Just a couple of sodden miles before breakfast. I was aching from last night’s effort, and my appetite for a sinewy 5 mile splash through the damp streets wasn’t quite there. So I settled for 25 minutes of faltering plodacity in among the rather depressed looking city centre workers as they tramped towards their desks.
But it was enough to give me that glow at work all morning, and it even kept me awake after lunch, despite having to read a 200 page document describing the amalgamation of two databases filled with mortgage payment transactions. Imagine yourself to be a spider traversing a vat of marmalade. Make it orange curd. Or honey. Imagine yourself to be a spider traversing a vat of honey. No really. Imagine it: size(honey_vat)/(((squelch, gloop)*8)*spider_size). Er, that’s what it was like.
Even more fun was to be had this evening when a few of us went to a packed Headingley to see Yorkshire beat Lancashire in the ’20/20′ match. Cricket continues to shrink. Foreigners, and Americans in particular, are usually alarmed when I explain that a proper cricket match lasts for five days – a total of about 45 hours. But such games are rare now. We’ve gone from 5 to 4 days for internationals, and down to 3 days for club matches. The 1-day game stays popular. And now we have the 20/20 idea. Twenty overs a side (that’s 120 deliveries, for the uninitiated), all in about 3 hours on a summer evening. The limited time available means a lot of big hitting and entertainment. In about 230 balls tonight, we saw 338 runs and 12 wickets. I’m not a huge cricket fan, but I enjoyed this. Cricket is no longer chess, but true sport.
