News of Carslemane

I say!

Well, the answer to the quiz in the last post was sweat and sour Beira prawns. Nice they were too, though of course they don't really eat such dishes in China.

Wonderful news. Whilst I was in dear old Blighty recently to attend the Duneditin 2008 blogging conference, I also met up with three Aussie friends in the oldest public house in Edinburgh (Quiz question - where was I? (see snap below for hint)). What excellent company they were, too.


From left to right: Jimbo, Caro and Jacko.

Well, after long discussions about old times, talk eventually turned to the whereabouts of Carslemane, who they all knew from their days in Fitzroy, Melbourne, when Carslemane was based there, working in an amusement park as The Demon Drinker from Downunder. And Caro and Jacko had news!

According to them, some time before they left on their travels to the northern hemisphere, they'd been crossing the outback in their Swagman motorhome, and had actually bumped into Carslemane. Carslemane was walking along a track about 1,000 kilometres east of Waly Waters, and they reported he looked OK, though a little hot, worn and tired. He also sported a scar on his face caused by a disagreement with a 'roo in a bar.

Caro and Jacko were only too delighted to top up Carslemane's supplies, including a slab of XXXX but Carslemane refused further help, apparently saying that "He had to do, what he had to do" and couldn't, therefore, take up their offer of a lift, even to the nearest pub. They left him, at his request, by the roadside, and as they pulled away, they saw in their rear mirror that he was, in their own words "Going strong towards the Top End".

Well I say, isn't that wonderful news? To think that, at this very moment, Carslemane is still probably somewhere in the outback, and still going strong.

MM III

Name this dish

I say!

No-one bothered to enter the quiz in my last post - at what temperature will a thermometer read exactly the same figure for both Celsius and Fahrenheit? Well, the answer is -40 degrees.

Anyway, here's another question. Mrs M and myself had a meal in the Hong Kong Restaurant - close by the Mount Soche Hotel.


Can anyone guess what my dish (shown above) was? Quite nice taste.

Well, as you may know, I've been trying to take my mind off cricket for a couple of weeks. The series between Australia and India is underway, and hasn't it been enjoyable watching India get the upper hand over their opponents. And to think - it's only one more week to go before the start of the Twenty20 series in Antigua, where each player in the winning side will earn $1,000,000. Can't wait.

In the meantime, I've been trying to find some non-cricket books to read, and hasn't it been difficult? I read Terra Incognita, by Sara Wheeler, about life at the South Pole, where it seems that the main topic of conversation turns out to be cricket. I even considered reading Bayonets to Lhasa, by Peter Fleming, about the 1904 British invasion of Tibet, but I expect that the Tommies would have spent their spare time clearing a pitch for the great game, even halfway up the Himalaya.

What a writer Sara is. None of this "It was on the occasion of my fortieth birthday" middle-aged angst for her. Here she is writing about nicotine withdrawal "Smoking is the leitmotif of polar expeditions. Shakleton understood the hardship of tobacco famine, and when he arrived at Elephant Island to rescue his men he threw bags of it ashore before he landed. The stranded men had been smoking penguin feathers, and one of them, the proud posessor of two pipes, had tried to smoke the wood on one in the bowl of another."

Here she is again describing her return to dear old Blighty. "I arrived back in London at the beginning of April. All the plants on my roof terrace were dead, but the spring sun was shining weakly through the tame northern clouds. As I began to pick up the threads of my life, the Frank Hurley quotation I had stuck on the kitchen wall loomed increasingly large in my imagination. 'After life in the vastness of a vacant continent,' it said 'civilisation seemed disappointlingly narrow, cramped, superficial and empty.' I say, it sounds like what Hotboy must feel like each time he emerges from his hit after a marathon meditation session.

Anyway, I have given up tryingto avoid cricket. My next book to read will be Dickie Bird's White cap and balls, about his life as a cricket umpire. Dickie wqas a batsman's friend. He didn't like giving batsmen out, and went though not a little anguish every time he had to raise his finger. The reason is obvious - he wanted the great game to continue forever, and each batsman given out only hastened the inevitable lifting of the bails.

MM III

The South Pole, and other poles

I say!

Bit of a gyppy tum earlier this week, so decided to supervise a bit of kitchen hygiene. Got Doviko to spread some boric acid behind the kitchen units - seems to have done the trick already, as there are far less cockroaches.

Only a matter of days to go until the big $20million Twenty20 cricket matches in Antigua. How exciting, but if you have visited this blog recently you'll know that I have been trying to take my mind off cricket for a few days until the series begins, at the Stanford Ground.

For example, I read a book about The Bogd Khan, the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutugtu, who lived in Mongolia in the early twentieth century, in the knowledge that he was unlikely to have either batted or bowled for Mongolia, being blind, overweight and a drunkard, and also knowing that cricket was not a particularly popular sport in that part of the world around that time, due to the complete absence of willow trees from which to make bats, and the national pass-time being horseriding and wrestling.

But then I was at a bit of a loss for something else to read, which would not feature the great game. I considered reading one of Hotboy's novels, but decided that his misplaced showpieces of sesquipedalian vocabulary might be a mite heavy on the literary palette.

So, I decided to read a book about the South Pole. I mean - cricket is rarely played at the South Pole for obvious reasons, the main one being that grass won't grow there, so it's impossible to prepare a decent wicket. Though sitescreens would not be a problem, I imagine.

The book I chose was 'Terra Incognita' by Sara Wheeler, and a wonderful read it is too - I can thoroughly recommend it to you. Sara reaches a state of extreme bliss due to her minimalist surroundings, and the lady can certainly write.

