Almanac Books: Books in my life – A reluctance to read

Books in my life: A Reluctance to Read 

 

A speech to The Friends of the State Library of South Australia 

 

 

I’ll begin by saying that I once came close to meeting the prolific and world-famous author Stephen King.

 

That was more than twenty years ago, but as the ABC cricket commentator Alan McGilvray used to say, ‘I’ll come back to that.’

 

As for books in my life, I was a late starter. A reluctant reader as a child, which was a continual source of frustration for my father, a rocket scientist who read widely, as did my mother, who was a nurse who raised her four sons primarily on her own, as was the way in the 1950s and 60s.

 

When I was a kid, I was too busy running around outside playing cricket and footy to give much time or thought to reading.

 

Although I did understand the words, ‘Perpetual motion.’

 

Which was how my father described me.

 

Although clearly looking at me now the description no longer applies.

 

The first book I ever read was by the then Australian cricket captain Ian Chappell

 

It was about the 1972 tour of England and it was called Tigers Among the Lions.

 

 

 

The book has a green cover with Australia’s Dennis Lillee launching himself to bowl, as an English umpire checks the bowling crease.

 

When I read the book now, I am reminded of the words of one of my early publishers, the late Paul Depasquale, from Pioneer Press.

 

‘It’s not Shakespeare, mate.’

 

Which is what Paul once said about my writing.

 

Straightforward prose it may be but if you mention Tigers among the Lions to Australian men of a certain age I  guarantee it will bring a smile to their face.

 

In fact, they probably still have a copy of the book.

 

And soon they’ll be rhapsodising about Massie’s 16 wickets at Lord’s, Greg Chappell’s first innings century in the same match and the way that Rod Marsh and Paul Sheahan ran off the ground on the last day of final Test at The Oval swinging their bats like giddy schoolboys. And that’s without even mentioning Dennis Lillee’s 31 wickets for the series.

 

And this is part of the joy of sport

 

It bridges the divide and makes a connection where otherwise one might not exist.

 

More than fifty years later, I’ve taken a retrospective look at that tour in my book, Playing to Win: Australia and the 1972 Ashes, which, among other pleasures, provided me with the chance to interview some of the men I had admired as a boy all those years ago.

 

 

 

It now feels in some ways that the circle is complete.

 

As I’m sure you are all aware books, can take a long time to write or even read for that matter.  It requires a deep immersion- the total opposite of social media, which has its benefits but there is also a cost.

 

Namely a scattered brain.

 

For me, reading and writing are intertwined.  One of the best ways to improve as a writer is to read.

 

Playing to Win took more than six years, from inception to publication, which brings me to Frank Rusconi – a quarry owner, mason, and sculptor.

 

You might have heard of the famous Dog on the Tuckerbox at Gundagai … well, Frank was its creator.

 

His most significant work, though, is his marble cathedral.

 

I have a postcard of it on my desk at home.

 

When I look at Rusconi’s marble masterpiece  I am reminded that no matter how overwhelming a task appears, it can be completed by taking one small step at a time.

 

It took Rusconi 28 years to fit 20,948 pieces into the final work. But then he lived to the ripe old age of 90, so I suppose that helped.

 

 

 

 

Back in 1973 after reading Tigers among the Lions, my next task was the sports section of The Advertiser that was delivered to the front lawn of our home at 17 Lascelles Avenue, Beaumont.

 

And from there it was magazines- remember those things-  Cricketer and Australian Cricket the purchase of which consumed all my pocket money.

 

 

 

In the summer of 1975, I was in Year Seven at Linden Park Primary, and the home Ashes series was raging.

 

Lillee and Thomson were running through the hapless English batsmen.

 

The phrase ‘Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust if Thommo don’t get you, Lillee must’ was coined in a Paul Rigby cartoon.  My passion for cricket was also fuelled by having a future Test captain, Kim Hughes, as my coach at Linden Park Primary school.

 

Hughes, who was also a teacher at the school, was a 20-year-old curly blond-haired ball of energy who would regularly part the lunchtime crowd with these searing low screw punts.

 

Yard duty certainly ain’t what it used to be.

 

When it came to cricket Hughes told his charges the best way to improve their batting was to skip with a rope. He made practice fun, and when he batted facing the other teachers on the Hay Street Oval at Linden Park, it was a sight to behold.

