In The Bleak Midwinter (post Dec 7)
I wrote this on Boxing Day 1994, in Cranham, Gloucestershire, and feel a bit the same today in Sedgeford, Norfolk. Boxing Day was the day the servants got their Christmas Boxes, incidentally. It had nothing to do with boxing. Imagine the day after the Lord Mayor's show, with all the teams you support losing, and nothing in your Christmas box. The imagine an Indian spiritual master appears in your woodland path and says, "Yeah, but you knew that really didn't you?"
watched
by the rich guarded
silence
of cotswold
farms
and a blinding sun
through bare trees
and the jagged saw
of a dog at the gate,
i wonder
what my pilgrimage
to an indian summer
half a world distant
taught me
about this old track
of unchanged england
wrapped up in compliments,
temporary as tinsel,
a feast that goes cold,
a santa that never
really delivers
as i slide
down my frozen hill
of ignorance
on slight city shoes
made in ahmednagar
towards
a painful wisdom.
December 26, 2006
December 17, 2006
December Poem Of The Month (Part VII)
My webmaster's away so I'm doing this myself. Hope it works. Happy Christmas everybody!!!
3. Christmas Eve 8 pm. (from Norfolk Carol 1996)
My daughter's dropped the torch
From iced fingers
Snowing the bulb
So the batteries don't connect
To its heart-warming glow
And we can't see the carol sheet...
But the wagon is hung with fairy lights
Frosted with moonshine
And we look like a Christmas card.
And we finally get
Past the too-crowded Inn
To the Promised Place-
A stable of prototypes:
Some faithful sheep farmers
With a vision of angels
If not of the road;
Three love-crazed riders
As seen on Look East
(Come out of the sunset
On secret paths
Across low fields
Of mud-chastened pasture
And shoots of corn the green
‘Green’ used to be
When the world was young,
Through winter-silent
Norfolk afternoon villages,
Church windows glinting
Like texts of mediaeval Latin)
An unmarried mother
(With a "lily-white"
King Herod of Sleaze
Biting her back,
Her face pure as Venus,
Her faithful Joe
Not quite the winner
Her parents had hoped for)
And tucked out of sight
Behind a bottle bank -
A babe in a crib.
The outlook
None too bright
As I lift our broken lamp
And the brass strikes off
And my voice stumbles in flight
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light,
The hopes and fears
Of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
3. Christmas Eve 8 pm. (from Norfolk Carol 1996)
My daughter's dropped the torch
From iced fingers
Snowing the bulb
So the batteries don't connect
To its heart-warming glow
And we can't see the carol sheet...
But the wagon is hung with fairy lights
Frosted with moonshine
And we look like a Christmas card.
And we finally get
Past the too-crowded Inn
To the Promised Place-
A stable of prototypes:
Some faithful sheep farmers
With a vision of angels
If not of the road;
Three love-crazed riders
As seen on Look East
(Come out of the sunset
On secret paths
Across low fields
Of mud-chastened pasture
And shoots of corn the green
‘Green’ used to be
When the world was young,
Through winter-silent
Norfolk afternoon villages,
Church windows glinting
Like texts of mediaeval Latin)
An unmarried mother
(With a "lily-white"
King Herod of Sleaze
Biting her back,
Her face pure as Venus,
Her faithful Joe
Not quite the winner
Her parents had hoped for)
And tucked out of sight
Behind a bottle bank -
A babe in a crib.
The outlook
None too bright
As I lift our broken lamp
And the brass strikes off
And my voice stumbles in flight
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light,
The hopes and fears
Of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
December Poem Of The Month (Part VI)
from Norfolk Carol, 1996
1. Christmas Eve, 3pm
The elements of Christmas -
Fire and ice -
In this tempered Arctic sun
That burns in the trees.
In these pools like skating rinks
Deep and dark and even.
Ice
In the flinty ground
And the bitter Easterly.
