Danni Wyatt

 

I am a great fan of Danielle ("Danni") Wyatt, who has been for more than a decade a leading member of the England Women's cricket team in both the ODI and T20 formats 

She was born in April 1991 in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, and learnt her cricket at the nearby Whitmore club, where her brother also played, and she began playing for Staffordshire Ladies in her early teens. Since then she has played for a variety of clubs in England, Australia and India. Her current English club is Southern Vipers, and for this summer's "100" tournament, Southern Brave.

She was selected for her England debut in March 2010, and has since been a regular member of both the ODI and T20 teams. For T20 internationals, she opens the batting with Tammy Beaumont, but for ODIs usually bats down at 6 or 7. She can occasionally bowl off-breaks. She is fast between the wickets, and her speed is also evident when fielding on the boundary, together with a very safe pair of hands and a strong throw.

 At only 5 feet 3 inches in height, Danni is small for a top-flight cricketer, but is exceptionally strong for her size. Excellent timing of the ball means that she has no problem in smashing sixes, particularly with off-side drives or pulls round to leg. When she is in good touch, she can score very fast and demolish any bowling. The "Times" cricket commentator once dubbed her "the diminutive dasher"!

Among her best scores for England are 124 against India and 110 against Pakistan. She was awarded her 200th England cap this summer.

Danni is also one of the very best fielders in woen's world cricket, and has taken several sensational catches at silly point or on the boundary. 

Her nickname in the dressing room is "Waggy".

Update, April 2022: Danni scored a century to set up a win against South Africa in the semifinal of the Women's World Cup in New Zealand, but didn't make runs in the final against Australia, which England lost. She had an excellent season against Australia in 2023, scoring a half-century in her first full Test Match, and was the highest run-scorer in the Women's Hundred. She has now played in more T20 matches, and scored more runs therein, than any other English woman cricketer.

In 2024, Danni married a woman football coach, and now wishes to be known as "Wyatt-Hodge"

Postscript

 In the final T20 match against India in 2025, Danni was given a special shirt in a  ceremony to mark her 300th appearance for England. Only Charlotte Edwards had previously managed this feat. She duly celebrated with a half-century. Then in the women's Hundred tournament in August, she became only the second English player (after Nat Sciver-Brunt) to pass 1,000 runs in this format. 

  Danni and her father:-

In April 2026 I was able, for the first time to watch Danni bat live, in a 50-overs match between Warwickshire and Surrey at Edgbaston, Birmingham. She smashed 124 runs in 80 balls for the visitors, including 8 sixes! I was able to congratulate her afterwards. It was a brilliant occasion.

In May, Danni's partner, Georgie, gave birth to a baby daughter, Daisy. Danni admitted that she now thought about Daisy all the time; and brought her out on the balcony at Southampton

 

Danni scored a terrific century against Sri Lanka in the opening match of the 2026 Women's T20 world cup, and celebrated with a cradle-rocking motion in reference to her new baby daughter: a delightful gesture! She would have been disappointed not to score many runs in the final against Australia, which England lost, but she ended the tournament with a total of over 300 runs, well ahead of the next batter, at an average of 60. This is more than any woman had ever scored in the tournament!

 

 

Poems: The Days

 The Days

The first day was golden with the radiance of pure light as the Sun rose. Creation began. But behind the radiance was the Anti-light, the false creation, which is the greatest sin.

The second day was glittering silver beneath the Moon; and it was a day of mysteries, of hidden things, and of the waters. And the sin of the second day was magic, and forbidden knowledge.

The third day was blood-red, and it was the day of Mars. A day of struggle and fight; a day of iron. The sin of the third day was violence, and blind rage.

The fourth day was black, as the infinite void; but from the blackness rose swift Mercury, the Quicksilver, who made it a day of buying and selling, of coming and going, and of messages. So the sin of the fourth day was greed.

On the fifth day the firmament was painted bright blue, and its lord was Jupiter. So great was he that some confused him with his Maker. And the sin of the fifth day was pride.

The sixth day was the shining green of verdigris. Here lay the naked form of Venus, who commanded it to be a day for lovemaking. And so the sin of the sixth day was lust.

The seventh day was rich imperial purple, robing ancient Saturn as he yawned on his leaden throne of unendurable weight. On this day all creatures rest from their labours. So the sin of the seventh day was idleness.

