Monday 27 April 2020

'a continual courtesy between the Heavens and the Earth'

Writing from Teignmouth on this day in 1818, Keats tells John Hamilton Reynolds that
'We are here still enveloped in clouds – I lay awake last night listening to the Rain with a sense of being drown'd and rotted like a grain of wheat. There is a continual courtesy between the Heavens and the Earth. – The Heavens rain down their unwelcomeness and the Earth sends it up again to be returned to morrow.'
  This sounds like the kind of weather we're promised here for tomorrow, but today, happily, it is still dry and relatively warm. Best make the most of it...
  It was also raining hard in Cardiff on this date in 1997 – raining so hard that a one-day cricket match between Glamorgan and Warwickshire had to be abandoned, with Glamorgan still needing 65 runs to win. For the first time ever, a mathematical formula was applied to determine what the result would have been if the game had continued – yes, this was the birthday of the incomprehensible Duckworth-Lewis Method, named for the pair of statisticians who devised it.
  In 2009, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy and Thomas Walsh of Pugwash got together under the name of the Duckworth Lewis Method and brought out an album described by Hannon as 'a kaleidoscopic musical adventure through the beautiful and rather silly world of cricket'. 'Beautiful and rather silly' also describes the album quite neatly. Towards the more beautiful end of its range is this evocative, wistfully melancholy song, Mason on the Boundary. I am conscious it will mean next to nothing to many of my readers – of whom, according to my stats, I have more in Norway, the U.S. and Turkmenistan (Turkmenistan?!) than in the U.K. – but give it a go...


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