‘Parting is such sweet sorrow’
I WILL BE relieved when the latest England cricket tour is over. Checking the score on the BBC website every so often means running the gauntlet of facetious twelve-year-olds with names like Jimbo and Gnasher sitting at their office computers and complaining endlessly about an individual player’s perceived shortcomings at the end of each over. These are the same people with nothing better to do, apart from collecting their fat unearned salaries each month, than suggest teams of cricketers with names that sound like furniture or cheese. Unfortunately this is having a corrosive effect on the Test Match Special team who, besides reading out idiotic text messages, now devote valuable commentary time to, say, the suitability of Geoffrey Boycott to be the next James Bond. This is another lamentable example of the short-term attention span brought about by the twenty-overs game. Will some future cricket-lover scouring a second-hand bookshop for works by Neville Cardus or John Arlott let out a cry of triumph on discovering The Collected Tweets of Jonathan Agnew? I rather doubt it. the other night I jotted down a witty rejoinder – ‘I won’t Disney-fy that with an answer’ – which in the cold light of day still seems to have potential, and I look forward to trying it out. But not I’m afraid in The Oldie. I have been informed that this will be my last appearance, due to the forthcoming redesign of the magazine. This is a reason for dispensing with my services that I have heard before, most recently when I learned that future submissions of mine to the BBC would no longer be needed after the move next door to New Broadcasting House. I realise of course that I am far from being the only Designated Moaner in these pages and can quite understand that I am surplus to requirements. So after writing this column for three years or more I leave with mixed feelings: sadness to be sure, but also an odd sense of elation, as with a football team whose first game after its relegation has been confirmed results in five goals being put past supposedly superior opposition. It means, for example, that I need no longer live in fear of having accidentally committed those fashionable solecisms ‘penned’, ‘curated’, ‘freighted’ or (a particular irritation) ‘heft’. But thank you all for being my companions on this latest stage of Ed Reardon’s journey – ‘journey’, there’s another one. I might even treat myself to an ‘It’s been an emotional roller-coaster’…