Runny Thoughts

Come back Australia, all is forgiven

A strange thing happened one morning a couple of weeks ago. Pale, sleep-deprived men staggered out into the streets, disbelieving grins on their faces. They smiled at random strangers and helped old ladies across the road. Some were even polite to traffic wardens.

Alan Sugar was nice to an Apprentice.

Yes, extraordinary circumstances prevailed: England had won a Test match in Australia during a live Ashes series (by which I mean an Ashes series that hadn't been won six months before it started by those dastardly Australians with their underhand trick of playing the game much much better than anyone had ever played it before).

From the prevailing mood of euphoria you'd've thought that the whole country had got laid simultaneously.

Which, in a funny kind of way, it had.

In the period between that Test match and the one that has just started, even stranger things happened.

England got confident. The country, that is. The cricket team was already confident.

Mockery of Australians became the norm. Pitying texts, tweets and status updates flew through cyberspace. Stranger still, Australians seemed resigned to their fate. In desperation, they selected a player called Beer, as if invoking the spirit of David Boon, whose record of 52 cans consumed on an Australia-England flight stands to this day. Hilarity ensued. Meanwhile, I got nervous, preemptively texting friends with doom-laden warnings like "it's still only 1-0, you know", "a long way to go yet", and "steady now".

And now we’ve had the first day of the Perth Test, and a couple of things have become clear:

Thing 1: even the most cautiously optimistic of England fans (guilty as charged) has realised that the series is England's to lose.

Thing 2: World Cricket, and especially Test Cricket, is in deep trouble.

A disclaimer on Thing 1: England may still lose the series, but, if they do, it will be the result of the biggest choke since Oxford United threw away a 7-0 lead with ten seconds of injury time left against the eight surviving members of Dagenham and Redbridge Under-12s (reserves) in the First Preliminary Round of the 1987 Watney's Red Barrel Consolation Cup.

Thing 2 is, for the England fan keenly anticipating a first Ashes victory down under since 1986, somewhat counter-intuitive (sorry, I hate that word, but sometimes only the hideous words will do). Much as England fans would enjoy a long-overdue retention of the oldest trophy in cricket, the sport needs Australia to be strong, and, unthinkable a concept as it may have been just a year ago, the signs for the future are not good.

Consider this: back in the day, when Aussie batsmen were lantern-jawed, box-girder-chewing, Pommie-munchers, it was commonly held that Australia’s second-best (and third, and fourth...) would make fine-grained, low-fat mincemeat of England’s first team. This was regularly proved by the insultingly easy victories for Australia A in the warm-up games at the beginning of England tours down under. It was as if they were the commis chefs in a Michelin-starred restaurant, passing the platter of diced Pom to a baggy-hatted, spongebag-trousered tantrum factory with a casual “there you go, chef, we’ve skinned, gutted and filleted them for you, and put them in a nice lemon and garlic marinade. I’m sure you can finish them off.” Batsmen of the calibre of Stuart Law (79 first class hundreds, average of 50), Darren Lehman (82 first class hundreds, average of 58 or so) and Michael Hussey (he could teach Prince Charles a thing or two about waiting your turn) were unable to establish themselves in the side.

But now, faced with injuries and loss of form, and the possibility of losing the Ashes at home after just three tests, the selectors turned to the next-in-line, and found the coming generation unready for the task.

Phillip Hughes may well develop into the most destructive batsman of his time, but at the moment, on all available evidence, he is as much a Test-class opener as I am a surprisingly spacious three-bedroomed house in Clapham’s fashionable Abbeville Village, situated within easy striking distance of all local amenities and travel links. His lack of anything approaching a defensive technique was cruelly exposed by Chris Tremlett, and England were up and running, able to exploit the lack of confidence in the Australian upper order with startling ease.

Soon enough they had the opportunity to bowl at Steven Smith, a talented young cricketer, albeit one batting at least a place too high, whose stated aim was to ‘come into the side and be fun’. This is a remarkable new slant on the role of the number 6 batsman, and one which prompted the ignoble thought that a more appropriate pick might have been Sir Les Patterson.

The shots played by Hughes (cross-bat to a full straight one) and Smith (indeterminate post-lunch prod) may have had the desired effect: ‘Test opener and number 6? Don’t make me laugh!’

