Well, after May’s thrills, June has been a mixed bag culminating in a run of some sort of form. My innings this season now read:
[40no – 2 – 3 – 5 – 16no – 20 – 6 – 0no] – 5 – 5 – 0 – 0 – 40 – 44 – 1 – 18
So, in my first 16 innings this season, I have an aggregate score of 205. Continue reading
Like Nick Compton, I was stymied in my attempt to score 100 runs by the end of May – and in similar fashion, through a combination of the weather and a rash stroke. Well, needing but 8 runs, I rashly missed a straight one. Yes, I know NC narrowly missed out on 1000 runs, but I reckon that a club cricketer in his first season of batting left-handed and with a touch of the old Parkinson’s can count 100 runs in the same breath.
I’ve been working really hard in the nets, and like many this damp season, have found scoring runs extremely hard. But lo, what numbers through yonder scorebook break? Here are my innings to date: Continue reading
[first published 24th May 2012]
It’s 5.19am, and I’m waiting. I’ve been waiting for quite some time now, and, to be frank, I’m getting a little impatient. I was on the urge of going to bed, around an hour and a half ago, having stayed up talking, arguing, reminiscing, and trying for some strange reason to find reviews of my few academic publications online. I suspect I was hoping they’d be damning. They probably are, but I, for one, cannot access them. It seems strange that one is not allowed access to an academic journal in which one’s work has been discussed, but never mind. Continue reading
Every so often you see them. Fingerposts. They point the way not merely with a sign but with a finger, like the manicules you find in old books, red hands in the margin pointing to some salient piece of information. They’re old, and ragged, and not necessarily particularly accurate as indicators of just how far one is to travel to reach one’s destinations. They are similar in many ways to the semi-pyramidal stones one sees which assert one’s position, yet these are accurate to within seconds, geographically speaking. Continue reading
[first published 2nd May 2012]
Sometimes it seems you have to travel all day to get back to where you started. After the epic (and in terms of Homeric storms, I rather think it counts as exactly that) journey from Brighton to Otley, I set off yesterday to the boarders. Eschewing perhaps the quickest route, I barrelled up the A68, a quite fantastic road, stomach-churning and beautiful with its mixture of long undulating straights with any number of blind summits and great sets of z-bends. It was only sad the weather refused me permission to drop the top. I arrived in Greenlaw, a small boarders village, just before six and, having been guided to my place of repose by Donald – following his bike through the village centre, I was embraced by the entire family at Mansefield. We talked and talked and cricket was mentioned and Pippa, my hostess, askd if I fancied visiting the oldest cricket club in Scotland, Manderston – on the Palmer estate. Off we drove. Continue reading
Walking into the evening sun is a strange experience. The height of the sun collapses any depth perspective, reducing the world ahead to one of silhouette, as if you are moving from three dimensions into two. Collapsing the any notion of time, what you see ahead of you lacks the fatness of experience, and yet it walks towards you as inexorably as you travel towards it. It moves inevitably from potential unrealised to a sharp stab of reality as it rushes past you. It acts as actual and analogy, as what you see both is the future and is an uncanny representation thereof. As you view it from the now, you can look behind and see the fatness of the past, to the side to experience the breadth of the present, and yet the future is largely unrecognisable. Continue reading
[first published 28th March 2012]
Last night I went to a concert at the Brighton Dome. It was the Waterboys, ostensibly flogging the new album, An Appointment with Mr Yeats. Now, the album is pretty good, and Mike Scott’s free interpretation of Yeats’ poetry creates something a little more than the sum of all its parts. His cherry-picking of lines from various poems may offend the purist, but in many ways is close to the spirit of Yeats’ own work, as he played wild and loose with Ireland’s mythic past. Continue reading
[first published 20th March 2012]
Things advance in some ways. Two weeks ago I made a short film of a coaching session I had with Simon Funnell. Forty minutes of one-handed drills are exhausting, and even using a lighter bat, 2lbs8oz instead of the 2lbs10oz one which I carried through last season, my right arm was exhausted by the end. You see, I’m not permitted to engage my left hand until the middle of April at best. This is frustrating in many ways, not least because I can’t bat properly nor practice behind the timbers at all. Methinks I’ll start the first game down the order and in the deep. Or scoring. Continue reading
[first published 18th March 2012]
The demise of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s printed edition has been greeted with an awful lot of breast-beating, not least in the Grauniad, where Ian Jack bemoans its demise in not-so unequivocal terms, and several of the commentators wax not-so-lyrical about the clumping great tomes. In an area in which information changes so rapidly and inexorably, the printed source-book is prey to obsolescence at speed. To take a cute example, the C18th children’s ‘science’ book (and I use the term loosely, because it’s anachronistic to use this term: natural philosophy is so much more accurate) The Newtonian System of Philosophy Adapted to the Capacities of Young Gentlemen and Ladies (London: John Newbery, 1761) AKA Tom Telescope went through six editions between publication and the turn of the century. Over this time several important changes were made to the text. Examples are the introduction of the Orrery as a demonstrative instrument in the 1790s, with a point being made about the slowness of the mechanical demonstrations to keep pace with new discoveries such as the planet discovered by Herschal in 1781: Continue reading
(first published march 2012)
So, the indefatigable Colleen H-H left a reply to my second blog on drumming as therapy.
Well well well …… you have failed to answer a couple or three or more critical points Dr Pete…. Continue reading
