Transatlantic

The first of this year’s Booker Prize long list. Divided into three books, the Transatlantic America and Ireland. The first book has three sections: Alcock and Brown’s flight from Newfoundland to Ireland, carrying a letter from a reporter’s photographer daughter; an abolitionist’s speaking tour of Ireland, and an episode assisting a maid with ambition’s emigration from Ireland to America; an American politician’s work in the Good Friday agreement.

The second book ties generation in with the first book. The maid’s civil war, her loss, building a business with a new husband, further loss. Her daughter’s life as a reporter, and her refusal to bow to convention, an unmarried mother, moving to Newfoundland, then to Ireland by ship. The photographer daughter, in her later years, meeting the American politician on the tennis court, in her later years.

The third book has the narrative change to the first person, more loss, and still the fear of eviction in Ireland. Comic: an elderly lady fully aware of her increasing bulk, fragility, not losing any self-effacing humour, accompanied by an elderly Labrador struggling against the march of time and its effects on continence, in an equally ageing and infirm Landrover. Sad: the loss of child, the resultant loss of the stepfather, the threatened loss of their inherited family home, by the bank, thanks to the global financial crisis the banks have catalysed. Loose ends tied? Some, not all, as in life.

Umpire + Light meter = Jobsworth

Surely, said David Gower, in a true commentator’s curse Murray Walker moment, there’s the letter of the law, and there’s the application of a little common sense. We got the former, as the umpires took the players off with four and a bit over left to go, and with England having every chance of finishing off a thrilling run chase and taking the series 4-0. An opportunity set up by Michael Clark’s brave decision to bat hard and declare, an approach that turned a potentially sterile day of motion-going to a keenly contested one, until it was once again stifled, by the meter-readers.

Now the England cricketers have had to apologise for urinating on the Oval pitch. In context, and in a recently evolved tradition, all the players who contributed to the series success stick around through the evening, into the night and after midnight, share some cans of beers, and do that talking, bonding, teambuilding thing we were so useless at in the past.

Tins of beer lead to the need to pee. A route march to the nearest facility leads to someone taking the ‘what the hell, there’s only us here’ line and saving the time.

Late-working Aussie journalists espying this leads to their publication and the need for a (understandably understated and reserved) apology.

The roles have been reversed. Winning and celebrating Poms grassed up by whingeing and whining Aussies. The joke was: where does an Englishman hide his wallet? Under the soap. Now it’s where does an Aussie hide his insecurities and insufficiencies? He doesn’t, he just tries to dob someone in.