Séamas O'Reilly: Sticky wickets, mental somersaults, and letting people enjoy things

Séamas O'Reilly doesn't like cricket. He doesn't love it either.

As a child, I achieved zen via cricket on TV.  This was not because I enjoyed it. On the contrary, I derived almost no enjoyment from it whatsoever. 

This was largely because I was unfamiliar with the sport — it did not have an august tradition in 90s Derry — and found its rules as inscrutable as an Italian soap opera. 

Compounding this was the fact that matches go on for days, and usually took the place of summertime programming I would otherwise have enjoyed during the long stretches of holidays when I mapped brave new frontiers in restless boredom.

It would have been easy — so easy, in fact, that I did not avoid it entirely — to blame cricket for this feeling; to hate the sport itself for the displeasure it engendered within me. It was, after all, an easy target. 

In his 1975 action-satire  Rollerball, director Norman Jewison parodied America’s broadest cultural stereotypes via the death-defying fictional sport of its title. 

It’s tempting to think a British equivalent of this same exercise would be largely impossible since cricket already exists. 

In place of the hyperviolent, capitalist machismo of Rollerball, consider the stuffy, imperious, and twee spectacle of men in jumpers harrumphing, often at their colonial subjects. 

This, while knocking over small bits of artisanal wood, perhaps for the purpose of stealing them for their museums back home.

All of this I knew to be unfair, even at the time. My zen moment was in discovering that the problem wasn’t with cricket, but myself. 

I simply didn’t enjoy it and, like most of us faced with something we don’t enjoy, sought to launder this subjective opinion through a gratifying and aggrandising filter of objective scorn. 

So it was that long before I learned of the actually rather grand tradition of Irish cricket – still less the deep passion for the sport shared by Derry men like Martin McGuinness and Eamonn McCann — I realised a better way to approach such issues was to let other people enjoy the things they like and try, wherever possible, to see what it was that gave them so much pleasure.

THE CRICKET METHOD

My ‘cricket method’ is a noble standard, and one for which I congratulate myself every now and then. 

Like a benevolent God allowing His people their callow pursuits, I stride through social media, feeling every bit the moral colossus, refusing to be drawn on music I don’t care for, food that’s not to my taste, or films I actively despise. 

Think of cricket, I chuckle, scrolling on by. Let people enjoy things, I say, my back aching from self-administered pats.

And then, alas, I go on one sun holiday, and discover the wafer-thin width of my resolve.

I have mentioned my hatred of the sun before, but a lifetime spent avoiding sun holidays has allowed me the mild fig leaf of irony when I say that I hate a hot day in Ireland or England. 

Relatively speaking, they are few and far between, and rarely reach the fever pitch of scorching horror one might encounter by an exotic poolside. 

Also, local blips in weather don’t involve much action on my part. I can stay indoors and, generally, complain about them quite freely, on the understanding that no one particularly likes hot city weather when working, commuting, or looking after small children.

But catapulting myself toward the sun with said children, at great personal expense, and to do so deliberately, knowing that this is what I’ve paid for, affords me no such rhetorical escape. 

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

I am still not quite sure what I was thinking, but a week in Spain has finally confirmed that I can be no moral colossus when it comes to overheating. 

It’s not just the constant sweating, the physical discomfort, the squinting and the burning, the constant re-application of syrupy, sticky fluids to avoid same burning and then other, sticker fluids to ameliorate the unavoidable eventuality of still same burning. 

No, it’s also the hectoring, wheedling need to always be acting like I am enjoying it. Worse, the knowledge that everyone else around me actually does so. Of course, they do. 

They’re good, decent people who hadn’t been stupid enough to pay a large sum of money to travel 2,000 miles to suffer in red-faced silence with the dawning, horrible realisation that my ‘cricket method’ mantra is a shallow fiction, and I do not merely hate the sun, I might also hate everyone who does not.

Unfortunately, that includes almost everyone I know, not least those I love most in the world, all of whom took to the searing, arid heat like ducks to water. 

Which brings me to my second point of contention. 

When I did make quibbles about being boiled alive for a large amount of money — comments minor in scope, and measured in tenor — their chief rebuke was that I should jump in the pool. 

‘Have a splash, you’ll cool down’, they said, perhaps alarmed at the fact my face and chest were the colour of agricultural diesel. Unfortunately — and I fear I may lose more of you here — I do not enjoy pools, or swimming either.

MENTAL SOMERSAULTS

It’s not that I hate either activity, I just don’t get it. I jump in, think “yes, I am definitely wet now” and everyone else around me reacts like they’ve won the Euromillions. 

“Cold too,” I think, attempting the mental somersaults necessary to translate this into pleasure. 

Granted, it does perform a cooling function, but that could just as easily be achieved by not being in a hot place in the first instance, which would be significantly cheaper, and come with the added benefit of not washing away the thin film of medicated grease keeping my skin from melting like a cornetto wrapper in a bonfire. 

But no, instead, I jump in, like an alien desperately trying to understand these strange humans and their ways, and I wonder how I ever thought I could cohabit with them in peace.

I was zen once, I say to myself. I won’t make that mistake again.