Ten Things 1

GH with an esoteric list of ten

I am a decimal thinker.  I wrote a book twenty years ago, The Tencyclopedia, consisting of esoteric lists of ten (Ten Fictional Mice, Ten Flags Featuring Weapons etc).  So from time to time on Cricket Et Al, I'm going to drop similar-sized lists of things I'm doing, visiting, reading, have heard or seen, which should help to convey how limited my life really is.

• Happiness is when your 14yo daughter alerts you to, and commiserates with you about, the death of Damo Suzuki, because she knows you like Krautrock, and you mark the occasion by listening to The Fall’s ‘I Am Damo Suzuki’ together.

• C’s new interest: political parties.  We are working our way alphabetically by country through the Wikipedia list.  Our favourite discovery: Canada’s Rhinoceros Party, whose campaigns promises have included abolishing the environment because it's ‘too hard to keep clean and takes up so much space’ and ‘building one nuclear power plant per household’ but with a monthly supply of lead underwear.  Now you know where the Nationals get their ideas from.

• I’ve been told by reliable sources that most male profiles on dating apps feature photographs of men either in Hi Viz or holding fish.  What I can say is that a sizeable proportion of women photograph themselves in their cars, leaving you, perhaps, to infer that they are ‘in the driver’s seat’.  Or that they live in their cars.  Maybe I’m not taking this seriously enough….
  

• Ricky in Trailer Park Boys: ‘I love all creatures like gophers and deerts, and those things that fly and everything else, but fuck seagulls. I got no time for those cocksuckers.’

• The things teammates say.  Seconds got bowled out for 60 last week, so Lukey finds himself dropped to the Thirds with me.  ‘Only one thing to do,’ he says determinedly.  Me: ‘Yep.’ Lukey: ‘Hope they get thrashed and nobody gets any runs.’ Me: ‘Too right.’  Lukey: ‘There are only three reasons to do anything - spite, guilt or to impress a woman.’ Me: ‘Altruism never got anyone back in the Twos.’

• Our umpire last week, Arsalan, arrived from Pakistan in November, so we chat about the election there while he puts the stumps in. He is a qualified engineer who played in the Quaid-E-Azam Trophy; here to remit money home he works five days a week in a Target warehouse in Tarneit and umpires at weekends; he says that the latter is a ‘good way to learn English’.  My very next conversation is with Scuz, left-arm spinner and aesthete, who is reading In Another Life, a memoir of liberal arts education by Howard Felperin, a Yale colleague of Harold Bloom’s.  Is there any other game, any other world, in which you could have two such dialogues consecutively?  
  

• The Surrealist Lee Miller exhibition at Heidi is outstanding.  A particularly highlight are her photos in Egypt in the 1930s when she was unhappily the trophy wife of Aziz Eloui Bey: they reek of isolation and ennui.  By the 1950s, her personality was so commanding that she hosted dinner parties while lying on the settee issuing tasks to her guests.  But I guess if you’ve bathed in Hitler’s tub, you can get away with most anything. 
  

• Take my mum to see Candide, the Leonard Bernstein musical, at the Palais - it’s every bit as good as we remember it from more than forty years ago, with the addition of Eddie Perfect as a swaggering, louche Dr Pangloss. We have dinner first at the Espy, which is heaving, and where mum is the youngest person by about fifty years - something out of which she gets a lot of mileage.

• Further adventures in Zola.  Though the long will-they-won’t-they of owner Mouret and shopgirl Denise provides the romantic thread, it’s the eponymous super store that seizes your imagination in The Ladies’ Paradise.  Has a commercial enterprise - its de luxe interiors, the mutual rapture of staff and its clientele - ever been described in such exquisite, lapidary detail? Zola’s inspiration was Paris’s great department store La Bon Marche, but today The Ladies’ Paradise reminds you of nothing so much as Amazon, in its irrepressible growth, hegemonic pretensions and capacity for flattening competition.  In the words of Denise’s uncle Baudu, a benighted rival: ‘Wasn’t it inconceivable? In less than four years they had increased it fivefold; their annual takings, formerly eight million, were approaching the figure of forty million according to the last stock-taking. It was madness, it was unheard of, and it was pointless to struggle against it any longer. They were getting bigger all the time, they now had a thousands of employees, they were proclaiming they had twenty-eight departments. It was this figure of twenty-eight departments that enraged him more than anything. No doubt they had split some of them into two, but others were completely new: a furniture department, for example, and a fancy-goods department. What an idea! Fancy goods! Really, these people had no pride, they’d end up selling fish.’  Zola himself falls under the spell of his creation. Unlike Money, which ends, like the Credit Mobilier scandal on which it is based, in ruin, the great bazaar remains unassailable -  just like Amazon.  It’s not the Zola of Germinal or The Downfall, or even my fave Therese Racquin, but still immensely readable and relevant.

• C hosting a three-friend sleepover tomorrow night.  They are great kids, but wish me luck anyway.