Another day at Lords
Rather than describe a day’s play whose stultification was only lifted by a breezy knock from Quentin de Kock I thought I would describe more the Lords’ experience. My son-in-law Dwayne has made a nice few quid as a Forex dealer and kindly for my birthday presented me with a debenture seat in the Upper Mound stand.
This had always been my favourite watching point at Lords being spacious, high up with good sight lines and amenities. It guarantees you your dedicated seat but you have to pay at cost a ticket for it for the big matches. The cost does not seem to bother the debenture holders who seem an affluent lot. Besides all the seats are sold.
The staff try really hard and are a smiling lot whose greeting would impress Daffers and the buffet lunch was not bad either.
Lords is a convivial place, a meeting place for old friends. Yesterday I had a barrister next to me whom I knew at University and acquired quite reputation as the tabloid favourite in privacy cases. It must have been 35 years since I saw him last and was agreeably surprised that despite his success and a profession not unknown for their pomposity he still had a vivacity bordering on the irreverent. I said to him a good friend used to instruct him when he was a struggling solicitor. He replied that some of us are still struggling. He greeted a tousled-haired fellow who sat exactly two rows ahead of me in the front row with a vaguely recognisable face who turned out to be the writer Sebastian Faulks.
I am not a great quaffer of alcohol at sporting events and my sobriety gave me a certain detachment. By tea time the murmur was a hubbub fuelled by champagne, lagers, Pimms – you name it and someone will order it.
Some find it odd that the cricket is little followed. Not me. I don’t believe that anybody really intends to watch it all day and it was not like the All Blacks v Lions Test that was so enthralling that by the end I had to stand as I could not bear the excitement.
Cricket has changed so much in my lifetime. Who would have thought that you would have spy cam oscillating like a little bird? Apparently it’s German technology and the the German controllers need a steer as did the spy cam to follow the proceedings. The programme was full of worthy MCC social projects and the MCC seems a different organisation to the one that did not pick D’Oliveira for the tour to South Africa. We will never know what happened as the minutes no longer exist.
I saw on tv an elegantly-suited Peter (now Lord) Hain at the heart of the Establishment but in one sense not changed in his desire for self-publicity talking about those times. ]
I wonder what he made of Ken Livingstone’s Holocaust remark in the context of such Jewish activists fellow South African co-travellers Helen Suzman, Dennis Goldberg and Abbie Sachs who opposed the apartheid regime so courageously.
Whilst I applaud MCC ‘s social initiatives in the black townships it’s a sad fact that there were more black people working as catering staff or in the WCs than I saw in the debenture area. Still I did not go there as social commentator but for a cricketing day out and I was not disappointed.