The point is not that these two are untalented - on the contrary, they are almost certain to develop into high class Test cricketers, given time. But when the Ashes are about to be lost, Australia should be able to whistle up cricketers who can offer more than a season's batting average of 22 (Hughes) and some bits-and-pieces middle-order biffing and occasional, eminently hittable leg spin (Smith).

Before you say anything, I am well aware that by even thinking those words, I am inviting run-a-ball double centuries from both players in the second innings, backed up by an unplayable and series-turning spell of spitting leggies from Smith and g azelle-like wonder-catches in the gulley from Hughes.

They were going to happen anyway. Not my fault.

Looking further down the order, the spin-bowling cupboard, post-Warne, is distressingly bare. X-man Xavier Doherty lasted just two Tests, poor chap, and it seems that the selectors are blind to the Ashley-Giles-esque qualities of Nathan Hauritz. He may never play Test cricket again, and it would be to Australia's detriment.

As for the fast bowling, the selection policy is in confusion, but the overwhelming impression is that this is all they have. There are no young thrusters waiting to burst into the squad. The standard of cricket being played in the Sheffield Shield, which used to be held up to all other countries as the example to which they should aspire, is, according to those who know, lower than ever before.

Now, it is very un-Australian even to consider the possibility of them not being at, or at least very near, the top of any sporting tree, and particularly crucket. But they’ve been doing some terribly un-Australian things recently.

The worst-case scenario is that the dip in quality in Australia's domestic scene persists, young athletes look to other sports (notably Australian Rules Football) and Australia become, medium-to-long term, a mediocre team, thus further denuding the pool of competitive Test-playing nations.

Unthinkable? That's what they would have said about The West Indies in the 1980s.

Australia's X-Factor Not Enough. Or is it?

I can restrain myself no longer. It seems that everyone is doing it. I think I even heard the Pope talking about it the other day. Or maybe that was something else.

Yes, it’s time for an Ashes preview.

If you are the kind of person who would rather go on a date with Gillian McKeith while being serenaded by Wagner (the X-Factor one, not the composer of Test-match-length operas) and danced at by Ann Widdecombe (see how topical I am!) than read about cricket, then I do urge you not to lose interest at this point. As I showed in the last, albeit rather long, and actually full of nested clauses (and parentheses) sentence, I do like to popularise these blogs of specialist interest just to keep the laypeople reading.

In the recent past, Ashes encounters in Australia have resembled a quadratic equation in which the unknown ‘X’ (as we will discover later, a crucial letter in this context) has been replaced by the words ‘Australia win' and all the other elements have also been replaced by 'Australia win'. On occasions the contest has been more uneven than the contents of Mr. Bumpy's Bumper Bag of Big Bumps. Australians would have you believe that the most recent meeting between the two teams Down Under occurred in 2006-2007 and resulted in a 5-0 trouncing for Australia over the Poms. It’s funny, but I can remember everything about that series up until the moment when the great English bowler Steve Harmison stood poised at the end of his run-up, ready to unleash his particular brand of hell on the unsuspecting and hapless Australian batsmen. As far as I know, the series stopped there and the next time the teams met was in England last year, when we thrashed them 2-1.

So visiting teams fare badly in Australia. On this occasion, however, England fans can allow themselves the merest hint of optimism. Why? Well, let’s compare the two teams in a completely even-handed, unbiased and utterly accurate and truthful point-by-point list:

POINT ONE - PREPARATION

Magnificent England’s preparation for this series has been thorough, professional and seamless - an object lesson in how to acclimatise, build momentum and send the right signals to both yourselves and the opposition. Under the inspiring leadership of Honorary Englishman and Great Cricketing Hero Andy Flower they come to Australia not having lost a Test series in the last 5 and having won 12 of their last 19 Tests. All of those wins have been so facile as to make stealing candy from a child look like a daring and sophisticated art heist as portrayed in The Thomas Crown Affair.

Feeble Australia, by contrast, have lost 12 of their last 18 international games, and were so scaredy-cat about losing two of the others that they arranged for them to be wiped out by mysterious and entirely uncharacteristic-of-the-country-they-were-in rainstorms.

Pathetic.

POINT TWO - SELECTION CONSISTENCY

Indomitable England have a settled squad.

