Father's Day is just not cricket
One of the things I do to earn a living is shuffle paper and people during exam season in a university. Today, Father's Day, I'm alone in a room with heaps of paper, blu tac, elastic bands, treasury tags, cardboard boxes, tables, trollies, and more board pens than you'll probably see throughout the entirety of your life. I can stare at that stuff, I can stare at the wall or I can stare out of the window where, a few floors below me, a cricket match is taking place.
It's easy to mistake two cricket teams engaged in passionate and unforgiving competition with just some people, who happen to be dressed in nearly-white clothes, who wanted to be in the same place but don't like each other enough to go within yards of one another. So they're standing around with odd hats on and every so often one or two have a brief dash, maybe followed by an unfathomable game of catch. If you watch long enough a point will come where either something is knocked off another thing or one of the players catches a ball, and then all-the-hell-that-cricket-can-muster breaks loose.
And as it is with cricket, so it is with life: people often look like they are passing a perfectly pleasant day rather aimlessly, when in fact they are engaged in a battle with something you can't even see, let alone comprehend, and which might destroy them if all the stars align.
Not, however, so with football. Football is, arguably, so acted out emotionally so that the game itself displays more, and deeper, emotion than is really being felt. And it's pretty straightforward to establish what is going on: the ball's the thing and the nets are the aim. Cricket? Not so much. Cricket takes some learning and then, still, you might never get there. And cricket fans like it that way
(For me this is where art and sport differ: it can still be great sport even if someone has to explain it to me.)
Yet I learnt about cricket in spite of it all. The home I grew up in had not even a pretence of interest in sport. I can remember Mum taking a slight interest in the Grand National, but only really to place that once-a-year bet. Then she'd watch from the doorway, ducking in and out, so concerned was she for the welfare of the horses. There are things my siblings and I have enjoyed in the way of watching sport, tennis being the strongest, well, Wimbledon to be more specific. We did not stay up for Flushing Meadow in the 80s, if it was broadcast... that I don't know says it all. Some athletics, I guess, and an interest in the Olympics. But not football. Not at all.
Dad, however, was interested in sport. He was a cricket fan, instrumental in establishing the team in the village where I grew up and where he had found a home after his very unstandard life, including children's homes, adoption at 12, public school, estrangement from his adoptive father.... He had longed for his own children and now he had a home, with people who were genetically connected to him. And with my mother had come my mother's family and they were terribly important to him. Not that his adoptive family weren't, but Mum's clan suited him, I think, for so many reasons. And, then, so momentously for this man with no blood relations, after the stillbirth of our eldest brother, came the arrival of three babies, who, by the stage the cricket team came to life, were into and all over everything, as kiddywinks are.
The Spanish translate village and home, as in hearth, as pueblo: it's where your heart certainly is. Your pueblo can be the village of your childhood, as it is with me, but it can be, say, your bit of the suburbs. It's your place, where your people are. Like it or hate it, you know it and it knows you. You can take someone out of their pueblo, but somehow their pueblo will never be extracted from them.
Dad had worked to establish himself and in our pueblo - he had friends, family, singing, cats and cricket, cycling, amongst many other things. Of course, because I was six when he died, I never discussed any of this with him, but I suspect there was a relaxation and joy at being known and being home, mixed with the delight of regularly going to London for work - getting back to the action, not being known. It sounds like the best of both worlds to me.
Sometimes he would sit with Wednesday, the cat who had adopted us all on.... a Wednesday, and watch the test match. Wednesday was a farm cat, almost certainly a bright one who had decided that the hard and overpopulated life on the farm was not for him, so he'd gone looking for better things. And he had found them. He had contempt for the rest of us, but Dad he liked, and they shared time together. I don't know how Wednesday felt about cricket but he liked Dad.
When I was 17 I volunteered to score for the cricket team at school. This was the late 80s and so, of course, the cricket team were the boys and we scorers were predominatetly girls. I have hazy memories of it all, and I know why: it's because those memories are steeped in shame. I didn't really know enough about cricket to do the job. I have an uncle who is a fan but I suppose it never occurred to him that I might be interested: I was a Peyton after all, we Don't Like Sport. And it would never have occurred to me to ask him. To give credit to my uncles, they never attempted to replace my father, and I'd rather have it that way and have many weird gaps in my comprehension of the adult male, than have had them try to extend themselves into our family unit, as some men sometimes did, with strange rules and odd values, seemingly thinking that any opinionated man was as good as my dad.
I volunteered for scoring because I wanted to be with the boys. I was in the very early days of boys at this point, before I knew for sure I was just not the right person for them, by-and-large. Of course I suspected I was not what boys or men would want, I know that many people feel they might never find love, but at this point I didn't have 30 years of evidence that mostly I'm not The Thing. And it was with some horror that I realised that, although I'd done my own cricket study, I didn't really know enough. I remember both the sunny heat of that hazy Saturday afternoon and the prickling, shocked heat of my own embarrassment as people - BOYS - had to put me straight.
