Brian Mitchell and Joseph Nixon’s thoroughly scurrilous Brighton column
Can’t remember the name of a book, TV show, or movie from yesteryear? Mike Hunter is the man with the answers
Dear Mike,
I hope you can help me with this, as it’s driving me absolutely potty. As a school child in England I would play a sport out on the playing fields by the school. Now, this game wasn’t football, or rugby. It did involve a ball, but a small, hard red-coloured one.
I’ll try to explain in more detail: we divided up into two teams of 11, and it was the job of each team (one man at a time) to protect these three small wooden sticks with another stick balanced on top of them with a sort of wooden “bat”, while the other team endeavoured (also one man at a time) to hit the aforementioned sticks with the ball. If the man with the “bat” hit the ball far enough away, he would attempt to “run” between the wooden sticks and another group of sticks a short distance away.
If the ball was hit in the air and a member of the opposing team caught it, the player with the bat was “out” and had to go and sit down furiously angry while pretending to be a good sport about it.
The only other thing I can think of was that we dressed in white to play the game, odd as this sounds, with sort of “pads” tied around the knees of the fellow with the bat, who also wore a codpiece.
Please help. I currently live in Arizona, where this game is nowhere to be seen. I’d love to play it over here or even set up a team, but all my queries and research have been to no avail.
Yours in hope, Stephen Callaghan Glendale, Arizona
Dear Stephen.
Owzat! Yes, you’ve nothing to worry about; I’m an “all rounder” when it comes to answering queries like this. You may have thought this would be a “sticky wicket” for me, and that I’d be “out for a duck”, or even that you’d “bowled me a googly”, but actually I’ve “hit this one for six.” Yes, the game in question is, of course, Real Tennis.
Good luck with your team, and everyone else please keep those letters flooding in.
Mike XX
In & Out
SPECIAL “HUMOROUSLY UNLIKELY CANDIDATES FOR MUSICAL ADAPTATION” EDITION
In
• Ai No Korîda
• The Man With
The X-Ray Eyes
• Magnum Force
• A Bouquet of
Barbed Wire
• Ice Station Zebra
Out
• The Dirty Dozen
• Brokeback Mountain
• The Parallax View
• The Triumph of
The Will
• The Plank
MORE RATIONAL RIB TICKLERS
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A: In perfectly ordinary streets although, for obvious reasons, their addresses are not made available to the public.
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A: course of Miralax and a change to a high-fibre diet soon solved his medical issues.
Q: Why do birds fly
south in the winter?
A: Migration.
Q: What do hedgehogs have for lunch?
A: Insects.
