While Ben Stokes and Mark Wood were polishing off the Australian tail at Trent Bridge on Saturday morning, I was in the cellar.
There are three things to take from that.
First, that in the forty-one years since I first went to a test match I’ve seen very little that was as thrillingly unexpected or as clinically executed as what England achieved in those three days in Nottingham.
Second, that only in cricket could polishing off the Australian tail be a thing.
And third, that I was in the cellar.
Don’t get grand ideas about my cellar. It is not a cavernous, candlelit, brick-vaulted space filled with exquisite wines. That’s my imagination. No, it is a sort of low tunnel full of junk, just high enough for me to stand up in because I am short. In it is the accumulated detritus of family life. Camping equipment. Tools. Offcuts of MDF. Tins of paint. Wire. The washing machine. A drumkit. Two ladders. A bicycle frame I will never build into a bicycle.
But every couple of years the cellar needs attention. So this weekend I cleared it. I cleared it through the Ashes triumph. I cleared it through the analysis of the Ashes triumph. I cleared it through Dulwich Hamlet’s season-opening, 3-0 victory over Canvey Island.
To be honest, I struggled to see the upside of clearing the cellar through these sporting milestones and I performed my task, frankly, grumpily. We all struggle to see the upside of the dull, prosaic things we have to do every day.
As Jesus went about his work, teaching and healing, one of the comments made about him, in Mark’s Gospel, was, ‘He has done everything well’. Not, ‘He’s astonishing’, or ‘What a triumph’. Just, ‘He has done everything well’.
He put the effort in.
Perhaps, then, doing things well is worthwhile in itself, even when those things seem unimportant and tedious. I reckon it is – it makes even tidying the cellar a tiny victory.
This week, we’ll all have to do more of those things – hopefully more effectively and less crabbily than me clearing the junk under the house. Jeremy Vine is going to have to start learning to dance, for heaven’s sake. I can’t imagine anything worse. But if they do it well, who knows what the next triumph will be?