Quintessentially English

I woke up to sunshine. My teeth hadn't turned green or fallen out after using the Incredible Hulk coloured toothpaste. A good start to the day.

It was warm and felt like summer and I even passed a wedding that had a vintage theme with a red double decker bus and a cream VW camper van to transport the guests. The wedding party were in summery colours and I could imagine them having tea in floral china cups and lots of tiered cake stands with cup cakes.

I took this particular shot at the local cricket ground which is on the way back from the allotment. I stopped for a while sitting on the old benches around the edge of the field with my bag of potatoes and muddy hands and my allotment gear on with the trusty canon compact on zoom.

Did you spot the ball?

At the allotment some potatoes were harvested but everything else needs to grow after the bad weather we've had.

So with cricket, allotments and summer vintage weddings it felt like a quintessentially English day.

A bit of blurb from wiki on the origins of cricket.

No one knows when or where cricket began but there is a body of evidence, much of it circumstantial, that strongly suggests the game was devised during Saxon or Norman times by children living in the Weald, an area of dense woodlands and clearings in south-east England that lies across Kent and Sussex. In medieval times, the Weald was populated by small farming and metal-working communities. It is generally believed that cricket survived as a children's game for many centuries before it was increasingly taken up by adults around the beginning of the 17th century.

It is quite likely that cricket was devised by children and survived for many generations as essentially a children's game. Adult participation is unknown before the early 17th century. Possibly cricket was derived from bowls, assuming bowls is the older sport, by the intervention of a batsman trying to stop the ball from reaching its target by hitting it away. Playing on sheep-grazed land or in clearings, the original implements may have been a matted lump of sheep's wool (or even a stone or a small lump of wood) as the ball; a stick or a crook or another farm tool as the bat; and a stool or a tree stump or a gate (e.g., a wicket gate) as the wicket.

I hope you're having a great weekend and had some sunshine today :)