Monday, 27th November 2006

Found this nice cricket quote today: "It's a funny kind of month, October. For the really keen cricket fan, it's when you realise that your wife left you in May." [Denis Norden, British television writer and compere].

The next test match doesn't start until Friday which leaves me free to write on other subjects.

Or cricket....

The thing is, when watching cricket, one has to be totally attentive and to know that the result of such attentiveness may be that nothing much will happen, maybe for hours, yet something stupendous may happen and perhaps the fact that one is committed to such possibility - and prepared for it - is in a sense willing it to happen. Years ago I read something Andre Breton wrote about the way Henri Cartier-Bresson worked, the way he captured the instant, the never to be repeated instant, in his photographs and when I read it, it reminded me of cricket (and of life, needless to say). He said of Cartier-Bresson:

"Actually, it's quite true that he is not waiting for anyone since he's not made any appointment, but the very fact that he's adopting this ultra-receptive posture means that by this he wants to help chance along, how should I say, to put himself in a state of grace with chance, so that something might happen, so that someone might drop in."

Stunning phrases, those: "ultra-receptive posture", "in a state of grace with chance". One reads them and knows intuitively that is the way to live, to be willing and ready, to have one's hand open in a relaxed, almost nochalant way, so that when the perfect catch occurs, at that moment one knows there really was no other possibility. Anything could have happened - and yet there was nothing else that could have happened - at that instant there was nothing more certain than chance itself.

A few years ago our esteemed PM, Little Johnny (known affectionately as "the lying rodent"), advised us when he distributed his anti-terrorist kits, complete with those invaluable fridge magnets, to be "alert but not alarmed" and there is something in what he said if we take "alert" to mean to be awake to the possibility of something glorious occurring rather than one's neighbour building a scud missile in his garage. Life occurs in the instant and you have to be there - don't look away or you'll miss out.

(If adopting an ultra-receptive posture is making your back ache, you are not doing it properly.)