Ethiopian delights and Colombo evenings
What's a World Cup tour writer's life like? All about recording podcasts in cemeteries and being mistaken for a taxi driver, of course
People watch the World Cup in Durham's Market Square • Andrew Fidel Fernando/ESPNcricinfo Ltd
Look, I don't remember what happened on June 23. I think this was when I made my way back to London after covering Afghanistan v India in Southampton the previous day. I'm sure it was a perfectly acceptable day. I probably had a coffee at Southampton station, took a train to London, checked into a tiny hotel room (all London hotel rooms are tiny), wrote a story, and possibly recorded a podcast.
The weather in the UK has been terrible for almost an entire month. It's been so gloomy in Southampton and Bristol and Cardiff and London that all through the day, it seems like 5pm in Colombo. Then, suddenly, the skies open up at 7:30pm and the sun breaks through, and it feels like 2pm in Colombo. Coming from the tropics, this feels highly disorienting.
I've come to realise a few things after a few days in Newcastle. Many people here are in some state of inebriation right through the weekend. (If you were to take a drink every time you saw a stag or hens' party, you might be as drunk as they are, which is to say nearly unconscious.)
"I've got ten miles to travel, but I don't have enough for the bus fare." So says a seemingly one-legged dude on crutches near the beautiful Millennium Bridge between Gateshead and Newcastle. I give him a few pounds on my way to the supermarket, but when I pass him again, I notice that he clearly has both legs, and that he has just tucked one up behind the other in baggy sweatpants, to create an illusion.
Lumley Castle, near the Chester-le-Street ground, is famously haunted - Shane Watson was so spooked by ghosts there that Darren Gough made fun of him during an Ashes Test. I don't make it to the castle, but Sharda Ugra and I nevertheless find what is apparently one of the oldest haunted pubs in England, in Durham's beautiful town. The ghosts there don't jump out at you from corners, nor do they haunt your dreams. But I'm certain they withdraw more from your credit card than you remember spending.
Still in Newcastle, colleague Sidharth Monga and I come upon a tiny Ethiopian restaurant that serves delicious, lightly spiced vegetable curries and rich meat dishes on rolls of mildly sour injera bread. With Ethiopian pop music videos playing on a TV in the corner of the room, and the walls decked out with African art, you are properly transported out of Newcastle for the duration of your meal. We eat here twice over the course of the week, and are the only non-Africans in the joint both times. Instagrammers haven't got here yet.
Monga and I have been asked to do a podcast together while we are in Newcastle, but typically, we've left it to the last day of our stay. I wake up late in the morning, hoping to record my bit in the apartment I am staying at, but discover to my horror that the cleaners have already got to work and are yelling at me to get out - the check-out time having apparently been an obscenely early 9:30am.
I am in Leeds for the third time in my life, the other two trips having been endlessly eventful. In 2014, Sri Lanka famously won a Test here. Another time, the people staying in the hotel room next to mine repeatedly had the loudest sex in history, driving me to the hotel lobby several times during my stay. This visit to Leeds is different. I'm on the designated "quiet floor" of my hotel. Sri Lanka predictably lose their match to India. It's almost boring.
The same can't be said of my first night ever in Manchester. I've linked up with Monga again, and following another late Ethiopian dinner, we decide to have a drink at a bar before we head back to our apartment. Almost as soon as we sit down with our drinks, a man of middling years approaches us.
It's my last day of proper cricket coverage for this World Cup. Often last days of tours are tinged with sadness. You don't know when you will see certain friends from South Africa or India or England or Bangladesh again, because people change jobs, or publications decide not to send journalists on tours.
Andrew Fidel Fernando is ESPNcricinfo's Sri Lanka correspondent. @afidelf