29
CONFESSIONS
I have been having occasional senior moments since I was about seven. At times my progress through life has been a struggle to keep one step ahead of complete chaos. It might be summed up by the invoice that I received one day in 1974 from Messrs Brady and Renaud, a long-established firm of electrical contractors in Cranleigh, which read:
Call to Old Harry’s Cottage, East Clandon, to investigate faulty dishwasher.
Trace to switch in ‘Off’ position £10.00
I have always been prone to aberrations like this, one reason why punctuality has always been a struggle. That John Cleese film Clockwork, in which his normal punctuality was foiled by a number of little time-wasting setbacks leading to personal calamity, spoke eloquently for me. As a friend once said, ‘Things do tend to happen to you, Christopher.’
Only on my last tour of New Zealand in 2008, for example (by which time I ought to have been beyond repeating mistakes on my laptop, my journalistic lifeline), I managed, by the erroneous push of a single key, somehow to erase forever the lengthy Test preview article on which I had been working all day. It was late at night by this time and I am afraid it was too much for me, one-eighth Portuguese as I am. Cleese in his Basil Fawlty mode could not have bettered the cries of anguish that rent the hotel corridor, nor torn so many hairs from his head.
As I have found from a few previous examples of this particular personal debacle, the worst thing about it is that it happens when you are very tired. For at least half an anguished hour afterwards, the brain is frozen by the awful realisation that the words have gone and cannot be recovered, ever, by any means, even by recourse to the best technical computer brains. You can therefore not remember how you started your piece, let alone how it went on. At least, on this occasion, unlike the one in Jamaica, I was not up against a deadline.
The point is, though, that I am often lucky as well. To give only one of many examples, on one occasion I dropped the keys of my hired car through the railing of a bridge besides which the car was parked. It is debatable whether it would have been better to drop the mobile phone, the notebook, the sunglasses or the hot cup of coffee, all of which I was also carrying at the time, but it happened that the keys fell towards a local professional cricketer passing below the bridge, who caught and returned them and in the proceeding conversation gave me some very interesting information that I would never otherwise have acquired.
It led to one of my rare journalistic ‘scoops’, most of them acquired more by luck than by industry and because cricketers and cricket people have trusted me with information. If my reputation for absent-mindedness has been exaggerated, I cannot deny that I have muddled my way to some sort of prominence in my field despite the truth that some days of my life can be a little like a sit-com starring Michael Crawford.
Long ago I learned to plan ahead and to rely on a well- filled diary, but as the Scottish bard observed, the best-laid schemes . . . I generally hit my head on a low beam, or forget where I put my glasses, or arrive a minute late for whatever I’m doing next because, despite the best intention of leaving a reasonable amount of time to get to the next assignment, I have received a phone-call just as I depart, then got behind a tractor, then missed the first train and finally got on one that sits outside Victoria for ten minutes because of a signal failure.
It really is not always my fault. During an October holiday in Corfu a few years ago Judy and I were taken by our hosts, Robin and Rosemary Gourlay, on a day-trip to Albania to see the outstanding Greek and Roman remains at Butrint. There is a ferry that takes passengers across to the south-western Albanian port of Saranda, which was still full of run-down, bullet-strewn buildings. Once driven in a smart Range Rover, by Robin’s impressive local contact, through the countryside and across a gentle river on an old-fashioned chain-ferry, the country’s natural charm outweighed the terrible legacy of Communist rule. We spent a happy late morning and early afternoon inspecting the World Heritage site, aware that we needed to be back in good time for the return ferry to Corfu at half past four.
Up swept our vehicle onto the quayside some fifteen minutes before the carefully checked time of departure. But there was consternation as the passports were inspected. The ferry had just departed. There it was, a blob halfway to the horizon, gradually receding into a speck. Now Robin Gourlay, a sometime director of BP, spoke excellent Greek and immediately assumed command of the crisis. He demanded to be put in immediate touch with the captain of the ferry. It happened that another Greek ferry had hit a quayside a few days before, with disastrous results, allegedly because of an inebriated skipper. Making use of the fact that he was accompanied by ‘a very well-known writer on The Times’, he thundered down the line that there would be more abysmal publicity for Greek merchant shipping unless he immediately turned the boat round and came back to fetch us.
