And Finally

For most Latin Americans, who are themselves no strangers to sporting eccentricity, cricket remains a baffling proposition. The game is dismissed as being far too English and is often confused with croquet. Ignorance, however, does not preclude peculiar theories on how the game is played. I remember a Uruguayan diplomat attempting to explain the rules to a colleague who had recently arrived in London. “It’s very simple, che. All you need to know about el críquet is that when the ball hits those three little sticks, it’s a goal.” In the nineteenth century, cricket was played across Latin America. Matches were sometimes held in fantastic surroundings: Emperor Maximilian I donned his white flannels in the grounds of Mexico City’s neoclassical Chapultepec Castle.

Driving home through Kent the other day, I was struck by how much the topography has changed. When I was growing up there in the 1970s, first in Rolvenden and then in Hawkhurst, there were hop gardens. Today there are vineyards. I’m not sure Alfred Jingle would recognize the county about which he stated in Pickwick Papers: “Kent, sir — everybody knows Kent — apples, cherries, hops and women.” The apple and cherry orchards are not nearly as numerous as they were in either his day or mine, and the hop gardens have largely, although not entirely, disappeared. As for the women, I can’t vouch for their numbers, but I’m delighted to report they remain very easy on the eye. I loved picking hops.

The woman on the path has come to a dead stop. She’d been shuffling along in that bunched-up posture we all developed when we bought smartphones, a two-fingered salute to the millennia of evolution that managed to pull humans into an upright position. Now she’s staring, open-mouthed, at her surroundings. I rather enjoy the shocked faces of passersby who catch sight of us swimmers at the Serpentine Pond in Hyde Park in our flimsy suits as we lower ourselves into the cold water each morning. I look still more shocking when I get out. My skin turns from its normal skimmed-milk color to bright neon, as though it has been slapped. And it has in a way: when you first enter water thats barely above freezing, you do get a shock.