Polite Paradise

Anyone else interested?

First International Test Match of the summer starts today, with England taking on Pakistan. I'm so excited, because several of my fave cricketers are playing, along with an exciting debutant.

And tomorrow the County Championship continues, so i shall have a minimum of three commentaries going on (which leaves me short by two matches possibly, depending if any of my 4 county teams are playing each other!) so I shall be glued to the radio all day!

For those confused about how to play cricket, see the 'official' guide below!

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in the Pavilion.
Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes out and is in until he's out. When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out.
Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in.
There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.
 When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.

Not at all, but for the purposes of maintaining citizenship, absolutely. 

That's Stoneman gone already... It's not even coffee time!

One or two of their current crop of commentators drive me round the twist - and I no longer do a long commute so I've got much less time in my car. (And my boss does rather frown at me listing to TMS at work...!)

I have been known to raise my voice at Geoffrey.

The advantage of being self employed is that my boss said that the radio while I do paperwork today is OK. 

Yeah, I'm not so keen on Vaughan, although I quite like playing Boycott Bingo!

Swanny can be good, or he can be very very irritating! Luckily I tend to find him amusing even when he's being irritating so I don't get as het up as some do about him.

James Taylor is brilliant, I think, very knowledgeable about the game and very good at talking about all aspects of it. I'm so glad he's found a space after everything went to hell for him playing.

It had a horrible feeling of being just like last year, didn't it?

See, this is what happens when they insist on starting at Lords. If they started at Old Trafford, we'd be looking at a solid day of rain today.

Go on, ask me how I know this, she says grumpily, dripping on the keyboard.

I think it's fair to say today's been an improvement on yesterday. Not a big improvement, admittedly (you know it's bad when even Stokes is dropping catches), but at least we've stuck to it. I can think of England teams in days gone by where Pakistan would be utterly out of sight by this point.

Fingers crossed for the second innings.