I'm only back in Shanghai

Just a quick note as I've only just found out how to blog from China. So here's a pic.

As you can see from my fashionable clothes, my cool expression and the caption on the window "I am the style."

Ils De Re

Ils de Re is French for Isle of Re.
And it was to this French idyll that Liz and me repaired to for a well earned spring, weekend, short, three-day break.


A street in Ils De Re on one of the rare occasions there were no French people flouncing up and down it getting in each other's way.

It was a very nice place and even at this early stage of the summer, quite full of Frenchies having a holiday.
This involves them being haughty, walking in a line abreast that stretches the exact width of the street so anyone approaching has either to reverse in front of them or suffer the withering stares of some Frenchies who are having to go through the tiresome experience of acknowledging the existence of other human beings and deigning to move a millimetre aside so they can squeeze past,  hiring bicycles and wobbling off on them in a dangerous fashion, mocking English people in restaurants who are politely doing the best they can in a language they are unfamiliar with and eating cheese.
In other words Frenchies are the same on holiday as they are everywhere else on the planet.
Got stuck into some moules marinieres and a delicious beer called Pelican Biere.
The place we stayed in was called Ars and everytime the bus stopped in the village the bus driver would announce its arrival by shouting ARSE! Ha ha ha ha ha, I'm sure you'll agree.

Regular readers of my so called blog will recall a piece of graffiti on the ceiling of a bar in Shanghai which informed us that "Chris is a homo!"  Whilst the author could be criticised for his lack of wit and creativity (though if I recall correctly he did also drew a 'jizzing cock' next to it) he cannot be faulted on the concise precision of his phraseology. Whoever he is, he's clearly widely travelled because look what I spotted in the Ars bus shelter.

Compare if you will.

Same precise phrasing , same language, same helpful urge to keep the world abreast of who is gay. The only difference is the lack of 'jizzing cock.' Presumably he is either working solely in the written word these days or the bus turned up.

The Mighthy ICC - The Final Chapter

Tom Bentall is the last player in our line up: AKA Tom, Tommy. Nothing creative here.

Tom wasn't born in the conventional sense. He was found. One summer morn' back in the 80's when summers actually had sun in them, the then skipper found a little baby nestling in a pile of old pads in the Home changing room. It was Tom.
Not really.
But he may as well have been. His Dad has been playing for ICC for 170 years and all his children, upon birth, were brought along to the club and more or less raised there by cricketers, the spiders in the shower and feral rabbits. All Tom's formative years have been spent in the company of immense idiots. Which tells you all you need to know.
It also explains why his body cannot tolerate vitamins, minerals, fibre and the like as he has been weaned on a diet of cricket teas and whatever he could scavenge from the pav. His body now produces all the nutrients it needs from Cheese and Onion sanditches, Lemon Drizzle Cake, Cherry Bakewells, warm milky tea, spider's webs and 4 year old cans of lager.
Tom plys most of his trade (the trade being medium pace, batting, fielding, talking shite, untidy scoring and possessing a good arm) for our arch rivals. Shipbourne Cricket Club. That's right. Those bastards. However before you go taking against him, he plays mostly for their 2nd IX and as such is not tarred by the same arse-brush as their 1's indubitably are.
Come Sunday though and he will, like a salmon, return to his spawning ground and ply his trade for his alma mater. Right again. The Mighthy Ightham Sunday All-Stars. Which explains his presence in the team photo all those many posts ago.
Let's now examine Tom's cricketing skill set.
Bowling. Tall, gangly, uniquely (at ICC) aerodynamic, Tom is a decent bowler. To fit more closely into the team, he's only missing about 4 and a half stone and a big pair of wobbly man boobs (which are surprisingly off putting to batsmen when they're jangling up to the wicket).
Batting: Again. A decent bat. But continuous absence from the influence of such Ightham luminaries as Moodie, Alexander, Smart, Bridge, Smith, Austin and Mungo has resulted in a strange technique whereupon the ball is sometimes tapped gently back to the bowler instead of pretending one's bat is a sort of willow Large Hadron Collider with which to smash the ball into sub-atomic God particles or the ball is played along the ground instead of smote into the ionosphere and worst of all he keeps his eyes open at the moment of impact!
Some people.
Never mind. We'll have all that drummed out of him by August.
Fielding: In Tom's case it isn't really fielding. It is more a cloak and dagger secret op behind enemy lines. Like the Special Operations Executive during WW2 Tom 's mission should he choose to accept it (which he does) is to set Kent's village cricket pitches ablaze. Not in the style of Joe Austin, by appearing and disappearing and wandering off at will. No. Tom hides in plain site. He likes to give the oppo the impression that in fielding he is a cretinous moron. While most of us can give this impression with some ease, Tom has to do things like throw it in left handed or drop it when the ball is being returned to the bowler or the ever popular, simply fall over when nothing's happening. Then when the chips are down and the batsmen take a risky run, he whips it into his right hand and unleashes a very fast, very accurate throw to the stumps. In first class cricket this would be worth at least one run out every game. At ICC it pretty much always results in four overthrows.
If you've been following this blog as assiduously as I hope, you'll already have spotted why. The give away is the phrase 'very fast, very accurate throw to the stumps.'
There are several things wrong with this.
1) No one ever throws fast accurate throws to the stumps. As the team's wicket keeper I have grown used to throws hurtling over my head, bouncing just in front of my ankles, not actually reaching me, heading off on a compass bearing at least 27 degrees North West of the one it should be on.  In other words, as I'm not expecting it to arrive at the stumps, I'm probably standing somewhere else. Possibly chatting to someone about the drizzle. The ball will sail off to the boundary unhindered by human glove.
2) Even if I happened to have wandered near the stumps, the ball's sudden arrival in a place it's never been before would have rendered it completely out-of-context. In short, it would have confused the fuck out of me and I probably would have simply watched it sail past as I tried to work out what this mysterious sphere above the stumps actually was.
3) In the completely unlikely event that I actually tried to catch it and run the batsman out, it undoubtedly would have been going too damn fast for me to hang on to.
The result? Order is restored. The situation is normal. Mirth is provoked.
Tom: Shipbourne. Ightham. Shightham.

