16 January 2011
Overnight, it was the first of the seven One Day International cricket series against Australia. England started well and got to 90 for no loss. At one stage they looked as though they would get something in the region of 320/ 330 runs but when Pieterson was out for 78 the scoring rate slowed down and there were only 58 runs scored off the last 10 overs, with England finishing, with 296 runs, all out, two balls short of the 50 overs. Still a challenging target for the Australians. In the event, Australia, the world champions at One-Day Internationals, were up to to it.. England did well to take them to the last over , from the first ball of which Shane Watson won the match with an impressive 6, giving him a personal best of 161 in ODI’s. How well matched at these two teams, so much so that had we scored off the last two balls of our innings it might have been a different result – it was that close.
Jill and Tony Griggs came to lunch today, or rather, should I say, brought our lunch to us, and what a delicious lunch it was too. Jill even insisted on doing the washing-up before they left. It’s a lovely idea and maybe we’ll start a new trend. I certainly recall as a young man will never went anywhere without taking a bottle, or even being responsible for bringing one of the courses but bringing the entire meal, well…! After lunch Alice was able to escape for a short time  while we had coffee and I showed Jill some of the add-ons on the blog. Tony sadly is computer challenged and really doesn’t understand how the thing works at all..
A gripe. In no way political just an opinion from a typical taxpayer. Something which is now becoming a fairly regular story. A farmer complaining this morning, on the radio, that he did not get a single application from a UK resident for the picking season for his daffodils. Instead, like so many other cases of farmers needing casual labour from time to time to pick or harvest  their produce, the English are just simply not prepared to do the work for the basic wage paid. Instead, hundreds, or even thousands, over the year, of Eastern Europeans are flown in to do this work.
With almost 3,000,000 unemployed in this country, surely the government could insist that the young and healthy, at least, did this work and, if they refuse, then, during the period the work was available, stop their unemployment benefit and certainly their jobseekers allowance. I seem to recall that Australia brought in some sort of regulation that if an unemployed able bodied person was offered work that they could easily cope with, which they refused to do, then, after six weeks they lost their unemployment benefit. I cannot recall whether this was ever put into practice, or even is still the case today. (I will check with the good doctor when he arrives on Wednesday) but something on these lines needs to be introduced in the UK as it is lunacy importing thousands of youngsters from elsewhere when a few weeks in the open air, working in the fields, would do our own youngsters a power of good. I certainly remember spending part of my own summer holidays lifting potatoes which was backbreaking work, but maybe our generation were made of sterner stuff than today’s youngsters!.