I’m just reading through a personal message from the White House as Daisy chomps her way through a mouse she must have brought in last night and left as a love-token in the vicinity of my chair. It’s a dreadful noise, the sound of teeth on bone and gristle.
The amicable letter signed Sincerely Barack Obama is quite a good one. A well-paid wordsmith clearly spent a good few hours constructing elegant paragraphs in a friendly, understanding voice that ultimately signifies very little. The President’s ghost wrote to me in response to an on-line petition urging the Big Man to pull his presidential finger out on the subject of climate change.
‘For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.’ Well there you are then, I knew I could trust the man. We can tell our children that everything’s going to be all right. The world is not going down the pan after all, because the American President is personally going to see to it that the United States of Consumption will cut its emissions. Now I can go outside without a care in the world and play croquet with the cheap-and-cheerful set I bought from Herr Lidl the other day.
I can’t be too hard on the man. After all, he was good enough to write back – and, let’s face it, letter-writing is a dying art these days. I remember going to a party given by some American acquaintances to celebrate the new president’s inauguration. They rigged up a big-screen telly and created a cocktail they christened Obamapunch for the occasion. Everyone was in high spirits (no pun intended) and it was an uplifting assembly of cosmopolitan folk. Yer man gave an assured and rousing address from behind his bullet-proof screen, and everyone cheered him on, happy in the knowledge that, at the very least, he was much more intelligent than the previous incumbent.
However… meeting the agenda on his oval desk was always going to be a tall order: save the world, while ending the inextricable struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, revitalising the economy and wiping a few trillion off the national debt. So I enjoyed the spectacle for what it was and went home after a few heady draughts of optimism with few illusions.
Sure enough, nothing much has changed. True, the American acquaintances have swapped their lovingly restored house in Martel for one of those beautiful Regency-style houses, once the combined homes and depots of rich wine merchants, overlooking the Gironde in Bordeaux. But rather than doing something truly radical, like fitting solar panels to every roof in the country, the American government, like just about every other government, continues to fiddle while the planet burns. For all his elegant suits and elegant words, the slick orator is effectively powerless in the face of concerted lobbying, vested interest and political intransigence.
Was there ever a time when you could trust a politician? If so, it must have ended roughly with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. If there’s any honour left, it’s an honour among thieves. Just like professional cricketers, in fact. The first test of the current series for the Ashes has been riveting, but spoiled a little by the failure of Stuart Broad to ‘walk’ when he knew that he’d edged a catch to the slips behind. He was half way through contributing to a stand that might yet prove to be the decisive factor in the match.
To walk or not to walk, that is the question? The debate was raging in the mid 60s, when I was an avid reader of my monthly mag, The Cricketer. The English team was only just emerging from an era of Gentlemen v Players, a time when only amateur ‘gentlemen’ were allowed to captain the plebeian professional players who made up the majority of the eleven. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, to walk if you knew you were out. Even then, though, there were many – often Australian, professional to a man and generally contemptuous of any trappings of a class system synonymous with British imperialism – who would stand their ground until the umpire raised his finger. Let’s not forget, too, that any who walked potentially faced the wrath of their team-mates.
The issue was not as simple as it sounded. I found this out as a cricket-crazy kid. I was playing in a game on some far-off field, just trying to get my eye in when I played at a ball outside my off stump and there was a loud appeal from the wicketkeeper and slip fielders behind me. I wasn’t sure whether I nicked it or not. So I stood my ground and waited for the umpire. Since he was a spare from our own team, he didn’t give me out. I played on for a few more balls until the inevitable happened and I drove over a straight ball, which shattered my stumps. But I think in my heart of hearts that the earlier delivery probably did touch the edge of my bat. To this day, I am haunted by the fact that I didn’t walk. I did the wrong thing, knowing it wasn’t right.
I was a kid at the time, and I like to think that I would have been bigger about it if it had happened when I was a man. So when I’m tempted by Friday’s incident to decry the boy Broad as a brat, I have to remind myself not to be a hypocrite. In any case, Broad has to live with his conscience (if he’s got one). He may even be remembered as the morally suspect bloke who did the wrong thing: the other side of a coin that shows an untarnished image of the great Australian wicketkeeper-batsman, Adam Gilchrist, a Boy’s Own hero if ever there was one, who walked without hesitation in defiance of the team ethic.
Perhaps I’ll write to my new friend, Mr. Obama, and see what he makes of it all. Americans don’t understand cricket, so I won’t mind too much if I don’t get a reply from him or his White House wordsmith. I’d rather he thought to write to Mrs. Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, assuming the great singer left behind a widow when he growled his last a couple of weeks ago. Bobby was a big man in many senses of the word. He may never have been quite as famous as the likes of B.B. King, because the only instrument he had was his voice. But what a voice! Bobby was to the black American blues tradition as Frank Sinatra was to the white American popular songbook.
If President Obama isn’t going to leave a solar-powered legacy, he could do worse than decree a national Bobby Bland Appreciation Day. We need our heroes – and heroines – more than ever in troubled times. We need the walkers of this life.