Ightham. Nearly done.

Joe Austin: Joe hasn't acquired a nickname. Don't know why. Perhaps because Joe sounds quite nicknamey anyway and Austin is impossible to nicknamise. If he DID have a nickname it might be, for reasons that will become clear, Will O' the Wisp. Mainly because the first bit sounds like Willy, which is automatically funny, but also because of his unique fielding style.

If we were comparing Ightham CC to a Panzer Division in 1941 we'd be wildly off the mark as they were professional, well equipped and could hit stuff they aimed at but if we were to ignore that and press on with this unlikely metaphor that we so foolishly embarked on, Joe would be the division's reserve. ie held back until we'd had all had our tanks blown up underneath us by T34's or we'd hidden behind a tree or run away. Joe then steps into the breach.
In short he can't play every week but will climb into his "Tiger" (a German tank - but in this metaphor, "play cricket") every now and then to save the day.
Joe never bowls. Why this should be so is a mystery but maybe the contraption that holds his body together perhaps goes someway to explain. Before every game Joe clambers into the complicated web of elasticated strapping, rope and pulley systems, ratchets and torque returns that hold his body together long enough to play a game of cricket, eat some cake, launch his bat with a blood curdling cry at the bowling of the enemy and sit around talking shit with idiots.
Batting. Textbook Ightham batting technique. Has more than once saved the day when batting low in the order. He deceives the oppo into thinking he's rubbish by basically being  rubbish for a bit, then becoming, in the blink of an eye, brilliant and launching a six or two back over the bowler's head with drives of a straightness rarely seen at ICC headquarters.
But it is Joe's fielding that sets him apart from the rest of the team. Literally. Sometimes by many miles.
It's known as the Austin Drift and it is this idiosyncratic but effective style of fielding that would earn him the nickname Willy O' the Wisp if we could be arsed to think of one.
Don't get me wrong. Joe's fielding is as brave, foolhardy and hilarious as the rest of us, it's just that Joe's compass is on the blink.
Let me explain. Usually fielders are carefully placed by our skipper according to some nonsensical plan he has made up in his head and once placed, we are meant to stay there. However Joe is a free spirit. Not one to be tied down, as soon as you take your eyes off him he will wander far and wide, appearing and disappearing like a woodland nymph. At once here and not here. Matter and anti-matter at the same time.
Of course in a higher standard of cricket where fielders are placed specifically according to the delivery the bowler plans to bowl, a fielder wandering off from his position would be a problem. But since none of our bowlers seem to know what day it is, let alone what they plan to bowl, it actually becomes a tactical advantage. Becoming visible and invisible at will, it sometimes appears to the opposition batsman that we have 27 players on the field, 3 on the pavilion roof, 1 in Cherbourg and another one peeing in the orchard.
Joe Austin: Tiger. Drifter. Woodland nympher.

The Might.....you know the rest.

Modesty prevents me profiling myself, except to say that I'm the wicket keeper. As such I get to wear gloves and thick pads on my legs. Which is very useful in the chill of a British summer such as we are experiencing right now. And so we move on to the next in the line up....

