It had been a pretty lively Wednesday night on tour. Sharing a room with an Australian in Henley-on-Thames had been a laugh for me as childish little reminders of our Ashes triumph had been left around the place by people unknown (!). The trauma of the previous few months had been momentarily forgotten as a great bunch of lads I’ve known for many years temporarily took my mind off what life had turned out to be (more of this later). But now after a drink or two, the mind wandered to what would happen on the other side of the world. 31 May 2006 would turn into 1 June 2006 and the scare stories we’d heard about the swamping of telephone lines, the demand for tickets, the excitement this tour would generate left me feeling helpless. The fate of my holiday, Sir Peter’s holiday, Reg’s holiday and Danno’s holiday was now in the hands of others.

 

I slept as I do with alcohol coursing through the body. Like a hippo, but with double the decibels no doubt. I had the phone on silent. In my room in Henley I went to sleep and awaited the news. I woke up to see I had text messages and it had come from Adelaide Exile. I don’t have the text message to refer to, but I do recall seeing the first word. “Sorry”.

 

Oh dear. Yes, that’s exactly what I said. Pretty selfishly, with Greg sleeping in the other single bed in our room, I dialled Adelaide Exile. The individual concerned may have his recall of the phone call, and may correct me, but it went something like this..

 

“Hello [AE]”

 

“All right mate”

 

“So what happened?”

 

“It has been unbelievable here mate. I was on the phone for hours and had no luck getting through. Everywhere was engaged. I tried Perth’s numbers and got nothing. I have your ticket for Adelaide but just couldn’t get anything else yesterday. Sydney sold out in minutes.”

 

“OK.”

 

I was shocked. It was definitely at the worst end of my fears. Not only were we struggling to get tickets from a man based in Adelaide, but Perth was almost certainly out.

 

At the time I had only really spoken to AE briefly, but it was what he said next that entrenched him as a mate for life.

 

“I’m so sorry mate. I feel I’ve let you down. With all you’ve been through you really deserve those tickets. I’m really sorry. I’ll do what I can when we find out what’s left.”

 

AE, if he’d met me in person, had only met me once – I seriously can’t remember when I first met him outside the pub near my favourite team’s ground – and he’d said this. I was really touched by his concern.

 

AE was referring to what had happened between setting up the trip and the ticket day, and to which I briefly referred to in my previous chapters. My mum had died in 2005 and left me with my ageing father who was showing signs of problems with his health. Added on top of the grief he was going through from losing his wife of nearly 40 years, which my own selfish loss couldn’t compete with, if you can call it that, and I had a recipe for real hard times. Ploughing through my own grief, and looking after someone who had his own demons to conquer was tough, but rewarding. Since mum’s death we undoubtedly got closer. Then, in January, Dad went to the doctors. I phoned him up afterwards. “How did it go, Dad?” “Not so well, they think I’ve got Parkinson’s”. At the time it was yet another hammer blow to my head. How was I going to cope with this? Who on earth was going to help me? Why was this all coming at me in one hit? It turned out that if it had been Parkinson’s, well…

 

A hospital referral was made, and a mystery appointment which we thought was for Parkinson’s turned out to be a test for throat cancer. He didn’t have that, but the doctor, as they do, was blunt with my brother and I. “If I were you I’d make sure he sees a geriatrician. There’s definitely something going on up there.” We had no idea. When he went to see the Parkinson’s specialist a few weeks later, he was in superb form. Reminded me of the bit in Only Fools and Horses where Albert was supposed to be crippled with back pain for a market selling spiel, and instead of recovering slowly, did a dance!

 

At the end of March I went away for a weekend, and Paul rang me to say that the doctor’s letter had come from the hospital and “it wasn’t good”. He told me that the specialist had said that he almost certainly had “Progressive Supra-nuclear Palsy”. I had no idea what on earth this was, but Dad had been taking some pills for Parkinson’s and there had been no real change in his demeanour. Paul said he didn’t know either. What we found out horrified us. It is a form of Parkinson’s (bracketed under Parkinson’s Plus) that doesn’t respond to drugs. You become housebound as your brain effectively dies. I’m sure medical people can describe it much better than I. First you get the living death sentence, then you get the real thing.