Wobbly Australia were so uncertain about the make-up of their squad that they could only narrow it down to 17 with two weeks to go to the first Test. When they finally got round to naming an appropriately-sized squad they included Xavier Doherty, an uncapped spinner who boasts a first-class bowling average of 48.26. So, having introduced Mr. Doherty, it’s time for:

Killer Stat Number One
Teams selecting players whose name begins with ‘X’ have an appalling recent record. Of the last 11 games played by sides picking a player whose first name begins with ‘X’, only one has been won. Xenophon Constantine Balaskas may have had a groovy name, but he was unable to prevent South Africa from three consecutive innings defeats against Australia in 1936. More recently, Xavier Marshall’s only success in Tests came when the West Indies beat England in 2009, but as this was the last time that England resembled a ragtag collection of five-year-olds who had never played cricket before, and they have since evolved into a fearsome squad of lantern-jawed Aussie-munchers, that result is irrelevant.

This is closely followed by:

Killer Stat Number Two
www.babynames.com lists no fewer than 28 boy’s names beginning with ‘X’. The fact that only two of those names (Xavier and Xenophon) have made it to Test Match Player status shows you just how flaky the letter is when it comes to top level sporting achievement. No side could possibly succeed with a name like that in its ranks.

POINT THREE - FORM

England have improved throughout their three warm-up games, in which all the batsmen have spent time at the crease, all the bowlers have taken wickets (including the second string) and tactical plans have been executed clinically. Most recently, they completed an easy victory over Australia A, in a fixture normally notable for the way it highlights the embarrassing gulf between the two nations. In days gone by, most of Australia second-best would have walked into the England side - nowadays they'd have as much chance of a game as I have of becoming manager of Liverpool’s all-powerful European Cup-winning side of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

As an indicator of the confidence running through this squad, suffice it to say that Monty Panesar took a one-handed wonder catch off a full-blooded pull shot.

Monty.

Not Jonty. Monty.

As for form between the two sides, how about:

Killer Stat Number Three
Jonathan Trott, England’s very-English-oh-yes middle-order batsman, has never ever lost a Test Match against Australia.

And how have Australia fared recently? Well, let’s wheel out:

Killer Stat Number Four
Baby-faced Aussie-muncher Ian Bell (192) scored more runs in his most recent innings than Ponting, Watson, Katich, Haddin and North cumulatively managed in their last game (169). So this pattern is bound to repeat itself in all five Tests. Obviously.

POINT FOUR - NICKNAMES

English players’ nicknames are a mark of the togetherness of the squad. Finny, Swanny, Cooky, Belly, Straussy. Just add -y to the surname and Boby’s your uncley.

Australian players’ nicknames are all over the place: Pup, Midge, Kat, Eagle. Make your minds up, guys - cricket team or menagerie? Of the others, Steven Smith is so undistinguished that, according to Cricinfo, he doesn’t even have a nickname.

Amateur hour.

That’s it. England are bound to win. It’s all going so smoothly.

Too smoothly. The last time England won the Ashes in Australia, they were so feeble in their warm-up games that they were famously slated by Martin Johnson in the ‘can’t bat, can’t bowl, can’t field’ article. This time they can patently do all of these things quite well.

So I’ve come to the uncomfortable conclusion that they’re bound to lose.

Bugger.

Reading My Writes

Good evening.

There’s a website out there in Internet-Land called ‘I Write Like’, and, if I may make so bold, I would like you to visit it: http://iwl.me/.
If you feel so inclined, cut and paste the last email you wrote (let’s say), and come back here with the results. I’m sure we’d all be very entertained if you were to paste them into the comments below (be warned, the link is VERY small - damn you, Typepad).

Then I’ll show you mine. (NB Nothing will self-destruct if you don’t do this. This isn’t Mission Impossible. Just thought it would be fun.)

All done?

Ok. So apparently I write like (in no particular order):
Joyce, Christie (Agatha, not Linford), King (Stephen, not Billie Jean), Fleming, Nabokov, Twain, Carroll and Shakespeare.

Which is all very well, except those are the results from a children’s book I’m writing.

I’ve come to an unpleasant conclusion: it’s entirely possible that my use of language is a little too sophisticated for the age group at which I’m aiming (although I am encouraged by Joyce and Carroll in a weird kind of way).