Joe: Joe has only been in the team for a year and as such has yet to acquire a nickname though he has, using a natural flair and by doing the opposite of what we advise him, acquired something of a reputation with the ladies.

Joe is only 16 or 17 (not sure). But it doesn't matter. Suffice to say he brings down the average age, not to mention average weight, of the team significantly. Joe had never partaken in the noble art of cricket before the late summer of 2011. Hard as it is to imagine, the character building humiliations of the game of cricket have been completely absent from this whippersnapper's life experiences. No more. Now he has joined the ranks of Ightham CC, his proper education can begin. Each fixture, not just a game of cricket, but a grounding in life and how to live it. If he is wise he will listen, absorb and learn from the non-stop out-pouring of ill-formed opinions, hare-brained theories, hilarious nonsense and irrelevant observations about the other team and become, not just a noble cricketing warrior, but a man. A man with stupid theories, an eye for a cake, a complete lack of cricketing technique and an almighty thirst it goes without saying but a man nonetheless.
What better time to turn to Joe's cricketing technique?
Joe is an all rounder in that he hasn't played long enough to know if he's a batter or a bowler or neither, like the rest of us. Sadly for me he hasn't shown any great desire to don the gloves of honour and pads of duty and learn the art of glovemanship (wicket keeping). And judging by the throwing skills on display so far this season, he's very wise.
Having never been taught how to bat or bowl in his formative years, Joe's techniques are unhindered by centuries of learning and he bats bowls and fields in a refreshingly abstract way. Whereas batters like Moodos, bowlers like Millsy and fielders like Pete Fryer have thrown away the rule book, Joe never knew there was one. And it's to his credit.
When bowling he is impossible to bat against because everyone who faces him has been brought up in the traditional way. How to play each type of delivery has been drummed into them since first they picked up a bat. The trouble with this is that when Joe bowls a delivery that has never been seen before in the entire history of cricket, they are unequipped with the appropriate shot to play it.
For example we've all faced a Yorker before. It's fast, flat and pitched so that it bounces just in front of the batsman's feet. So we jam the bat down as quick as we can, shut our eyes (it goes without saying) and hop in the air like a frightened deer. Not so a Joe Yorker. No textbook has yet been written on how to deal with the one I witnessed last year.
Counter-intuitively this Yorker was neither fast nor flat. It was indeed very slow and very high. It was the highest delivery I've ever seen. On delivery it went almost vertically in the air. Almost. It had enough of an angle on it for it to have some forward momentum. It's high, arcing parabola conveniently took it EXACTLY the same distance as a cricket pitch.
In other words the batsman found it dropping vertically on the top of his head.
What does one do? Getting the foot to the pitch of the ball is irrelevant for it is about to pitch on your head. Watching the ball onto the bat is impossible without resting the bat on your eyes. This was going to be interesting, I mused as I retired a few steps in order to enjoy the fun.
In the end the batsman chose to do this:
He hopped about from one foot to the other, shouted "Fuck!" swished at it as one might swish at a angry wasp (ie swishing like fuckerio), alarm the wicket keeper, kick at it, take cover and finally, simply twirl round and round on the spot hoping the ball might hit his bat.
Luck was with him. Miraculously making contact with neither his cranium nor bat, the ball didn't have enough momentum to knock the bails off.
Joe's batting however is textbook. If the textbook is entitled "How to bat the Ightham way."
You know the technique pretty well by now but I'll tell you the essentials once again.
Eyes: Shut.
Bat: Aimed like a warhammer.
Foot placement: Who cares?
Balance: For sissies.
Concentration: Nice to have but a bit of a luxury.
Soundtrack playing in one's head "The Ride of the Valkyries" by Wagner.
Which leaves nothing more to do than emit an audible shriek as the bat is deployed at Warp speed and then the slow trudge back to the pav with the bat tucked under one arm as the umpire attempts to reassemble the scattered remnants of what were once a nice orderly set of stumps.
Batter. Bowler. We simply don't know.

Mighthy Ightham (the profiles continue)

And so we come to the 2nd most important member of the team.

