Healing by putting your bat out

Something quite unusual happened earlier this week. Running a few errands I went into a picture-framing shop that was empty save for the proprietor. Upon looking up and registering my face, he seemed to abandon his previous train of thought and became suddenly animated.

"Mate," he said incredulously, "how about poor Phil Hughes?" That gambit started a half-hour conversation about Hughes, about cricket, about a lot of awful things, and also about some uplifting things. This guy had no inhibitions about telling me, a complete stranger, how the week had made him feel.

I'd actually walked in there in a bit of a zombified state, having not slept much for a few days prior, so it wasn't until I went to pay that it finally dawned on me that I hadn't been the target of some scattergun emotional purge. He'd said all of this stuff to me because he'd been framing a cricket photo for me. It wasn't the last thing I completely forgot in the last week, including filing this blog post.

In truth, nothing else has really seemed worthy of worrying about this week. I've wondered how many other people have felt like me, aimlessly bumbling their way through work and not getting much done.

I also wonder whether that feeling could carry on through the summer - that India might actually beat the emotionally wracked Australians and that neither they nor the rest of us will particularly mind. An Aussie win would probably be a nice tribute, but really, who actually cares? Just over a week ago I remember feeling quite strongly about Michael Clarke's deteriorating relationship with Cricket Australia. I don't think I could muster a shrug of the shoulders at the moment.

The day after Hughes died, I went down to the shops and bought all of the newspapers, something I haven't done for years but had felt would be some kind of old-fashioned comfort. It wasn't, but the woman behind the counter wanted to talk about Phillip Hughes. She wasn't a big cricket fan, she said, but this had rocked her. I told her I knew how she felt.

The days after that were a bit different though and that was because of a Sydney man named Paul Taylor, who put his cricket bat outside, took a photo of it and told the rest of the world to do the same. You all know the rest of the story but I think this guy deserves acknowledgement for starting something that was so positive and healing for a lot of us and changed the last week into a celebration.

It's awful that it took the death of a brilliant young man to awaken the feelings that many have expressed in the past week, but the love-in from which the cricket community benefited was heartening and I'm sure helped many more than me through a bewildering period.

Beyond the tribute to Hughes and the sense of goodwill for cricket that "put out your bats" achieved, I wonder what effect the literal act of pulling out and holding a bat again had on those of us who have had them stashed away gathering dust for too long.

As I put a few of my old faithfuls out I held each one of them in turn and remembered some of the games in which I'd used them, and rued that they perhaps hadn't been put to better use. I immediately arranged with a friend to have a net this week, and find myself longing for the sensation of cracking one straight out of the sweet spot.

Maybe I won't middle a single ball, but I can't say it's likely to bother me at all.