The real killer, though, came when I entered the last two chapters. I wrote them in a hurry, desperate to tie up loose plot ends, and haven’t edited them.

In short, they are, frankly, pants.

In fact, if you’ve got a moment, they are the biggest load of unfeasible bollocks written by anyone since someone thought to themselves “I know, I’ll put an albino monk in there - that’ll be realistic”.

I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that, on the basis of those two half-baked, feeble, raggedy-assed, insultingly dimwitted, semi-literate, downright unpublishable, please-for-pity’s-sake-and-for-the-good-of-humankind-never-write-anything-again, miserable apologies for chapters, I write like...

Dan Brown.

I am sure you will draw your own conclusions.

I, meanwhile, am going into the garden to eat worms.

Collective Useless Numpty Transference Syndrome

It is about 10pm on Sunday 27th June, 2010. At about 6.00 this afternoon, I had the beginning of this post all worked out.

This is what I was going to write:
"Today saw a dismal performance from an over-rated team full of their own self-regard, crowning one of the most inept sporting displays on foreign soil since the passing of the Inept Sporting Displays Act of 1853.

But that's enough about the Australian cricket team."

I hope you see what I was trying to do with that.

If you don't, you are clearly not an English sports fan.

Congratulations on both counts.

Anyway, regardless of whether you are a sports fan or not, I'm sure you'll be interested to know that this afternoon saw the first known occurrence of a phenomenon I am choosing to call Collective Useless Numpty Transference Syndrome (you can work out the acronym yourselves, I'm sure).

I invented it, so I get to name it, OK?

Briefly, what happened was this:

England (football) were, to quote the magnificent Malcolm Tucker, about as much use as a marzipan dildo in their footballing contest with Germany.

England (cricket) on the other hand, were, as is their recent wont, progressing quite nicely against another 'old enemy', Australia, who have performed as disappointingly in the last week as the perennially under-achieving Rain Gods of Wimbledon.

They then contrived to turn a facile victory into a cushion-munching, finger-slicing-while-chopping-onions, beer-all-over-the-kitchen-throwing near-defeat that had me, well, you know, munching cushions and so forth.

I have a theory. And it's one that makes those no-hopers at CERN look like amateurs.

The footballing no-contest in Bloemfontein, South Africa ended at approximately 4.50 our time.

England (cricket) were playing in Manchester, England and started imploding at approximately 6.00.

The distance between the two towns is 5934 miles.

Until 4.50, the England football team had possession of the Mantle Of British Sporting Ineptitude.

At the final whistle, no longer having use for it, they tossed it aside like a used up tube of toothpaste, whereupon it pricked up its ears (yes I know mantles don't have ears), sniffed the air (yes I know that even if mantles had ears they wouldn't use them to sniff the air), and hot-footed it (yes I know etc) to Manchester with all possible speed.
84 miles per minute, to be more or less precise.

Speedy buggers, these Mantles of Ineptitude.

Upon arrival in Manchester, the Mantle headed straight for the England (cricket) dressing room, where its mystical powers caused them to lose six wickets for eighteen runs.
Rumours that exceptional pace bowling from Shaun Tait and Dougie Bollinger were also involved are scurrilous and not to be believed.

Luckily for the spirit of English sportiness, Tim Bresnan, who was batting at the time, is blessed with the elusive ingredient that is crucial to any sporting over-achiever: Self-Belief. This is not to be confused with Self-Regard, for which see England (football) above.

Bresnan's Self-Belief gave the Mantle Of British Sporting Ineptitude a withering stare and told it to sod off, enabling Bresnan to hit two of the last three balls for four and secure a series-clinching victory.

The Mantle was last seen on the M1, heading South. It is expected to arrive in South-West London late tomorrow afternoon.

Come on Andy!

I Say Old Bean

DISCLAIMER: Despite the unpromising beginning, this post is NOT about football. Keep going. You’ll get to the bit about food soon enough. If, on the other hand, you prefer football to food, you might want to read the opening paragraph and stop there.

So. Hats off to the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea on a feisty defeat to Brazil in their World Cup opener last night. Funny how the countries that are keenest to show off their democratic credentials in the name of their country are the ones least qualified to do so.

Still, they played as if their lives depended on it.

