Senator Andrew Bartlett
Saturday, January 22, 2005
 
night creatures, sunshine and cricket
Do you play cricket? or ever wondered what happens when the night creatures come out to play in the sunshine?

Tomorrow (Sunday) I engage in one of my far too infrequent attempts to do ‘other’ things that aren’t politics. I’ll be playing in a trial game for a not-overly-serious- but-still-formally-organised cricket competition. This cricket competition has the extremely good sense to occur outside of the summer months, but someone has had the not so brilliant idea of having a practice game in January.

I used to be very enthusiastic about playing cricket when I was a lad, until I was about 15 when suddenly I got totally unenthusiastic with the whole thing for no particular reason (as opposed to getting instantly unenthusiastic about playing rugby due to the very clear-cut reason of dislocating my collar bone).

It never occurred to me until many years later that playing a game that involves standing out in the sun for an entire day was perhaps not best done during the height of summer. However, by that stage I was a (small ‘g’) goth which meant going out in the sunlight at any stage was kept to an absolute minimum, so it wasn’t really an issue for me. As my doctor noted the other day while checking my skin for melanomas, whatever else people may say about goths, they definitely have the right idea when it comes to avoiding skin cancer.

I got back into playing cricket as a completely unexpected consequence of going to the 25th birthday celebrations of the seminal community radio station, 4ZZZ. The people attending this event generally consisted of current and lapsed ratbags and alternative musicians. It was the sort of function where you could expect to find yourself the winner of a raffle where the prize was a bag of marijuana (which rather unhelpfully did happen to me, followed by someone even more unhelpfully telling the media about the Senator winning the bag of dope – oh how I laughed). This was particularly ironic as I may well have been the only person in the entire room who had never tried marijuana.

It was fascinating meeting up again with a whole lot of people, many for the first time in 10 or 15 years. Interestingly, most of the blokes amongst that group looked fat or bald or haggard (or all three) and most of the women looked stylish and beautiful – I’m not sure what that means. If someone had told me that going to this event would lead to me re-entering the world of cricket playing, and for a team led by someone who when I last met them was a good solid respectable atheist and who had now become a genuinely believing Rastafari, I would have suggested they had been smoking some of my raffle prize. However, it’s all true.

The Brisbane Band Cricket Competition has been happening since 1993 and I lined up for DJNoMC's team. Amazingly, after a few years of mid table performances, last year we found ourselves 2nd on the ladder at the end of the round robin section and primed for a real tilt at the title. I even played a few songs in a band so I could feel like less of a ring-in! However, in a shock result that was typical of my entire year, we got knocked out in the first round of the finals to the team that came 7th. For those interested, a full outline of the year’s results can be found through checking out the extensively detailed website of competition stalwarts and 5 time winners, the Goats.

So, this is a long-winded way of saying that because I attended a radio station reunion in 2000, I am playing cricket tomorrow. December this year will see the 30th anniversary of 4ZZZ. Whilst I won’t be buying any raffle tickets, I’m curious to see what unexpected consequence might occur this time.

(NOTE: I emphasise that I don’t condone consumption of illegal drugs. And whilst I think that our drug laws are stupid and counter-productive, I also think the potential negative health consequences of marijuana are understated.)


posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Saturday, January 22, 2005 Permalink
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