Sporting Melodies

To Lords on Saturday, complete with the wife and her bad foot. A very happy day’s cricket, although the new brother-in-law needed educating about the traditional Lancashire anthem which rang around the ground as Dominic Cork swept a Robin Martin-Jenkins delivery to the mid-wicket boundary. “What are they singing?” he asked, with the bemusement that comes only from someone who knows all the words to Sussex by the Sea. Well the correct answer is of course that they are not singing, they are chanting the refrain – Ow, Lanky, Lanky, Lanky; Lanky Lanky Lanky Lancashire.

For my readers who do not know the words, Sussex by the Sea goes something like this:

Now is the time for marching,
Now let your hearts be gay,
Hark to the merry bugles
Sounding along our way.
So let your voices ring my boys,
And take the time from me,
And I'll sing you a song as we march along,
Of Sussex by the Sea! For...

(chorus)
We're the men from Sussex, Sussex by the Sea.
We plough and sow and reap and mow,
And useful men are we;
And when you go to Sussex,
Whoever you may be,
You may tell them all that we stand or fall
For Sussex by the Sea !
Oh Sussex, Sussex by the Sea !
Good old Sussex by the Sea !
You may tell them all that we stand or fall,
For Sussex by the Sea

Up in the morning early,
Start at the break of day;
March till the evening shadows
Tell us it's time to stay.
We're always moving on my boys,
So take the time from me,
And sing this song as we march along,
Of Sussex by theSea. For ...

(chorus)

Sometimes your feet are weary,
Sometimes the way is long,
Sometimes the day is dreary,
Sometimes the world goes wrong;
But if you let your voices ring,
Your care will fly away,
So we'll sing a song as we march along,
Of Sussex by the Sea. For . . .

(chorus)

Light is the love of a soldier,
That's what the ladies say,
Lightly he goes a wooing,
Lightly he rides away.
In love and war we always are
As fair as fair can be,
And a soldier boy is a lady's joy
In Sussex by the Sea. For ...

(chorus)

Far o'er the seas we wander,
Wide thro' the world we roam;
Far from the kind hearts yonder,
Far from our dear old home;
But ne'er shall we forget my boys,
And true we'll ever be
To the girls so kind that we left behind
In Sussex by the Sea

Despite all this Sussex managed to win the match due, in no small measure, to the superb bowling of James Kirtley. I must remember to ask the older brother for a rendition of Ipswich football anthems (of which there is a CD available from the supporters club). The daughter won’t be particularly informative about Portsmouth FC chants. If Pompey songs exist at all they are probably foul-mouthed and unprintable.

Centrefolds and Fuming in the Forum

One of the good things about the Daily Telegraph (apart from its format) is the strange mixture of serendipitous trivia and rather more straightforward information that you find on the Social News – Obituaries double page spread.

Yesterday’s paper was a case in point. Obituaries led with the untimely departure of Wasim Raja (there’s a great all-rounder for you – no protective headgear when batting against Messrs Roberts, Garner and Croft in the West Indies) who apparently suffered a heart attack while playing for Surrey Over-50s at High Wycombe. Others on the obituaries page were Bruce Gary – drummer with The Knack whose infectious hit (My Sharona) never infected the Ranting Nappa, but features on President Bush’s iPod; and the late Lord Deramore whose writing efforts culminated in the publication of an erotic novel when he was 85.

Moving to the section on Bridge News I enjoyed learning about the Annual Bridge Awards in Warsaw. Bridge Personalities of the Year were (jointly) Bill Gates and Warren Buffett who are reported to “know and trust each other through bridge”. Happily the award for enterprising reporting was given to someone who had written up a game of bridge played during the year at the South Pole. Correctly instead of calling the players North, South, East and West he described all four players as being North.

Birthdays and Anniversaries for 24th August unite Sam Torrance (53), Stephen Fry (49), Antinia Byatt (70) with Cardnal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor (74) with the Massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572 and the destruction of Pompeii in AD79.