 

Kim Hughes, as a player, experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows.

 

Christian Ryan later wrote a book called Golden Boy about Hughes’ life and career. Its staccato style works a dream. Hughes’ story is Shakespearean in nature.  The ambitious young player from the West, who scaled the heights of world cricket with hundreds against the might of the West Indies on a diabolical pitch at the MCG and England in the  1980 Centenary Test at Lord’s.

 

 

 

 

Having been a part of The Establishment during Kerry Packer’s World Series cricket revolution, Hughes was later betrayed and brought down by his own. The book is confronting but it’s  a great example of compelling sports writing. Or any writing for that matter.

 

Every Friday afternoon during the last school  term of 1975 I visited a small boutique bookstore on Portrush Road near a deli that we called ‘The Cottage.’

 

The store though only had one cricket book.

 

RS Whitington’s Illustrated History of Australian Cricket.

 

 

 

It was the largest and most expensive book I’d ever seen and was stored high on the shelf.

 

It looked important and had this striking black cover of Victor Trumper leaping out to strike a ball.

 

When I visited the store, I’d ask the owner to bring the book down from its lofty perch, which required him to get a step ladder that he stored out the back.

 

As you can imagine, it wasn’t long before the owner started to tire of this.

 

As Christmas approached  he wearily said to me one afternoon, ‘Let’s hope Santa likes cricket.’

 

That year Santa delivered, and I remember the joy of being able to look at the book without the pressure of the store owner peering over my shoulder.  It probably matched the relief that the owner felt when my father finally purchased the book.

 

When I was 13, I discovered a second-hand book store on the Parade, across the road from Pembroke, where I was now attending school, courtesy of a sports scholarship.

 

The year before, Kings and Girton had merged to form Pembroke, and the school needed to bolster its sporting teams with young players who showed potential. And I can tell you that’s one tag you never want to have, ‘As having potential.’

 

The second-hand book store was a gold mine for sports lovers. It had a great cricket section, complete with dusty-smelling, hardback books from the 1950s and 1960s. I still recall the sound of the bell as the door opened, alerting the owner that a customer had arrived.

 

To reach the sports section you had to walk to a back room on the left, where books overflowed from the shelves and were also scattered on the floor.

 

Old comics were found near the front of the shop, near the store owner’s desk.  The owner was a man in his 60s with big, bushy eyebrows who rarely spoke, and when he did, it was in a whisper.

 

It was in this bookstore that I first discovered Tiger and Scorcher, a British comic full of sports stories.

 

 

 

I’m sure the writers at times were playing a joke on some of its young readers.

 

Among the storylines was Billy’s Boots which featured a young Billy Dane, who wore the boots belonging to Deadshot Keane, a former England international. Whenever Billy put the boots on something magical happened and the old players’ skills were transferred to Billy.

 

Some of the other characters in the comic included the Grand Prix driver Skid Solo and Hot Shot Hamish the Scottish footballer who kicked the ball so hard it broke the back of the net.

 

I later found out I could subscribe to Tiger and Scorcher at the newsagent at the end of Tusmore Avenue, where it intersected with Kensington Road. I’d pick up my copy every Friday after school, when I cycled home to my father’s house at Glen Osmond.

 

At this point my parents had now divorced. In fact, they were first in the queue after Gough Whitlam’s no faults divorce laws were introduced. It meant my dog Snoopy and I would spend half a week at Mum’s unit at Beulah Park and half at Dad’s house at Glen Osmond.

 

For people who know me well this probably explains many things in my life, including my lack of organisation skills.

 

My copy of Tiger and Scorcher arrived at the newsagent in Australia two months after its publication. A fact that bewilders my kids when I tell them.

 

‘What you had to wait two months for something?

 

Having collected all the editions of this comic from 1976 to 1980, it was to my disappointment and my father’s eternal regret that he gave all of my comics away to St. Vincent de Paul when I was twenty.

 

Without telling me.

 

Just after my father died in 2019, I found a pack of about 60 Tigers and Scorchers in a second-hand book store in Elizabeth.

 

All in mint condition.

 

I paid $40 for the lot. Given that they were selling for around $20 each on the internet, I considered it a small win.

 

It felt like divine intervention.

 

As a teenager, I also discovered the Billy Bunter  books by Frank Richards.

