Tea

Life in fourteenth century Italy was unpleasant. Cricket had not yet been invented. Toilet facilities were rudimentary. People were hemmed in on all sides by plague, famine, war, and the wretched twanging of mandolins. Then there was the threat of being burnt at the stake, a popular pastime in the Middle Ages. (Had it not been for the persistent drizzle in these parts, the barbeque would surely have been credited to European civilisation.)      

But there was one area of life in which the people of pre-Renaissance Italy had the advantage over us twenty-first century types: the complete absence of advertising. It is only this accident of history that explains why Dante left marketing executives out of The Divine Comedy. If there is a divine authority, She will surely find a circle of hell especially for these characters, perhaps just down the corridor from the spin doctors and the talk show hosts.

Too harsh? I think not. Language is our most precious invention, a tool of immense power and infinite creativity. If you employ it to tell half-truths about car insurance, you abuse it, as surely as if you’d used the Mona Lisa to prop open your kitchen door in order to better hear the ping that signals the readiness of your microwave pizza.

Advertising speak is language stripped of irony, joy, and meaning. It describes a sterile mockery of reality, in which every man, woman and child is a walking embodiment of a targeted demographic, and the word-play of the seven year old stands in for wit.                     

I give you Exhibit Z: the Yorkshire Tea break. Having sold all the tangible assets of English cricket, the ECB is now auctioning off parcels of time. There is, apparently, a company called Yorkshire Tea. Tea is also the first word of tea break. See what they did there?

That isn’t the worst of it. We learn that every tea break at English Test matches:

“…will be made fun and engaging for the many fans of the game.”

An organisation that specialises in filling little paper bags with bits of leaves has taken it upon itself to arrange for our late afternoon entertainment, whether we like it or not.  

Cricket lovers aren’t naïve hippies. We know that the wheels of the trans-global cricket juggernaut need to be oiled with a little currency. We’ve made our pact with the underworld, but it should be made clear that we didn’t exactly sell our souls, so much as lease them out.

So are entitled to say there is a limit, and that limit is reached when it is no longer possible to avoid the advertising, when your hamper is searched at the gates lest you smuggle in a rival brand of herbal hot water grit, when you can’t even enjoy a relaxed tea interval without some grinning, caffeine-fuelled inanity in a bright T-shirt getting in your face and insisting that you’re going to have some fun, dammit.

Therefore I suggest that, for the duration of this crass commercial exercise, every single cricket fan in England switch to an alternative source of interval refreshment, and share pictures of themselves pointedly not enjoying a cup of the ECB-approved beverage. Hot chocolate, cocoa, mint and jasmine infusion: the choice is yours; although I find that a pint of gin very often hits the spot (particularly if Cook is batting).