Tag: cricket

Keeping sane amid the chaos

How (if you’re me!) to keep measured and sane amid the chaos.

For starters, two reminders from a Buddhist meditation handbook:

‘…one shouldn’t have a great deal of desire… one must be content, which means whatever one has is fine and right.’ ‘Whatever one has is fine and right.’ (My italics.)

‘The place where we stay should be free from a lot of activity and a large number of people… (we should reduce) our involvement in too many activities.’  Now there’s a challenge.

Then there’s something I’ve loved since childhood – watching cricket. I enjoyed England’s decisive and exuberant victory over Pakistan in the second test match that ended yesterday. Always good to head out to Lords or the Oval, or stand on the boundary at Cranham cricket club … (A friend reminds me of the joke – ‘God gave cricket to the English so that they should have some sort of idea of eternity ‘ – that was certainly true of the first test match. I was there.)

And moving out beyond the cricket field – out further into the wild, and the wilderness, into the countryside, to the coast, to the mountains:

(‘What would the world be, once bereft /Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left…’)

walk (or run) in the meadows and beech woods

head off down to Cornwall and walk around Penwith from St Ives, via Zennor and Land’s End and Porthcurno, to Penzance (carrying a tent and heavy rucksack in the hot sun a small downside, likewise the heat exhaustion!)

puzzle over the wild flowers (betony abundant in Cornwall – a small sense of triumph identifying it!)

listen or watch, or maybe both…

– two buzzards wheeling above me on the coast path near Treryn Dinas just east of Porthcurno, piping much of the time, occasionally they come together and there’s a scurry of wings, and they resume their circling. The following morning, 7.30, I’ve struck camp, and I’m on my way, light rain, grey out to sea, and they’re back there, ahead of me, still slowly circling

– the owl which I disturbed in the woods later that morning – it took off maybe only two or three feet away from me, a vast and silent presence, and a powerful absence, disappearing into the light at the end of the green tunnel behind me

– the sound of a soprano, yes, a soprano, from the Britten opera being performed at the Minack theatre a mile away, it was 9pm, and I was tucked away in my tent, trying to sleep…

– a yellow snail (a ‘white-lipped banded snail’), and a red-winged fly – the small and surprising things, which puzzle, and take the mind down from the high and inflated places to the simple and beautiful

– and back in the Cotswolds, a lesser spotted woodpecker now a regular visitor to the bird feeder and the birdbath in the garden, and the goldfinches

– and the long warm summer evenings, the stillness, and the small party which headed out onto the common at midnight to look for glow-worms

There is hope for the world yet.

 

A rose in winter, a field in Cheshire and a radio universe

A woodpecker drilling in a local garden, a single rose standing tall in a rose garden, and a grey and misty dawn over the river, on this absurdly warm December day. Daffodils are in flower they tell me, but not here. There are I hope snows to come, and chill sunsets and frosty dawns.

Last night the sun set behind Jodrell Bank – in a BBC4 TV programme celebrating the radio telescope and Bernard Lovell, its legendary director. I drive past it whenever I’m heading to the family home in north Cheshire, along a stretch of road between Chelford and Twemlow. The 250ft high bowl and its skeleton frame tower high above. It’s Cheshire farming country, as it was when I cycled out there as a teenager, and stood in awe – little has changed. The same houses, the same brick, the open fields and woodland brakes. And this the telescope that tracked Russian rockets in the Cold War, against Lovell’s better instincts, and explored the radio universe for evidence of the big bang, played a part in the discovery of pulsars (a regular pulse instead of static) and continues to this day to explore the far reaches of the universe. Dark matter isn’t beyond its gaze, though multiverses remain the province of the mathematicians.

I wanted to be an astrophysicist until I learnt it wasn’t enough to be simply numerate. Long equations floored me. (But still fascinate.) But Jodrell Bank against a sunset sky, or rising up dark in the night, a shadow which might have come out of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds – that still amazes. Jodrell Bank is home territory, as the stars and the wide universe were home for me, in my back garden as a 12-year-old, staring up each night, with my star charts.

Lovell was brought up a Methodist, and never lost his sense of wonder, or his sense of the limits of scientific knowledge. He also captained Chelford cricket club. What more could you ask of a man.