ASHES MORNINGS (1)

Thursday, November 21st

Given what the anticipation normally does to my already erratic sleep patterns, I actually slept surprisingly well, and, as usual, I got up at 4.45am and staggered around the bathroom for a while before heading downstairs and making a cup of tea with which to take my morning pills with, whilst also knocking up a couple of sandwiches for my packed lunch as I waited for the kettle to boil.

This is a fairly typical morning, although today I was also able click on the radio to find out quite how the first two sessions of the latest Ashes series had gone. Aggers was talking "down the line" to some hardy souls who had spent the night in the Ashes Museum at Lords, and there was some mention that the people there might have been much sleepier if the Australians hadn't been six down but instead had been "two hundred and fifty for one or something like that..."

"Hmm..." I muttered to myself as the sound of the kettle drowned out my tiny analogue LW radio, "perhaps things are going better than I expected..."

After an interview with Graham Swann promoting another series of his Ashes Diaries and telling the world how good it is for the world to see the "fun" side of James Anderson, eventually I staggered up to the keyboard and was able to find out that, at tea on the first day at the Gabba, Brisbane, Australia were 153 for 6.

Naturally.

England (and Wales) always play far better when I'm not listening.

Typically, Brad Haddin clobbered a six almost immediately - on his way to the first fifty of the series - as I tuned in and this resurgence of Australia's fortunes was at least checked by the seemingly quite lengthy departure of TMS for my first shipping forecast of the Ashes winter... and it wasn't until six o'clock that I got my first DRS debate of the series, and the first appearance in my day of the sainted Geoffrey... which was, of course, accompanied by the kind of good Australian batting that I have traditionally always had to listen to.

Told you it was my fault.

Still, listening to either Aggers or Victor again is like meeting up with an old friend, and it brings with it a real sense that all is right with the world, which is good, really, given the waves of melancholia which can overwhelm me just before the dawn.

I really need this sort of "comfort listening" when things seem otherwise to be so bleak...

It's very calming, very soothing, and afterwards I can look forward getting to listen to most of the final session of the day's play before I head off to work, and might, just might, even get a little bit of play to listen to in the car given the slowness of the over rate.

So, for once, Sir Derek Jacobi will have to wait for the return journey in the evening before he gets to tell me any more about that notorious "Study in Scarlet…"

I had an almightily vexing commute with idiots abroad to delay me and delay me again, especially as I had to make both supermarket and petrol stops on the way, but the day ended (and the working day began) with Australia on 273/8 with Stuart Broad having frustrated his critics in the local Australian press by taking 5 for 65.

Meanwhile, the thing that I was most looking forward to that day is the film written by Mark Gatiss and called "An Adventure in Space and Time" which was likely to keep me up late enough to not want to also stay up all night for day two of the first test match, and so I couldn't really expect tomorrow morning's overnight news to be quite as good as today's, given that it will most probably involve England batting, which always makes me tense because they do seem to have collapsed a lot over the years, and the prospect of that is far more likely to have me waking up in the middle of the night and tuning in "just to see how things are going…" because you can't really judge the state of the game until both teams have batted...

God help us...