In fact, come to think of it...

Anyway, their performance was in stark contrast to Spain’s. They seemed to think that if they just kept passing the ball eventually one of the passes would go into the net.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about vegetables.

And before you jump to the inevitable conclusion, I have indeed steered the subject away from football and am not referring to the England team.

Ba-boom-ching. Thangyouveddymudge.

There’s been a certain amount of self-sufficiency in the Runny household of late. Why, only last night, the Flame-Haired Temptress and I partook of our own radishes, dipped in someone else’s salt; followed by our own potatoes, chives and spinach, paired with someone else’s butter, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and raisins.

A veritable feast.

Peas are on their way, too. And we’ve got more herbs than the annual meeting of the Tijuana Brass Appreciation Society.

All of this has appeared from nowhere, it would seem, lovingly nurtured by the soothing hand of the F-HT.

It was different back in the day. When we first started growing veg, I was the instigator.

Our garden wasn’t big. Nor was it accessible, as we occupied a first-floor flat.

So starting a veg garden was not an undertaking to be embarked on without serious consideration.

I sourced, ordered and bought raised beds, compost and seeds, not making much of a fuss about how clever I was being.

And then, with a great deal of huffing and puffing, I planted and nurtured them.

There came the time for thinning out, the process whereby dozens of healthy pre-pubescent radishettes would be sacrificed to the merciless God of Waste in order that the fittest of the species be given a little Lebensraum.

It’s not for the faint of heart.

After several weeks’ consultation with the sage of all things horticultural, Dr. D.G.Hessayon, I took a deep breath, armed myself with tweezers and set about my grisly business.

The procedure was executed with surgeon-like delicacy and accuracy.

For about five minutes.

Then I got fed up and just ripped the buggers out willy-nilly.

Or left them where they were.

Surely, I thought, they can sort it out for themselves? It can’t make that much difference.

You live and learn.

Time passed and vegetables (some of them, at least) grew.

Then, disaster.

Slugs and snails appeared. Puppy dog tails probably weren’t far behind.

The best thing to do, I was assured, was to nail them at night.

Manfully, and again with the minimum of fuss, I donned waders and sou’westers (it was a wet spring) and strode into the fray. Eschewing all offers of sustenance, and protected only by the trusty torch of truth and the kitchen scissors of slug-murder, I dispatched them to all four corners of our small plot.

It only encouraged them.

If you’re not a gardener you may not appreciate the determination and downright evil exhibited by the average group of guzzling gastropods.

Think Simon Cowell crossed with Genghis Khan.

Still, eventually, we had a crop of sorts.

Modestly accepting the loving applause of an admiring throng, I made a very small meal of some very small potatoes with a couple of very small leaves of spinach on the side.

The slugs opened an ‘all you can eat’ buffet round the corner.

The next year we were moving, so the garden went by the wayside.

Now, established in the new place, where the garden is more accessible, we have enough room for the following:

A shed.

A dried-up pond (large enough for frogs to breed, but not large enough for them to hide from Felis Catus).

A vine.

A faux palm tree (Felis Catus likes to think he can climb it. When he is halfway up, he thinks again).

A couple of raised beds.

It is in these raised beds that we are nurturing the stuff of food fads.

You know how it goes. Every couple of years the foodie community rejoices in a new, painfully chic, fashion ingredient.

Never mind that said ingredient has been in plentiful supply and gone unnoticed for years. This year it is the thing.

Delia started it years ago with those blessed cranberries. One moment you couldn’t buy cranberries because nobody stocked them; the next you couldn’t get them because they were sold out.

Pomegranates, blueberries, Alfonso mangoes, rocket, chard, butternut squash, Jersey Royals, asparagus, artichokes, salsify, polenta, pea shoots, carnaroli rice, argan oil, etc etc. They’ve all had their moment in the sun, leading to some truly horrendous culinary disasters as amateur cooks chuck them willy-nilly into everything they cook, based purely on the fact that Nigel did a feature on them in The Observer last Sunday.
Pomegranate risotto anyone?

Thought not.

You’d have thought that we’d exhausted them all.

I beg to differ.

Broad bean leaves.

Rip them off, wash off the black fly (for black fly there will be), and wilt them in oil with garlic.

They look a bit like baby spinach, but taste like broad beans, which is a little disturbing.