Richard Bridge AKA Bridgey, Skip, The Silver Fox. (If I need to explain the first one, you've clearly been fortunate enough never to have read this blog before. In which case, leave. Leave now while your faith in humanity remains intact. 
Why Skip, I hear you ask? Well anyone who's played sport will know it's because he is our Captain or Skipper. In other words, our leader, our man at the helm, our wise old owl who leads from the front waving his bat like a mighty sword, who plots the downfall of our enemies, inspires his troops, finds out where the fuck Joe Austin's gone, prises a match fee out of Benwell, swears loudly in despair and who, late at night, when we've just been beaten by the 8 men, 2 children and a dog that make up the Falconhurst CC 1st XI, looks to the heavens and quietly implores God "Why me?" Bridgey has been skipper for over 8 years.
Silver Fox is a nickname Bridgey himself is trying, unsuccessfully to insert into the team's vocabulary on account of his prematurely grey hair. He thinks it imbues him with a certain sophisticated, savoir faire. Anyone who has been present at one of our "team bonding sessions" at The Old Red Lion in Holborn or in the changing room when he releases one of his infamous "squeakers" will know that it will take more than a few grey hairs to achieve this. Needless to say only Bridgey calls Bridgey The Silver Fox.)

The man who must take the raw materials described in previous posts (us) and with a magic alchemy worthy of Merlin himself, mould them into a tightly-knit, ruthless team of athletic gods. An impossible task?
Completely.
Sometimes though, he manages to arrange events in such a way that a motley collection of loafers, dandies, cretins, drunks, cripples, pensioners, teenagers and fatsos all turn up at the same ground, at the same time, with the intention of either playing a game of cricket or eating cakes (it doesn't matter which, for to achieve one, it is more or less mandatory to achieve the other) who are as capable of genius as they are of laughable ignominy. Often in the same game. What am I talking about? Often in the same over.
The frustrating thing for Bridgey is that it's impossible to know which. Which goes some way to explaining his grey hair.
Though he is by nature a kindly soul and a philosophical Captain, his temper may flare up occasionally and many is the picturesque, quintessential village green, nestled deep in the glorious Kent countryside, surrounded by pretty thatched cottages, perhaps a Norman church over yonder and little old ladies making cucumber sandwiches, that has echoed to the cry of "FOR FUCK'S SAKE!"
He is though, a magnanimous opponent and only slags off the opposition behind their backs. As exemplified by his stirring words upon being beaten by well known bellends, Shipbourne CC 1XI, and I quote "We'll clap them off, call them cunts and go for a pint." I put it to you my one reader, that even the Cambridge educated, ex-England skipper, writer and phsycoanalyst, Mike Brearly could not have encapsulated the Art of Captaincy so eruditely.
Anyway. It is to his cricketing skills that we must now turn. Bridgey is a very capable all rounder - which for my one American reader (howdy pardner) means he can bat, bowl and field to a good standard. Normally a cricketer excels in one, two or (surprisingly frequently) none of these disciplines but rarely do they excel in all three. Bridgey is one such freak.
Bowling - Though a very respectable bowler he is reluctant to put himself on to bowl until the crap batsmen are in (one of the perks of being the Captain), whereupon he will greedily despatch the old, the young and the infirm who tend to occupy the lower batting order, as efficiently as a dose of Swine Flu.
Batting - 'Pon being called on to bat Bridgey will belabour the ball happily to all corners of the ground with a combination of textbook cover drives, sublime cuts, pulls and almighty, cross-batted, eyes-shut, trouser-rending heaves down to cow corner, not to mention the textbook, Ightham-patented shot in which one thwacks it with an impeccable timing usually completely absent from the rest of the innngs, really hard into one's own foot from where it cannons of the ankle with a sickening crunch and dribbles out somewhere between square leg and mid-wicket at such a slow pace one can easily hobble a "quick" single. While crying.
Fielding - A reliably safe pair of hands Bridgey rarely drops a catch. Of late though his usually, equally reliable ground fielding has developed what can only be described as irony. How the hell can that happen? Well it goes like this. One of us will temporarily allow our admittedly pretty mediocre standards of fielding to slip yet further and either drop a catch, let a 4 through our legs or simply fall over. This is usually accompanied by hoots of derision, the tinkle of light laughter from the rest of the team and, by now his catchphrase, a "For Fuck's Sake!" from Bridgey. Sometimes this mistake will elicit a shout from Bridgey for us to tighten it up in the field a bit boys. Irony then kicks in.Within two deliveries the ball will be hit smartly to Bridgey and he will miss it. Balance s now restored to the universe.
For a summation of Bridgey's contribution to Ightham cricket we must go back in time to a late summer evening after a match in which we managed to scrape a win and in doing so, avoid relegation to Div 3 (where all the knobs end up - snigger). Ensconced in the George and Dragon and the loving embrace of 5 pints of cooking lager the team was looking wistfully back at the season's ups and downs. That's right. We were taking the piss out of each other. With great dignity Bridgey bore the good-natured attacks on his honour until he could bear it no more. With the wisdom of Plato and the eloquence of Stephen Fry (though not the sexual orientation), he said,
"At least I've managed to keep you bastards in Div 2 for 6 years."
Which is truly not the work of a mortal. It is the work of a magician.
Bridgey. Philosopher. Sufferer of fools gladly. Paul Daniels.

