraints, not to mention other stuff I needed to be working on), I knew it meant that my own sketches would be not much more than very rapid caricatures. In fact, I experimented in the Watershed bar one lunchtime and soon realised that my offerings needed to be limited to one-minute sketches (literally).
In order to keep things simple, I gave myself some specific ‘rules’, namely:
1.    7x4.5cm ‘picture frames’ (ten per A4 sketchbook page x 10 pages).
2.    The sketches would be very simple, ink LINE drawings only – no shading or black infilling.
3.    On completion, I would ‘colour’ (with watercolour markers) backgrounds to each sketch (limited to just three colours: red, yellow and blue).
4.    Every sketch I produced would be included in the final 100 images – NO editing or corrections allowed!

Most of the other people participating would no doubt have been entering their respective offerings on Instagram: #OneWeek100People2018 (for some reason, I can no longer update my Instagram account via my laptop… so I abandoned Instagram a few months ago).

For me, I decided that I would simply post a SINGLE image, incorporating all 100 scribbles, on my One Day Like This blog and also this blog.
The resulting sketches were hardly inspiring art(!), but I did enjoy the process AND the challenge. The vast majority of my images were indeed produced ‘on location’… most of them are VERY ordinary, lots are absolute rubbish, but perhaps a handful are quite good (well, I like them anyway). Lots simply look like pretty awful cartoon characters!
For my taste, I ended up concluding that ‘keeping it simple’ was the key.
If I did it again, I’d probably do things very differently… I don’t think the three-colour backgrounds worked very well… and my insistence on drawing ‘frames’ for every image ended up making them look a bit like those old cigarette cards (you’re probably MUCH too young!). Although restricting my sketches to very small frames simplified (and therefore speeded up) the ‘100 people’ challenge, I also think it would have been good to vary the style, size and medium (and not just heads)… Having said that, the use of ‘frames’ (as opposed to lots of random scribbles covering pages of my sketchbook) made it easier to come up with very sparse, graphic images – perhaps I should have concentrating on producing more of these?
Anyway, I’ll be fascinated to see what work other people end up producing.
PS: You'll need to click on the image to enlarge it... but it'll probably be a little blurred!

I would walk 1,000 miles…

You probably remember The Proclaimers “I’m Gonna Be/500 miles” song (“But I would walk 500 miles/ And I would walk 500 more/ Just to be the man who walks a thousand miles…”)?
Well, when I had a health scare last April, my consultant asked me what exercise I did. I responded by saying I walked every day. “How far?” he asked. “I’m not sure, but probably something like 3 miles a day” I replied.
Actually, I realised that I didn’t actually know how far I walked on a daily basis, so decided to make a spreadsheet (yes, I know!) to monitor things. I don’t use a fitbit app or a step monitor, I simply plot my basic routes via Google maps – so I think the results provide a fairly conservative figure for the distance I actually do cover on a daily basis. I certainly didn’t change my walking habits, I simply made a note of how far I’d walked.
Well, it’s been interesting just monitoring my daily walking routines and, in fact, it turns out that, on average, I DO walk just over three miles a day.
Indeed, in the 46 weeks since I started my walking spreadsheet, I’ve covered 1,000 miles (that’s, on average, some 22 miles a week).
In other words, since 22 April 2017, I’ve walked the equivalent (according to Google) of John O’Groats to Lands End (874 miles) and then back beyond Exeter!!