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From Kevin Marsh...
There was very little to laugh at or be cheered by this week even though it is just four weeks to the start of the English cricket season. On Friday 9 April - the western church's Good Friday - the MCC plays Sussex at Lords and that prospect should instantly lift the nation's mood. Except that at the moment the umpire drops the bails onto the stumps at the start of that first game he tugs the end of an unbroken thread fixed at its other end to the last saturday in September and the almost unbearably sad days of autumn. And that is the trouble with spring - it reminds you that autumn is inevitable.
On the face of it - and perhaps when you are young - spring makes you happy and optimistic and reassured at the cycle of life and growth with daffodils and green shoots and renewal but it is in fact a time of panic as the days lengthen without, at first, growing any warmer. And then the days do grow warmer but that is no better because once again - in my case for the fiftieth time - you know you will miss, through work or whatever, the greater part of the coming warmth and sunlight and anyway you've probably had two thirds of all the springs and summers you'll ever have.
It is not April but March that is the cruellest month and autumn, almost unbearably sad though its days are, is more comfortable and much less cruel than either March or April since it pretends no optimism and there is always the reassuring whiff of rot about it. If you wanted to feel down about all of this then Thursday's programme was the one for you, though as I quipped to the saintly Ed as he bundled a handful of shag together for the morning pipe and settled down to committing a few more verses of Heraclitus to memory, anyone waking up to the news of appalling terrorist bombs, baby killings, wrongful imprisonment, abortion, mis-sold mortgages and suicide under the burden of debt might just feel that their own lot in life wasn't quite that bad after all. Jean Sneyd for one - though to be fair, her plight, or more accurately that of the villagers of Menheniot near Liskeard in Cornwall, was in its own way grim. Or ironic. Or comic. Or all three - in that postmodern kind of way that John claims not to understand. came onto the programme to talk about the oddity that had come about in her neck of the woods that amounted to this: after thirty years of campaigning for a bus shelter, the village had finally got one - at precisely the moment that the bus service was withdrawn. Not only that, but in a fit of bureaucratic sadism of an unusually intense kind, the bigwigs had shut the public lavatories in the village too.
Paradox of the week was the appearance of the , to explain that he hadn't been gagged and prevented from telling the world on the Today programme that global warming was a bigger threat than terrorism. While mental absence of the week was Carolyn's moment with Jim White and David Hepworth as they discussed the on Friday.
It's unfair to draw attention to this because it was close to the end of the programme and Carolyn was pre-occupied with counting the Jaffa cakes to make sure they'd go round all the guests, and she'd been put off by Rebecca Marston's sparkly deely-boppers. All the same, it was a bit unfair to let Jim White wave his arms around like that and deliver the most insightful critique of the many layered ironies that were the 70s only to hear Carolyn say "and what do you think of that, Jim ?" He responded well by insisting "I am Jim" ... but you could tell he wasn't sure and that his spirit was broken.
Oh. And another really odd thing happened this week. As you know, I write these letters by hand on pages ripped from the saintly Ed's jotter, recharging my Osmiroid at intervals from the inkwells on the Today writing desks that it is Jim's job to fill from a large jug of Quink. This does not always go smoothly since the fumes from the blue-black are very much stronger than those from the blue or the black alone and he has been overcome on one or two occasions and has had to retire to a beanbag or the wingchair in the corner of the writing room with a look of excessive peace on his face.
It was while we were looking for him on one of these occasions this week that we found not Jim but a weird creature snuffling between the footrest and the waste-bin at the side of the escritoire. Naked and almost human, a tiny grey skinned body with a huge head and bulging eyes and whisps of grey hair whipping its enormous forehead as it rooted amongst the crumpled rejects and early drafts of this letter and debated good and evil with itself hissing "Sholto good, Pandora evil..." before it found an item it prized and its mouth cracked into a tombstone smile and it breathed a hoarse ecstatic cry of "The Precioussssssssssssss.........." and scuttled off clutching its paper treasure to its underground lair in a dark place on the borders of Mordor called Marsh Wall.
Kevin
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