 

 

 

 

The cake, the hampers, the chaps at boarding school playing cricket and rugger. The haplessness of Billy Bunter, the fat owl of the Remove. Politically incorrect but a lot of fun.

 

A few years later I read a biography of Sir Donald Bradman by Irving Rosewater

 

 

 

 

For me Irving Rosenwater’s name conjured up images of this mysterious figure, like one of the characters who worked in the technology lab of a James Bond movie.

 

Rosenwater was, in fact, a renowned cricket historian and statistician.

 

He was also a miserable old prick, although not quite as severe as the former British army officer and cricket historian Major Rowland Bowen.

 

Bowen, when he was 52, cut the bottom part of his leg off in the bath to see ‘what it felt like.’

 

Let’s face it, cricket does attract some curious characters

 

But back to Irving for a minute

 

I met him at the Kensington Cricket Club at an under 16  function that was organised by our coach Barry Jarman and also attended by Richie Benaud, Neil Harvey and Garry Sobers  – so it was quite the line up.

 

On the night of the function, Irving was at the club researching his book on Bradman.

 

Now to say Rosenwater had a wandering eye was like saying Bradman could bat a bit.

 

So given my mother, a divorcee – as was the language of the day – was the only single parent at the event, Irving tried to chat her up. Mum told me that the strange English man had been a ‘bit fresh’ with her.

 

Later that year my mother gave me a copy of Rosenwater’s book

 

Unsigned.

 

It must be said.

 

It’s still probably the best biography on Bradman produced and there have been many.

 

So I was making progress as a reader.

 

My reading had attained what football commentators call momentum.

 

When I was 16, my father used to bring me here to the State library every Friday night. I’d look at the latest editions of the International Cricketer magazine from England for hours while he chose his pile of books to read for the week.

 

 

 

 

Then, one Saturday, when playing for Pembroke firsts, I was bowled first ball against Sacred Heart and the Friday night visits to the library were suddenly stopped.

 

My father blamed my dismissal on ‘tired eyes’ from reading too much.  I later discovered the real reason for the end of the Friday night library visits was that he’d met a woman called Dorothy who from then on quarantined his weekends.

 

 

 

Romance, it seemed, trumped books.

 

I next moved on to The Flashman Chronicles by George McDonald Fraser.

 

I loved reading about Harry Flashman, the bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, who was the main character in this series of books.  The laddish politically incorrect cad, Flashman, had the habit of playing key, if accidental, roles in critical moments of British history.

 

These outlandish plots taught me about storytelling and inadvertently showed me how to teach. The footnotes were worth the price of admission alone.

 

 

 

Again, I found a close-to-complete collection in the second-hand book store across the road from Pembroke.

 

Now back to William Shakespeare, whom I was introduced to by my Year 12 English teacher, Mr Grant, through the play Macbeth

 

Mr Grant had a great passion for literature and in 1980, he taught in a small upstairs classroom at Pembroke senior campus on Holden Street to a room of about a dozen Year Twelve English students.

 

He was a very gentle person, and I held him in high esteem.

 

Mr Grant showed a genuine interest in his students, and you felt as if he enjoyed your success as much as you did.

 

Mr Grant asked us to memorise Macbeth’s famous soliloquy that begins … Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow …

 

The one that speaks to the ultimate futility of life.

 

 

 

I finally managed to recite it sitting on the balcony of my dad’s house that overlooked the city and clearly remember him shouting ‘hooray’ and raising his arms in triumph, when the task was complete.

 

Twenty-five years later I bumped into Mr Grant again, perhaps appropriately outside  a book store at Norwood.

 

I was by now working at the ABC and had had a book published.

 

When I  reintroduced myself, he stared back blankly.

 

His eyes looked upward as if he was searching for an answer.

 

He then asked.

 

‘Were you in the special class?’

 

By that, he meant the kids doing a generalist’s course, not matriculation.

 

It was an easy enough mistake to make as the special class was conducted in the same room as Year 12 English.

 

But the meeting did take me back to Macbeth’s soliloquy of ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’

 

When I was 19, I’d repeatedly turn to Sir Donald Bradman’s The Art of Cricket – a part history, part instruction book complete with photos of how to play specific strokes.  I’d put the book on my  father’s bed and practise shots in front of his mirror when he was at work.

 

 

 

 

One of the highlights of that year was attending the Bradman Medal, the award for the best District cricketer of the season.

