The eternity game

Passing St John’s cricket ground this evening, I saw this…

… and was reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s observation that “the English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them an idea of eternity”. He was right, in a way. With those wonderful lengthening shadows and those breezy young chaps in whites, there was something quintessentially English and timeless about the scene. I guess that someone walking along the Madingley Road on the evening of June 14, 1904 would have contemplated esssentially the same spectacle — except of course that Gilbert Scott’s University Library tower would not have intruded upon it.