of willow and leather

We all have our foibles.

An aside. I was inordinately pleased to see that the BlackBerry predictive text support actually recognised the word foibles, even though it suggested doubles first. And how do I describe such words?. Surely there must be some word analogous to synonym and homonym that describes words thrown up as alternatives by predictive text systems. Qwertonym perhaps?

This train of thought reminds me of my delight when I first read The Meaning Of Liff, sometime in the early 1980s. It was a little black book, a stocking filler containing words to describe things that we didn’t have words for.

My particular favourite was Didcot, the word suggested by the authors to describe that tiny bit of card that was punched out of my railway ticket by the ticket inspector, who would use a device looking like a stylised nutcracker.

I digress.

It’s a glorious day, the sun’s shining, God’s in His Heaven and all’s well with the world. I’m on my way to the only place I could want to be this morning.

Lord’s. And may the best team win.

What a truly fabulous game cricket is.In the past, there was a part of me that felt purist about the very concept of one day cricket, feeling that it despoilt the true game. Now, some thirty years later, I am grateful. Because it has made the game accessible to many more.

I have American colleagues pretty much queueing up to come, a French colleague openly curious about what makes the game tick. And most important of all, I have a child of mine accompanying me. Something I feel would not have happened but for the one day game. Now he even comes to watch Test matches.

Who knows, maybe the next generation will speak the same way about Twenty-Twenty games?

What matters is access, as Dave the Lifekludger is wont to remind us. The more accessible something is the better.

We shouldn’t worry about the effect it has on the long game, the true game. We are now used to seeing abridged books available for over a century now, yet book publication has probably not been at higher levels.and, if you take the JK Rowlings and Vikram Seths of this world, they’re not particularly short either.

So it’s off to Lord’s I go, ready to watch a day’s jousting between willow and leather, at Headquarters.

Paradise enow.