Cambridge Sony Shop. Saturday. Your host, Damian “Ebony’n’Ivory” Counsell, and a Sony employee of south Asian descent who’s darker than a sideboard are wincing at the fall of cheap England wickets in their second innings. Mr Sony even goes off on one about a particularly shoddy piece of umpiring in the Aussies’ favour. Meanwhile, all the white people are looking at MP3 players.
07Aug05 — 7
The mental image I have just formed of you as one half Stevie Wonder and the other Paul McCartney is quite distressing.
Good finish. I’ll have my crow raw thanks.
Well, your devotion was rewarded, though, wasn’t it? I wonder how Norm will bear it? Me, I’d be trying to work out whether the LCD version or the Plasma was better, and remembering that I’ll be unable to afford either for the foreseeable future. Course, the cricket would be great for comparing white and green tones. Can’t think of any other reason for wanting to watch cricket….
Ah, it’s probably all thanks to the horrid class-consciousness of the English that they won’t watch Lord Freddie of Flintoff and his chums. Tebbit overlooked that.
I didn’t hang around for hours or anything; mostly I just monitored proceedings by radio and Web. However, my shouts could be heard across the city when I was listening to the end on Radio Bloke.
Forgive this horrible piece of advertising, Damian. It’s in a book you once lost. Pertinent though.
Preston North End
Tottenham Hotspur versus Preston North End.
Finney’s last season: my first. And my dad
with me. How surprisingly well we blend
with these others. Then the English had
the advantage, but today we feel
their fury, sadness and pity. There were some bad
years in between, a lot of down-at-heel
meandering. For me though, the deep blue
of Preston was ravishment of a more genteel,
poetic kind. They were thrashed five-one, it’s true,
and Finney was crocked by Mackay. Preston went down,
hardly to rise again. But something got through
about Finney the plumber, Lancashire, the Crown,
and those new days a-coming. The crowd dissolves,
but we are of the crowd, heading into town
under sodium street lights. This year Wolves
will win the title. Then Burnley. I will see
Charlton, Law and George Best. The world revolves
around them and those voices on TV
reading the results. I’m being bedded in –
to what kind of soil remains a mystery,
but I sense it in my marrow like a thin
drift of salt blown off the strand. I am
an Englishman, wanting England to win.
I pass the Tebbitt test. I am Alan Lamb,
Greg Rusedski, Viv Anderson, the boy
from the corner shop, Solskjaer and Jaap Stam.
I feel no sense of distance when the tannoy
plays Jerusalem, Rule Britannia or the National Anthem.
I know King Priam. I have lived in Troy.
[…] By following the ‘Blog aggregator of a friend I found an interesting live journal. I won’t name the intermediate friend because his is a just-for-mates ‘Blog. The interesting live journal, however, seems to be a public thing. It belongs to Shreena who is doing a PhD on Augustine—a man worth of a thesis. One of the longest friendships of my life started with me talking crap about Augustine over dinner at Green College and being corrected by someone who actually had a clue. Shreena describes herself as Indian, but, like me, passes the Cricket Test with flying colours. Also, like me, she is has no illusions that racism is confined to whites. Here she is writing about British ghettos. […]
Pootergeek
England and Australia, the Ashes Series, the sound of leather on willow, an evocation of a traditional British summer. As Pootergeek points out, things do change: The Tebbit Test Cambridge Sony Shop. Saturday. Your host Damian “Ebony’n’Ivory” C…