I was enjoying the prospect of a good read without so much as a reference to cricket when, would you believe it, on page 14, I quote "...in our thermals and ate eggs and hash browns while a biochemistry graduate from North Dakota who had recently learned the rules of cricket discoursed upon them at length. It took the rest of the table some time to grasp the basic principles involved. I dealt confidently with all appeals to me as custodian of this British secret; it didn't matter that I too had never understood the rules. Those elysian Sunday afternoons on the edge of sunlit village pitches never seemed to have anything to do with cricket."

Well, I say! Even at the South Pole, they may not play the great game much, but they still talk about it - even amongst chaps from North Dakota. And there's more! On page 175, "...he records that when the ship arrived news from the outside world was conveyed to them in the following order. One: Australia had lost the Test. Two: the Titanic had sunk. Three: the Balkan War had been waged. Four: Scott was spending another year on the ice." Well I say! Good to know that in the old days they had their priorities in the right order.

Here is a quiz question for you - at what temperature will a thermometer read exactly the same figure for both Celsius and Fahrenheit?

Above: MM III at the South Pole

Above: Mrs M at the North Pole

Above: Mrs M heading towards the West Pole

Above: Mrs M on top of the East Pole.

MM III

The Bogd Khan

I say!

Some Kalimbuka news first of all. I have had to place Kha'bahje on 'gardening leave' - ironic in itself, as he is our gardener in the first place - however, I didn't want to actually dismiss him after so many years of loyal service, so instead have placed him on semi-long-term leave, and sent him back to his village, near Mangochi. I don't want to go into too much detail about the reasons, but suffice to say that it involved a young girl (well, it's hard to tell how young, actually, and I certainly didn't want to look too closely), and a latin term. Anyway, we can't have that sort of thing around here.

Fortunately, I have already found a replacement, and he's a very sturdy chap indeed. Name's Wilson - apparently named after Harold Wilson (Baron Wilson of Rievaulx), once PM of dear old Blighty. Well, I didn't hold that against him. It also turns out that his second name is O'Brien, which I thought rather peculiar in the circumstances, as I don't believe O'Brien is a Lao or Lomwe surname. I did check with him that it wasn't a case of having misheard him, as with Kha'bahje / Cabbage, and that his name in fact was N'bryen, or similar, but he assured me that it was O'Brien, and he even got Doviko to write it out for me. Apparently, there was some sort of liason in his family history with one (or more) of the Fathers at a mission up north in central Malawi. He wouldn't reveal more, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, back to the subject of this post, the Bogd Khan.

It being the end of the cricket season in dear old Blighty, and there not being too much other cricket activity elsewhere in the world at this time of the year, as we wait for the big $20million Stanford match in Antigua, I thought I'd take the opportunity to get up to date with the backlog of cricket books.

However, I decided that - no! I would not read a book about cricket. Neither would I read a book about Africa. I decided that - for the first time in twenty years - I would read a book about something else.

I was getting into a slight rut, you see, and therefore decided to read something completely different - a book about Mongolia.

Mongolia is one of the very few places on earth where there is, historically, little or no cricket activity. There are some sound reasons for this. Firstly, most of Mongolia is very, very flat, and, undoubtedly, choosing a pitch in such circumstances would be difficult. I mean, one could well imagine the discussions - "Let's put the pitch there." "Why there? Why not over here - it's just as flat." And so on, ad infinitum.

Secondly, as you can see from this report, there are traditionally no willow trees in the Gobi, and therefore nothing from which to make cricket bats.

Thirdly, sitescreens are few and far between in Mongolia. Fourthly, there are few Yorkshire pit miners in Mongolia. I could go on at length about this topic, but I expect that by now you get the gist.

So, I thought, correctly as it turns out, that by reading a book about Mongolia there would be little-to-no chance of even happening upon a reference to cricket, cricketers, pitches, Geoffrey Boycott, and suchlike, and that, for the duration of the read, I would be completely cricketless and unlikely therefore to even think about the great game.

The book in question is about Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, (an extremely distant ancestor of Albert McClochendichter on the female side of the family), better known as Baron Ungern-Sternberg, the 'Bloody White Baron'. He was called the Bloody White Baron not because of his skin colour, but because he was a White Russian (of German extract - hence the connection with McClochendichter's Germanic ancestors). The book was written by James Palmer, and here is a review (random quote "Ungern didn't start out mad").


The Bloody White Baron came to a sticky end. After some years of rampage, and generally not playing with a straight bat (metaphorically speaking - as there were no matches ongoing at the time in that part of the world) in Mongolia, he was led outside and shot. One of Ungern-Sternberg's claims to fame was that he befriended Ja Lama, who, according to the Wikipedia, was an adventurer of unknown birth, though I have it on good authority, and as is also obvious from his name, this chap Ja hailed from the Windies, and could spin a ball square.

I would point out that, since that time, in the early twentieth century, cricket in Mongolia has made an appearance, but I diverge! Back to the Bogd Khan.

According to Palmer, the Bogd Khan, previously knows as Javzandamba VIII (no relation whatsoever to Denagamage Proboth Mahela de Silva Jayawardene), was the Holy Emperor in that part of the world, at that time. Possibly a descendant of Ghengis Khan, hence the name, the Bogd Khan was blind, extremely fat (so fat he could not bend down), a womaniser, a drunkard, possibly a cannibal, a manifestation of the bodhisattvas, and a reincarnated lama of the khutukhu lineage, and therefore a blissheid. Mongolian Buddhism at that time was fairly flexible, it must be said.

Not only that, but the Bogd Khan died of natural causes.

Well, I say! Isn't it amazing what one can learn when one turns away from cricket for an hour or two!

Only a couple of weeks to go until the Stanford 20/20. I think I may well read yet another non-cricket book before that time.

MM III