Despite the total lack of content in my past few entries, I haven’t actually been sitting on my porch with my hat over my eyes and my feet up, chewing a bit of straw. Nope. I have in fact been very busy, gadding about hither and thither. A few weeks ago we went to Cornwall (piratey!) and Brighton (always fun!) by way of Glastonbury (terrifying! Glastonbury is for hippies what Croydon is for chavs. I kept expecting someone to run up to me and exclaim that they’d known me in a previous life). Two weeks ago we went to Wales with TB and Chicken, and last weekend SiC and I went to Leeds to watch the cricket.
Yes, the cricket. It pains me almost physically to admit this, but cricket is starting to win me over. Not the game itself so much – I kind of get what’s going on now, but seven straight hours of hitting a ball with a bat really isn’t that exciting – but the arcane rituals and ceremony that go with it. For example, Test Match Special. TMS exemplifies everything that’s great about Britain: solidarity in the face of adversity (i.e. Australia), jovial camaraderie, charming eccentricity, and of course, conversations about cake. Boy, they sure do like them some cake.
And cricket fans are mad! Proper mad! Like most of you I’m sure, when I imagine a cricket spectator, it’s usually a slightly older gentleman in a beige suit jacket and a straw hat, clapping genteelly with a glass of Pimms in one hand. And trust me, they do exist. But what struck me about this match was the noise. For the entire day there was a continuous, deafening roar from the Western Terrace (traditional home of boisterous lunatics), even while the match was suspended for bad light or tea. (I love that cricket matches break for tea. “Oh rath-er, tally ho and pip-pip! Come on chaps! Let’s all go have some cucumber sandwiches!”)
And did you know that it’s tradition to show up to a cricket match in costume? When I asked SiC why this is, he looked at me incredulously. “Because it’s cricket,” he said. Why of course. At Headingley we saw several teams of superheroes, a gang of nuns (men), half a dozen brides (also men), a Viking, several Roman centurions, some rather terrifying large babies, and far, far too many bikinis, blond wigs, high-heeled shoes and fishnet stockings (all on men), in the notoriously cold and rainy Yorkshire weather. (What is the English fixation with men dressed as women? And while we’re at it, can someone please explain the phenomenon of pantomime to me?)
Our seats were in the members’ area (la-de-da), but we snuck into the Western Terrace at the end of the day because that’s where the crazy lives. I don’t think a single person in the Western Terrace was actually paying any attention whatsoever to the cricket. They were too busy drinking, screaming their fucking heads off and making enormous snakes out of empty beer cups. When the stewards tried to intercept these beer snakes, the crowd would pull them apart and throw the sections at the stewards so they would burst into little beer-cup explosions on impact. There was also any number of beach toys being batted around, including a giant inflatable lobster, because why wouldn’t you come to a cricket match with a giant inflatable lobster? While we were trying to find an empty couple of seats, a drunken lobster enthusiast decided that he was going to crowd-surf on top of it. This went surprisingly well until a couple of stewards grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him out of the stands, nearly spilling my beer in the process. Fascists!
But the best part of the day by far (besides whatsisname batting a double century or whatever) was when SiC busted this cop listening to a Test Match Special headset. Hard day at work mate?