Racing over the Births, Anniversaries and Deaths classified column I found a little General section which promoted a website called www.fumingintheforum.org. Here every Victor Meldrew and Ranting Nappa that was ever born gather to expostulate about Ruth Kelly, Immigration, and every other issue of concern to the stalwarts of Middle England.

I could drone on about the chess section and the quote from the Bible that heralds the Personal advertisements (“Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof …” 1 Chronicles 16-32-33), but the reason I visited the Social News – Obituaries double page spread in the first place was to find the backup Sudoku puzzle. It was “Tough” but I solved it (just).

Bad Hair Day (Or How a Series of Bad Decisions Can Ruin a Sporting Sunday)

Well, I can’t let yesterday’s cricket fiasco pass by without a few words, can I? The blood has boiled after all at the ineptitude of everyone involved in the England – Pakistan ball-tampering incident.

Before the crisis erupted there had been a series of bad decisions from three umpires (amazingly the man who sits and watches replays on TV even managed a howler) and both teams had cause to feel let down by the officials. Certainly the Pakistan team were at fault for staging their protest after tea, but they had cause to be aggrieved: the umpires had failed to explain properly an accusation of cheating.

The events that followed were simply a nonsense (“farcical” would be the wrong word because it implies an element of humour). “Jobsworths” were everywhere and the man who should have stepped forward – England’s captain – missed the opportunity to a) approach Inzamam directly to see if there was anything he could do to defuse the situation, and b) refuse to accept victory in the match by default

Cricket, as everyone knows, is a game which is proud of the term “spirit of cricket”. It is a wonderful builder of bridges and repairer of broken roads. Where the hell was the “spirit” of cricket yesterday? Messrs Hair, Speed and Proctor should be removed from public sight immediately, and Mr Strauss taught that captaining England is a bigger job than organising field placements.

Grand Central Terminal

125th Street Harlem, Mount Vernon East, Pelham, New Rochelle, Larchmont - the names of stations on Metro-North’s New Haven line are a happy memory of the trip I made in June to the US Open at Winged Foot. Each morning of the tournament the older brother, the used guitar salesman and I would extricate ourselves from the breakfast table and scramble the couple of hundred yards or so from our lodgings to find our train at Grand Central Station - a train that would take us and our fellow golf fans through the Park Avenue tunnel on our 20-mile commute to our destination station – Mamaroneck. Sometimes the trains would be “specials”, but more often they would be regular service to the consternation and bewilderment of the normal users unused to the appearance of crowds of golf fans en route to the course.

But the purpose of this particular blog is neither the journey nor the tournament itself (which will always be remembered more as the Open that Phil Mickelson and Colin Montgomerie lost, rather than the first that Australian Geoff Ogilvie won). This is about Grand Central Station (or “Terminal” as it is more correctly named).

Grand Central is a film star (North by North West, Superman, Men in Black, etc., etc.), it crops up regularly in fiction, and is used as the backdrop for several TV shows. The station has an extraordinary, cathedral-like Beaux-Arts interior with the famous Information Point and clock at the centre of the main concourse as well as its celebrated “sky” ceiling. The exterior was once prominent but is now pretty much dwarfed by surrounding office blocks. It handles around 700,000 people per day which is about double the number at London’s Waterloo. It covers a much larger acreage and the tracks, assorted waiting rooms and apparatus sink about 10 storeys below ground level. In the 1970s it was very nearly pulled down as part of a major development plan but was thankfully saved following huge public pressure backed by the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In 1998 a complete restoration project was completed and it is now one of the most impressive railway stations in the world.

What is particularly good about the station is the complete absence of clutter. At Waterloo the concourse is crowded with kiosks, temporary information desks and stalls selling the Evening Standard. It is difficult to move through the crowds of people trying to figure out train movements on the poor TV monitors and there is a total lack of style. Grand Central on the other hand is marvellously open, free of clutter and, as for style, New York’s finest just oozes the stuff. Instead of the ubiquitous Burger King that dominates Waterloo you are offered an Oyster Bar and Restaurant (which has traded continuously on the site since 1913). More trendy and modern eateries include an outpost of the Cipriani (Harry’s Bar) empire on a balcony overlooking the main hall. Here it was that the used guitar salesman, the older brother and I frittered away a fistful or two of dollars on pasta, bellinis and carafes of wine while watching the comings and goings.

