19 May 2016

Pub Cricket

Peace on the road

By Chin Chin

A game of pub cricket, yes, that used to be the key to keeping the family happy when setting out by car on a long drive to Wales or Scotland. It was a good game because there was no element of skill in it. The touring equivalent of ‘beggar my neighbour’, points were scored by reference to every pub sign that was passed. That meant that, cheating aside, a five-year-old had just as good a chance as an older cousin, even one with a formidable reputation in the quiz world.  “Cheating aside”, I say, because a skilled navigator who knew the road well could adjust the route to ensure that the car passed the Fox and Hounds (the maximum of sixteen legs at one point each) while he was batting, but the Forest (given out, as no legs at all) when it was the turn of whichever of the children had been particularly irritating.  Still, cheating of this sort was harder to spot than a back-hander at Fifa, so journeys would pass in relative peace.

Not any more, I am afraid.  An important ingredient of the game of pub cricket is pubs and, now that we all travel on the motorways, one passes very few of them. Motorway service stations have boringly uniform names and I defy anyone to invent a scoring system based on them which is simple enough to satisfy the junior members the family. That means that we need a new game if we are going to avoid the children playing on their iPads with the parents continually trying to get them to take an interest in their surroundings and then wishing that they had left them at home.

The obvious answer is some sort of quiz, a quiz tempered by throwing in some easy questions for the children. That should keep things reasonably quiet, but it will have collateral advantages as well. Any increase in knowledge among the younger generation is to be welcomed, and some of the answers may stick in the mind and supplement the efforts of their useless schools. That’s what I thought, anyway, and I just wish that I had read some of those SATS test questions before I put my plan into operation. It went wrong from the very beginning.

“Suppose Farmer Giles has 18 sheep and Farmer Michael has five,” I began, addressing the seven year-old. “How many less has Farmer Michael?”

“Four,” came the reply from her elder sister.

“I wasn’t asking you,” I said.  “Anyway 18 minus 5 is 13 not 4.  You really should know that at your age.”  I let irritation at youthful ignorance creep into my voice.

“No, I said ‘fewer’ not ‘four’,” she replied.

“Well, obviously it’s fewer, but the proper answer is four.”

“No, Daddy, I meant you said ‘less’ when you should have said ‘fewer’. That’s bad grammar. They told us so at school.”

“In ordinary speech it’s optional,” I said, airily.

“That’s not what the dictionary on my iPhone says,” put in the seven-year-old.

“I thought we agreed that there will be no cheating by looking at the iPhone,” I countered in a desperate attempt to change the conversation.

“It wasn’t the answer we were checking,” said the older child.  “Oh well, one point to me and my turn to ask the question now. What is the difference between a subordinated conjunction and a coordinating conjunction?”

“Er, one is ‘subordinating’, and that means putting under and the other is, er ‘coordinating’ that’s about working together,” I replied.  “It’s a question of degree.  It’s obvious when you see one.”

“What about ‘he will give me a present if I kiss him’.  That was in the SATS test.”

“Really, I don’t think you should be saying that sort of thing,” I put in quickly.  My wife, who was driving, raised one eyebrow. She had been on at me that morning for using bad language in front of the children.

“We didn’t have those subordinating and coordinating things when I was at school,” I said.

“There must have been a lot of blanks when you talked,” said the seven-year-old, “all jerky, rather like the Romans must have sounded never saying ‘the’.  ‘I am going on holiday with my father mother’. Hard to understand!”

“No, we used them, of course.  We just didn’t focus on labels.  The important thing was to express our thoughts.”

“How did you know how to do that?” asked her elder sister.

“Oh, instinctive, I suppose.  You know genetics, er Darwin. The ones who couldn’t do it died out. That sort of thing.”

“Daddy….”

I remembered suddenly that the older girl had just been on a tour of the National History Museum and that they had had a lecture on Darwin. She frowned and I saw her gathering herself for the killer blow.  Fortunately we seemed to be coming to an exit. “Just a moment, we must take the turn off here. Now I just need to concentrate.  Oh look, the road will be going cross-country for a bit.  That means we will be able to play pub cricket.  My favourite game. You all know the rules?”

The extra leg cross-country cost us half-an hour in journey time and we didn’t pass a single pub.  Still, it confirmed my long-standing view that pub cricket is the finest game in the world.

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