It often annoys me, given how hard it can be to find a parking place in our street, when people put out a few bins in the road as an indication that the space will be required the next day, for builders, deliverers, scaffolders or removal vans.
It was one of the last of these that recently came into view the morning after several bins went out over the road, but any annoyance the night before vanished on seeing the slogan on the side of the lorry: “Life is an elaborate metaphor for cricket.” Hats off to “Anthony Ward Thomas, Master Removers”, my joy at your branding all the greater for the old-fashioned writing in which your name is painted, and for the fact that yours is a big red lorry, and so truthful compared with the big red bus that carried the big fat NHS lie that helped drag us out of the EU.
“Life is an elaborate metaphor for cricket.” Wonderful. I am not in the habit of rushing outside to take photos of lorries, but I did so, to be able to share this wisdom with friends from university. That was where one of our number, Mark Gault, would often sit in silence, broken only by occasional deep-throated salvoes that… “cricket… is my life.”
Sadly, Mark, a brilliant adman, is no longer with us. Indeed, it was his funeral that I was attending in New York when, as I wrote here recently, Ghislaine Maxwell spotted me on the plane and later introduced me to her boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein. (That’s another story, but wow, what a shock, was it not, ahem, to see she has been moved to a lower-security prison after a visit from Trump lawyer Todd Blanche!?)
My partner Fiona, not a sports fan, knew and liked Mark, but never fully understands why these days, occasionally I channel him and suddenly growl that “cricket… is my life.” These utterances have been more frequent in recent weeks, as what was surely one of the greatest Test series in history, between England and India, unfolded. It has left me feeling so sorry for people like Fiona, who don’t get it, and so superior to countries – like the United States for example – that never will.
Americans may have Apple and Amazon, they may be winning the AI race, and they may still make movies and TV shows people all around the world want to watch. But one, their president is killing their soft power; and two, they will never appreciate either the meaning of Anthony Ward Thomas’s lorryside slogan, or the depth of the entertainment and intellectual stimulation given to millions by every one of the five Tests just played.
Coincidentally, I was talking last week to cricket fanatic Irfaan Ali, the president of Guyana. It is a fascinating country, 85% covered by rainforest, yet which right now has the highest economic growth in the world, thanks to a huge discovery of oil.
What wouldn’t Rachel Reeves or any other finance minister give for figures like these? 2020: 43.5% growth; 2021: 20.1%; 2022: 62.3%; 2023: 37.2%; 2024: 45.3%.
The IMF has Guyana down for 10.3% growth this year, low set against their own recent past, massive by European standards. It all means that a country which in 2015 was the second poorest in the hemisphere – after Haiti – is now on track to have the highest GDP per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean by 2030.
Ali is a charismatic figure, currently mid-election campaign, passionate about a lot of the things I care about – biodiversity, trees, the climate crisis, mental health, the rules-based international order… and cricket. He had been following England v India closely, and was raving about it.
I confessed to him that when I was growing up, I thought Guyana was an island between Trinidad and Barbados, as some of the greatest West Indian cricketers from my childhood and youth came from there… Clive Lloyd, Lance Gibbs, Alvin Kallicharran, Roy Fredericks.
I have since learned that it is a country at the top of South America, bordered by Venezuela, Brazil and Suriname; slightly smaller than the UK, with a population of just 800,000, English the main language, cricket the national sport. If Ali was passionate about biodiversity and mental health, and using their sovereign wealth fund to invest for the long term – which he was – the passion reached fever pitch when I asked why West Indies cricket was so poor compared with my childhood, when I saw nothing wrong in bunking off school whenever any of the above were playing close to home.
Presidential Passionate Rant No 1: West Indian fast bowlers were so good, and so fast, that the others (England and Australia, I think he meant) got the rules changed to make them less effective – fewer bouncers allowed, a wide given for anything straying down the leg side, pitches adapted to slow them down. PPR No 2: India is becoming a cricketing commercial superpower at the expense of other countries, and England and Australia need to wise up to what is happening.
He is not alone in feeling the Indian Premier League (IPL) is over-commercialised, too glitzy, too focused on big names rather than actual teams, too celebrity-driven, not least given some of the team owners within the US-style franchise system.
Ali is only 45, and likely to be in politics for some time. But given how critical he was of cricketing authorities, including in the West Indies, but ranging far wider than that, I would not be surprised to see him pop up in the politics of sport one day.
It won’t be straightforward to get the balance right between growing an economy on oil, and staying true to a passion for biodiversity. President Ali very kindly invited me out to help support him in keeping on the right side of that line.
Having spent an hour or so looking at Guyana videos on YouTube, it is an offer I will gladly take up. Enough Tree of the Day contenders to last me a social media lifetime.
Also, go online and check out Kaieteur Falls. There is barely anyone on the planet who hasn’t heard of Niagara Falls. Well, at 741ft, Kaieteur Falls is five times taller, and at 300ft wide is broader than Niagara is tall. The world’s largest single-drop waterfall by volume has been added to my bucket list.
It seems everyone has a podcast these days, and that includes Count Binface, the Screaming Lord Sutch de nos jours who brightens up elections by standing against prime ministers and the like, wearing a very fetching dustbin over his head, and campaigning for things like the return of Ceefax, a price cap on croissants, the nationalisation of Adele and the phasing out of Piers Morgan emissions. Beneath the bin of course is a real person, who has a pretty smart take on politics.
He introduced himself to me – without bin – at a recent book festival, flattered me wildly, and asked if I would go on his podcast, Trash Talk. How could I refuse?
During the interview last week I said that just as I don’t want to know what Banksy looks like, I felt a little cheated that I now know what he, Count Binface, looks like, and it is nothing like a dustbin.
“You don’t really think that will get in the edit, do you?” said the bin.
Like I said, smart. Keep the myth going, Binface.
