What a sporting feast the last fortnight has been! Thankfully our tv remote has speech control, so you only have to whisper “Sky Sports Cricket” to transition from Karate Kata in Tokyo to England making a complete horlicks of it against India in between the showers at Trent Bridge. If nothing else it saves the humiliation of being shown how to navigate the complexities of modern viewing by one’s teenage children.
As a former commentator, it’s hard not to view with a critical ear. (Or do I mean listen with a critical eye?) Probably the best Colemanballs I’ve heard so far is “and the leading three are working as a pair”. As someone who’s committed plenty of bloopers in the glasshouse of live sport, I probably shouldn’t stow thrones, but that is just illiterate!
Have you watched the Karate Kata? A lot of Olympic sports only hit the mass public eye every four years and most of the martial arts probably fall into that category. But Kata is something that should be on our screens to start every working day. It works wonders for your failing supply of oxytocin. For the uninitiated, it is not a contest. It involves one person in fancy dress, going through a series of poses, with an incredibly steely look and the occasional frightening scream. It’s hysterical. Goodness knows what’s actually going on, how it is scored or come to that why they bother in the first place.
I’m not sure if it’s a function of old age or a sign of growing imaginative creativity, but increasingly I find myself getting inexplicable flashbacks of previous moments in my life, mostly images and thoughts that haven’t entered my conscious brain for years. I’ll be standing at the sink, scouring Alison’s burnt pans, when I’ll suddenly get a really vivid picture of launching kittens off the roof of our observation tower in the Omani desert, back in 1973. (I was on the parachute squadron and we used the parachutes from two inch mortar rounds to train our desert cats in airborne tactics). It’s quite disconcerting as it’s happening more and more and the thoughts are totally random. I can’t help thinking the Almighty is preparing me for the Afterlife.
I’m due to be playing my third game of cricket this season tomorrow, for the Eastbourne 4th XI. Weather permitting and it may well not, I am scheduled to keep wicket for forty overs. If JaJa99 No 206 fails to materialise you’ll know it was a game too far! Meanwhile I’m on the edge of my seat in anticipation of the next round of Karate Kata…..
ADayInTheStrifeOf 