But they are worth a go. At the very least they are more plentiful and require less patience than broad beans themselves, which always look so promising in their plump pods, but which invariably yield a crop barely big enough to coat the bottom of an eggcup.

All I ask is this: if broad bean leaves turn into the next superfood fashion, just remember where you read it first.

Strictly for the birds

Yesterday, one eye on the weather (that’s a quarter of an eye each, as there were four of us), we visited a miracle.

This is where I get evangelical and stuff.

You must visit the London Wetland Centre.

It doesn’t matter where you live or what your level of interest in wildlife is: go there.

Birdwatcher living in Barnes? It’s on your doorstep. Go there.

From Fremantle, Western Australia and don’t do outdoorsy stuff or nature of any description? Go there.

Live on the moon and enjoy hunting birds until they’re extinct? Go there. But don’t bring your gun.

Seriously, that a place such as this should exist anywhere is good enough, and proof that amidst all the earth-plundering insanity that overwhelms modern life there are people who are quietly doing the right thing in an unpreachy kind of way. But the true miracle is that it’s right slap bang in the middle (ish) of London. A short bus ride from Hammersmith tube and you’re immersed in forty-two (Douglas Adams would be so happy) hectares of twitching paradise. Eider ducks threaten to trip you up as they take the kids for a walk; red-breasted geese honk en masse as if to compensate for their weird anatomical-drawing like appearance; tufted ducks dive obligingly for between twenty and thirty seconds, just like what it says on the laminated sheet. And much more besides.

If you’re not interested in the minutiae, it’s just a brilliant walk with a convenient shop and cafe to anticipate.

But if ornithological trivia is (should be ‘are’, really, because trivia are plural) your thang, I have news.

Apparently there was an American Golden Plover on site yesterday.

Now although I was once a junior twitcher of almost unparalleled spoddiness, I wouldn’t know an American Golden Plover from a speck of volcanic ash on my binoculars, which is generally what birds look like in real life. I know what a regular (or, as I discover, Eurasian) Golden Plover looks like. Or at least I do as long as it’s sitting on my desk with a big sign saying ‘I am a Golden Plover’ round its neck. But put me in the wild and I am reduced to ridiculous and ever-more-fanciful guesswork.

“Cranes,” I murmur, as a pair of suitably-wide-winged birds take off half a mile away on the other side of the lake. I say it just loudly enough for my family to be impressed, but too quietly for the bona fide twitchers standing two yards away from me to hear. For if they do, I am undone, the gossamer fabric of my expertise unravelled like an Andrex roll fleeing an overexcited puppy.

Tactical game, birdwatching.

I came over a touch Fotherington-Thomas as we walked round, marvelling at nature in the raw, at one with the awesome delicacy and beauty of the planet, and as near as dammit wept when I saw a mother coot with its two fluffy chicks doggy-paddling (cooty-paddling?) into the reeds. How wonderful, I thought, that in stark contrast to the general mood of things these days, there are people who really value nature, devoting themselves to the preservation of habitat and cherishing the lives of the birds as they might their own children.

How inspiring, I thought.

We nipped into a hide, to shelter from one of the brief but violent showers that are the hallmark of any self-respecting Bank Holiday Monday. Scanning the horizon, binoculars glued to my eyes, I fielded questions from both sides, as my family tried to ascertain firstly what that brown bird bobbing up and down on the water was, and secondly what sandwich or tortilla wrap I would prefer for lunch.

I blanched a little as I realised the answer to both questions was ‘duck’.

I like my hypocrisy with hoisin sauce.

Not Waving But Drowning

Imagine you have a hobby. Maybe you do. Perhaps you like to paint. Or play netball. Or build models of San Francisco out of toothpicks.

You get the idea.

Most of the people I come across in my regular working life have a hobby: they play a musical instrument.

Incidentally, before I get on to the main business of this blog, I must urge you, if you haven’t already done so, to seek out and befriend an amateur musician. Two or three, why not? If you can steer them away from subjects like Bruckner symphonies, awkward fingerings in Sibelius tone poems, and the relative merits of recordings of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, they are extraordinarily invigorating and enjoyable company. What’s more, the standard achieved by amateur orchestras and choirs in this country is little short of staggering - as if I, a dedicated but limited Sunday cricketer, were taking on a County attack and scoring fifties, if not hundreds, on a regular basis.

