Harrrington's - being the collected thoughts of the Hon Sec, by way of excuse and explanation.

Michaelston is a capital fellow and one of those coves whose company is most agreeable, whether it is time spent in companionable silence or developing a thesis on the rightness of the ‘Called Timed Out’ law and how Umpires seem to be getting younger.  We’d first met pretending to be other people.  It was the mid 70s and I’d managed to slip out for the day and had got to The Oval when I had found myself next to the most frightful bore.  In an attempt to shut down conversation I pretended to be the San Marino Naval Attaché and with much arm waving and calling out to Saint Agatha every time another bouncer was unleashed I fended off idle chit chat rather better than the English batsmen did the assault Messrs Holding, Roberts et al.  On the other side of the said bore was the fellow who I now know to be Michaelston but at the time was pretending to the Head of State for the newly independent Republic of Mahali Popote and did not understand what was being said to him....

 There are many things I can not be doing with.  I example for you the sort of cove who appears on the wireless to instruct you on gardening and implies you are lacking in morale fibre if you don’t spend all the daylight hours out amongst your begonias.  Another thing I can’t be doing with is the chap who is sure that everyone agrees with his singular prejudice against whatever it is and does not notice the well honed silence his remarks are being met with. But above them all, is that kind of manager who believes all his minions must be exact copies of him in mean and method – saving they be not so good as this kind of bounder hates the thought that others could be more skilled.  I, on the other hand, appreciate the skills in others I do not possess. Take Arthur Rhoose, one of those fellows in the Foreign Office who are essential for the smooth running of any embassy as they can remember what we actually promised to do under the Treaty of Windsor and what we gave t...

Robert Fairbrother liked Association Football, ‘in a certain way.’ He had become entranced when, aged five, his father took him to his first game. He enjoyed the way that, about twenty minutes from the ground, individuals or small groups of chaps began to meld into something greater, coalescing into fellow travellers on a journey of common purpose. Silent and strong men became voluble and about ten minutes from the ground the smell of mild ale and woodbine cigarettes poured out of the public bars he passed; landmarks on the road he knew as well as a good Catholics knew the Stations of the Cross. Five minutes from the ground the men selling rosettes and scarves heralded their arrival at the nexus of his childish dreams. Fairbrother’s own scarf, which he wore as a livery of his support, included a tassel which, despite all empirical evidence, he firmly believed would bring luck for his favoured XI when wrapped tightly around his index finger.   Entering the ground was to enter a ...

  Captain Archibald ‘Trig Point’ Stocking was the finest leader of native guides I ever met. His memory of terrain was equal only to his attention to detail in producing cartographic impressions of the same. Stocking had been disappointed in not being appointed to a post at the Ordinance Survey and continued something of an undeclared war against them. It was his dream to catch them out and would, to this end, always carry a collapsible theodolite, quibbling over the placement of a contour line here and a spot height there then entering into detailed and prolonged correspondence over the matter.   I remember a particularly extensive exchange over the exact nature of St. Peter and St Paul’s,Ormskirk. The OS had inscribed it as a ‘Church with a Tower’ and he claimed that, as it had both and the steeple was built first, it should gain precedence in its symbolic existence. Might have been the other way round, thing was with St. Ps and the other two churches so blessed with exc...