The twenty-eighth of September, 2011: good morning, my name’s Cowdrey

A story from Rob Smyth’s very nice book The Spirit Of Cricket (Elliott & Thompson, 2010) makes me want to sink into a warm tub of distilled essence of John Arlott and not emerge until time has come full circle and we’re back safe and sound in the Good Old Days again.

Colin Cowdrey was 41 when he was recalled to the England Test side in December 1974. He hadn’t played Test cricket for nearly four years. England were 1-0 down in the Ashes series, and being battered by the Aussie pace duo Jeff ‘Thommo’ Thomson and Dennis Lillee. The second Test was to be played at the WACA in Perth, then home to most lethally quick pitch in Australia.

Cowdrey arrived in Perth after a 50-hour flight. When asked about Thomson and Lillee, he urbanely replied: ‘I can’t believe they are as fast as Gregory and McDonald in the twenties, and I played them.’

Here’s Rob Smyth’s account of his innings:

When he arrived at the crease in the first innings – ‘It was the signal for tears to prick the eyes of all but the stony-hearted,’ wrote Christopher Martin Jenkins – he walked up to Thomson, shook his hand, and said: ‘Good morning, my name’s Cowdrey.’ … Cowdrey got unflinchingly behind the ball, taking the inevitable blows without complaint and batting for more than two hours in each innings, even though England were again blown away.

Goodness. How can anyone not love Test cricket?

Appropriately, Cowdrey – later Baron Cowdrey of Tonbridge – gave his name to an annual ‘Spirit of Cricket’ lecture at the MCC; the lectures are, without exception, worth reading and/or listening to.

Speaking of ‘Lillian Thomson’, I’m very fond of Lawrence Booth’s provocative summation of the Aussie take on Bodyline in his book Arm-ball to Zooter (Penguin, 2006):

Fifty years on, [England fast bowler Harold Larwood] was still getting hate-mail. And Australians – the same ones who would chant ‘kill, kill’ as a rampant Dennis Lillee ran in to bowl – were still moaning.

One last cricket thing: you ought to read David Hopps’ excellent Guardian piece on British-Asians in English club cricket, and not only because it name-checks Hopps’ club Thorner CC and the Leeds district of Harehills (just up the road and just down the road from Clutterbuck HQ respectively).

The twenty-seventh of September, 2011: it is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays

There’s been a predictably pleased response to the first episode of Stephen Fry‘s latest TV programme for the BBC, Planet Word. If it’s okay with linguistic lord of the Internet Stan Carey, it’s okay with me.

The only things that unsettled me were (in increasing order of severity):

1. The number of corduroy blazers Fry seems to possess. I counted four (one sporting ill-advisedly garish elbow patches). And this was just the first episode!

2.  Fry’s increasing vocal resemblance to Professor Lord Robert Winston in avuncular Ruby-is-now-one-year-old-and-she-can-make-rudimentary-sounds mode. You may well have seen Fry and Winston in the same room together – but have you ever heard them in the same room together?

3. The comic sans. Stephen! What’s with the comic sans?

A fourth thing didn’t irritate me, but did make me think: here is an opportunity to share some trivia with the world, or at least with that small portion of the world that reads Clutterbuck.

The programme didn’t specify – and so many viewers may have wondered – where the spoofy Little Red Riding Hood story performed by the Little Theatre for the Deaf came from. It had an odd ring to it, with its anachronistic quips about Calvin Coolidge and the Metro-Goldwyn lion.

Well, I’LL TELL YOU. It’s by James Thurber, and it’s from The Thurber Carnival.

I can’t find my copy of The Thurber Carnival. And so ends another disappointing Clutterbuck.

No, wait! Luckily, someone splendid has scanned the story out of the book, so I don’t have to! Here it is:

Yeah. It’s not hilariously funny, is it? Ah, well. So ends another disappointing Clutterbuck.

The twenty-sixth of September, 2011: I have to write down almost everything I see

I have played this song to death. You can have it now.

 

I had better link to Emmy the Great’s website. Only polite.

The twenty-third of September, 2011: dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor

I love this gag, from a Punch cartoon supposedly composed by AE Housman (it sounds convincingly Housmany to me), recalled by WH Auden, and recalled again by Stephen Fry in his excellent poetry primer The Ode Less Travelled (Arrow, 2007).

Two English teachers are walking in the woods. The first, on hearing birdsong, quotes Wordsworth:

Teacher 1: Oh cuckoo, shall I call thee bird/Or but a wandering voice?

Teacher 2: State the alternative preferred/With reasons for your choice.

The twenty-second of September, 2011: bahhh ba-da-ba bah, ba ba ba

On hearing the news that my youth, such as it was, is over, I immediately thought: do I really want to be one of the several million people on earth who are at this very moment posting REM videos from Youtube to their poorly-attended WordPress blogs?

Not long after that, I thought: yes, yes I do.

What to choose, what to choose? I don’t want to be too mawkish. I do want to offer a reminder that REM were the best band ever to have existed (this is not just my ‘opinion’, it is a fact). I don’t want to be a oh-I-picked-up-this-insanely-good-bootleg-from-a-weird-little-record-store-in-Dortmund completist snob.

So here’s something nice. Not obscure, because it was on MTV, for god’s sake – but it’s a bit different, and  just obscure enough that you might not have heard it, or, at least, might not have heard it in ages, in which case it might just make your day.

Then there’s this, which is just too mighty to be resisted.

