Traveling on the tube on the way to lord’s is an experience.
There are more beige suits, dark jackets, sun hats, and bacon end egg ties in close proximity to you than you get at your local pub.
And it is unsettling.
It is sort of like traveling on a train from 1938, except with dead people.
Make no mistake some of these men are dead. They don’t know it, but there is no doubt they are just going to the cricket because they have always done it. A beyond the grave leisure activity, a chance to catch up other corpses and talk about how things were better in their day.
They are the great cricket undead.
I had one seated next to me. I stared at him for 3 stops, and by the end I was convinced he had passed on. He hadn’t moved, or given any signs of life, his skin was a matte grey. `I thought someone better do something, so I reached out to take his pulse and just before I got to him he sprung to life with a splutter.
When I looked around I realised it wasn’t just him, there was a carriage full of them.
Each more ghostly than the last, copies of the times or the telegraph in their old bony hands, a packed lunch by their loving wives sitting at their feet, and three layers of beige on.
You wonder what these guys do the rest of the year.
I’ve never seen them lining up for a film.
Perhaps there is some special Lord’s mortuary, and they are shipped out so that younger members won’t get their seats.
When you leave the tube you have to dodge them on your way to the ground. They don’t walk, they do a shuffle trudge, and they take up the whole footpath, like a zombie obstacle course.
Once in the ground, you realise there are thousands of them, still doing this shuffle trudge, getting in your way, taking hours to piss, stopping in walk ways, dissing any new (post war) changes, dropping booze and food on their shirts, and slowly getting life in their cheeks.
Lord’s is a special place if it can bring these guys back to life.