The ferry had undoubtedly left early, having seen no one waiting on the quay, but it was still a remarkable, and gratifying, sight to see the captain obeying orders and steaming back towards us. The other passengers, including the former chief sports sub on the Telegraph, Brian Stater and his wife, were not exactly pleased to have to return to Albania and start their journey afresh. But we were given free cups of tea for our inconvenience.
I bumped into Brian and his wife again a few days later when I emerged from the ocean on a beach where they were strolling in isolation. I must have looked like a drowned rat, having plucked up courage to swim in the calm waters from one bay to another, albeit careful to keep within my depth in case my stamina failed me. ‘You remember that James Bond scene, where Daniel Craig comes out of the water?’ Brian later related: ‘Well, it was nothing like that.’
Those who have heard me commentate on cricket in calm and reflective mode may think that I was exaggerating when I said that my life is really a well-concealed comedy. But it is true. It has, for example, been well documented (and grossly embroidered) by my writing and golfing friend Mike Selvey and others, that I once came down to the foyer of a hotel on the north coast of Jamaica with my suitcases in hand and my bill paid, ready to drive across the island to Kingston. As Mike and I were about to leave in the same hired car I decided to make a call to my office. To my irritation, none of the numbers that I pressed seemed to respond in the normal way. I had pulled out of my pocket not the said mobile, which was sitting upstairs on a table, but the television remote control from my just vacated room.
A few years ago I started a hue and cry at home because my mobile was missing again. My wife and daughter were enlisted to search the house from top to bottom. No good, so I rang my office at The Times and asked them to cancel the sim card forthwith. Another phone was posted to me and when it arrived three days later I had one more search before donning my golf shoes to play some practice shots in the garden. Something hard under the sock in my left shoe turned out, of course, to be the missing article.
30
CRISES – AND CONSOLATIONS
We all have a mixture of good and bad luck, but one of the arts of life is not to take them too deeply to heart. I find it hard. Unlike the insurance company in the advertisement of a few years ago, I fear that I do tend to make a drama out of a crisis.
There have been a few, too. I have told of the terrifying day in Jamaica when I lost my front- and back-page stories with one touch of a single letter on the keyboard of my laptop, and of the theft of my briefcase at Gatwick Airport as I was leaving for a tour of the Caribbean. But these were not completely isolated examples. I had twice had other laptops stolen in my time as Daily Telegraph correspondent, once from the back of my locked car, parked near Hammersmith Bridge in London, the second time from the Media Centre at Lord’s on the very day that the sparkling new press box was being used by journalists for the first time
There was, eventually a happier outcome – up to a point – when another of my briefcases was stolen overnight from my car, which had been parked overnight in the drive of Brian Johnston’s house in
Boundary Road on the eve of the 1982 Nat West Cup final at Lord’s. This was a particularly smart case, made of leather and sable skin, which had been presented to me and to all the other members of a cricket tour to Dubai, including the former England cricketers Mike Denness and John Snow. On this occasion there was, as I recall, nothing of great value inside other than my driving licence, my glasses and some other personal items, plus pages of proofs for the next edition of The Cricketer and other articles of great professional importance to me.
I informed the local police, naturally, who gave me leave to mention my loss during my radio commentary on the final later that day. I asked on the air for the case to be returned to me if possible, especially as there were things inside of much significance to me but little to anyone else. The following afternoon I was commentating for BBC television on a John Player League game at Chelmsford when my wife answered the phone to a man who wanted to speak to me. Judy said that I would be back later in the evening and asked who was speaking. He was, he said, ringing on behalf of a ‘friend’ who had found the briefcase. She expressed her relief and asked if he could take it to a police station, since its loss had been reported. His friend could not do that, he replied. He wasn’t very nice and he might smash the glasses and throw the driving licence and the papers away. He thought that he might want some kind of reward for their safe return, too.