 

This was a heartbreaker. I didn’t want to tell my dad what this was, but what can you do? You hope the doctor is wrong, but you know deep down that they are not. Then thoughts turn selfishly to yourself. How am I going to cope? How am I going to deal with a Dad dying before my eyes, but unlike mum’s with cancer, it being a living death where the father you respected remains in an old frail weathered body, but his brain had died long ago. I had no thoughts of Australia, no thoughts of a future. It was about Dad.

 

But Dad knew. And Dad wanted out. He wanted to be with his wife, I knew it, and I think everyone knew it. As much as I wanted my dad to be around, I knew he would hate being a burden. He would never be that to me, but I am always a realist – maybe too realistic – and told him that times would be tough, but that I would always do my best. When my Dad complained of back pains, I never gave it a moment’s thought that this was the beginning of the end. The doctors prescribed him anti-inflammatory drugs, and when I told the locum he had PSP, the doc had to look it up. That was concerning. We went back the following week when Dad had trouble sleeping and woke me up constantly. We had an appointment with the PSP nurse that week and we hung out our hopes on that. When Dad got steadily worse, the PSP nurse came round to see him. He was admitted to hospital that night. There he got worse. A minor infection turned into pneumonia. Over the Easter weekend his condition deteriorated. On Wednesday 19 April 2006 at 11 a.m., he died.

 

That AE had felt the need to apologise for not getting tickets really touched me, and I can’t say enough about what that, and what other friends did for me at that time. AE had no need to do anything. He was a mate doing me a favour and I said as much. He had taken time out for something I could not do. I’d no sooner blame him for not getting me tickets as I would a weatherman for a thunderstorm. He had tried his utmost and not got anywhere. I resented the Aussie authorities a lot more than you could imagine. For AE, there was nothing but gratitude.

 

I thanked AE for his help, and rang Sir Peter up to tell him the bad news. Now all hopes rested on Reg and his contacts. I had got up early so didn’t really want to interrupt him or disturb him if he was asleep. I got dressed and met Sir Peter for breakfast in the Catherine Wheel. We bumped into Reg with the newspaper tucked under his arm (I remember that bit). As he stood at the bar, I asked “any news.”

 

In his furtive, discreet way he just uttered two words “Not bad.” Dying to ask what constituted “not bad” he said he just had to pop out but would let us know when he got back.

 

What in heaven’s did “not bad” mean?

 

What seemed like ages passed before Reg returned. Sir Peter was a phlegmatic as always, convinced we would still secure tickets. I was the usual ray of pessimism – well jesus, life had given me plenty of reasons to look up, hadn’t it? – and was convinced we’d be recreating an Old Jos version of Last of the Summer Wine in Glenelg that winter.

 

So Reg said what he had. “We’ve got the first four days at Perth, and the last three days at Adelaide.”

 

That constituted “not bad” in the eyes of Reg. In my eyes that constituted “fucking amazing”. Apologies for the language.

 

“Well I have tickets for one, possibly two people, for all five days at Adelaide” I said, so that means, laughably, we had spares for the last three. “And my contact had no joy last night, but believes that there will be more going on sale to local residents at the ground in a couple of weeks in Adelaide, so we may get some more then.”

 

When we found out that they weren’t selling 5th day tickets at Perth, we had probably secured 80% of all the seats we would need. I am wondering at what point Reg would have said it was “bad”. And yes, I do know he had to get tickets for all legs of the tour, and Sydney aside, I think he had immediate success.

 

The next part of the story will deal with the outsiders looking in, as this part concentrates on securing the tickets for the test match. Hence I’ll jump about chronologically if you don’t mind.

 

By hook or by crook tickets for the remainder of the Adelaide test had to be secured. If I ever get the desktop to work, I’ll recount those stories in the next part as well.

 

I hope this tides you over. It has been in the drafting for quite a while (and there will still be countless errors in it!)