SIX AND OUCH
WHY I HAD TO GROVEL TO A BIKIE AFTER A BIG BACKYARD BASH
While this week’s rectangle is about that hottest of hot button topics – wait for it ... backyard cricket – it begins with Informer admitting I’ve never been on a motorcycle.
And so to cricket of the aforementioned variety and which featured in an exciting match last weekend. The Informers had people round, with lots of kiddies, nibblies, drinkies and the mandatory bat, stumps, tennis ball and adhesive tape.
Seasoned backyard cricketers will know the tape is essential, because when you wrap it around half the ball it imparts devilish swing. And this one was particularly jazzy thanks to my daughter’s medium pacers.
One by one bamboozled batters succumbed to her guile, variously snapped up at point or silly mid-on, clean bowled or sent packing by the back fence acting in time-honoured form as “automatic wickie”.
Nevertheless, runs did flow, many of them to Mrs Informer’s dismay as fielders in various states of sobriety and ill-advised ambition wrought havoc diving among her flowers, vegetables, native plants and other stuff I don’t care about.
As host, Informer deigned to bat last and when the time came I needed 34 runs to claim victory.
My son brought himself on to bowl, eager to humiliate his father who wasn’t much chop at cricket even before I started developing cataracts.
The lad was in form yet somehow I was reading him with ease. I entered double figures with a neat clip to the birdbath boundary, then moved into the 20s with a cracking drive that flashed past Mrs Informer in the covers, bounced into the house and struck the stereo with force enough to switch on Spotify. On 30, all I needed was a four to win the day and, given how well I was batting, this was going to be a doddle. However, being a sucker for a grandly stupid gesture I thought four be buggered; only a six will do.
The ball pitched in my hitting zone and my backswing swung back like a swung back backswing. Then I brought the bat forward in a gorgeous arc, certain the ball was about to leave our yard like Apollo 11, soar over the road and land somewhere near Barry’s rainwater tank at No. 14.
The ball indeed went for six ... except. Due to some last nanosecond deviation it caught the top edge of my bat and, instead of rocketing forward, momentum took it backwards to clear Tam and Valerie’s yard at No. 11 and land in the yard beyond it ... No. 9 ... the bikie’s place. Which brings me back to motorcycles.
You were wondering, weren’t you? I don’t know the bikie’s name, but he’s fully equipped with all the leather, head tattoos and meth lab. No, that was a joke. He doesn’t have head tattoos. Mind you, if you wrapped half his scone in adhesive tape I reckon he’d swing like Sinatra.
But I digress. Now, because it was my mate’s kid’s tennis ball, and because I’d hit it into the bikie’s yard, it fell to me to retrieve it.
Dear reader, take it from me, there is nothing more pathetic than a late middle-aged man with cataracts, a Culture Club T-shirt and sock tan, nervously knocking on a bikie’s door and asking ever so meekly: “Excuse me, kind sir, but may we please have our ball back?”
BEING A SUCKER FOR A GRANDLY STUPID GESTURE I THOUGHT FOUR BE BUGGERED; ONLY A SIX WILL DO.