There’s something about May that is like a time-warp for cricketers. Doesn’t matter how old you are, but the day before a game, usually a Friday these days, a huge depression, a massive black dog, a staggeringly intense fugue swallows you up and drags you down under the waves if its raining.
There’s almost nothing worse in the game than day-before-rain. Especially if you are away. Wickman is playing away (in the cricketing sense) tomorrow. How do you judge the rainfall that you can see outside when you have so little experience of the oppo’s facilities?
In this particular case Wickman is off to deepest Surrey. But how deep? Deep enough that a weather system which has turned central London into something as damp as a fat girl’s gusset might just brush by and leave the oppo’s square as crisp as the well used handkerchief that you find in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn since you got that awful cold in February?
Wickman has spent all day, when he hasn’t had to deal with client traumas, trying to gauge how damp the oppo’s facilities will be. Firstly, looking at a geographer’s map of rock types, there’s a chance that the particular village Wickman is visiting could be on clay. Perhaps. It’s Surrey. It’s not built on the cricketer’s friend, the chalky havens of the North Downs. Which is bad. Every fule kno that clay does not absorb water.
No. From memory this one was low lying. It had a pond next to it. And a ditch. Ponds and ditches are, even in these days of global warming (where’s that when you need it? What’s the point of a searingly hot April if you get a sodden May?) places where water collects. And unless some oaf has created a pond from so much cement and used a hose, it’s an indication that 1) precipitation is an issue and 2) It doesn’t tend to disperse.
Wickman reckons the outfield, in a steamy July, was pretty much a mixture of grass and seaweed. Which makes him think, in his Friday evening paranoia, that this particular cricket club is probably within the tidal reach of some major South Eastern river and is, even now, under six foot of water with some local types trying to surf an unseasonal bore which flows from Pavillion to sleepy B road.
Then Wickman is thinking that it’s been SUCH a dry April that, all things considered, the place is like blotting paper. The rain of the last few weeks will have been gobbled up by grass roots thirstier than a man who’s tried a four day dessert crossing with nothing more in his rucksack than a packet of Smiths Crisps (the ones with the blue packet of salt) and mistakenly shaken the salt over the crisps when he got hungry and is now contemplating drinking his own urine. Neat.
And that’s why it’s a timewarp. Because Wickman can remember being 10 and desperate to play for the u11s the following day. Or 15, having been picked for the school 1s and knowing that he can wear his whites and blazer to lessons in the morning and get off double maths because the game starts at 11.30. Or thirty-two (ahem) and hoping that a game is on against Ewhurst and knowing that probably, given the fact that the sky looks like the same colour as John Major’s oldest underpants, its about to rain like it never has before and that religious types will be buying large quantities of wood and raiding pet shops for pairs of rare animals.
May. Wickman has nothing good to say about May.
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