Media fury in Oz
THE AUSSIE press has been very harsh about its cricketers. "Our Worst XI" read the headline to a team photograph as they went into the last day of the Fifth Test without a hope. "They can't bat, they can't bowl, they can't field and they can't think straight," read another headline across a double-page spread, after the inevitable innings defeat.
Yet television interviews on the spot with Aussie supporters picked up nothing but magnanimity and congratulations on the England effort. After the match, both teams apparently repaired to the pavilion bar for a celebration/congratulation that went on a bit.
That's more like it. And the Aussies did win a Test – running away with it – and draw another. It wasn't a complete whitewash – nothing like the 5-0 drubbing England got last time they toured.
But let nobody say it's only a game.
Imponderable
AND, OF COURSE, we have a share in England's victory – and not such a small one either.
Skipper Andrew Strauss was only born here, it's true, but Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Trott and Matt Prior grew up in South Africa and learned their cricket here. Pietersen is a product of Maritzburg College.
Where would South African cricket be – and where would they be – if Pietersen, Trott and Prior had stayed on? Would they have been in the national side? It's one of those imponderables.
It gets verse
A WHILE ago we carried a bit of weird verse which contained lines like:
Herds of beautiful voetsaks
Ate the succulent short green kloof,
While a couple of drunken disselbooms
Slept on the farmhouse roof ...
It ended with the words: "Ag, sies tog man!" The origin was uncertain. It seemed possible it was inspired by a couple of zols.
Now Esme Nel, of Pinetown, says the poem was made up by South African troops "Up North" during World War II, who enjoyed pulling the legs of their British and other Commonwealth allies.
"The Springboks had great fun describing, for instance, a fight to the death between a disselboom and a paw-paw."
Those must have been great evenings in the mess. Did I tell you, by the way, about the aardvark that only yesterday swooped from the sky to carry off in its talons the staatsamptenaar that was picking at the voorlopers on my front lawn?
Ag, sies tog man!
Under canvas
WHICH recalls the evening in a mess under canvas in the Western Desert when Churchill challenged Smuts to an exchange of Shakespeare quotes.
(For the benefit of younger readers, Churchill was prime minister of Britain; Smuts was prime minister of South Africa, commander-in-chief of the South African defence force – a general - and also a member of the British war cabinet).
Churchill was a man who (although he wrote superbly) had battled to pass the school exams to be accepted into the British army. Smuts had taken Cambridge by storm and was eventually named one of the three most brilliant students ever at the university. (The others were Isaac Newton, who developed the law of gravity, and John Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost).
So there they were: Churchill, a wag and noted tippler, and Smuts, an intellectual and near-abstainer, firing Shakespeare quotations at each other. It went on and on. Smuts found himself reaching desperately into passages of the plays and sonnets he thought he had forgotten.
But every time Churchill came back chirpily with another quote. Eventually Smuts was flummoxed. He could not remember another line from Shakespeare.
At which Churchill admitted he'd been making up his own quotes for the past half-hour.
Ag, sies tog man!
Aspirins
A RECENT Tailpiece referred to a fellow who came home a little late at night and pushed two aspirins into the mouth of his sleeping wife. (I'm not going to repeat the joke, but she didn't have a headache).
It reminds Norma Potter, of Margate, of something she read in a novel: "There are no aspirins in the forest because parrots eat 'em all."
True. All that squawking and screeching in the jungle causes terrible headaches.
Tailpiece
I'M GETTING sick and tired of people in my house walking all over my hat collection. It's about time I made a stand.
Last word
It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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