I’m writing this Post in a Sports Hall where my son is getting his weekly Winter fix of Cricket Nets. For those not of the English persuasion, that is just batting in an indoor setting without injuring passers by, breaking stuff or catching a nasty chill.

The last point is, I recognise just a bit soft and pathetic.
If the Scandinavians played cricket they’d be playing in their shorts on a frozen lake or something.
 
Pathetic we may be, but nevertheless it was one of the finest exports of the British Empire from previous centuries. Admittedly to be a relatively fine export from the age of Empire is competing with some pretty suspect achievements.
Specifically, invading many other parts of the world that were just minding their own business, attacking and killing their people then renaming their cities to something that could be pronounced by someone from Chelsea.
 
On the positive side, they then imported cuisine from the far reaches of the empire, with the longer term benefit that it headed off the risk of our high streets just being full of Pork Scratching, Suet Pudding and Brussel Sprout restaurants.
Actually, I quite like two of those three but, strangely I couldn’t think of any other disgusting British foodstuffs when I wrote that.
With such a rich source to tap, I could surely have done better there.
 
We did establish the Greenwich Meridian as the metric used across the world as a measure of how far to the left or right you are from a small area of London though. We can claim that as an achievement as it’s universally used to this day,
I guess as no-one could think of any better place to choose.
 
The Greenwich Meridian line actually runs North to South a few hundred yards away from my house in fact which, I would have thought, would mean that by just walking that distance I could cross into the other hemisphere and hence into a different day.
 
I’ve tried it, and I didn’t,
 
There is a pub just over that line from me, and the staff there do seem to be  a little on the backward side, but that’s just coincidence I think.
 
 
Anyway, how I got into this line of thinking was to point out that my father has never taken part in cricket activities – playing or spectating. In other respects, I’ve started noticing that I’m becoming him.
There is a famous poem written about a woman becoming her mother, turning a combination of brown and grey, and wearing plaid skirts or something.
 
The equivalent seems to be happening to me but in my case the changes are these:
 
i) I have developed an interest in keeping bees.
Strange as I don’t like honey and the only redeeming feature of them – aside from pollinating our flowers so crops and life on earth can be possible, was that, as a child my younger brother was allergic to bee stings. He had some treatment with injections to overcome it but from then on, had to be stung every month by a bee to stop his immune system from falling back into its old ways.
I got to be the one to dress up in beekeeping gear and hold a bee from my dad’s hive, sharp end first into his outstretched arm.
 
You know, I’ve believed that justification until this day and, only now I come to write it down do I wonder if this was one of my dad’s confidence tricks, as described in a previous Post.
Probably not.
He did laugh at us, but didn’t normally torture us.
 
 
ii) I watch Fred Dibnah TV programmes and start to think that steam trains and traction engines are huge and magnificent things that I’d just like to own myself.
Previously I thought they were just nicely painted ways of keeping Dibnah out of harm’s way
 
iii) I start to think that growing a beard might look OK, no-one would laugh and I could get up later in the morning.
 
All of this is probably not really driven by fear of turning into my dad. He’s a generally splendid man and I could do much worse than turn into him.
I think it’s more to do with fear of growing older.
 
However, that fear has, literally this minute been headed off by hearing on the radio that Sean Connery – the greatest James Bond in my opinion – was the same age as I am now when he first played the part.
 
Perfect – just typed 700 words of drivel and I’m cured of an irrational mental hang up.
There are people that would charge good money for that.
Advertisement