If you are neither a cricket nor a classical music fan, you may not have made it through that last paragraph. Sorry about that.

Anyway, let me return to my muttons, as the saying very nearly has it.

My hobby is standing in front of the aforementioned musicians waving my arms, all the while hoping that my efforts will in some way improve the sound they are making. Luckily for me, I also make my living from it. I understand this is what is known nowadays as a win/win.

You may not know anything about classical music. Even if you do, it’s probable that you’re ignorant about exactly what it is that conductors do.

Yes, that’s right, we collect the fares.

Ha ha.

Well done.

May I continue?

The art of conducting (and yes it is an art, but this is the last time I will take it seriously in this post) is so complex that several widthy books have been written about it, a lot of them as off target as this penalty kick. They will typically include diagrams of what we in the trade call ‘beating patterns’ - ‘different ways of waving your arms around’ to anyone else - the practice of which can cause the budding conductor severe muscular and frontal lobe injuries should they not exercise due care and attention.

These very gestures, finely honed over decades of intensive and draining study, are the selfsame ones that are ignored by orchestras the world over, from Aalborg to Zanzibar (both now permissible in Scrabble, incidentally).

This is the natural way of things. Orchestras know best.

But what do these gestures mean?

Well it’s complicated. Let me talk you through some of the gestures that make up the average (and believe me, we’re mostly average) conductor’s stock-in-trade.

The All-Purpose ‘Starting-Everyone-Off’ Gesture
Otherwise known as the ‘upbeat’ (a misnomer if ever there was one), this is usually a nervous upwards jerk with both arms, somewhere during the fallout of which the benighted orchestra is expected to play together. The conductor, sensing an ominous silence of the kind not experienced since Marcel Marceau and Harpo Marx went on a day trip to a trappist monastery, then jiggles his arms about a bit on the way down, in the hope that someone, somewhere, will interpret it as an invitation to play.

This renders the meaning of the gesture, already oblique, completely impenetrable.

The ‘Oh Bugger I’ve Started Too Fast’ Flail
The trouble with this one, which resembles little more than a flightless bird trying to defy gravity and evolution simultaneously, is that it simply gets in the way. The damage is done. The orchestra, which, remember, always knows best, has already gone off at the speed you gave them with your first gesture (see above). Too late now, mate. If you wave your arms slower, half of them will go with you, and the other half will stay the same speed. The music will die, and it will be your fault.

Music-murderer. Blood on your hands. Shame on you.

The ‘You Shouldn’t Have Played There’ Shimmy
Usually directed at a player who has been sitting around doing nothing for a while, like a trombonist (and before all the trombonists reading this start complaining, and you know who you are, just take a long hard look in the mirror and then tell me I’m wrong).

Where was I?

Oh yes. The shimmy. The way it works is this:

1. The player, whether trombonist or not, has not had anything to play for a while, and has lost track of where they are. This is emphatically the composer’s fault for not giving them enough to do.
2. Thinking they recognise the bit the second clarinet has just played, they hastily stop playing ‘Words For Free’ on their iPhone, pick up their instrument and start playing music instead.
3. Loudly.
4. In a quiet bit.
5. The conductor, sensing something is wrong, but not sure exactly what, looks up, sees guilty trombonist (let’s say - it’s just a hypothetical example, for God’s sake, don’t be so touchy) and gives ‘em the shimmy.

The shimmy requires co-ordination: the left hand must clearly send the message to the errant player ‘you’ve come in two bars early, but it’s ok we all make mistakes, now all you have to do is keep calm and start the next bit, you know the one starting with the rising diminished fifth...HERE!’; the right hand must continue conveying flowing rhythm and expression to the rest of the orchestra as if nothing untoward was going on. The effect should resemble an expert maitre d’ removing a fly from a customer’s wine glass while diverting his attention with a well-directed compliment about his tie.

It usually looks more like a startled man hiding a pornographic magazine from his wife.

The ‘More Expression’ Left-Hand Flemble
A cross between a flap and a tremble, this gesture is designed to encourage a more expressive style of playing (usually, for some reason, from the first violins. Probably because they’re nearest). Unfortunately, as the co-ordination required to execute the gesture takes up all of the conductor’s available RAM, it usually results in stasis of the right hand, and the music, more often than not, falls apart just a teensy bit.

