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Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk
In lieu of a review, here is a photograph of The Instant Cricket Library by Dan Liebke balanced precariously in a cactus in France.
It took us quite a while to find exactly the right cactus, but we are happy with our final selection.
The Instant Cricket Library is an imagined anthology – excerpts from unpublished, imaginary and other hard-to-find cricket books.
It is very funny. It is worth buying for the Andy Bichel chapter about “dozeneering” alone.
You can find a few different ways to buy it here.
Does it really count as a “cricketing object in an unusual place” if it has only been emplaced in that location in order to achieve the official status of “cricketing object in an unusual place”? If I was trying to put a cricketing object in an unusual place then “on a cactus” seems a logical and perfectly normal approach to achieving that designation, and hence not really very “unusual” at all. I’m also pretty sure it counts as what is technically known as “cheating”. On the other hand, since the ultimate arbiter of what counts as an “unusual place”, or for that matter a “cricketing object”, is KC himself, perhaps it is okay when yer maj does the deed.
There are no real regulations. If it’s a cricket thing in an unusual place, it counts. We never once said that such instances had to occur without intervention.
Have you been at the mescaline again?
Ha ha Edwardian – KC’s certainly come close to mescaline, given the above story.
Did I read correctly – Bail-out accusing KC and others of us of cheating? The language in this debate is becoming unacceptable. Anybody stumbling across this discussion might mistake us for politicians, campaigners or leaders of the free world.
As one of the more regular contributors to this “cricket stuff in unusual places” KC genre, I personally feel affronted. Sometimes we spot someone else’s cricket stuff in an unusual place, sometimes we have cricket stuff with us and find ourselves in or near unusual places for cricket stuff.
https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/tag/cricket-bats-in-unusual-places/
I have enjoyed skimming the canon, including the diversity of ways in which the pieces have come into existence.
While I feel loathe to correct KC on any matter, let alone the regulations (or lack thereof) for his site…
…I feel I should draw readers attention to a posting from long ago in which KC DID set down some regulations for this feature.
https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/cricket-bats-that-seem-like-theyre-in-unusual-places/2009/02/16/
I’m pointing this out more to share my enjoyment of Ceci’s masterpiece from years gone by (above) than to score points on the matter of feature regulations.
I wholeheartedly retract my more strongly worded allegations. I think the crux of my point, in so far as I actually had one, was that I’d be rather less surprised to see a cricketing object somewhere if that’s the place I’d actually put it – unless I had left it there and forgot about it. Discovering that the reason I couldn’t find my portable library is that I’d years ago scattered it around a French cactus field would indeed be a most startling revelation. Almost as startling as developing my summer holiday photos (do people still do this?) and discovering a miniature Rob Key hiding among the penguins.
Did you really need the cactus? Isn’t a cricket book in France unusual enough? Or maybe you wanted to “up the ante”, as Ravi Shastri bellows during the third over of a T20?
Come on, cricket books regularly make it to France. The place is positively awash with Britons.
Actually I must admit that the thing I found most unusual this post was my discovery that there were cactus fields in France. In that respect I found this one more convincingly surprising than almost any of the other cricket things in unusual locations. Perhaps I just need to get out more.
Monsieur Benaud might have had a word or two to say about French cricket, come to think of it.