 

Having played for Student Teachers, I wasn’t sure what surprised me the most. Receiving a few votes in the Bradman Medal, or being seated at the table next to the great man, and even more surprisingly, the table next to the 60 Minutes reporter, Jana Wendt. Bradman was rarely interviewed by the media so he cannily organised for 60 Minutes to come to the dinner in honour of his name.

 

The olive-skinned, tall, slender Jana Wendt was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

 

So that night represented a Holy Trinity for a red-blooded cricket-loving 19-year-old Australian male.

 

Don Bradman … Jana Wendt  … and  … endless beer.

 

Not necessarily in that order.

 

I managed to scrape through Year 12 and got into Phys Ed. After a year to forget as the sports master at Trinity College in Gawler I scored a job at St Ignatius Junior school. It was then I discovered RF Delderfield’s To Serve them all my days, the story of a shell-shocked Welshman , David Powlett-Jones who finds a welcoming community at the fictional Bamfylde school in North Devon.

 

 

 

 

What struck me was the kindness of the headmaster Algy Herries, reminded me of the St Ignatius  deputy Principal Jim Carey who had welcomed me, a non-Catholic  teaching at a Jesuit school.

 

A little bit of kindness went a long way. And it’s a philosophy I’ve tried to adopt in life wherever I can.

 

This new connection for me to the Catholic church meant that The Devil’s Advocate by Morris West had appeal.

 

 

 

 

The story features an English priest diagnosed with a terminal illness, who is sent by the Vatican to  a village in southern Italy to investigate the life of a local candidate for sainthood. It’s a story of among other things, the vagaries of memory, prejudice, conflict, ceremony and ritual. And that there were always two sides to a story.

 

In my mid-20s working at St Ignatius provided some stability to my life. My eldest brother was very ill and my parents and I didn’t really know what to do to help.

 

Reading Tell me I’m here by Anne Deveson helped me realise we weren’t on our own.

 

 

 

 

The book tells the story of her son, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man, lived on the streets for a while and later took his own life.  It mirrored my eldest brother’s life in so many ways, except that Stephen survived. Only just at times.

 

The book also drew light on a taboo subject revealing the anguish of family members desperately trying to help someone who is so ill. And in particular, when a cure is so elusive and stigma so heavily set. 

 

Around this time, The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy became a favourite.  My upbringing seemed a million miles away from Conroy’s broken-down protagonist, former grid iron coach and teacher  Tom Wingo .

 

 

 

 

I grew up in Adelaide, he grew up in the swampland of South Carolina.

 

Yet the book resonated, as I, like Wingo, had grown up in a turbulent household.

 

It’s such rich storytelling.  It had everything I related to in terms of literature, sport, family folklore and madness.

 

I can’t remember how I first discovered Martin Flanagan’s writing. It might have been through The Age newspaper, which I occasionally picked up at Argo deli, down the road from St Ignatius.

 

One of his books was about the 1970 VFL Grand Final in  1970 and other stories of the Australian Game. 

 

 

 

 

Reading Flanagan was like sitting in a bar, listening to him. He had such a feel for the human in people that it blazed out of every page.

 

Flanagan tracked down some of the former players and wrote the story of the game, detailing how it affected individuals for the rest of their lives. It’s really an examination  of myth and loss.

 

I first met Bernard Whimpress at the Adelaide Oval in the mid-1990s when I visited the Adelaide Oval museum where he was the curator.

 

After an engaging conversation Bernard left me with the question, ‘Who was the only first-class cricketer to win the Nobel Prize for literature?’

 

That is a very Bernard question as he sees sport as part of a reflection of broader society.

 

The answer was Samuel Beckett by the way.

 

Bernard has been a great writing mentor to me  and others over the years and it’s easy to see how he would be equipped to perform such a role

 

Bernard’s Passport to Nowhere Aborigines in Australian Cricket 1850 to 1939 reveals the value of boots on the ground research in uncovering history.  It was published in 1999, revealing how far ahead of the game Bernard was.

 

 

 

 

But that only explains part of it. In the literary world much like the sporting world , some people like to see you get ahead  … just not ahead of them, to quote Kim Hughes who knew all too well about that subject.

 

But Bernard is different in that not only is he a fine writer but he also gains pleasure from the advancement of others.

