Cricket and fireworks

My baseball buddies back home will be pleased to hear that I've already had my first cricket lesson. Last Saturday I was biking through Victoria Park trying to trace my way back home from school, and the path took me past what was a bit like batting cages. Men were taking turns bowling (what we'd call pitching) balls for another to hit. I stopped to watch for a while, and one of the guys asked if I wanted to "have a go at it." Sure, I thought. Why not? So he pulled out another ball for me to try bowling with. They're a bit smaller than a baseball, cork on the inside and covered with red leather with stitches around what would be the equator to hold it together. You take a running, hopping leap and then throw the ball with a straight-arm motion over the top. It's a lot harder than it looks. My first throw went straight into the ground. (OK, some of my teammates from back home will tell you that that happens with my  first throw of the day with a baseball, too, but this got only marginally easier with practice.) The guy who lent me the ball gave me a few more pointers, so I wasn't embarrassing myself too badly by the time it started raining some 25 minutes later. I biked home happy and with my pointer and middle fingers stained red from the dye on the leather.

Last night I went out in search of a Bonfire Night celebration and ended up in Southwark Park (pronounced suthuk). I asked the guy next to me in the food line for a bit of background. "Basically it's a celebration of the torture and assassination of a Catholic terrorist," he said (see PS below), and went on to tell me more of the story. He also lamented that Bonfire Night has turned into these huge gatherings of people to watch fireworks and eat food from trailers serving things like burgers and hot dogs. When he was a kid, people didn't really celebrate Hallowe'en but instead would make an effigy and go around asking for money ("a penny for the Guy") that they'd buy their fireworks with. Then they'd gather all the scrap wood they could find and build bonfires on the 5th of November in which to burn their effigies. Now nobody has bonfires, he said, because of the safety issues. So to my eyes it looked more like a small county fair (little rides for the kids, loud thumping music, fast food), and a fireworks show that lasted maybe 10 minutes. I hear they do it up bigger in other parks, but the only thing big was the crowd, which was massive. Even the fireworks didn't have the towering dandelion-flower-type explosions that so dominate the Fourth of July (which was kind of refreshing, actually).

Only in Istanbul have I been in crowds as thick and as often as I have here. For being a famously standoffish people (that's a bit overrated) Londoners don't seem to much mind being crammed cheek-by-jowl in parks and on the Tube. There is no such thing as personal space on public transit here in rush hour. London on the Tube at the beginning and end of the work day: a claustrophobe's hell.

PS added later. 

A Londoner emailed me two traditional Guy Fawkes poems:

Guy, guy, guy,
Poke him in the Eye
Put him on the bonfire
And there let him die.

and

A rope, a rope to hang the Pope
A piece of cheese to choke him
A barrel of beer to drink his health
And a right good fire to roast him!

Nice little rhymes for the kiddies to chant, eh wot?