110. Loyalty, Allegiance and Support

Jeremy Corbyn didn’t sing the national anthem at a service in St Paul’s Cathedral soon after becoming elected as the leader of the Labour party.  He was accused by some of not showing respect or loyalty to his country. 

On Friday 18^th September, the day that the rugby World Cup started, a column in The Times newspaper was headlined,

“The left will never really love this country”.

If he cares about rugby at all, will Jeremy Corbyn be supporting the country of his birth or will he and other English socialists have their loyalties elsewhere?  What about expats living abroad; will they be supporting the country of their birth or will they be hoping that their adopted country triumphs?

I never had any interest in the Winter Olympics until the 2010 Vancouver games.   I couldn’t name one UK competitor but I was really hoping that Dow Travers would do well in the giant slalom because he was the Cayman Island’s first ever winter Olympian and Caroline and I were living on Grand Cayman at the time.  He finished 101^st only beating a skier from India and one from Mexico.  The UK didn’t have a competitor in that event but if we had, I would have hoped Travers would beat him.

In February 1956 I was given a book token as a ninth birthday present.  I didn’t use it immediately and so the token was unused for some weeks.  Then in April of that year I discovered the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.  I literally read the 1956 Wisden from cover to cover many times. 

I had lived in Sidcup in Kent until 1953 and so I started by reading about Kent County Cricket Club.  By the end of the summer of 1956, I could recite all the Kent averages from the 1955 season and all of the county’s records.   I can still remember many of the adverts in that edition.

Although I played cricket in Middlesex for many years and played with and against many Middlesex players, Kent remains the county whose result I always check first because Kent was, is and will remain, my county.

In January 1955 my Dad took me 30 miles to Norwich to watch Norwich City play Bristol City in the 3^rd Division South of the Football League. 

Norwich lost 0-1 but despite that and despite the fact that the school where I taught for 33 years was only three miles from Tottenham Hotspurs’ home ground, White Hart Lane, and even though for ten years I lived only 500 yards from Underhill where Barnet played, Norwich City is still the team whose results matter more to me than those of any other club. 

I am in touch with Patrick Gallagher.  Pat and I were at University together 50 years ago.  He was a very good cricketer indeed.  After we graduated, we both lived in London and we both joined Finchley Cricket Club.  In a game for Finchley against Malden Wanderers, Pat performed the remarkable feat of taking all ten wickets in an innings – the only time I ever saw it done.  That feat was astonishing enough but what made it almost incredible was that two of those wickets were as a result of catches by me at first slip.

A couple of years later he emigrated to Australia and he has been living in Sydney for the past forty years.  In July this year I met him and I was surprised to hear him talk quite casually of “our opening bowlers” when referring to the Australians: Johnson, Starc and Siddle.  I hoped that he was doing it to see if I would ‘bite’ but I soon realised that I was wrong; he meant it. 

After the test series had finished Pat sent me an email with his thoughts on the outcome and wrote:  “…all our quicks leaked runs…”, “I think our bowling can improve…” and, “Ever since 2005 our batsmen…”.  I think this shows that his assimilation into becoming an Australian is total and complete.

Perhaps Pat should bear in mind something said by Cecil Rhodes 150 years ago:

“Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.”

Does it matter that Pat has thrown away his lottery ticket when it comes to cricket?  No, I don't think it does.  Support for a team is rather like religious faith.  Faith is the belief in something for which there is absolutely no evidence.  Every year I believe and have faith that Norwich will get promoted that season or win the Cup.  For a week or two, I really believe that it will happen.  

Support both defies and denies logic.  It is only when the cold reality of the facts hit me in the face that I accept, grudgingly, that my hopes for that season with regard to Norwich will not be realised.  Last season was a wonderful exception.

With most sports, Pat transferred his allegiance to Australia within a couple of years but with cricket it did take longer.  In 1981 he had been in Australia a few years and when England won the Ashes series he was still a Pom, disturbing the neighbours in an Adelaide hotel while he cheered loudly in the small hours of the morning as England won at Headingley.

But, after a few years of playing cricket with Australians, watching and reading about Aussie cricket and talking about Aussie cricket, especially in the pre-internet days, he found it harder and harder to stay engaged with English cricket.

Is he demonstrating that he has passed the Aussie version of the Tebbit test?  I am always tremendously uplifted whenever I see an Afro-Caribbean or an Asian spectator in an England shirt supporting England and so I shouldn’t be surprised if and when the same thing happens in other places. 