I wanted to add something from Up (1998), because I think it’s great and an insufficient number of people agree with me (I think I was perhaps excessively swayed by Michael Stipe’s pronouncement on its release that “If another band had released this record, people would be out in the streets, screaming, naked” – I remember thinking at the time, why do they have to be naked?).

But instead I’ll post this, because I’m soppy.

Sorry it’s got a man’s arse in it. It isn’t Michael Stipe’s. I know that because in 1994 Naked City told me so.  Oh, the memories.

The twenty-first of September, 2011: poor intoxicated little knave

Apologies to poetryphobes and/or misGeorgianists. Again the Clutterbuck returns to English poetry, and to the eighteenth century.

One of the most attractive features of the period is the feeling, apparently widespread among poets and writers, that there is literally nothing that you can’t write a poem about. The taste of the 18th-century poets where muses are concerned is eclectic verging on deranged.

It’s an approach that feels rather modern. It’s a vivifying reminder that old poetry isn’t in fact a soppy agglomeration of flowers, maidens, wars and skylarks (that all came later: blame the Romantics). In fact, I was recently leafing through The New Oxford Book Of Eighteenth-century Verse, R. Lonsdale ed. (OUP, 2009) in search of an ardent love poem (for research purposes) – and I couldn’t find one!

What it all recalls to me is the strapline adopted by the Harry Smith anthologies of American folk music – back when music was weird. This was a time when poetry was weird; just as weird as life.

I’m not going to quote. I don’t need to. The titles are enough. How about To A Young Woman With Some Lampreys (John Gay)? Or Written For My Son, At His First Putting On Breeches (Mary Barber)? Or There’s Life In A Mussel: A Meditation (George Farewell)?

Thomas Gray is best-known for his Elegy In A Country Churchyard, but personally I’m more fond of his Ode On The Death Of A Favourite Cat, Drowned In A Tub of Gold Fishes (‘The slipp’ry verge her feet beguiled,/She tumbled headlong in’).

Then there’s On Losing My Pocket Milton At Luss (Robert Andrews). Or An Elegy On The Death of Dobbin, the Butterwoman’s Horse (Francis Fawkes). Or Lines Written Upon A Window-shutter at Weston (William Cowper).

I think my favourite might be John Wolcot’s To A Fly, Taken Out Of A Bowl Of Punch (‘Ah! poor intoxicated little knave…’). This, of course, is the milieu that also gave us Burns, with his addresses to lice and mice and haggises and so on.

Even if it sometimes recalls William Topaz McGonagall (‘But during my short stay, and while wandering there,/Mr Spurgeon was the only man I heard speaking proper English I do declare.’) and sometimes Vogon poetry (‘Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning’), it’s all just so damn’ invigorating.

The heedless intermixing of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, of the ‘profound’ and the ‘trivial’, would – like a great deal of eighteenth-century literature – have to be called post-modern, if only it weren’t all so decidedly pre-modern.

The twentieth of September, 2011: the goat and compasses

A poem, stumbled across in a 1922 anthology of poems.

When evening came and the warm glow grew deeper,

And every tree that bordered the green meadows,

And in the yellow cornfields every reaper

And every corn-shock stood above their shadows

Flung eastward from their feet in longer measure,

Serenely far there swam in the sunny height

A buzzard and his mate who took their pleasure

Swirling and poising idly in golden light.

On great pied motionless moth-wings borne along,

So effortless and so strong,

Cutting each other’s paths together they glided,

Then wheeled asunder till they soared divided

Two valleys’ width (as though it were delight

To part like this, being sure they could unite

So swiftly in their empty, free dominion),

Curved headlong downward, towered up the sunny steep,

Then, with a sudden lift of the one great pinion,

Swung proudly to a curve, and from its height

Took half a mile of sunlight in one long sweep.

And so we, so small on the swift immense hillside,

Stood tranced, until our souls arose uplifted

On those far-sweeping, wide,

Strong curves of flight – swayed up and hugely drifted,

Were washed, made strong and beautiful in the tide

Of sun-bathed air. But far beneath, beholden

Through shining deeps of air, the fields were golden

And rosy burned the heather where the cornfields ended.

And still those buzzards whirled, while light withdrew

Out of the vales and to surging slopes ascended,

Till the loftiest flaming summit died to blue.

‘The Buzzards’, by Martin Armstrong. I don’t know anything about Martin Armstrong, but I love ‘pied motionless moth-wings’ (as the poet Matt Merritt has pointed out, one of the striking things about buzzards is how different they can look in different circumstances), and I love the sense of encroaching dusk, which recalls Edward Thomas’ Two Pewits “riding the dark surge silently”.

I’ve just looked up Martin Armstrong in the DNB, and am now faintly embarrassed to admit to never having heard of him. In brief: poet and novelist (1882-1974), Newcastle-born, author of The Buzzards And Other Poems (1921) and novels including The Goat and Compasses (1925) (good name for a pub), associated with the then-popular Georgian poets de la Mare and Blunden.

Anthony Bertram described him as:

essentially level-headed, and his keen mind, his tolerance and his wit were never marred by prejudice. It was that balance which enabled him to write such exquisite prose; and it was a fine human sympathy, working unostentatiously under his dry exterior, that flowered in the tenderness of his stories. Through his poems, but never in his workaday life, one saw into a glamorous and tragic imagination.

I fear he lived and worked in a time when it was very hard to be a good poet.

And now, having opened that book to type out the poem, my hands smell like a second-hand bookshop.