CORRECT WEIGHT #3

… And saving the best til last:

John Arlott. What a raconteur, what a brilliant man. He possessed like no other sporting commentator the ability to take us into his intimate circle as if we were all quaffing a port at his club or maybe a dinner party he was hosting.  He conveyed in honey tones a sense of when England was grand, cricket was erudite and radio was the prime instrument of mass media, an era when cricket was not about coloured clothes, dumb player tweets and bookies’ odds but national pride.  He painted verbal watercolours of a quieter life, village greens, reflection. The song is one of my very favourites, probably top 5 I’ve written.  Why? Not just because it speaks of the great Arlott, it sums up what I have always found to be the great dilemma, whether to choose the art of art over the art of living. Simplicity, mundane existence, contentment has a lot going for it and the lives of ordinary folk are as important as those of any tortured artist.  Perhaps its lineage is from the great poem Elegy Written in a Country Chuchyard which I read at school and made a lasting impression, certainly it encapsulates my whole attempt to create art out of the banal, the sweet, the inconsequential. Can’t you just hear Arlott reciting these very lines

The thoughtless World to majesty may bow

Exalt the brave, & idolize Success

But more to Innocence their Safety owe

Than Power & Genius e’er conspired to bless

Regardless, I think John Arlott a great cricket song and the BBC should play it during test matches! We will be doing it in the 2013 gigs.

JOHN ARLOTT MAKES ME CHUCKLE

John Arlott makes me chuckle

With his stories of the forties from the Oval

And her soft hand makes me giggle

As it tickles from the buckle to the navel

And I don’t know how a song can come from this

Bruce Springsteen wouldn’t have me as his main protagonist

I’m far too ordinary

I work a steady job

I’m a journo into Pernod I vote Labor

I’ve got a quarter acre block

A small to average cock

And a fence that I went halves in with my neighbour

Still I sometimes feel I’m on the wrong side of a timewarp

My feet beat their retreat down footpaths never touched a sidewalk

I’m a no one in my loungeroom

But I’m sure I’d be a someone in New York

She always makes me tingle

When she scratches certain patches down my spine

And I bite her ear and kiss it

And a wicket falls while Frindle’s marking time

It’s a simple life I lead

And I feel guilty that I lead it

I’d search for more excitement

But I’m not sure that I need it

I’ve an ex-wife and a sex life

That it took me years to find

And there’s just no greater pleasure

Than John Arlott on the tele

And her etching little numbers in my spine.

So this is my dilemma

On the one hand I’m a man with great potential

On the other I’m a lover

Much more potent

Than some glamorous credential

Still I sometimes feel I’m on the wrong side of a timewarp

My feet beat their retreat down footpaths never touched a sidewalk

I’m a no one in my loungeroom

But I’m sure I’d be a someone in New York