QUOTES OF THE WEEK...
CHRISTMAS is coming, so it must be time to roll out the autobiographies.
This week, Mitchell Johnson, in his recently released Resilient, on boys being boys at the Aussie Academy in 2000 and how his bromance with Shane Watson began.
“Every night we’d pile into the common room and watch Neighbours before dinner. Every time there was an ad break there would be an all-in wrestle on the floor until the show started again.
“In one wrestle I was dragged through the door and into the bathroom by a heap of guys and somebody pushed my head into the toilet... and the red mist descended.
“Somehow I managed to break free and I grabbed whoever it was by the front of the shirt as I got up and someone grabbed mine.
“I raised my right fist and he did the same. Then we looked at each other. It was Watto. I think we both looked at each other and thought, ‘nah, I’m not going to hit him, he’s my mate’, and put our fists down at the same time. I can’t say I wasn’t angry. It took me a few days to get over it.”
With mates like that who needs Neighbours?
Arthur Marshall, writer and broadcaster, recalled on BBC Radio 4’s
on the unfortunate fate of boys at his school not being allowed to bat in glasses.
Unquote, Quote …
“Here was the unfairness; the boys in the 1st and 2nd XIs, fully sighted and well able to protect themselves, were provided with a contraption called a box, a snug reinforced padded leather compartment worn about the crotch and into which they tucked, I assume whatever came most easily to hand. It would have been considered a gross impertinence for any lesser player to plead for this protection. In the lower echelons our genitals were expendable.”
T’was ever thus.