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inquired whether I would be joining the team on its forthcoming up-country match in Kalgoorlie. Kalgoorlie is celebrated throughout Australia for its gold mines, and for that apparently indispensable adjunct to towns where lonesome men get too rich, too quick: its brothels. Unfortunately, the logistics of taking in the forthcoming Melbourne Cup
and
making it up to this indubitably colourful fixture were too awkward to contemplate, and I had elected to go for the former.
    ‘I’d rather go to the Melbourne Cup,’ I explained to the baby hackette in a jet-lagged attempt at flippancy, ‘You get a better class of horse.’
    This did not net me too many friends amongst the doyennes of Melbourne society, where it was widely and faithfully misreported as ‘a better class of whore’. If the press want you to be out-spoken, you can bet your bottom, devalued Australian dollar, you are
going
to be out-spoken.
    I arrived at the new and commensurately sumptuous Adelaide Hilton. It was midday, and Phil was playing at the Oval in the state match against South Australia.
    He had remembered.
There, in the bedroom, on top of the television, lovingly juxtaposed between a pile of
laundered
(at least we’re making progress) jock-straps and cricket socks, was a floral display. Nothing too ostentatious, mind you. No, indeed on reflexion about exactly the same size as the floral displays ubiquitously dotted throughout the entire hotel. And the same selection. ‘Happy Tenth Anniversary, darling’, it proclaimed, in suitably non-person-specific terms of endearment. It was signed ‘PH EDMONDS’.
    I was appropriately overwhelmed, and reflected that even if Philippe-Henri had forgotten how to sign his name in anything other than autograph, room-service or credit-card fashion, at least he had remembered that it was ten years since the outbreak of inter-Edmonds hostilities. Ten years and one day to be exact. I had left England on 29 October, and arrived in Australia on 31 October. Somewhere in between a twenty-seven-hour international flight and an eight-hour time difference, 30 October, the actual day of the original mental aberration, had been lost, snaffled up by lines of longitude.
    Well, the darling boy, whose memory is about as good as Kurt Waldheim’s when it comes to remembering emotional occasions which involve expenditure on small tokens of undying love and affection, had at least not forgotten this decadal notch on the yardstick of conjugal bliss. I have to admit that underneath this taut exterior of armadillo-feminism, I had been missing him.
    ‘And I’ve been missing you too,’ he admitted, in one of those intimate moments when, according to women’s magazines, men are supposed to tell you you’re wonderful, beautiful, adorable, desirable, etc. ‘There’s been nobody here to aggravate me.’
    The tour so far has been fairly eventless. The management’s blanket ban on players writing, broadcasting or giving interviews to the press has resulted in fairly lacklustre, if occasionally critical, media coverage. Every member of the press corps shall henceforth be receiving exactly the same statement from the manager, Peter Lush, the assistant manager, Micky Stewart, or the captain, Mike Gatting. According to many of the hardened journos who have already decided to dispense with the press conferences, the ‘Gattysburg Addresses’ (as the captain’s desperately non-sensational, well-coached and relentlessly innocuous statements have been christened), are ‘basically tremendously wise’. There is a lot of ‘cricket-wise’, ‘batting-wise’, ‘bowling-wise’, ‘Ashes-wise’, ‘fielding-wise’, and ‘practice-wise’, together with a ‘tremendous’ amount of ‘basically’. Gatt, patently, has assimilated the art of saying much which means nothing; with such a thorough grasp of international diplomacy, maybe
he
should be chairing the Eminent Persons’ Group.
    No, there has been little yet of the ex-Miss Barbados