So the first week ends.

Afghanistan

As this map shows, Afghanistan is not a nation in any meaningful ethnic sense of the word.

 

Afghanistan has been called "the crossroads of Asia". Alexander the Great led his army through the Khyber pass, east of Kabul, on his way to India in 327 B.C. The region was converted to Islam in the later 7th century A.D. Genghis Khan destroyed Herat and other cities in 1222. Tamerlane overran all central Asia and advanced as far as Delhi at the end of the 14th century. Babur, coming originally from Samarkand, occupied Afghanistan and from there advanced through the Khyber pass into India where he founded the Mughal Empire in 1526. He was buried in Kabul. The glories of the Mughals never recovered from the sacking of Delhi by Nadir Shah of Persia, who invaded over the Khyber in 1526, thereby inadvertantly clearing the ground for the later British domination of India.

As the British and Russian empires were expanding in the 19th century, Afghanistan was merely the territory left between them which neither managed to conquer. The British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839-41 was a complete disaster (and is the subject of the first of George Macdonald Fraser's "Flashman" novels), and there was a later British intervention in 1878-80. Britain became increasingly alarmed at Russian advances in the 1860s into the Central Asian emirates which are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and the others, and feared that India might be directly threatened. Kipling's splendid novel "Kim" deals with a Russian plot to take over Afghanistan in the late 19th century. A treaty was signed in 1919 leaving Afghanistan uneasily neutral. 

This neutrality prevailed, more or less, until the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a pro-communist regime: an unwise action that sparked off a new intensification of the Cold War. The Afghan war was enormously expensive to the Russians in both casualties and money, and played a major role in the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade later. The Americans responded by sponsoring Islamic resistance movements, which in restrospect was equally unwise. The communist government was overthrown, but then after a civil war the Taleban took power and imposed a particularly strict form of Islam, leading eventually to the 2001 World Trade Centre bombing. 

   It looks as if the subsequent Western intervention has been no more successful in the long term than previous attempts. 

I found this poster when I was in the Soviet Union in 1984.

The best book I know on the subject is "Afghanistan" by Bijan Omrani and Matthew Leeming: a very detailed combination of history and guidebook. See also "The Places in Between" by Rory Stewart, the former Member of Parliament and cabinet minister: an account of his extraordinary walk across Afghanistan in 2002. 

At a more trivial level, the Khyber Pass provided an excellent opportunity for cockney rhyming slang. See the film "Carry on up the Khyber", made long before the coming of political correctness and falling very much into the "so-awful-that-it's-good" category. It features Kenneth Williams as a local potentate who bears, inevitably, the title of the "Kharzi".

Shrewsbury battle re-enactment

I recently attended a "re-enactment" of the battle of Shrewsbury (1403), held near the site of the battle a few miles north of Shrewsbury. The re-enactment itself was rather silly, but the great pains had clearly been taken with the reproduction armour, and the heraldry was magnificent.

   This are the rebel forces

In the centre the Percy coat of arms, a blue lion on gold, denotes the Earl of Worcester. To the right, with his back to us, is the leader of the rebels: Henry Percy, "Harry Hotspur", Worcester's nephew. He wears the Percy arms quartered with Lucy: three silver pikes, or "luces" on red (a good examply of "canting", or punning, arms), with overall a red three-pointed "label", indicating that he is the eldest son of his father, the Earl of Northumberland. To the left, the red heart on silver denotes their Scottish ally, Earl Douglas. This symbol commemorates how an earlier Douglas had vowed to take the heart of Robert the Bruce on pligrimage to the Holy Land. (In fact, he never got there, being killed in Spain on the way).  

Some of the rank-and-file archers wore on their jackets the very distinctive arms of the Visconti family, the Dukes of Milan: a serpent swallowing a child. They explained to me that they were English mercenaries recently returned from fighting in Italy!

There was a splendid warhorse on display, and also minstrels!

Not many of us are aware of how close British history was to being changed by the battle. The rebels were, of course, defeated; Worcester and other leading rebels were executed in Shrewsbury; Percy was killed and his body chopped up and exhibited in different parts of the country, by order of the King, Henry IV. But the Prince of Wales, later Henry V,narrowly escaped death when hit in the face by an arrow. A surgeon had to devise a special instrument to extract the arrow-head. This scene was also enacted: rather well, I thought. 

