Cricket

Another cycle along the river, and another googly from my 6 year old niece: what are those men in white playing, uncle Oly?

Ahh, that'll be cricket. As you can see from this picture, a bunch of Englishmen on a sunny summer's day, all wearing white, all seeming to do their own thing.

There are those who don't get it. Lord Douglas-Home moaned "Oh God, if there be cricket in heaven, let there also be rain!".

But I prefer the take of John Fowles: "Cricket remains for me the game of games, the sanspareil, the great metaphor, the best marriage ever devised of mind and body. † For me it remains the Proust of pastimes, the subtlest and most poetic, the most past-and-present; whose beauty can lie equally in days, in a whole, or in one tiny phrase, a blinding split second".

I don't really understand it, but it feels right - which is pretty much how I feel about cricket.

Now: try explaining that to a 6 year old!