EDITOR’S LETTER
A play for the future
Just for a moment, let us pause, breathe and take it all in. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. Be still, that throbbing vein in the side of your head. Hold the obituaries. Suspend doomsday for a week. Maybe even two. Something of value is about to take place. Something that will stay with you. It’s only cricket. But sometimes only cricket is enough. What are we here for if not to love things? We wrestled with the right words for the cover of this magazine. What even is this summer? Significant? Seismic? Poignant? In the end, we went with anticipated. Anticipated, with its synonyms of hope, expectation, looking forward. For some reason it seems to fit.
Routinely it’s billed as the ‘old rivalry’, hanging on to all that past, and with good reason. It brings out the nostalgist in all of us. Most of us wouldn’t be here without it. I know I wouldn’t. It’s always there, what went before, bedded in the soil, ever fertile ground for stirring TV montages and specially themed podcasts and, well, evocative backdrops to baroque magazine covers.