Not really cricket...

As a child I never learned to ride a bike or fish, these are things that came to me much later in life and subsequently I’m a wobbly bike rider and I lose most of my fishing tackle in the weeds. It’s not that I didn’t want to learn I did, but in our house failure wasn’t allowed and that hardly encouraged you to try something new.

All the other boys on the estate went fishing and dashed around on bikes. I often wondered how they learnt to do it until one day I realised that they’d learnt from their dads who’d shown them what to do, even holding onto the back of the bike seat, running along beside them until they could balance on their own.

Of course my dad was a busy man and he wasn’t really interested in fishing or bikes. He was interested in football and cricket though. I’ll never forget those happy days in the park and on the beach as he powered yet another goal past me or bowled me out for another humiliating duck. How I laughed as he ‘quacked’ me and tossed me the tennis ball. Of course this was always followed by his innings, which went on and on as he knocked every ball I bowled into the far distance either scoring a six or running back and forth twenty or thirty times until I emerged bloodied from the hawthorn bushes with the ball.

As he often used to remind me: I was rubbish at football and cricket. Eventually I gave up playing beach games, taking myself off to paddle in the sea on my own as my dad didn’t like the water much.

Later, in my teens, I discovered I was pretty good at rugby and got on to the county team. My dad even came to watch one match, but disappeared to one on my mum’s friend’s houses after ten minutes or so. Well it was cold, and it would have been rude not to pop in (she was a redhead my mum met in hospital whose name escapes me), besides my dad didn’t really like rugby.

Anyway, that's why I don't play cricket and why I’m not racing in the Tour de France this year.