I’m just reading through a personal message from the
White House as Daisy chomps her way through a mouse she must have brought in
last night and left as a love-token in the vicinity of my chair. It’s a
dreadful noise, the sound of teeth on bone and gristle.
The amicable letter signed Sincerely Barack Obama
is quite a good one. A well-paid wordsmith clearly spent a good few hours
constructing elegant paragraphs in a friendly, understanding voice that
ultimately signifies very little. The President’s ghost wrote to me in response
to an on-line petition urging the Big Man to pull his presidential finger out
on the subject of climate change.
‘For the sake of our children and our future, we must do
more to combat climate change.’ Well there you are then, I knew I could trust
the man. We can tell our children that everything’s going to be all right. The
world is not going down the pan after all, because the American President is
personally going to see to it that the United States of Consumption will cut
its emissions. Now I can go outside without a care in the world and play
croquet with the cheap-and-cheerful set I bought from Herr Lidl the other day.
I can’t be too hard on the man. After all, he was good
enough to write back – and, let’s face it, letter-writing is a dying art these
days. I remember going to a party given by some American acquaintances to
celebrate the new president’s inauguration. They rigged up a big-screen telly
and created a cocktail they christened Obamapunch for the occasion.
Everyone was in high spirits (no pun intended) and it was an uplifting assembly
of cosmopolitan folk. Yer man gave an assured and rousing address from behind
his bullet-proof screen, and everyone cheered him on, happy in the knowledge
that, at the very least, he was much more intelligent than the previous
incumbent.
However… meeting the agenda on his oval desk was always
going to be a tall order: save the world, while ending the inextricable
struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, revitalising the economy and wiping a few
trillion off the national debt. So I enjoyed the spectacle for what it was and
went home after a few heady draughts of optimism with few illusions.
Sure enough, nothing much has changed. True, the American
acquaintances have swapped their lovingly restored house in Martel for one of
those beautiful Regency-style houses, once the combined homes and depots of
rich wine merchants, overlooking the Gironde in Bordeaux. But rather than doing
something truly radical, like fitting solar panels to every roof in the
country, the American government, like just about every other government,
continues to fiddle while the planet burns. For all his elegant suits and
elegant words, the slick orator is effectively powerless in the face of
concerted lobbying, vested interest and political intransigence.
Was there ever a time when you could trust
a politician? If so, it must have ended roughly with the assassination of Bobby
Kennedy. If there’s any honour left, it’s an honour among thieves. Just like
professional cricketers, in fact. The first test of the current series for the
Ashes has been riveting, but spoiled a little by the failure of Stuart Broad to
‘walk’ when he knew that he’d edged a catch to the slips behind. He was half
way through contributing to a stand that might yet prove to be the decisive
factor in the match.
To walk or not to walk, that is
the question? The debate was raging in the mid 60s, when I was an avid reader
of my monthly mag, The Cricketer. The English team was only just emerging
from an era of Gentlemen v Players, a time when only amateur ‘gentlemen’ were
allowed to captain the plebeian professional players who made up the majority
of the eleven. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, to walk if you knew you were
out. Even then, though, there were many – often Australian, professional to a
man and generally contemptuous of any trappings of a class system synonymous
with British imperialism – who would stand their ground until the umpire raised
his finger. Let’s not forget, too, that any who walked potentially faced the
wrath of their team-mates.
The issue was not as simple as it sounded. I found this
out as a cricket-crazy kid. I was playing in a game on some far-off field, just
trying to get my eye in when I played at a ball outside my off stump and there
was a loud appeal from the wicketkeeper and slip fielders behind me. I wasn’t
sure whether I nicked it or not. So I stood my ground and waited for the
umpire. Since he was a spare from our own team, he didn’t give me out. I played
on for a few more balls until the inevitable happened and I drove over a
straight ball, which shattered my stumps. But I think in my heart of hearts
that the earlier delivery probably did touch the edge of my bat. To this day, I
am haunted by the fact that I didn’t walk. I did the wrong thing, knowing it
wasn’t right.
.jpg)
I was a kid at the time, and I like to think that I would
have been bigger about it if it had happened when I was a man. So when I’m
tempted by Friday’s incident to decry the boy Broad as a brat, I have to remind
myself not to be a hypocrite. In any case, Broad has to live with his
conscience (if he’s got one). He may even be remembered as the morally suspect
bloke who did the wrong thing: the other side of a coin that shows an untarnished
image of the great Australian wicketkeeper-batsman, Adam Gilchrist, a Boy’s
Own hero if ever there was one, who walked without hesitation in defiance
of the team ethic.
Perhaps I’ll write to my new
friend, Mr. Obama, and see what he makes of it all. Americans don’t understand
cricket, so I won’t mind too much if I don’t get a reply from him or his White
House wordsmith. I’d rather he thought to write to Mrs. Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, assuming
the great singer left behind a widow when he growled his last a couple of weeks
ago. Bobby was a big man in many senses of the word. He may never have been
quite as famous as the likes of B.B. King, because the only instrument he had
was his voice. But what a voice! Bobby was to the black American blues
tradition as Frank Sinatra was to the white American popular songbook.
No comments:
Post a Comment