The Tebbit Test

Cambridge Sony Shop. Saturday. Your host, Damian “Ebony’n’Ivory” Counsell, and a Sony employee of south Asian descent who’s darker than a sideboard are wincing at the fall of cheap England wickets in their second innings. Mr Sony even goes off on one about a particularly shoddy piece of umpiring in the Aussies’ favour. Meanwhile, all the white people are looking at MP3 players.

This entry was written by PooterGeek, posted on 07Aug05 at 12:27, filed under Cambridge, Englishness, Sport. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

5 Comments

  1. hakmao
    Posted 07Aug05 at 13:18 | Permalink

    The mental image I have just formed of you as one half Stevie Wonder and the other Paul McCartney is quite distressing.

    Good finish. I’ll have my crow raw thanks.

  2. Judy
    Posted 07Aug05 at 14:07 | Permalink

    Well, your devotion was rewarded, though, wasn’t it? I wonder how Norm will bear it? Me, I’d be trying to work out whether the LCD version or the Plasma was better, and remembering that I’ll be unable to afford either for the foreseeable future. Course, the cricket would be great for comparing white and green tones. Can’t think of any other reason for wanting to watch cricket….

  3. dearieme
    Posted 07Aug05 at 16:40 | Permalink

    Ah, it’s probably all thanks to the horrid class-consciousness of the English that they won’t watch Lord Freddie of Flintoff and his chums. Tebbit overlooked that.

  4. PooterGeek
    Posted 07Aug05 at 19:38 | Permalink

    “Well, your devotion was rewarded, though, wasn’t it?”

    I didn’t hang around for hours or anything; mostly I just monitored proceedings by radio and Web. However, my shouts could be heard across the city when I was listening to the end on Radio Bloke.

  5. George Szirtes
    Posted 08Aug05 at 13:36 | Permalink

    Forgive this horrible piece of advertising, Damian. It’s in a book you once lost. Pertinent though.

    Preston North End

    Tottenham Hotspur versus Preston North End.
    Finney’s last season: my first. And my dad
    with me. How surprisingly well we blend

    with these others. Then the English had
    the advantage, but today we feel
    their fury, sadness and pity. There were some bad

    years in between, a lot of down-at-heel
    meandering. For me though, the deep blue
    of Preston was ravishment of a more genteel,

    poetic kind. They were thrashed five-one, it’s true,
    and Finney was crocked by Mackay. Preston went down,
    hardly to rise again. But something got through

    about Finney the plumber, Lancashire, the Crown,
    and those new days a-coming. The crowd dissolves,
    but we are of the crowd, heading into town

    under sodium street lights. This year Wolves
    will win the title. Then Burnley. I will see
    Charlton, Law and George Best. The world revolves

    around them and those voices on TV
    reading the results. I’m being bedded in -
    to what kind of soil remains a mystery,

    but I sense it in my marrow like a thin
    drift of salt blown off the strand. I am
    an Englishman, wanting England to win.

    I pass the Tebbitt test. I am Alan Lamb,
    Greg Rusedski, Viv Anderson, the boy
    from the corner shop, Solskjaer and Jaap Stam.

    I feel no sense of distance when the tannoy
    plays Jerusalem, Rule Britannia or the National Anthem.
    I know King Priam. I have lived in Troy.

2 Trackbacks

  1. By PooterGeek » Blog Archive » Wandering The Web on 26Sep05 at 23:02

    […] By following the ‘Blog aggregator of a friend I found an interesting live journal. I won’t name the intermediate friend because his is a just-for-mates ‘Blog. The interesting live journal, however, seems to be a public thing. It belongs to Shreena who is doing a PhD on Augustine—a man worth of a thesis. One of the longest friendships of my life started with me talking crap about Augustine over dinner at Green College and being corrected by someone who actually had a clue. Shreena describes herself as Indian, but, like me, passes the Cricket Test with flying colours. Also, like me, she is has no illusions that racism is confined to whites. Here she is writing about British ghettos. […]

  2. By 2005 Blogged: Dispatches From the Blogosphere on 10Feb06 at 17:29

    Pootergeek

    England and Australia, the Ashes Series, the sound of leather on willow, an evocation of a traditional British summer. As Pootergeek points out, things do change: The Tebbit Test Cambridge Sony Shop. Saturday. Your host Damian “Ebony’n’Ivory” C…

Post a Comment

Your email is never shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*