And. I. Longed. For. My. Dad.
It was my first and last afternoon scoring, and I slunk off back to my self, knowing that whatever inadequacies were all of my own, I was also clearly inadequate to the tune of whatever understanding of, and passion for, the world my blinking father had taken with him into his ineffable silence.
Today, Father's Day, my social media accounts are full of people agonising about their missing - or wanting - fathers. It's so sad to see and my heart goes out to them. I'm lucky because the molten-steel agony of the first decade of my loss is long, long gone and so all things emotional are easier to field than that Difficult Opening Decade. And when it was the early days capitalism hadn't realised it could invent a day and make us buy stuff because if we didn't buy stuff for our dads then we're bad people and they are, patently bad dads or we don't care about them or both.
Bleuch.
And, for me, the pain of my loss just attaches itself to whatever it fancies. Christmas Day can be fine say, and Father's Day doesn't even touch me, but I'll find myself dealing with a puncture or singing in a choir or trying to choose between one apple and another and suddenly, for no reason, I'll be poleaxed. Winded. Kidnapped by my long-dead dad and swept away on a tide of uncomprehending incapacity. It happens all the time, I guess there are so many things which can flip me, things which we call triggers these days, that I've sort of relaxed into it, like that pair of shoes I've got where the Velcro is so full of hair and threads and such like that I have to bend to reattach it every seven or eight paces.
For most of my life though, I have essentially played cricket. I have seemed as if nothing is much of a problem, belieing the chaos raging within (though some of those close to me have known, and I salute them and apologise and will buy them a drink soon, I promise, if they're still speaking to me). As a little kid I learnt very quickly that my grief was not acceptable in the wide world, that I needed to make like a cricketer and while I was splittingly, burstingly jelliefied and oozing through the holes of my psyche, I needed to make nonchalant, make friendly, make funny and not let on. What was the point of telling anyone that if I hear These Boots Were Made For Walking, I can hardly breathe, and that my heart seems entirely to subside to almost nothing if it's the Suzi Quatro version?
And so, while footballers have their charm, especially as I finally got to my first professional sports event when I was 18, taken to see the Canaries by my first love, it's cricket all the way for me. Incomprehensible, weird, inscrutable, cricket where it looks like virtually nothing is occurring until it's all going to cock.
PS Dear bosses, if you read this, I wrote most of it not at work - I am actually doing some work today.... Yours, a grateful employee
It's easy to mistake two cricket teams engaged in passionate and unforgiving competition with just some people, who happen to be dressed in nearly-white clothes, who wanted to be in the same place but don't like each other enough to go within yards of one another. So they're standing around with odd hats on and every so often one or two have a brief dash, maybe followed by an unfathomable game of catch. If you watch long enough a point will come where either something is knocked off another thing or one of the players catches a ball, and then all-the-hell-that-cricket-can-muster breaks loose.
And as it is with cricket, so it is with life: people often look like they are passing a perfectly pleasant day rather aimlessly, when in fact they are engaged in a battle with something you can't even see, let alone comprehend, and which might destroy them if all the stars align.
Not, however, so with football. Football is, arguably, so acted out emotionally so that the game itself displays more, and deeper, emotion than is really being felt. And it's pretty straightforward to establish what is going on: the ball's the thing and the nets are the aim. Cricket? Not so much. Cricket takes some learning and then, still, you might never get there. And cricket fans like it that way
(For me this is where art and sport differ: it can still be great sport even if someone has to explain it to me.)
Yet I learnt about cricket in spite of it all. The home I grew up in had not even a pretence of interest in sport. I can remember Mum taking a slight interest in the Grand National, but only really to place that once-a-year bet. Then she'd watch from the doorway, ducking in and out, so concerned was she for the welfare of the horses. There are things my siblings and I have enjoyed in the way of watching sport, tennis being the strongest, well, Wimbledon to be more specific. We did not stay up for Flushing Meadow in the 80s, if it was broadcast... that I don't know says it all. Some athletics, I guess, and an interest in the Olympics. But not football. Not at all.
Dad, however, was interested in sport. He was a cricket fan, instrumental in establishing the team in the village where I grew up and where he had found a home after his very unstandard life, including children's homes, adoption at 12, public school, estrangement from his adoptive father.... He had longed for his own children and now he had a home, with people who were genetically connected to him. And with my mother had come my mother's family and they were terribly important to him. Not that his adoptive family weren't, but Mum's clan suited him, I think, for so many reasons. And, then, so momentously for this man with no blood relations, after the stillbirth of our eldest brother, came the arrival of three babies, who, by the stage the cricket team came to life, were into and all over everything, as kiddywinks are.