 

Jonathan Rendall, the author of This Bloody Mary is the last thing I own: A Journey to the end of Boxing, was a journalist for The Observer Magazine, The Times and The Independent.

 

 

 

 

He died in his forties and lived, from what I could gather, a pretty troubled life at times.

 

His prose in the few books he wrote, sings.

 

I was recommended this book by the New Zealand author Lloyd Jones, whose semi-fictional The Book of Fame, about the All-Blacks’ tour of Europe in 1905, which is a brilliant example of a story that transcends its subject.

 

In This Bloody Mary Rendall recounts his times as a boxing reporter and then a manager.

 

At one point, he’s trying to locate a Cuban boxing legend called Kid Chocolate, who, by the time he finds him, is old and decrepit.

 

Here’s a snapshot of the writing

 

‘Kid Chocolate sat down on one of the chairs and opened his mouth to speak. But rum trickled out instead through his cracked lips stained with tobacco, like lava suddenly spewed from a long-extinct volcano. His voice when it emerged was a hoarse whisper, and he formed words with difficulty, each syllable accompanied by the widening of his eyes and a grin, as if greeting every tortured sound as an old forgotten friend.’

 

It’s almost as if you are there.

 

I was recommended Dispatches by Michael Herr by my teaching colleague, Stephen Holland.

 

 

 

 

The book about a war correspondent spoke to me almost in a different language about war. It was like nothing I had read before.

 

There was something about the urgency of the writing and its psychedelic nature that made me think that working in journalism would be fascinating.

 

So at that point after teaching for 15 years, I decided I wanted ‘to do not teach.’

 

Although I am reminded of that line from ‘When Harry Met Sally’, where Sally announces to Harry that she wants to study journalism so her life can start happening.

 

Harry responded ‘So you want to write about what other people are doing?’

 

But that’s what I did, while not a war correspondent, I worked in radio and print, for more than 20 years.

 

One of my former ABC colleagues Michael Sexton’s The Trials of Jack Broadstock  brings to life the west end of Adelaide during the depression years and beyond,  it also reveals Broadstock’s ability as a footballer and the power of his conman personality.  Sexton combines the forensic and poetic in telling this story. In short, it’s brilliant.

 

 

 

 

When I was grappling with how to go about writing Second Innings, a memoir about growing up in Adelaide in a household that was constantly in turmoil, and what followed, I  reread Steve Bisley’s book Stillways about his formative years spent on a farm under the domineering control of his father, a World War Two veteran. The story was engaging, but it also revealed Bisley’s experience in the theatre. His ability to capture a scene, just like a stage play, was illuminating.

 

 

 

 

Memories of a Fox by Harry Gallagher is a memoir about a street-wise swimming coach.

 

It’s also a love story

 

How’s this for an opening

 

‘Memories travel poorly, get confused in the shuffle. Truth is bruised. Edges crumble, fall away. Childhood epics are of little consequence now.

 

Some substance survives.’

 

The book takes you to time and place which is what all good memoir does.

 

 

 

 

When Richard Ford in The Sportswriter invented the character of Frank Bascombe, the former sports writer turned real estate agent he created one of the great fictional characters of modern times. Bascombe who is divorced by the time we meet him in The Sportswriter is grieving the death of his son and full of acerbic yet poignant observations.

 

 

 

 

More recently Twistby Colum McCann about a journalist/ novelist Anthony Fennell  who writes about a ship that repairs underwater sea cables that carry data for the internet. The co-ordinator of the journey is an Irishman called John Conway. The book has references to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with its connections to Africa and Conway is an unstable, enigmatic personality not unlike Kurtz.

 

 

 

Fennell is reflective and has many regrets but there’s one line that really stands out.

 

‘All the truth but none of the honesty’

 

It’s the way that Fennell’s father describes a semi-autobiographical novel his son has written.

 

‘All the truth but none of the honesty’ meaning that context and inclusion are everything to get to the truth.

 

It’s such a great line.

 

Think about that line the next time you or someone you know faces a meeting with management or, even worse, Human Resources.

 

And lest you think, hold on, this is a little too male-dominated, I suppose you’d be right. The fields I read of sport and non-fiction have historically been dominated by men.

