DISTRACTIONS

Daily life can be chock full of distractions, which is usually a good thing. We’ve all seen recently what happens if people get too bored and decide that they would rather make everyone else as “poor” as they consider themselves to be rather than finding something useful to do. It’s always depressing to see those people who consider themselves to be impoverished strutting about flashing their bling and waving expensive phones about and mentally comparing them to the kids in real poverty I saw on the streets of Cairo last year getting simple pleasure from jumping in a canal at the end of the day.

There are children in schools in Africa and Asia who are wearing positively beaming smiles and proudly sporting the crispest of uniforms when they are given an opportunity to get themselves an education in an actual school when it opens up near them. These are not schools filled with computer screens and the latest schoolbooks, often they are just a teacher and a chalkboard armed with little more than a piece of chalk and their knowledge, but those kids are wise enough to know that going there to listen and learn might just make enough of a difference to their lives to mean that they can go on to live their lives protected from the poverty they grew up in because of their own sheer hard work.

The sad thing is that if they manage to get themselves into a position where they can move to a country like England, they’ll probably get mugged, or get a load of racial abuse from people considering themselves to be “better” than them.

Strangely enough, England is still mostly a rather great place to live. Anywhere that can still have its balloon festival or put on a five day Test Match in two of the cities hit by the week’s outbreaks of violence within a couple of days, and can summon enough indignant citizens to get out of their houses to go and help sweep the streets cannot be quite as doomed as we might have thought. I have, quite rightly, made many observations over the years about the parallels with the fall of the Roman Empire that we can see every day if we know where to look, but the Visigoths aren’t quite winning the battle for civilization yet.

Of course, the balloons and the cricket might only be distractions too from the main problems, but they can’t half be entertaining ones. Whilst it is rather marvelous to see the England (and Wales) Cricket Team finally looking as if they know how to actually play the game after the sport’s own “forty years of hurt”, my main source of entertainment from the Test Matches still comes from the wacky world of TMS, which manages to be one of my own happier distractions during the summer at least. During this (third) match at Edgbaston they really have played a blinder, especially with the almost comic genius of announcing to Geoffrey Boycott an anagram of his name: Grotty Coffee Boy.

The loaded silence was exceptional.

The TMS commentators range in age from 51 to 71 (looking that up was another distraction)  and are pretty much all outside the accepted age seen on out television screens, so we must be very grateful to whatever broadcasting gods manages to save them for radio, although, because there has been a surprising amount of play despite the rain and rioting, we have been a little deprived of the true genius that seems to happen during those long days where play is just a slight possibility but not actually happening, and their brains are truly racked to keep the airwaves burbling. Many may prefer the more modern cold ruthlessness and partiality on display by the summarisers like FEC Michael Vaughhan, who comes from a later era of sportsmen (and is only 37), but that doesn’t sit very well with me. Give me Henry Blofeld’s descriptions of “a smashing cover drive going like a tracer bullet” and “a rather startled pigeon on the outfield” over that sort of thing any day.

Of course, having looked them up I now find myself worrying about their ages, realizing that this kind of genuius in inevitably finite, and their health. Reading about Aggers suffering from Dupuytrens Contraction rather upset me yesterday, especially as he remains such a cheerful sounding soul, but then I also found out that Graham Gooch had a finger amputation because of it which seemed exceptionally sad.

Those distractions. They do make you find things out, don’t they?

Finding things to fill my spare time not only feeds my “media disease” which leads to me trawling around for information like that at ridiculous times of the day, but also seems to feed my “stuff disease”, too. Leave me alone with a keyboard for any length of time and, after composing another string of pointless words for the world to disregard, I will go and order yet another book, despite the house being already full up to the brim with them and a piled up backlog of potential reading that really should provide me with enough distraction to keep me amused from here to doomsday, or whenever the Visigoths come to ransack the place should turn out to be.

The latest is one that had been in a pending “awaiting stock” state for two years now. I found a cheap used copy on AbeBooks instead and am now waiting for it to chug its way through the international postal network and reach me. It’s another book about the moon (as if I didn’t have enough already), but the really interesting thing about (hopefully) finally tracking it down was the Amazon review I read by one of those “Moon landings all faked” people. Hilarious! And final proof, if it were needed that too many of us have too much time on our hands and really, really need to find those distractions.