He rang off then but when I got home Judy told me about the call and I rang Paddington Green Police Station for advice. They told me that if he rang back I should try to arrange to meet him in a public place and to tell him that I would be prepared to pay money for the safe return of the case and its contents. Sure enough, he did ring back late that night and we arranged to meet at Victoria railway station the following afternoon. We agreed a specific train from Redhill, and a meeting just beyond the ticket barrier of the relevant platform. I gave him a description of what I would be wearing and we agreed a sum of money, I forget now precisely what.
With some trepidation on the next day I duly cashed a cheque for the money – £100 I think, worth rather more then – and caught something like the 3.36 from Redhill. Not untypically, I very nearly missed the train and had to make a dash along the platform to catch it. Once inside it was as if I were in an Agatha Christie film. To me the detectives, three of them as I recall, were fairly obvious by their macintoshes and newspapers; somehow not your typical afternoon travellers from Surrey to London. But the train was on time and, with butterflies churning inside, I allowed most of the other passengers to precede me before making my way to the barrier, discreetly accompanied by the men in macs. On the other side of the barrier a tall, pale-faced, youngish man was waiting with some papers in a polythene bag. There was no sign of the briefcase, alas. ‘I thought you had the case’, I said to him. ‘The papers are here’, he said. (Some were, some weren’t, and my glasses and driving licence had gone.) ‘OK’, I said: ‘Here is the money.’ The moment that he took the envelope and exchanged the polythene bag, a uniformed policeman seemed to appear from nowhere in support of the detectives and the arrest was made.
It was all quite dramatic and so, in a no less nerve-racking way, was the subsequent trial at the Old Bailey when the oddest thing was that the thief and I had to wait to give evidence in the same room. I could not help wondering if he would want revenge, whatever the verdict. He was found guilty of demanding money with menaces and sentenced, with other crimes taken into account, to a jail sentence of, if I remember correctly, three years. Like many of his kind, he seemed more a sad than a vicious character.
Cars were less secure then and perhaps all of us are more security conscious. Some of these accidents of life are avoidable, some not. My unfortunate bout of E. coli poisoning in Mumbai was a case of the wrong sort. If only I had been able to leave at the planned time. But, then, as so often, I seemed to have a little bit more work to do than most other people. Rightly or wrongly, I had put doing a good job before having a good time.
It was William Haley, the renowned Times Editor, who said: ‘hard writing, easy reading’. I don’t know whether the thousands of articles about cricket that I have churned out over the years, many hundreds of cricket reports in my BBC days and more than a handful of books on cricket have been easy to read but it is certain that an awful lot of sweat was shed in preparing them.
Conscientiousness, the assiduous approach, has been for me both a reason for achieving, but also a bar to fun and relaxation. My poor wife has despaired of my constant failures to hold good to my intention to leave five minutes earlier or to get to the table in good time for a lovingly cooked hot meal. I have always seemed to have something to finish.
One form of happiness for me is a clear desk, one I have seldom enjoyed. I suspect, however, that the alternative is almost as bad. Relaxation is for habitual relaxers but to the workaholic it can seem like boredom. I have had some wonderful days sitting by the sea with a good book in places such as Barbados, but I can never sit still for long before plunging in for a swim.
At home, although energy levels are not what they were, the urge soon comes to hit a ball or to go for a walk with the dog, especially the latter since Pepper, a gentle Border Collie bitch who has been a paragon since puppyhood, came into our lives when we moved back to Tismans Common in 2005.
The real truth, I think, is not that I have been an exceptionally hard worker but rather a slow one, a bit of a perfectionist and someone determined to fit sixty seconds into a minute.
When we were paying for our children’s education financial worries were perennial, as they are for most people. Somehow, however, they did not have the debilitating effect that they did for more than a year after our decision, in 2004, to downsize our living quarters as a means of supplying a capital sum to put towards my pension when I retired as cricket correspondent of The Times.
We found what we believed to be the ideal solution in the same parish, Rudgwick, that we had lived in for twenty-five years. Arun Cottage, once owned by the gifted actress Julie Walters and her husband, is pretty and practical, a Victorian cottage that was less secluded and had much smaller rooms than Naldrett, but which still has a rural aspect, enough room for a tennis court and a full-pitch shot and the capacity to cater for at least some of an expanding family at such times as Christmas and Easter.
Our old house, with its handsome Georgian frontage, lovely position and forty-two acres, albeit most of them rather poor fields, should have sold well, but timing is everything in the buying and selling of houses, as it is in most things. The market was just at the start of its downturn for houses in that sort of price bracket and a quick sale was ruled out by the fact that we had not been able to afford to modernise it as we should have done to attract well-heeled Londoners looking to move to the country. I was badly advised about its realistic value.
The sale of Naldrett House took more than a year. The consequence was a combined mortgage and bridging loan that rapidly dwindled our savings and gnawed away at the minds of Judy and me like the sea at a piece of flimsy coastline. General doubt about the economy had taken hold and no one seemed prepared to take the plunge that we had.
It was hard to relax and have faith that it would all come right. Several times a sale seemed tantalisingly close, especially when a Rudgwick family we greatly liked seemed genuinely tempted. Eventually I gave our original agents a deadline beyond which we would switch to another firm. Within two days two originally interested parties were bidding against each other again, albeit at a level some way below even the latest estimates of the house’s value. Judy and I knew that the engaging Scottish family who eventually bought the house were the ones who really wanted it, because we had personally kept in touch with them. The relief was intense when Judy rang me in May 2005 whilst I was working at The Oval to say that contracts had finally been exchanged. It all worked out well in the end. We have been extremely happy at Arun Cottage.
Followers of English cricket will remember well that strange tour early in 2009 when everything
seemed to go wrong for England. The captain and coach, Kevin Pietersen and Peter Moores, were sacked a week or so before the tour; England were bowled out for fififty-one in Kingston; the second Test on the new white elephant of a ground in Antigua was called off after ten balls because the bowlers could not run in on an outfield comprised entirely of soggy sand; and the West Indies twice held out for tense draws on the last day of Test matches that England had looked like winning. Judy and I had a wonderful time, spending the first two weeks of that trip on a beautiful cruise ship, the Silver Shadow, but even then things went wrong personally.
We were due to leave London on the day that it snowed more heavily in the south than it had for nineteen years. Heathrow was closed, the unfortunate travel company, ITC, which had carefully planned a comfortable journey to Miami for 200 or so British passengers going to the Caribbean to see the first two Tests, had to rearrange flights the next day. We were amongst the last group to arrive on the ship, at six in the morning about thirty hours late. We had eventually got onto a Virgin flight to New York where it was also snowing heavily. At least JFK Airport continued to function. Needless to say, unfortunately, the Americans seemed to deal with the extreme weather far more efficiently than our people in London. They had a large fleet of snowploughs working up and down the runways; and de-icing the wings of aircraft taking off is simply normal routine for them in winter.
On such occasions I definitely have a guardian angel but I have paid for this tendency to keep others waiting occasionally, which is, of course, nothing more than selfishness. It preys on my conscience. On the last morning in Barbados I woke in a pool of sweat after dreaming, with more than usual vividness, that I had left a Test match at lunchtime to go to re-park my car. I cannot think why or where – this was a dream. A whole series of calamities followed, including my way being barred by a high iron gate, unhelpful gatemen saying that there were no more places in the car park, and a mad rush down an endless staircase, three steps at a time, only to find another door closed. All the time I was aware that I was due to commentate immediately after lunch but my mobile would not work to inform the producer. And people kept holding me up by recognising me and asking for the latest score.
CMJ Page 35