Posted by Send him in. Let him weather the marketing and do all the preparations and cooking. Then you can just swan in on Boxing Day to eat leftovers and get drunk.
No, this is Nightwatchman with an upper-case N. The Wisden cricket quarterly is doing gift packages.
If you don’t know what it’s all about, they’ve helpfully provided a few samples – a Select XI to be precise.
The point is that it’s cricket writing that isn’t so time-sensitive. They’re longer musings on the game and its effect on people. The samples include a piece by Gideon Haigh about cricket writing and a piece about the psyche of the nightwatchman (lower-case N) by Jon Hotten.
There’s also a poignant piece by our friend Sam Collins about making his film Death of a Gentleman
Each year’s Nightwatchman is £30, but if you put in the code XMAS15 you can get the 2015 Collection for £25 plus postage and packing.
I have bought ‘Death of a Gentleman’ as a Christmas present, based partly on the repeated mentions of it on this site (and partly on the Uncle Jrod involvement).
If it’s rubbish (which I’m sure it isn’t), can I have compensation in the form of a Christmas nightwatchman to come in and listen to the complaints about me giving people rubbish presents? Or at least to listen to two or three of them before I have to come in myself anyway, as is often the way with nightwatchmen.
I assumed, due to the title of the piece, that this was the “through the night” thread for the many of us who were up all night watching the antipodean test match cricket.
But I wasn’t 100% sure and was too shy to post anything, until now.
Where were you all? “In the arms of Morpheus” is not an acceptable answer in these circumstances.