Fire
In the solstice sunset
Bleeding the black woods
And its ice-pink afterglow
And its fire-blue areola.
Ice
In the barn-wide rising moon.
Ice
In my soul as I'm turned
To the unlit wings
That cradle and grave
The sunset's light show.
Fire
In my soul
At a rising star
Burning like ice
In the polar blue.
Fire
In my hearth at home
(Crackling through logs),
In the farmer's field
(Roaring through twigs),
Red-raw and orange
Tongues of life-lust:
The vital, stripped down
Simplicities of winter.
This poem’s companion piece will be posted on Dec 24
December Poem Of The Month (Part V)
Final Assembly (post Dec 17)
The unpurged images of term recede
And, hark, the herald angels with dirty faces
Sing in excruciation.
They get younger each year and I,
To serve them half my days resolved,
Get no younger with them.
The praised boy who fishwise leapt with joy
Five Christmas terms ago
Grins at the clapping school now, sardonic.
Where has he gone - are we going - so fast?
O Jesus! still these discordant Years,
That carping torn, that gong-tormented Sea.
The unpurged images of term recede
And, hark, the herald angels with dirty faces
Sing in excruciation.
They get younger each year and I,
To serve them half my days resolved,
Get no younger with them.
The praised boy who fishwise leapt with joy
Five Christmas terms ago
Grins at the clapping school now, sardonic.
Where has he gone - are we going - so fast?
O Jesus! still these discordant Years,
That carping torn, that gong-tormented Sea.
If Kpiling Was At The Waca
If you can keep your bat when all about you
Are losing theirs for nought ‘protecting’ you,
If you can trust yourself when coaches doubt you,
But make allowance for their cod-calls too;
If you can wait and not be stressed by waiting,
And, being dissed, don't deal in disrespect,
And, being slated, don't give way to slating,
And yet don’t gloat at those who can’t select.
If you can spin a dream ball like the master
And bowl him too, and blunt that Aussie’s aim,
If you can meet Disaster and Disaster
And laugh and add a Five For to your name,
If you can bear to hear that name mis-spoken
By commentators, pundits, toffs and fools
And watch the chance you span your team to, broken,
And turn, and spin again with worn-out tools:
If crowds that jeer you, never jar your virtue,
If crowds that hail you king don’t halt your touch,
If neither Poms nor Aussie foes can hurt you,
If records count with you, but not too much;
If you can fill the series-losing innings
With finger spinning glory and some runs,
Then England’s yours and everything that's in it,
And, Pan EH Sar, you’re the Man, my son.
Are losing theirs for nought ‘protecting’ you,
If you can trust yourself when coaches doubt you,
But make allowance for their cod-calls too;
If you can wait and not be stressed by waiting,
And, being dissed, don't deal in disrespect,
And, being slated, don't give way to slating,
And yet don’t gloat at those who can’t select.
If you can spin a dream ball like the master
And bowl him too, and blunt that Aussie’s aim,
If you can meet Disaster and Disaster
And laugh and add a Five For to your name,
If you can bear to hear that name mis-spoken
By commentators, pundits, toffs and fools
And watch the chance you span your team to, broken,
And turn, and spin again with worn-out tools:
If crowds that jeer you, never jar your virtue,
If crowds that hail you king don’t halt your touch,
If neither Poms nor Aussie foes can hurt you,
If records count with you, but not too much;
If you can fill the series-losing innings
With finger spinning glory and some runs,
Then England’s yours and everything that's in it,
And, Pan EH Sar, you’re the Man, my son.
If Kipling Was At The Waca
"If Kipling Was At The Waca" was broadcast to the world, by an Indian woman broadcaster, at 2.15 on Saturday 16 December, with the correct pronounciation of Panesar's name. And Bristol City were 1-0 up v Millwall at the time...
December 13, 2006
Don't You Know Who I Am?