The battlefield church, built after the battle, was open for the occasion. It contains the coats of arms of many of those who fought for the King

This one belongs to a branch of the Corbet family, who lived nearby. It is another example of a "canting" coat of arms, a "corbie" being a raven or crow.   

All in all, an enjoyable day!

History: Europe at the end of the 16th century

 There are a number of things to note about this map. Starting in the east, we have the massive kingdom of Poland-Lithuania, (pale blue with a red border) and to the south of it the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire (purple), the most powerful state in Europe. The Turks had overrun the Balkans and attacked as far as Vienna, and in addition ruled Syria, the Near East and Egypt. These two huge states blocked the westward expansion of Russia (pale green) for another century, after which they both began to decline.

By contrast, Germany was then a chaotic mess of more than three hundred independent states, some of which were Protestant and some Catholic. They were all nominally subject to the Holy Roman Emperor, who was always a member of the Habsburg family (whose ancestral lands are shown in dark green). Within a few years Germany was to collapse into the appalling slaughter of the Thirty Years' War.

   Italy was also disunited, with the Popes ruling the centre and Naples and Sicily to the south being part of the Spanish empire (in orange). Spain also ruled what is now Belgium, but had recently lost control of the Protestant-dominated provinces to the north (pale green) which had become the Dutch Republic. The proud Spanish Empire was entering a long period of decline. By contrast France was smaller than today, but was about to embark on the "splendid century" which would see French frontiers expand to the Rhine and the Alps, and French culture dominate Europe.

  England and Scotland were shortly to be united under King James I (James VI of Scotland). Fifty years earlier, Henry VIII had given himself the title of "King of Ireland", but as the map shows, large areas of Ireland were not yet under English control.   

Literature: Orwell and Connolly at Eton

 

The author and critic Cyril Connolly, who was a pupil at Eton in the 1920s, wrote the following musings on the school's influence at the conclusion of his book, "Enemies of Promise":-

   "Were I to to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest their development."

George Orwell, who was Connolly's contemporary and friend at Eton, reacted to this with scorn in "Inside the Whale", his long essay on writing between the wars:-

   "When you read this passage, your natural impulse is to look for the misprint. Presumably there is a "not" left out, or something. But no, not a bit of it! He means it! And what is more, he is merely speaking the truth, in an inverted fashion. 'Cultured' middle-class life has reached such a depth of softness at which a public-school education - five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery - can actually be looked back upon as an eventful period".

Connolly went on to say, "... it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual". I doubt if Orwell would have disagreed with this!

   It is not widely know that Orwell originally went from his prep school to Wellington College in Berkshire (where he is, of course, registered under his real name of Eric Blair) before transferring to Eton after a few weeks. Cyril Connolly in "Enemies of Promise" admits that, as a socialist, he feels guilty about having enjoyed life at Eton, but then reflects "If you wanted retarded development in unfriendly surroundings, you should have gone to Wellington." When I taught at Wellington, about 20 years ago, the then headmaster asked me to look up literary references to the college for his use, but I doubt if he used this one!

Recent reads: "Cakes and Ale" by Somerset Maugham

I would describe this as almost a perfect novel. Not a great deal happens, but there are enough unexpected twists to keep the reader occupied, and the character-descriptions are splendid.

   The story: The narrator is Ashenden, a name that Maugham used in others of his stories. Edward Driffield, a famous writer (loosely based on Thomas Hardy) has recently died, a biography is planned, and Ashenden is approached for information, because they had met when Ashenden was a boy and Driffield was a struggling unknown author living in the same village. 

   Ashenden reflects on this, and also on how they met again several years later in London, when he was a medical student and Driffield was at long last beginning to achieve some recognition. But it quickly become clear that the biographer (a literary hack called Alroy Kear, who is mercilessly dissected) will be producing a fundamentally dishonest book, because he intends to leave out all the most controversial aspects of Driffield's life; particularly the strange case of his first wife, Rosie, a former barmaid.

   There are marvellous depictions, in a restrained but lethal manner, of the horrors of growing up in a village riven by social snobbery, the awful people hovering on the fringes of the London cultural scene, and the ridiculous tourists visiting Driffield's last home; now preserved as a shrine to his memory. 

   All in all; a wonderful novel, which I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone.