Blowers on song

It was good last week to catch up with Henry Blofeld, relishable old bean and Grub Street comrade from way back. To prime his loquacious enthusiasms for a long, hot (some hopes) summer at the Test Match Special microphone, over a couple of nights we clinked far too many into the bottle-bank hole marked ‘green’ and on Friday Henry wowed a rafter-packed throng in the local school hall with An Evening with Blowers. ‘My dear old things…’ his intimate fruitiness collectively greeted them, and we were putty for the next two hours and then queued well past closing-time at the book-signing session. A single Friday on, and yesterday Henry was due to attend an altogether more historically auspicious occasion. Today marks the bicentenary of the most enduring fixture in any team sport. The schools had been playing each other for even longer, of course, but at Lord’s cricket ground the first Eton–Harrow contest was in 1805 — that is, the first of Thomas Lord’s sporting arenas on what is now Dorset Square; the wily old speculator did not reseed his field at (via a brief stop in Regent’s Park) the present, fabled site in St John’s Wood till 1814.