Don’t you know who I am? - 07 Dec 2006
Article from Sec Ed Magazine, Thursday 6 Dec 2006.
(Posted on my staffroom wall all week but I don't think anyone's noticed! Case proven, I think.)
Fifty is a dangerous age. Just as dangerous is 25 years’ teaching experience. Last November, with both measures clicking creakily and noisily into place, I decided to meet the challenge head on. I’d suffered for my art. Now it was the nation’s turn.
I planned a book, and a national tour promoting it. The book is called Exile In His Own Country and includes a prominent school section called Marked for Life. The tour would take in theatres, arts festivals and schools and in the latter include poetry workshops for pupils and staff. The final tour date – a home fixture just outside the old Smithdon Hundred close to my school catchment area – brought the project to a close last month. It has been a life-affirming, and life-changing year.
It has also had its funny moments. Writers in schools often complain that their presence and purpose has not been made clear (to pupils – or even staff) in advance of their visit. Never mind a cogent introduction, staff sometimes don’t even know who you are – or what you’re doing in their assembly, or even their classroom. They’re grateful, but puzzled.
You have to explain your function to them there and then, with the pupils listening in. After decades of working in schools myself, none of this surprises or fazes me. The person who has set up the visit is sometimes away that day or double-booked starting an exam somewhere or in a vital, or at least compulsory, briefing, or managing a pupil no-one else can deal with, or maybe even talking to the press about your visit.
They have forms to register (or fill in) and no-one to cover them. It’s no-one’s fault. Schools have remorseless routines with staff rushing from pillar to pigeonhole all day long – bells driving at them as if they were Pavlov’s dogs – and any variation in the day requires a major effort to facilitate or even to remember.
Staff are also very protective of their classes. They know what these pupils have to learn by the end of term, what exams they’re taking, what coursework hasn’t yet been done. They know their names and their needs – special and ordinary.
However, once you’re in the room and working with pupils, a kind of liberation comes over the teacher concerned and they tend to be the greatest assistants on God’s earth, grasping what the writer is trying to do immediately and doing everything in their power to help make it happen. They are sometimes like translators – “It’s like the refrains in the war poetry we’ve been doing Craig” – and they are invariably your right hand man or woman with anything you need to make the most of your time with the pupils.
Even the function of the teacher in the room with you as simply a supportive presence is a vital part of the writer-in-school experience. Schools pay good money to get the writer in and the role of the teacher is never mentioned or prepared, but it can double the value and make the time go an awful long way.
The writer meanwhile is usually trying to adapt the hours of creative tuition he has planned to the clock-oppressed slot he has been allotted with each group. The teacher who’s booked you wants the best for all his or her pupils, naturally, and so sometimes sets up well meaning but unworkable arrangements.
One school hilariously asked me to perform my complete 90-minute show non-stop to each entire year group in succession all day. When I do the show in the professional theatre, I get an interval at half time, an adult, theatre-literate audience, all sorts of technical protection, lights, music etc, and it still almost kills me. And that’s just doing it once.
In the desert heat of last summer, in different schools, I performed the show to year 9s. My own idea and not a good one. I have learned my lesson (it wasn’t funny at the time when my use of a mild swear word at the end of a poem about my Uncle Dai was greeted with the heckle “language!” from a mock-indignant year 9 boy, though I treasure the experience now).
Apart from the physical impossibility, such non-stop “performance” is not a good use of time. Teachers themselves can often help you improve what you are offering for their pupils with feedback, though of course this usually comes afterwards – hence the value of a return visit.
A writer works best with smaller groups over an extended time, with the emphasis gradually moving from his own models to the pupil’s responses. The ideal would be one – or at most two – groups worked with intensively all day, from warm ups to a finished piece of writing. It’s an ideal and, as a teacher myself, the realities of budgets and of the greatest benefit to the greatest number obviously come in to play, but it’s worth bearing in mind. The experience can and should be priceless. Don’t spread the writer too thin. The experience has much more value in the long run if it’s focused towards more time with less people than the reverse.
It’s also unsatisfactory if the writing has to be left as a follow up for homework. The writing requires the professional’s response at that stage as much as – if not more – than any other, and there’s always the chance that, with curricula being as crammed and hectic as they are, the follow up won’t get done. Some work is so good, too, the writer might be able to recommend possible publication outlets or competitions.
I came home on National Poetry Day in October – a wet miserable Thursday – after a day’s workshop in a seaside town school in Norfolk and felt exhausted and elated at the same time.
This was not because my photo and news of my tour were on the front page of this publication (though that was nice), but because I had got some year 11 boys drumming the desks and chanting call-and-response football poetry, then writing their own war chants with absorbed and conscientious grasp of structure, rhythm and all the devices. It was real work. And, at 50, you don’t want to be doing anything less.
Gareth Calway is head of English at Smithdon High School in Norfolk. Exile In His Own Country is available via www.garethcalway.co.uk or www.bluechrome.co.uk To talk to Gareth about poetry workshops on football, schooldays or other themes, call 01485 571828.
Article from Sec Ed Magazine, Thursday 6 Dec 2006.
(Posted on my staffroom wall all week but I don't think anyone's noticed! Case proven, I think.)
Fifty is a dangerous age. Just as dangerous is 25 years’ teaching experience. Last November, with both measures clicking creakily and noisily into place, I decided to meet the challenge head on. I’d suffered for my art. Now it was the nation’s turn.
I planned a book, and a national tour promoting it. The book is called Exile In His Own Country and includes a prominent school section called Marked for Life. The tour would take in theatres, arts festivals and schools and in the latter include poetry workshops for pupils and staff. The final tour date – a home fixture just outside the old Smithdon Hundred close to my school catchment area – brought the project to a close last month. It has been a life-affirming, and life-changing year.
It has also had its funny moments. Writers in schools often complain that their presence and purpose has not been made clear (to pupils – or even staff) in advance of their visit. Never mind a cogent introduction, staff sometimes don’t even know who you are – or what you’re doing in their assembly, or even their classroom. They’re grateful, but puzzled.
You have to explain your function to them there and then, with the pupils listening in. After decades of working in schools myself, none of this surprises or fazes me. The person who has set up the visit is sometimes away that day or double-booked starting an exam somewhere or in a vital, or at least compulsory, briefing, or managing a pupil no-one else can deal with, or maybe even talking to the press about your visit.
They have forms to register (or fill in) and no-one to cover them. It’s no-one’s fault. Schools have remorseless routines with staff rushing from pillar to pigeonhole all day long – bells driving at them as if they were Pavlov’s dogs – and any variation in the day requires a major effort to facilitate or even to remember.
Staff are also very protective of their classes. They know what these pupils have to learn by the end of term, what exams they’re taking, what coursework hasn’t yet been done. They know their names and their needs – special and ordinary.
However, once you’re in the room and working with pupils, a kind of liberation comes over the teacher concerned and they tend to be the greatest assistants on God’s earth, grasping what the writer is trying to do immediately and doing everything in their power to help make it happen. They are sometimes like translators – “It’s like the refrains in the war poetry we’ve been doing Craig” – and they are invariably your right hand man or woman with anything you need to make the most of your time with the pupils.
Even the function of the teacher in the room with you as simply a supportive presence is a vital part of the writer-in-school experience. Schools pay good money to get the writer in and the role of the teacher is never mentioned or prepared, but it can double the value and make the time go an awful long way.
The writer meanwhile is usually trying to adapt the hours of creative tuition he has planned to the clock-oppressed slot he has been allotted with each group. The teacher who’s booked you wants the best for all his or her pupils, naturally, and so sometimes sets up well meaning but unworkable arrangements.
One school hilariously asked me to perform my complete 90-minute show non-stop to each entire year group in succession all day. When I do the show in the professional theatre, I get an interval at half time, an adult, theatre-literate audience, all sorts of technical protection, lights, music etc, and it still almost kills me. And that’s just doing it once.
In the desert heat of last summer, in different schools, I performed the show to year 9s. My own idea and not a good one. I have learned my lesson (it wasn’t funny at the time when my use of a mild swear word at the end of a poem about my Uncle Dai was greeted with the heckle “language!” from a mock-indignant year 9 boy, though I treasure the experience now).
Apart from the physical impossibility, such non-stop “performance” is not a good use of time. Teachers themselves can often help you improve what you are offering for their pupils with feedback, though of course this usually comes afterwards – hence the value of a return visit.
A writer works best with smaller groups over an extended time, with the emphasis gradually moving from his own models to the pupil’s responses. The ideal would be one – or at most two – groups worked with intensively all day, from warm ups to a finished piece of writing. It’s an ideal and, as a teacher myself, the realities of budgets and of the greatest benefit to the greatest number obviously come in to play, but it’s worth bearing in mind. The experience can and should be priceless. Don’t spread the writer too thin. The experience has much more value in the long run if it’s focused towards more time with less people than the reverse.
It’s also unsatisfactory if the writing has to be left as a follow up for homework. The writing requires the professional’s response at that stage as much as – if not more – than any other, and there’s always the chance that, with curricula being as crammed and hectic as they are, the follow up won’t get done. Some work is so good, too, the writer might be able to recommend possible publication outlets or competitions.
I came home on National Poetry Day in October – a wet miserable Thursday – after a day’s workshop in a seaside town school in Norfolk and felt exhausted and elated at the same time.
This was not because my photo and news of my tour were on the front page of this publication (though that was nice), but because I had got some year 11 boys drumming the desks and chanting call-and-response football poetry, then writing their own war chants with absorbed and conscientious grasp of structure, rhythm and all the devices. It was real work. And, at 50, you don’t want to be doing anything less.
Gareth Calway is head of English at Smithdon High School in Norfolk. Exile In His Own Country is available via www.garethcalway.co.uk or www.bluechrome.co.uk To talk to Gareth about poetry workshops on football, schooldays or other themes, call 01485 571828.
December 11, 2006
December Poem Of The Month (Part IV)
Advent Calendar Selection Box
from Sheer Paltry
Bard Of Bristol
"You’re supposed to be at ’ome!!"
Standing in my team red before a game, yelling the chants - in and out of sync,
The main feeling is of being a complete fraud.
It's not that the team doesn't matter to me:
It matters enough to give me a heart attack.
It's just that, with only distant memories of 2-3-5 to fall back on,
I never really understand what's going on.
There are fifty blokes with a view I could ask from anywhere around me
But they each seem to be commentating on a different match.
And I live five hours from Bristol so it's hard to stay in touch.
And, however you market it, the match atmosphere is just like you get in a men-only garage -
Oily, reductive, ferociously competitive about everything and nothing-
Aggravated by six pints of booze and ten thousand men-brains,
The kind of thing I went to University to get away from.
If it weren't for the tightening in the stomach every match day,
The inferno of baying noise - purged by love and loyalty
(And comradeship and chantorion and cheer,)
The shiver of the perfectly pitched pass,
The tantalising tactical one twos, the toothsome tingling tackles,
The faith-affirming final ball through the box,
The frantic flash of foot through frenzied ball
The fluent flight of ball through air into flapping net,
The fabulous tapestry of red against blue over green,
The red knights tilting at perfection,
The pavilions of banners, pennants and scarves,
The child’s red and white Christmas of the goal consummations -
Then I probably wouldn't bother.
from Sheer Paltry
Bard Of Bristol
"You’re supposed to be at ’ome!!"
Standing in my team red before a game, yelling the chants - in and out of sync,
The main feeling is of being a complete fraud.
It's not that the team doesn't matter to me:
It matters enough to give me a heart attack.
It's just that, with only distant memories of 2-3-5 to fall back on,
I never really understand what's going on.
There are fifty blokes with a view I could ask from anywhere around me
But they each seem to be commentating on a different match.
And I live five hours from Bristol so it's hard to stay in touch.
And, however you market it, the match atmosphere is just like you get in a men-only garage -
Oily, reductive, ferociously competitive about everything and nothing-
Aggravated by six pints of booze and ten thousand men-brains,
The kind of thing I went to University to get away from.
If it weren't for the tightening in the stomach every match day,
The inferno of baying noise - purged by love and loyalty
(And comradeship and chantorion and cheer,)
The shiver of the perfectly pitched pass,
The tantalising tactical one twos, the toothsome tingling tackles,
The faith-affirming final ball through the box,
The frantic flash of foot through frenzied ball
The fluent flight of ball through air into flapping net,
The fabulous tapestry of red against blue over green,
The red knights tilting at perfection,
The pavilions of banners, pennants and scarves,
The child’s red and white Christmas of the goal consummations -
Then I probably wouldn't bother.
December Poem Of The Month (Part III)
Advent Calendar Selection Box
In The Bleak Midwinter (post Dec 7)
watched
by the rich guarded
silence
of cotswold
farms
and a blinding sun
through bare trees
and the jagged saw
of a dog at the gate,
i wonder
what my pilgrimage
to an indian summer
half a world distant
taught me
about this old track
of unchanged england
wrapped up in compliments,
temporary as tinsel,
a feast that goes cold,
a santa that never
really delivers
as i slide
down my frozen hill
of ignorance
on slight city shoes
made in ahmednagar
towards
a painful wisdom.
Cranham, Glos. Christmas ’94
In The Bleak Midwinter (post Dec 7)
watched
by the rich guarded
silence
of cotswold
farms
and a blinding sun
through bare trees
and the jagged saw
of a dog at the gate,
i wonder
what my pilgrimage
to an indian summer
half a world distant
taught me
about this old track
of unchanged england
wrapped up in compliments,
temporary as tinsel,
a feast that goes cold,
a santa that never
really delivers
as i slide
down my frozen hill
of ignorance
on slight city shoes
made in ahmednagar
towards
a painful wisdom.
Cranham, Glos. Christmas ’94
Forward To Adelaide
Listen out for it on the World Service!
The Second Test (with apologies to Tennyson)
'Forward to Adelaide!'
Was England’s team dismay'd ?
Not tho' the Aussies knew
Fletcher had blunder'd:,
Freddy the heart of the side
Made head, its head belied
Monty again denied
Back to the valley of Death
The bruised and bashed lumbered.
S. Clarke to right of them,
McGrath to left of them,
Brett Lee in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with seamers’ spell
Boldly, they batted well,
Left-hooked the jaw of Death,
Right-jabbed the mouth of Hell,
Boundaries plundered.
Flash'd all their willows bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the seamers there,
Charging the bullies while
All the world wonder'd:
Spun by that portly bloke
Right thro' his line they broke;
Colly and Pietersen
Dealt him the boundary stroke,
Blocked him and bludgeoned
Knocked off a fifty – then
Knocked off a hundred….
S. Clarke to right of them,
McGrath to left of them,
Brett Lee in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Shane warned and cast his spell,
But all to no avail
They that fought back so well
Came back from cricket death
While ancient records fell
Knocked off a century,
Knocked off two hundred….
(to be concluded, hopefully with something along the lines of “When can their glory fade…?”)
When can their glory fade?
Oh, in a couple of days.
What COULDN'T be blundered
They managed it just the same.
Collapsing at Adelaide
The almost-six hundred!
The Second Test (with apologies to Tennyson)
'Forward to Adelaide!'
Was England’s team dismay'd ?
