Tsutomo Yamaguchi....

...died on 6 January aged 93.

He was the only survivor of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By an unimaginable nightmare he was packing to leave Hiroshima for Nagasaki after a 3 month assignment at the Mitsibushi shipyard when the first bomb fell. He saw it parachuted from the American plane and suffered serious burns although he was 2 miles from the epicentre of the blast.

He managed to make the 200 mile journey to Nagasaki and rejoin his wife and baby son barely stopping to have his wounds treated. And the day he reported back for work the second bomb fell.

Amazingly his wife and son survived with him although his son died of cancer in 2005 aged 59.

His story rightly reminds me of the horrors of nuclear war. Of the MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction principle that somehow kept the USA and Soviet Union from launching first strikes during the Cold War. Of Cuba and its missile crisis in 1962 which seems so long away now.

Yet Tsutomo Yamaguchi's story is a telling and potent reminder of dangers we dare not forget. It brings home what is at stake in Iran and Pakistan.

Ball Tampering

I make no apologies for returning to the goings on in South Africa and the latest Test Match.
Our noble lads have been accused of that greatest of greatest sins - tampering with the ball - in the hope that it starts to swing or move in the air in the opposite way to which it is supposed to do when new.

All very mysterious, and on a day when the most damge to the ball seemed to be at the hands or bats of the South Africans who built up a huge second innings lead. The complaints seem to go back to the previous game in Durban when our guys seemed to be able to make the ball go like a bannana and the Boks couldn't manage a centimetre from the straight and narrow.

It reminds me of a small collection of essays I found when going through some papers after my father died some years ago now. It was entitled "A ball by ball commentary: the true story". A more innocent title one could not imagine. perhaps a tale or two from TMS of yesteryear. But on closer inspection I found laid bare the dastardly secrets of the ball tamperers art.

I can only think that my father had confiscated this treatise from some fellow member of the Bacup Tradesman's CC. I noticed with interest a reprint of a sermon given by the Rev Septimus Toad at the Beulah Methodist Church sermons in 1938 where he abandoned the usual railery againt the devil drink for a 30 minute tirade against the evils of ball tampering and its spread through the local Sunday School league.

The Rev Toad's oratory clearly fell on stony ground because it seems as if the dark arts have been passed down from father to son and from son to son's sons over the following years. My father's collection even included an essay on "Maintaining a cheerful countenance before the umpire" and another debates the respective merits of the Tizer and Vimto bottle tops as part of the tamperer's trade. There is a rueful tale of how in one match a pack of dogs ran off with the ball and it was only discovered later that the fielder with the role of the lozenge sucker had been going too strong on the aniseed drops.

One team who found themselves on the end of a particularly effective reverse swing plan from their opponents found the best way of countering their wiles was to ensure that the outfield was not cleared of cowpats when they next played. It is a fact that no one has yet found a way of producing reverse swing after a ball has landed in the brown stuff.

Needless to say I have made a copy of this valuable book and it is on its way to Messrs Anderson Broad and Onions.

Come to think of it perhaps it is the onions what did it - or may be an overdose of South African sour grapes.