Yesterday I was reading The Times newspaper and was struck by two stories which appeared on the same page. The first was about a number of words that have been outlawed and taken out of the official Scrabble dictionary because of their racial overtones.
The reason given was that these words are inappropriate for children playing the game. This was labelled nonsense by aficionados of the board game who pointed out that children could still play other potentially offensive words.
No list of the offensive words omitted is given (presumably because listing them would in itself by offensive).
I thought the best comment came from a scrabble official who pointed out that the banned list are just words, they only become offensive if they are directed at individuals.
On the same page was a piece about the terminology of cricket changing. This will have Sir Geoffrey Boycott turning in his grave (or it would do if he was dead).
I have already noticed in coverage of our major summer sport that the word batsman has been changed to batter. Now the powers that be are introducing a farcical new competition. Firstly we had test matches over five days, then one day cricket was introduced (who remembers the Gillette Cup which was 60 overs per team?) Then we had one day cricket of 50 overs and then this was dumbed down to Twenty-20 cricket which in its own way was exciting enough but mainly consisted of batsmen (sorry batters) trying to smash as many balls into the crowd as possible.
For the uninitiated, Twenty-20 referred to the number of overs per team in a match. An over is six balls. So this was a contest of 120 balls per team. But not content with this, we now have what is being termed The Hundred. This is basically 100 balls per team but no overs as such. I won't go into the intricacies of it all.
One official got into trouble by suggesting that the new competition with the balls being counted down on a large screen was aimed at women and children (presumably because it was thought that they had the attention span of a gnat or that being female or young they couldn't comprehend the rules of the normal game). This is nonsense. If a young person loves cricket they very quickly can understand what it's all about. My eight year old grandson fully understands the different types of cricket because he plays the game himself and has a father and grandfather who also love the sport.
Not only are we being insulted by the suggestion that we can't keep still for more than a few minutes but we are now being subjected to Americanisms which will be brought into the new 100 balls game. We have already seen that batsmen have become batters. Now there will be no reference to wickets as this will be changed to outs and there will be no such thing as overs, just balls. In fact there are so many new constraints that the whole thing has become totally confusing - and that's exactly what the new format is designed to prevent.
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Having lunched at the King's Head on Monday, we popped along to the Queen's on Tuesday and had a lovely lunch in one of their garden marquees. It was quite a warm day but there were heaters and lots of people there. I took the opportunity to take a photo of the staff and a few others and was given permission to reproduce a couple of evening shots with the lights on.
Hope you enjoy the photos here. Tomorrow I will have a gallery of photos from our latest visit to North Norfolk.