Dear Daniel,
On Friday, I went to the Headingley cricket ground to watch a Yorkshire versus Lancashire 20/20 match. As we sat down on the Western Terrace, directly in front of a large group of men wearing spandex leotards, my friend Jon's reasons for loving cricket came back to me. Jon tells the tale of his first trip to the same ground, sat in the same stand.
It was the start of the day, people were arriving and unpacking their picnic baskets, finding their seats and preparing for the day's play. A man gets up from the lower tier of seating, off to visit the gents. He looks just like Barry Manilow. As he gets to the steps in the centre of the seating, a large ground of lads sitting further up notice him and start chanting, "Barry Manilow! Barry Manilow!" down at the poor, embarrassed guy, who shoots them back daggers: he clearly gets it all the time.
And then cricket happens.
Fast forward six hours and "Barry Manilow" is up on the shoulders of a security guard, hands in the air, leading the Western Terrace through the Copa Cabana, "HER NAME WAS LOLA! SHE WAS A SHOWGIRL!"
Cricket, Jon maintains, is a journey.
The match on Friday was rubbish, but we enjoyed the journey. Unfortunately, a pigeon had to die.
Living in Headingley it's easy to take the cricket for granted. It's still there, year after year, easily ignored. And all the time you ignore it, you're missing something. Beck is the same. Still there, still playing. You're aware he's around, but he doesn't really hit the headlines.
But it turns out that if you ignore him you're just missing out on the chance to see five men make music with cutlery, clapping, roasted chicken and one string on a guitar, crosscut with bizarre and unexplained shots of puppets of them doing the exact same thing.
The moral is: keep looking.
Dear James,
Welcome back. I've often wondered who I'd support in a Yorkshire-Lancashire cricket match. Lancashire play at Old Trafford, but I like Sheffield more than Manchester. Maybe I should support Cheshire. Or just carry on ignoring the whole thing, it's not as if we get televised cricket over here. We didn't even get the FA Cup Final live on Saturday as ESPN dedicated both their channels to the fucking tennis. It's impossible to ignore tennis over here. It is, however, quite easy to ignore Beck. I was walking along the street the other day when "Lazy Flies" came on my i-pod and I realised that was the last Beck album I bought, 11 years ago. Of course, Shirley Ellis I'm far more au fait with.
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