This can engender a modicum of panic in the ranks, which in turn leads to:

The ‘Getting-It-All-Going-Again’ Thrash
The conductor is under the impression that faster and larger gestures will be clearer.

Wrong.

It just looks as if he is drowning.

Eventually everything settles down, and the musicians remember that the conductor is like the national speed limit: everyone ignores him, but it's kind of comforting to know he’s there. They can then get on with the business of listening to each other and playing together (driving safely) while very occasionally slowing down to sixty-eight miles an hour (watching the conductor) when they see a police car (when they think he's looking).

After a while we come to:

‘The Wrapping-It-All-Up’ Lung
Somehow, the music needs to stop. Regardless of how they negotiate the final bars, the conductor must do one of two things, depending on the circumstances.
If the music finishes loudly: stiff outstretched arms, open mouth.
If the music finishes quietly: exaggeratedly long silence after the final chord, closed eyes.

NB These are not optional.

As the applause begins, a relieved smile and nodding head are usual. These purport to mean ‘well done everyone, you were great' but actually mean 'well done me, I'm great, aren't I?'

So there you have it. A crash course in conducting. Why not give it a go yourself?

Next week: the rehearsal, including 'Stopping After You've Made A Mistake And Pretending You Heard A Wrong Note In The Woodwind Section’ and 'Anecdotes - How And When To Tell Them'.

The Rewards of Culinary Incompetence

We’ve all done it. Don’t pretend you haven’t.

In a fit of brazen chutzpah (is there any other kind?) you imagine you know better than the recipe. A professional food writer has shared the knowledge and experience garnered over decades of hard work, but you look at their offering and think ‘pah! What do you know, Simon/Hugh/Delia/Nigella/Jamie/Albert/Marco Pierre/Heston (delete as appropriate)? I can do this standing on my head. Where you say butter, I will use sunflower oil. Where you say fifteen minutes, I know very well you mean thirty-five. Where you ask for the juice of half a lemon...well I’ve got all these lemons in the basket and they’re going to go off soon - I’ll chuck three in.’

For this recipe you will require:

Fillet of salmon. For eight. Three of whom are ill and have cancelled.

Some potatoes - neither the same amount nor variety as in the recipe.

Purple sprouting broccoli.

Those lemons.

Garlic. Plenty.

Fat of some kind. Whatever you have.

A chisel.

1. Check the recipes. Salmon wrapped in foil with lemon juice - piece of cake. Grated Golden Wonder potato cake - no problem. Steamed purple sprouting with garlic and anchovies - duh.
2. Put the books back on the shelf. You won’t need them again.
3. Peel and grate the potatoes. Some of them go a bit brown. That’s ok, they’ll be brown once they’re cooked anyway. Add the cloves of garlic, crushed, to the potato gratings.


4. Lay the salmon fillet on oiled foil.


5. Squeeze the lemon(s) over the salmon.


6. Pick the lemon pips out of the salmon.


7. Wrap the salmon parcels.


8. Foil torn. Start again.


9. Once that’s done, turn your attention to the potatoes.


10. They really have gone quite brown, haven’t they? And you haven’t started cooking them yet.


11. Heat the fat and add the potato/garlic mixture.


12. So far so good. Relax and watch a bit of cricket.


13. Shot!


14. What’s that smell?


15. Ah.


16. This is why you need the chisel. Hack the potato from the bottom of the pan. Remove burnt-but-not-actually-inedlble crust and set aside. Put the rest of it back in the pan and return to the heat.


17. Back to the cricket.


18. Got him!


19. Bugger. Fish.


20. Oh God when should I put the broccoli on?


21. Not now.


22. Idiot. You’ll regret that.


23. Potato doing nicely, fish ok.


24. Consider making broccoli puree instead.


25. Realise that success of dish depends on people being at table at the right time. People sadly not in evidence.


26. The potato is burning again. Never mind. Crunchy bits are good.


27. Assemble plates, cutlery, food, wine, people.

It was all so simple. And, despite your best efforts, absolutely delicious. Pat yourself on the back and thumb nose at food writers. Consciously or not, you knew better all along.