But all those immigrants who support England today are second or third generation and I suspect that those who arrived relatively recently still support their country of origin. 

Fifty years ago, in the 1960s when England played the West Indies at The Oval, all the West Indians in the crowd, and there were many of them, vociferously supported the Windies.  That clamorous support is largely absent nowadays for two reasons.  Ticket prices have risen disproportionally in the past 45 years and are beyond the means of many.  Most South London Afro-Caribbeans who do go to The Oval were born here and those few who do attend are supporting England.

I don’t think Pat supports Australia just to have a happy, calm and harmonious time socially and at work.  For reasons that I can’t understand and that totally elude me, he really does genuinely support Australian cricket and probably gets the same unrestrained joy when Australia wins a series against England 5 – 0 that I experience when Australia is bowled out before lunch for 60.   I regard it with the same mystification and bafflement with which I view religious faith.   To me at least, it challenges reason.

As I said earlier, support denies and defies logic and so at the moment I am looking forward to the Ashes series of 2017-18, supremely confident that by then Finn and Wood will have become world-beating opening bowlers; somebody will have been found who can open the batting with Cook; we have an authentic wicket-keeper/batsman and at least one genuine, international-class spinner and we will retain the Ashes by winning at least three tests.

I really believe that.

A last thought:  When Canada plays France in the Rugby World Cup on 1^st October, which team will the Quebecois support?

109. A Fizzy SCAM!

Having been forced to be teetotal for the past eight years, I have become something of a connoisseur of non-alcoholic drinks.  When I eat in a restaurant, I usually have sparkling mineral water with whatever I choose from the menu, whether it be red meat, chicken, fish or pasta. 

Unlike the wines I drank during the dinners of my younger days, when the selection was primarily based upon cost, and the quality of the wines varied enormously, there is, in my opinion, very little variation in the taste and quality of sparkling mineral waters.  One ice-cold sparkling mineral water with a slice of lemon tastes much like any other ice-cold sparkling mineral water with a slice of lemon.  There are some exceptions of course but very few.

Wines vary in quality from the literally undrinkable to the heavenly.  Sometime in the mid eighties, four of us went to a well known and very expensive restaurant in the City of London that was offering three courses from the a la carte menu for only £9 a head.  We anticipated that the final bill would come to around £60 but the wine was so sublime (and so expensive) that the final total came to more than £200.

On the other hand, sparkling mineral water is never undrinkable but then again, never awe-inspiring.  If the quality of wine varies on a ten-point scale from 1 to 10, then sparkling mineral water varies from perhaps 4 to 7 and if the flavour is altered by the addition of a slice of lemon and ice, that range is even narrower.

Recently, I have become aware of a scam that is possibly costing people like you and me, collectively, hundreds of thousand of pounds a year.  I first began to suspect that a deceit was being perpetrated by some restaurants a couple of years ago.

Whenever the bottle of mineral water was brought to our table at a restaurant that we visited often, the waitress would twist the metal bottle top, open the bottle and pour some of the water into a glass that was already loaded with ice and lemon.  She then left the bottle on the table and walked away.

Last Saturday we were in a restaurant in Calderdale in Yorkshire.  The food was excellent and the mineral water was satisfactory.  Just before I emptied the last of the bottle into my glass, I asked for another.  When it arrived I asked the waiter not to open the bottle but to leave it on the table.  Instead of just doing that, he asked me, “Why?”

I wish now that I had told him to mind his own business but instead, I told him that I hadn’t finished the first bottle yet and I didn’t want this second one to start going flat.

When I opened it some ten minutes later, I found that the cap was screwed on very tightly but there was no “crack” of the breaking seal as I turned it.  When I examined the bottle top I saw that it had not been attached to a metal rim.  There was no seal to break.

We have a SodaStream unit at home.  It makes sparkling water at a cost of about £0.05 a litre.  When ice and a slice of lemon is added, SodaStream sparkling water becomes indistinguishable from the “mineral” water I am sometimes served in some restaurants.

I can see why they do it.  The bottle of water I was presented with in Yorkshire cost them less than 2p to produce but I was charged £3.50 for the pleasure of drinking it.  That is some mark up.

Someone should investigate and do something about it!

October 16th 2015

This is the bottle of sparkling mineral water as it arrived at our table this evening.  Notice that the seal is already broken.