We went over the Rec yesterday as it was nice and warm and sunny 25 degrees and white puffy cumulus clouds. I took the gear over in the big bag just in case at some point the kids would be up for a game. Initially I thought I'd get a bit of a game with some randomers that were setting up, but they turned me down! It's not like Peter Philpotts England that he writes about in his book a spinners yarn, but then that book was written pre Thatcher and the whole idea of there being no such thing as society and privacy and the individual being the key to some kind of perception of success has kind of warped peoples minds since, so I wasn't that surprised that they basically told me to sling my hook. In Philpotts reminisces he talks about the fact that you can visit any beach in England or playing field (Remember this is before cricket was hi-jacked and privatised by Murdoch) and find kids and families playing cricket and just join in, happy for you to make up the numbers and contribute to the batting, bowling and fielding. Whereas these days with the Thatcher-ite private aspect of what's left of society, if you try and join in with people or even try and talk to people they look at you as if you're a paedophile or a freak.
Anyway all the kids mucked about doing other stuff and then eventually I tempted Ollie, Joe and Kieran to do some catching drills and then some other kids started to look at realise that actually catching and doing real stuff is better than sitting around texting and we eventually got enough of us to have a knock about including one girl, but she soon got TWS (texting withdrawal syndrome) and left us.
We set up on the edge of the square over on the cricket pitch. On the square there is almost another strip, but it's intersected by the drain/water valve, but it's still on the slightly higher piece of ground that the square sits on and it seems to get rolled and so in relation to everywhere else it's very flat, so for us with a plastic ball it was fine. With six of us fielding we had two batsmen scoring as many runs as possible off three overs, so we were all divided into pairs and the winners were going to be the pair that scored the most runs, if you were dismissed you lost 3 runs. The off-side of the set up was the outfield, so it ended up we only had one person ever standing on the square itself and they were wearing trainers so it wasn't like any damage was ever going to be done.
The revelation of the day was that Ollie Bybuke was a decent bowler and is well up for a game of cricket and he played pretty well, so hopefully over the rest of the holiday we're going to see more of him in our knock-abouts and maybe in the nets outside our gaff.
