Still gummed-up. Just too many things open, I assume.
One particular gummer-upper is leaving YouTube Videos open and paused.
Like this short bit of film (a bit over a quarter of an hour long) done in 1950 by the British Council about cricket and its magically universal, quasi-religious appeal. GodDaughter2’s Dad sent me the link to this many weeks ago, and I started watching, cringed a bit, but then, still determined to force myself to watch it all, in all its post-WW2, pre-Sixties non-glory, I kept the thing paused and open, until now.
In 1950 everyone English loved cricket, and assembled in suits at Lord’s to watch or, if they were a member of the miserable majority for whom that was impossible, no matter. All civilised or would-be civilised people, everywhere on earth, could listen to the cricket on the radio, thanks to John Arlott and his posh colleagues. Arlott himself spoke a bit un-posh, which meant that everyone could love cricket. Although of course, you were, then, ideally English-posh, you didn’t have to be English-posh. You merely had to aspire to that happy state, and who on earth, in 1950, did not do that? Then? Nobody. Look, even people in turbans could play or attend to cricket, no matter what their colour or their creed, or how amusingly and wrongly they spoke English, i.e. in the opposite way to the way other-narrator (besides Arlott) Ralph Richardson spoke English. You could be an Or-stralian, non-posh, even non-white and non-Christian and talk English like a music hall joke character covered in black make-up, and still be part of cricket. Cricket was ultra-inclusive.
There follow a string of comments to the effect that the world is crap now compared to what it was in the 1950s. (I dissent. For starters, I can now have a blog. Nobody could have a blog in 1950. Also, I enjoy T20 cricket as well as the day-after-day-after-day version of cricket which was all they had back in 1950.)
It all makes a fascinating contrast to the equivalent efforts now being made to make cricket really, properly inclusive, in the form of pieces of writings like this, by ESPN’s Daniel Brettig, about all the micro-aggressions that non-white cricket people still have to put up with these days, but really, really should not have to.
The edited of this posting was a shambles, because I found I could only do it after it had been “published”. Sorry if you were then actually trying to read it. But, I think it’s done now.
Of course cricket is much more popular around the world today than it was in 1950 and indeed that it ever has been before. Portions of the English cricketing establishment seem to waver between being unaware of this and somewhat resenting it. The Australian reaction has been more to embrace it wildly as long as there is money in it, which I think is a better one.
Came across this in my news feed immediately after your post. It’s soccer, not cricket, but it’s England.
It all depends what you mean by “BLM”, doesn’t it?
Does it mean: black lives matter? (They do.) Or does it mean the organisation Black Lives Matter, and all of its political programme? (That stinks.)
I think that for most sportsmen, in England, for now, it means the first. And I also suspect that for most of the English yobs booing, it also means the first.
What Brian said…