Mighthy Ightham (cont. again)

Right who's next? Ahhh.

Andy Moodie AKA Moodos, Moods: (No need for explanation on this one. But I'm going to do it anyway. His real name has the" y" sound on the end already so we can't put another one on. We've tried.)

Over the years Moodos has probably been our most prolific run scorer. Many is the twelve year old, would-be England bowler who has had his little spirits crushed by Moodos smiting every ball into various parts of Kent, Surrey and Sussex (East and West) and, on one memorable occasion, France. ("Oi Monsieur Pantalon,voulez-vous donnez notre ballon back. Do not worryer. Vous are not being invaded - no need to run away encore.")
Oh yes. Moodos is a master practioner of what the Olympic Commitee now recognise as a martial art. It is entitled "Batting - Ightham style." It's a unique style, or tao if you will, that has evolved over the 200 odd years the club has existed. I'll try to summerise it here. It starts at 5:30PMish the day before the game with essential mental preparation:
1. Get royally arseholed with Benwell/Leggett until about 4AM on the day of the game.
2: Rest.
3: Roughly an hour and 10 mins before the game starts, set off on the hour and a half journey to the ground.
4: Stop at a garage for breakfast. Tuna sandwich (or whatever they have left), Peperami, Lucozade, fags, crisps are the essential food groups our Batting Master requires to operate at peak athleticism.
5: Arrive at ground. Apologise to skip.
6: Change into traditional robes (nylon trousers and two sizes too small shirt).
7: Traditional war cries from one's fellow warriors ring in the ears of our Master as he dons his armour, such as "Hurry up Moodos, you look like shit!"
8: Before long, take up the bat like a warhammer, emerge into the light blinking like a mole and to hoots of derision, bestride the sward, towards the field of battle.
9: If everything has gone according to plan, the nasty fast bowlers will have commenced their rest and the Master will be faced with an elderly spinner, a 12 year old spinner, a seamer with a dodgy back, a 16 year old fast bowler (all pace, testosterone, anger and no common sense), a guileful trundler or someone's mate who turned up at the last minute and said he used to bowl at school.

What am I talking about? It doesn't matter who bowls the first ball at him. It could be Richard III, Michael Holding, the Queen, Zeus, Dale Steyn or a mouse. Literally whatever, however and whoever bowls the first ball, the Master will aim to hit it so hard, it evaporates into ball vapour. Direction - irrelevant. Shot selection - irrelevant. Feet Placement - Laughably irrelevant. Balance - Unrequired. Altitude - Irrelevant. Sutting of the eyes - Essential. Might of swipe - Everything.
The innings will now take one of two directions.
Direction 1: Stumps shattered - The Master walks back to the pav to advise the novice monk/batsmen where they are going wrong.
Direction 2: The ball goes for a 6. The Master will then take 12 balls to score 147, go a shade of red unseen in the human species, achieve a temperature of 3000 degrees Kelvin and become, from that moment onwards, unable to bowl, field, catch or do anything more strenuous than eat cakes, stand, mock, sit, look at things (as long as they're not too bright) and breathe.
Moodos. Drinker. Bon Viveur. Masterbatter.

Where the hell have I been!?

It's the usual excuse. Work. When someone acquires the muddleheaded opinion that I might have a clue what I'm doing, they will occasionally offer me financially remunerated work. And so it behoves me to down blogging tools (a computer, cup of coffee, a furrowed brow, a look that tries to suggest cleverness to the casual onlooker) and just bloody well get on with it for fuck's sake.
My other excuse is tonsillitis. I have just suffered my first, and I hope last, dose of tonillitis. A disease, I previously thought of as the disease of sickly 14 year olds.
It goes like this.
Stage 1: Flu + Sweating
Stage 2: Flu gets better but you get a 'sore throat.'
Stage 3: The 'sore throat' becomes a 'seriously fucking painful. No really, I'm not joking. Seriously fucking painful' throat.
Stage 4: You can't sleep.
Stage 5: You see the doc who laughs at the size of your tonsil which is now a fat, bloated slug, covered in white slime, lying, not tucked away at the back of your throat, no, it's moved out, it's now just in your mouth. You can see it. You can see the veins in it.
Stage 6: You take penicillin.
Stage 7: Gradually it stops hurting, you stop sweating.
Stage 8: Health!

I am somewhere between 7 and 8. Sometime during Stage 5 it can develop into Glandular Fever which is exactly the same as Tonsillitis with the addition of liver problems. Turns out my liver's fucked anyway so it's not that worrying