Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

It's over, and my nerves, shredded, reknit and reshredded again now have time to mend properly before the final test at the Oval.

England won by three wickets, but that last few runs nearly did for me, especially after Freddie Flintoff and then Geraint Jones went. I could see Warne single-handedly pulling the Aussies' fat out of the fire.

This has to be the best test series for twenty years.

But it should have a health warning.

Ah, me.

Today I was supposed to be tidying up in The Tower. I guess there will still be time later on, but for now the cricket has taken over. Instead of doing anything constructive, I have been slumped in front of the TV watching England make a meal out of finishing off the Aussies' tail end. Still, at tea, the Aussies are all out, and England have the paltry target of 129 to win. Being England, I fully expect them to make a meal out of that, too.

In the meantime, I am going to nip across the road to Waitrose and buy a few provisions, before the final session gets under way properly. I have spent too much of today courting DVT, the change will do me good, even if it's for no more than 20 minutes.

Later, peeps.

Last night I got home very, very tired and was in bed at 12.30, which for me is almost unheard of. I’d been to the pub after work and had a few pints with pax_draconis. jfs showed up very briefly before going back to Ilford to provide moral support to westernind in her continuing struggle with evil property developer^tm at a planning meeting of the Borough Council. Hopefully that went well; maybe we’ll get the skinny on that when jfs comes along to the athenaeum club tonight for the games session.

We briefly discussed the latest arrangements for NWO, and agreed a couple of contingencies should certain potential players fail to respond to invites. We also looked at ways of accommodating other character needs in line with player availability; we’re a little less convinced of the reasons we’re doing that, but let it not be said that we do not at least try to accommodate everyone!

I fear that I am losing my tolerance for beer. I am rather hoping that it has more to do with the hot weather than anything else. Unlike when I was in my twenties, when I would go out four or five times a week, these days I can go weeks without visiting a pub, certainly in the summer. In the winter, of course, we have the quiz league, so Tuesday nights are beer night, but it is rare that I drink more than four pints, and almost never more than five, even at my thirstiest (I have never been able to process huge quantities of liquid, and I no longer touch spirits).

Whatever the cause, for the second week in succession, I found myself in a pub after work, and returning home feeling – and my powers of description fail me here - bleh.

The upshot of going to bed comparatively early, was that I woke up at five this morning, but managed to force myself back to sleep for a couple of hours. What’s the point of turning in early if you get no extra rest?

In the meantime, I have discovered another disadvantage of working in a steel and glass building. I have a portable radio here at the moment, complete with earphone (one of those old fashioned earplug stylee earphones that you shove in one ear and get glorious mono. Sadly, I can barely get a signal on medium wave, and Radio 5 Live does not transmit on FM. This means that my enjoyment of the third Ashes Test is limited to keeping track of the score on a pop-up on my PC, which fails to update automatically as it is supposed to, on account of the arthritic behaviour of the server today. I strongly suspect that someone somewhere is downloading the entirety of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or maybe using the network printers to create multiple copies of the unabridged Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I am tempted to look into the prospects of acquiring a cheap digital radio at lunchtime, but I suspect that the words cheap, digital and radio do not sit easily in the same sentence when arranged consecutively. We shall see. A colleague of mine opines that they work best by a window (as do I), so it might be a pointless endeavour anyway.

As I have to go to the bank and pay over my monthly tribute to the Great God Barclaycard (one of the more awesome and terrible of the credit deities), I may well investigate the mysteries of digital radio anyway.

It gets me out of the office.

To mark this entry precisely in time, England are 93-1 as I type. That remarkable bell-end, Strauss being the wicket to fall for a mighty six runs. Will he still be an opener in the fourth test? I hope not, unless he does something clever in the second innings.

Must awa’. More later, perhaps.

Edit Typing in word and then cutting and pasting into LJ really scews the LJ Tags over.

¹Proverbs 1:7; the cricketing edition.

My nerves are shattered.

England won the second test by just TWO runs. Both England and Australia opted for the Hollywood countdown finish. I need to lie down for a bit...

Hmm. I'm at something of a loss for something to do right now. I can play on the computer, but as I have three torrents downloading, I am loath to do anything that may slow them down, which really rather limits the amount of surfing I can do. I think this is a hangover from my dial up days; there's really no reason not to carry on as normal when you have 2mb broadband, but somehow it doesn't feel right. I'm sure that I'll wean myself off this bizarre self imposed inhibition at some point.

I might try and do a little writing afterwards, though I have to admit that I am not really in the mood. I feel like doing something time-wastingly pointless, but which doesn't require a great deal of effort. Which is pretty much what I've been doing all day, really, and using the cricket as a vehicle for my laziness.

The third day's play in the 2nd Test at Edgbaston has been one of those that only the Ashes series can kick out. England looked to be going for one of their characteristically useless second innings, and undoing all the fine work they had put in during their and the Aussies' first innings, and then came in Freddie Flintoff who almost single-handedly turned things around with 73 runs (including a 50 partnership for the final wicket), and this with an injured left shoulder. Then, during the Aussies' second innings, just as it looked as though the English bowlers were going to let them off lightly, Vaughan calls Freddie back into the attack, and he takes two wickets in one over, and suddenly the game has swung back our way.

At the end of play, Australia were 175-8. Two tail-enders left to try and get 107 runs tomorrow. If they were playing anyone other than England, I would expect it to be over by lunchtime with the Aussies dead and buried.

But.

Still, a good day's entertainment, and we should level up the series ahead of the third test next week.

But it's the Ashes...