John Grinstead > Recent Status Updates

Walking, he notes Alpaca - would they make a reappearance or are they just for effect? - and a significant badger sett whose location he noted. Why? Does it have a significance that we will return to or is it a dead end?

Simply too full of alliteration and symbolism…”a lifelong career down in the dusky darkness had lurked like a spectre stalking the subconscious, casting a pall over everything.” to the detriment of moving the story forward. It seems to take an age to progress.

Beautiful imagery - ‘Maputo here, Harare there, Lusaka over there, Mombasa ahead, and each is a small heap of gold coins on a tapestries cloth, joined by nothing - no night-lit roads or urban sprawl.’

Alaska - ‘A cloud-free confection of crackable white.’
‘The continents pass by like fields and villages from the window of a train.’

Some lovely alliteration as the space station sweeps across the globe on its penultimate orbit - “A cloud-free confection of crackable white” (Alaska)

P.111, Orbit 13 and we have our universe set against a 12 month calendar, featuring human existence coming into being mid-afternoon on NYE!

Chie’s reflections of her Mother from the photograph of her on the day of the moon landing evokes the thoughts of chance - of passing through a crack - that brought her to this place.

On contemplating replacing astronauts with robots - easier to manage, less training, no complications but “what would it be to cast out into space creations that had no eyes to see and no heart to fear or exult in it?”.

6 astronauts waking up to another day, where they circumnavigate the earth 16 times in 24 hours. They fleetingly observe changes in the weather system - tracking a large typhoon - whilst on Earth, Chie’s Mother dies.

“Turning head on heel in the slow drift of their hurtle, head on hip on hand on heel, turning and turning with the days.” the alliteration evoking the rhythm of the slow movement within the spacecraft whilst it hurtles though orbit.

He lives in stubborn denial of age, pushing himself further, time and again, accruing record numbers of wickets along the way. He is an extraordinary athlete with seemingly endless resilience to the inevitable questions about when he’s going to retire.

Suffering and joy, with little in between, appears to be the way Jimmy experiences cricket and, to a lesser extent, life.

Having suffered a stress fracture in his back, turned his ankle the day before a Test, he nonetheless comes back strongly, eschewing the attempts to get him bowling faster in favour of doing what comes naturally to him.

There’s quite a lot of references to sulking and kicking a jumper down to fine leg - perhaps too many - but they provide a contrast to the elation he clearly feels when the ball comes out of his hand just right or when contemplating his life with Daniella.

Some of the reminiscences are a bit over the top - “I remember the commentary during his [Daley Thompson’s] pole-bolting heroics at the LA Olympics in 1984” Aged two? And the there’s an awful lot about how well trained in losing he was - “…it had been baked into me…that England lost to Australia” - and initially at least some imposter syndrome.

This ghosted autobiography starts well - at the end of a superb sporting career - before we hit the well trodden route of turning back to where it all began. By Chapter 13, we are 5 years on from Jimmy playing truant from school to him walking out at the MCG, where he makes his ODI debut for England. Cricketing stardom was never pre-ordained - as a slight teenager, he freely admits his mates were better than him.

Every Western politician should read this book and pay particular note of the chapter entitled @afghangov.org; Rory Stewart unpicks not only the hypocrisy of the approach to Afghanistan (and its neighbours) but drives a coach and horses through the notion that the likes of Tony Blair, clutching his Koran by his side, have any real understanding of the Afghan people, their needs or aspirations.