My sunburn is beginning to peel. I’m having a certain amount of fun seeing how big a piece of skin I can peel off each time. I say a certain amount of fun; it’s also making me feel slightly nauseous. It reminds me of an obsession that took hold of me when I was studying GCSE French. We had these large text books which were laminated. One day, I noticed my text book had a slight tear on the cover lamination. I tore the lose bit of plastic off. Now I had a book, covered in laminated plastic, but with a small hole at the bottom.
Throughout that lesson I continued to tear bits of the plastic off, enlarging the hole so that it became a perfect square. This hole troubled me during double Geography and Latin, and by the time the next French lesson came about, I had one thing on my mind; tearing the whole sodding laminated plastic off that book. I would spend entire lessons peeling off huge swathes of the stuff whilst simultaneously telling Luke, the guy sitting next to me, about my marvellous day ‘a la plage’, my ‘dejeuner’ and the ‘discotheque’ in the evening.
I finally purged the entire front cover of its laminated prison, but it still didn’t feel right. It soon became apparent that the back cover’s lamination had to go too. So I once again wiled away the hours pulling, tearing and ripping these bits of plastic off the book. That done, I liberated the spine. Then the inside bits that overlapped.
Then Luke’s book needed doing. The front. The back. The spine. The inside bits. Tearing, ripping, destroying.
I got a B.
CRICKET: I’m still recovering from the end of the first test of the Ashes. It was an absolutely fantastic last day with Collingwood playing a classic Test cricket innings of old. He even got out at exactly the right moment in terms of the dramatic narrative of the match. Unfortunately, with the last hour and a half to go, and having followed it all day on television and radio, I had to rely on a carefully concealed mobile phone to bring me updates. I was in church singing evensong, once again cursing God that his bloody services always seem to coincide with important sporting events.
So there I was, ploughing through the Magnificat by Tallis, one eye on the conductor, the other on my phone. My right hand held the music, my left turned the pages of a hymnbook to secretly get the score across to the bass sitting next to me; the hymn number signifying the England total. I was quite pleased with that; it made me feel like a spy passing on important information amongst the enemy.
Illicitly listening to or following cricket can be very exciting. I once sat through a one-on-one music tutorial at school concerning four part harmony. Unbeknownst to the teacher, I had a small radio tucked into my jacket and an earpiece in my right ear concealed by my hand. At one point Ashly Giles picked up a wicket and I let out an excited ‘ooohh!!’, confusing the teacher who had just reprimanded me for use of parallel fifths.
As I stood in church on Sunday, signalling to the bass that Monty was in (by looking a bit lost and wafting my left arm ‘bat’ about carelessly) I yearned to be listening to Test Match Special. I could imagine the roars greeting every forward defensive shot, the crowd leaping up and knocking over their pints, fingernails and whole hands gnawed away in the tension. Boycott cackling as the Aussies grew impatient. Blowers babbling away, flustered and getting it all wrong (“so it’s Lillee bowling to WG Grace…oh my dear old thing!”) and the roar that greeted Monty, Anderson and England as they held out for the draw.
But no. Instead, a little message appeared on my phone; ‘result: draw’, just as the congregation finished the Lords Prayer. Not very emotive and exciting, but England had only achieved a sort of Dunkirk victory, so it seemed rather appropriate. Let’s hope they can regroup and sort out the bowling. I won’t be able to follow the Lords Test, oh no, I’ll be in Germany on a choir tour. Sodding God.