There are no commercial advertising hoardings on the concourse at Grand Central. A huge American flag was installed after the World Trade Centre attacks, but that rather adds to the feel of the place. It makes you wonder if London can ever do the same. I quite like Marylebone Station and the Liverpool Street Station redevelopment was good until the clutter crept back in. I’ll reserve judgment on the new-look Kings Cross and St Pancras and only hope that they will be as easy-to-use and pleasing-on-the-eye as New York’s finest. Meanwhile I feel like checking out Milan, St Petersburg and a few other great stations, but they are for another year.

Knocked Out

The NHS are building a vast new mortuary at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham (just outside Portsmouth) and it was the building footprint that I could see from my Day Patients Clinic ward as I waited for my hernia operation on Wednesday. They’ll have it ready for me by 2009 together with the rest of the hospital’s £200 million redevelopment. Quite a change from the small military hospital which first appeared on the site around 1904 – linked to Portsmouth centre by a tram service.

The surgeon reckoned that I might become argumentative so changed the plan to do me under a local anaesthetic and ordered the full knock-out general anaesthetic instead. He was probably right, but it does leave me rather ignorant about what went on. I just woke up an hour after going into the theatre with a large plaster on my tummy and (to my relief) my pubic hairs still intact. A cup of Nescafe and a slice of marmite toast later I was whisked away by my two responsible adults (the wife and sister-in-law) and driven straight to my place of work to process the day’s orders. Not much of a story in that!

The considered opinion is that I shouldn’t operate heavy machinery for a while, or make any major decisions. So the lawnmower remains unused and I’ll hang on to the wife and cat for the time being. There is also the thing about lifting things. It was very sensible to have the hernia done in August when things are quiet at work and typical of my customers that two “eighty-plus” book orders have rolled in immediately after the operation. The poor wife (with her injured foot) is acting as my “porter” for the time being and trundles after me down the corridors at work laden with parcels, briefcases, packing materials, etc., etc. I feel quite Victorian about it all, although I do get some strange looks from other workers on the premises.

Anyway, the forty-eight hours are virtually up so I’m off to have my first permitted (but shallow) bath – to the huge relief of the wife and the cat

Neglect and Sour Grapes

It has been an odd year. I started out in January with the intention of blogging regularly but then, around mid- March, I started suffering from bloggers’ cramp, or blogger’s block or whatever. There has been no lack of material. If anything I have had too much to blog about – Irish car rental costs, Grand Central Station in New York, Colin Montgomerie, Monty Panesar, the cursed hot weather, the older brother’s disguise (short trousers, dark glasses and a baseball cap), staff reductions (I’m on my own now), the World Cup, and the wife’s poor foot (still encased in an inflatable boot while recovering from an operation).

My sincere apologies are due to the two or three poor souls who try to read the “ranting nappa” on a regular basis. I hereby resolve to try and blog better and to blog more often. I might even try and backtrack on matters such as Grand Central Station.

But for the moment my theme is “neglect”. While the blog hasn’t suffered unduly in my absence (it is much as I left it), other things do get altered by neglect. My hair, for instance, became like thick thatch this summer and needed emergency treatment as I was wilting in the hot sunshine.

The house in France got neglected as well. For about eight weeks we left the ancient edifice untended and unvisited until last weekend, when we finally managed to cross the channel again. The “blue paint” operation (see passim) is half complete (how did blue paint get onto a lavatory seat?), but masking tape had become embedded on the window panes. The handsome vine which grows along the front of the house was another matter altogether. Like some sort of Triffid the hot weather had caused the vine to try and engulf the building altogether (see photo above). Certainly there were many grapes, but none were of the eating or drinking variety.

Rather than relaxing, the weekend was spent pruning vegetation, collecting up more than one hundred arachnids of one sort or another from inside the house and creating a rather impressive bonfire. By the time we left on Monday morning the house looked a little bit more respectable.

Fortunately blogs don't require this degree of maintenance, but I'll try and improve on the regularity my postings in future.