The Barrel Race
IT'S THE National Sea Rescue Institute Barrel Race at Point Yacht Club on Sunday. That's when they get into barrels that have been cut in half and paddle across the bay, led by the commodores of Point, Royal Natal Yacht Club and Bluff Yacht Club. It's a hoot.
No, I exaggerate. They don't put to sea in barrels, they do all kinds of things just about as silly. The yachties have a round the harbour race, open to everything from keelers to the smallest dinghy. The power boats have a kind of treasure hunt across the harbour, based on cryptic clues.
The actual barrel is in the PYC dining room, and from it tickets are pulled for literally hundreds of prizes. Items are auctioned. Master of Ceremonies Rob Main Bailie goes into orbit. And quite a lot of beer is quaffed. It's still a hoot.
The theme this year is "Shipwreck" and I'm told the Playhouse has been involved in providing the décor.
It puzzles me slightly because I was at the Barrel Race last year and seldom have I seen so many sailing folk completely wrecked. What's different?
As I recorded in this column, at one stage I had a statuesque blonde and her midget schoolfriend – they hadn't met in 15 years – sobbing on my shoulders because they were so happy. I wonder if they'll be there again.
The Barrel Race is a major fund-raiser for the NSRI which puts to sea in the filthiest weather to rescue craft in distress (it sometimes even rescues bathers swept out to sea). It is manned by unpaid volunteers and funded by private sector donations.
The Barrel Race is great fun in a great cause.
Timeless Test
THE 1948 cricket Test against England at Kingsmead still resonates. It's astonishing the way the throwaway mention of a match 62 years ago can generate such discussion. Mention of Cliff Gladwin, the England tailender who got the winning run with a leg-bye, prompts a response from historian and writer Peter Quantrill.
He says his recollection of Gladwin is the phrase he is reputed to have uttered on walking to the crease: "Cometh the hour, cometh the man."
"Now of course with his north country accent, it might well have sounded: 'Coometh the 'our coometh the man.'
"And some say that the origin of the phrase is his."
It seems that might well be right. Although it's a phrase we often hear, nobody seems to know where it originated. It sounds like something from the Bible. John 4:23 has "But the hour cometh, and now is" – but that's as close as it gets
A trawl through the references is much the same. There's an English proverb:"Opportunity makes the man". Harriet Martineau titled her biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture, in1840, The Hour and the Man. An American, William Yancey, said of Jefferson Davis, President-elect of the Confederacy in 1861: "The man and the hour have met". PG Wodehouse, in Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, has: "And the hour ... produced the man."
At the climax of Sir Walter Scott's novel, Guy Mannering, Meg Merrilies says: "Because the Hour's come, and the Man". In the first edition and in the magnum opus edition that Scott supervised in his last years, the phrase is emphasised by putting it in italics.
The hour and the man – but nobody said it quite like Cliff Gladwin at Kingsmead. Nobody else took it into the lexicon of English phraseology in the same way.
This is surely another indication of the superiority of Test cricket. Can you imagine any meaningful phrase emerging from Twenty20?
Serious flaw
READER Rodney Kenyon points to a serious flaw in an e-mail that is flitting about.
"Currently doing the rounds is an information e-mail with the sort of trivia we all love to read, including this gem: 'If the population of China walked past you eight abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction in that country'.
"I appreciate the Chinese are devilishly clever, but it strikes me that if the entire population of China were engaged in the pursuit of walking eight abreast past a designated point, the reproduction rate would slow down dramatically."
Quite so.
Tailpiece
Divorce judge: "I've decided to award your wife R10 000 a month."
Divorcing husband: "That's jolly decent of you. I'll try to slip her a few bucks myself."
Last word
The multitude of books is making us ignorant.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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