 

That said, I have read and greatly admire the work of Helen Garner, especially on matters of crime, Hazel Rowley’s exceptional and intimate portrait, Franklin and Eleanor, Mary Lovell’s brilliant biography of Richard and Isobel Burton, A Rage to Live, Stephanie Convery’s book on the dangers of boxing in After the Count, and the pioneer of UK women’s cricket writers Margaret Hughes—All on a summer’s day—a terrific blend of memoir and analysis. As well as many others.

 

 

 

 

To finish, let me take you back to 2005.

 

That is how I almost met Stephen King

 

I was in my second year of working for the ABC as a Drive presenter in Alice Springs.  As you might imagine, it’s never a big drive around the town, so I’m not sure how many people tuned in. But the job was challenging, and the stories were often complex and important. And it was fun.

 

And I will say this about radio.

 

Presenting a radio show is like juggling while cycling on a tightrope suspended 100 metres above the ground, while someone talks to you and someone else shakes the wire. You would always finish with plenty of adrenaline running through your veins.

 

It didn’t take much to make a mistake, and I think I made every mistake possible.

 

This particular day was a typically blazing hot afternoon in mid-summer.

 

A somewhat dishevelled-looking bearded man wearing a baseball cap walked into the Dymocks store located in the Alice Plaza in the Todd Mall.

 

So far, nothing unusual to see here.

 

The man walked into the fiction section of the store.

 

As this was happening, the store’s owner, a woman in her 50s with an eye like a dead fish, watched on from the front counter. There was very little that Bev Ellis, the head of the Central Australian Football League and owner of Dymocks, didn’t notice …well, except for one rather significant thing, as it turned out.

 

As Bev’s eyes focussed, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

 

The unkempt, bearded man was scribbling in her books.

 

So what did she do?

 

Bev chased him out of the store and flagged down two police officers patrolling the shopping centre, pointing in the direction where the man was last seen heading – into Woolworths.

 

When the police arrived with the offender in tow, Bev, for one of the first times in her life, I imagine  took a backward step.

 

The man took his cap off.

 

You see where this is heading

 

The man who had been scribbling in the books was Stephen King.

 

He had, in fact, done Bev a giant favour by autographing her books.

 

To her credit, Bev Ellis called the ABC to report what happened. And I interviewed her about it.

 

We tried to track King down but by then he’d fled into the desert – literally.

 

Stephen King still tweets about this incident to this day, and of all the stories I covered for ABC, this was the one that travelled the most —picked up by the BBC, Times of India, CNN  and so on.

 

I mention this because Stephen King’s The Body is one of the books I often return to, to get a sense of what it was like to be a kid.

 

 

 

 

For those of you who may not have read the book, it’s about four boys searching for a body in a forest. But it’s so much more.

 

The movie Stand by Me is a film adaptation.

 

Although this book is set in a different part of the world than the one I grew up in and is set around ten years before I was born, its meaning and language is so relatable.

 

One of the closing lines from the movie is

 

‘I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?’

 

There is something about the way King portrays life through the eyes of a twelve-year-old. These years, for me seemed like a golden time. When life sometimes felt like a long summer holiday. Girls were largely undiscovered, and sport was the defining theme of life.  It was you and your mates, and the world didn’t exist much outside of local boundaries. There’s joy in the simplicity of it all.

 

Take this description,

 

‘Different strokes for different folks, they say now, and that’s cool. So, if I say ‘summer’ to you, you get one set of private, personal images that are entirely different from mine…I think it was all 1960 and that the summer went on for a space of years, held magically intact in a web of sounds; the sweet hum of crickets, the machine gun roar of playing cards riffling against the spokes of some kid’s bicycle as he pedalled home for a late supper of cold cuts and iced tea …’

 

King manages to capture feelings of long, hazy summers during that transitional period of life when anything seems possible. Life is on autopilot, and memories are seared into our minds. I know nostalgia can be misleading sometimes, but it can also be comforting.

 

I’ll finish on this note, given that I’ve mentioned cricket a fair bit in this talk.

 

The American comedian Groucho Marx was once watching a county game at Lord’s when an MCC official asked him, ‘You’re over here on holiday, are you Mr Marx?’

 

To which Marx replied, ‘I was until I saw this game.’

 

So, as King wrote, different strokes for different folks

 

For cricket fans, may you enjoy the Ashes summer ahead

 

For non-cricket fans, fear not,

 

It’ll all be over soon enough!

 

 

You can read more from Barry Nicholls Here

 

 

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