The Spanish translate village and home, as in hearth, as pueblo: it's where your heart certainly is. Your pueblo can be the village of your childhood, as it is with me, but it can be, say, your bit of the suburbs. It's your place, where your people are. Like it or hate it, you know it and it knows you. You can take someone out of their pueblo, but somehow their pueblo will never be extracted from them.
Dad had worked to establish himself and in our pueblo - he had friends, family, singing, cats and cricket, cycling, amongst many other things. Of course, because I was six when he died, I never discussed any of this with him, but I suspect there was a relaxation and joy at being known and being home, mixed with the delight of regularly going to London for work - getting back to the action, not being known. It sounds like the best of both worlds to me.
Sometimes he would sit with Wednesday, the cat who had adopted us all on.... a Wednesday, and watch the test match. Wednesday was a farm cat, almost certainly a bright one who had decided that the hard and overpopulated life on the farm was not for him, so he'd gone looking for better things. And he had found them. He had contempt for the rest of us, but Dad he liked, and they shared time together. I don't know how Wednesday felt about cricket but he liked Dad.
*******************************
When I was 17 I volunteered to score for the cricket team at school. This was the late 80s and so, of course, the cricket team were the boys and we scorers were predominatetly girls. I have hazy memories of it all, and I know why: it's because those memories are steeped in shame. I didn't really know enough about cricket to do the job. I have an uncle who is a fan but I suppose it never occurred to him that I might be interested: I was a Peyton after all, we Don't Like Sport. And it would never have occurred to me to ask him. To give credit to my uncles, they never attempted to replace my father, and I'd rather have it that way and have many weird gaps in my comprehension of the adult male, than have had them try to extend themselves into our family unit, as some men sometimes did, with strange rules and odd values, seemingly thinking that any opinionated man was as good as my dad.
I volunteered for scoring because I wanted to be with the boys. I was in the very early days of boys at this point, before I knew for sure I was just not the right person for them, by-and-large. Of course I suspected I was not what boys or men would want, I know that many people feel they might never find love, but at this point I didn't have 30 years of evidence that mostly I'm not The Thing. And it was with some horror that I realised that, although I'd done my own cricket study, I didn't really know enough. I remember both the sunny heat of that hazy Saturday afternoon and the prickling, shocked heat of my own embarrassment as people - BOYS - had to put me straight.
And. I. Longed. For. My. Dad.
It was my first and last afternoon scoring, and I slunk off back to my self, knowing that whatever inadequacies were all of my own, I was also clearly inadequate to the tune of whatever understanding of, and passion for, the world my blinking father had taken with him into his ineffable silence.
*******************************
Today, Father's Day, my social media accounts are full of people agonising about their missing - or wanting - fathers. It's so sad to see and my heart goes out to them. I'm lucky because the molten-steel agony of the first decade of my loss is long, long gone and so all things emotional are easier to field than that Difficult Opening Decade. And when it was the early days capitalism hadn't realised it could invent a day and make us buy stuff because if we didn't buy stuff for our dads then we're bad people and they are, patently bad dads or we don't care about them or both.
Bleuch.
And, for me, the pain of my loss just attaches itself to whatever it fancies. Christmas Day can be fine say, and Father's Day doesn't even touch me, but I'll find myself dealing with a puncture or singing in a choir or trying to choose between one apple and another and suddenly, for no reason, I'll be poleaxed. Winded. Kidnapped by my long-dead dad and swept away on a tide of uncomprehending incapacity. It happens all the time, I guess there are so many things which can flip me, things which we call triggers these days, that I've sort of relaxed into it, like that pair of shoes I've got where the Velcro is so full of hair and threads and such like that I have to bend to reattach it every seven or eight paces.
For most of my life though, I have essentially played cricket. I have seemed as if nothing is much of a problem, belieing the chaos raging within (though some of those close to me have known, and I salute them and apologise and will buy them a drink soon, I promise, if they're still speaking to me). As a little kid I learnt very quickly that my grief was not acceptable in the wide world, that I needed to make like a cricketer and while I was splittingly, burstingly jelliefied and oozing through the holes of my psyche, I needed to make nonchalant, make friendly, make funny and not let on. What was the point of telling anyone that if I hear These Boots Were Made For Walking, I can hardly breathe, and that my heart seems entirely to subside to almost nothing if it's the Suzi Quatro version?
And so, while footballers have their charm, especially as I finally got to my first professional sports event when I was 18, taken to see the Canaries by my first love, it's cricket all the way for me. Incomprehensible, weird, inscrutable, cricket where it looks like virtually nothing is occurring until it's all going to cock.
*******************************
PS Dear bosses, if you read this, I wrote most of it not at work - I am actually doing some work today.... Yours, a grateful employee
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