Match called off due
to rain
On the 2nd of August 1923 a man named Warren Harding
was unfortunate enough to keel over and die in a hotel room in California. This was rather a shame of course; he was
only 57 years old and away on holiday with his wife, but what marks his death
out as significant is that at the time Warren Harding was the sitting President
of the United States.
What tends to follow in these circumstances is that power
passes to the Vice President, give or take a few constitutional recitals, but the
Vice President at the time, Calvin Coolidge, was also on holiday (well, it was
August). Coolidge was staying at his
father’s house in Vermont, about as far from California as it is possible to
get and still be on American soil.
It was after midnight in Vermont when a telephone call was
received at a general store near the Coolidge home. The store was the only place in town with a
telephone, but remarkably there was someone at the store awake enough to
receive the phone call and deliver the message to Coolidge that he had been promoted. Having been thus rudely awakened President
Coolidge was sworn in the same night by the light of a kerosene lamp (there was no electricity
in the house).
Why, you might ask, am I telling a story about an incident
that only Kenny is old enough to remember?
Well, my point is that even in the early 20th century, and in
a country as vast as the United States, when you really need to get a message
to someone, there are ways of getting it done.
Let’s fast forward to south-east England, 2014. We have smartphones, we have laptops; we have
email, texts and phone calls. We also have
Facebook and Twitter. We have cars, lots
of cars. If anything there are TOO MANY
ways to send a simple message between one person and another, which makes it
all the more mystifying that such a fundamental breakdown in communication could
occur between the fixture secretaries of Greys Green CC and RUASCC this
weekend.
A solitary email was sent from one party to the other
saying, and I may be paraphrasing here, “it’s
been shitting it down with rain for the last 48 hours so we’re calling the game
off.” The email was not read or
acknowledged; the message was effectively lost.
Eleven RUASCC players turned up at Greys Green to be met with… nothing
but each other. I arrived a bit late for
the scheduled start time, fully expecting to have to sprint onto the pitch to
bowl the first over. 10 minutes later I
was back in the car heading home - it was the fourth game of the season to be lost to the weather.
Recently a young man named Gary Turk published a video
encouraging everyone to “Look Up” from their phones and laptops and to engage with
the real world around them, his argument being that too many people spend too
much time on social media and not enough time being social. The irony is that his video has racked up
nearly 40 million YouTube views and he’s gained several thousand followers on Twitter,
but I like to think that Mr Turk's message would have encouraged someone to pick up the
phone and talk to someone about Saturday’s match being cancelled rather than leaving a note in cyberspace with no confirmation of receipt.
As it happens I don’t entirely agree with Mr Turk’s thesis. Yes of course we shouldn’t ignore other
people for the sake of the electronic devices, but that’s technological
progress and, as ever, people need to think for themselves to find the right balance. Presumably Mr Turk will also
be producing videos telling us to “Back Away” from microwave ovens or “Whatever
you do don’t fly that aeroplane”. And
let’s not forget that, on the whole, real people are pretty awful. I mean, some of them actually vote for UKIP.
There is of course a video response to the “Look Up” video,
called “Look Down” which I thoroughly recommend.
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