Not tho' the Aussies knew
Fletcher had blunder'd:,
Freddy the heart of the side
Made head, its head belied
Monty again denied
Back to the valley of Death
The bruised and bashed lumbered.
S. Clarke to right of them,
McGrath to left of them,
Brett Lee in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with seamers’ spell
Boldly, they batted well,
Left-hooked the jaw of Death,
Right-jabbed the mouth of Hell,
Boundaries plundered.
Flash'd all their willows bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the seamers there,
Charging the bullies while
All the world wonder'd:
Spun by that portly bloke
Right thro' his line they broke;
Colly and Pietersen
Dealt him the boundary stroke,
Blocked him and bludgeoned
Knocked off a fifty – then
Knocked off a hundred….
S. Clarke to right of them,
McGrath to left of them,
Brett Lee in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Shane warned and cast his spell,
But all to no avail
They that fought back so well
Came back from cricket death
While ancient records fell
Knocked off a century,
Knocked off two hundred….
(to be concluded, hopefully with something along the lines of “When can their glory fade…?”)
When can their glory fade?
Oh, in a couple of days.
What COULDN'T be blundered
They managed it just the same.
Collapsing at Adelaide
The almost-six hundred!
December 02, 2006
December Poem Of The Month (Part II)
Advent Calendar Selection Box
Kings Of The Forest
The Robins went back to the Forest
And did what they didn't before.
The robbers got two goals and two pens
The Robins the same and two more.
To go to the top-of-the-tree club
And sing out our victory song
Is brave and adventurous and merry
And shows us both plucky and strong.
This may be the day that the Robins
Proved to themselves they can be
The kings of the forest come April
And end it atop of the tree!
Kings Of The Forest
The Robins went back to the Forest
And did what they didn't before.
The robbers got two goals and two pens
The Robins the same and two more.
To go to the top-of-the-tree club
And sing out our victory song
Is brave and adventurous and merry
And shows us both plucky and strong.
This may be the day that the Robins
Proved to themselves they can be
The kings of the forest come April
And end it atop of the tree!
Forward to Adelaide!
This one was written on Friday and Saturday Dec 1-2 after long nights half awake to the progress of the Adelaide test. I posted it to Sportsworld and for the second week running, they broadcast it to the world shortly afterwards in the middle of interviews with proper grown up Australian cricketers, the nearest I've got to facing some of the bowling my heroes are currently dispatching...
Forward to Adelaide!'
Was England’s team dismay'd ?
Not tho' the Aussies knew
Fletcher had blunder'd:,
Freddy the heart of the side
Made head, its head (Strauss) belied
Monty again denied
But into the valley of Death
The bruised and bashed lumbered
M. Clarke to right of them,
McGrath to left of them,
Brett Lee in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with seamers’ spell
Boldly they batted well,
Back from the jaws of Death,
Out of the mouth of Hell
The once-losers clambered.
Flash'd all their willows bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the seamers there,
Charging the bullies while
All the world wonder'd:
Spun by that portly bloke
Right thro' his line they broke;
Colly and Pietersen
Dealt him him a boundary stroke,
Blocked him and bludgeoned
Knocked off a fifty - then
Knocked off a hundred….
Forward to Adelaide!'
Was England’s team dismay'd ?
Not tho' the Aussies knew
Fletcher had blunder'd:,
Freddy the heart of the side
Made head, its head (Strauss) belied
Monty again denied
But into the valley of Death
The bruised and bashed lumbered
M. Clarke to right of them,
McGrath to left of them,
Brett Lee in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with seamers’ spell
Boldly they batted well,
Back from the jaws of Death,
Out of the mouth of Hell
The once-losers clambered.
Flash'd all their willows bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the seamers there,
Charging the bullies while
All the world wonder'd:
Spun by that portly bloke
Right thro' his line they broke;
Colly and Pietersen
Dealt him him a boundary stroke,
Blocked him and bludgeoned
Knocked off a fifty - then
Knocked off a hundred….
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