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#273 Hazel Druett You’ve Got Your Work Cut Out there Miss!

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I turn round, and there are four workmen watching me and they said ‘Carry on Miss. We’re enjoying this!’, and I said I bet you are.

Hazel Druett

I was doing cricket one day with my group of kids. Nearby were the goalposts and every year the council would come to take them down and put them up and this day they’d come to take them down. I’m talking to my group of kids and explaining to them all how to play cricket and I turn round, and there are four workmen watching me and they said ‘Carry on Miss. We’re enjoying this!’, and I said I bet you are. There’s me trying to teach a group of seven-year-olds who have never played cricket before how to play And I’m showing them these are the stumps and this is the bat and these are the bails and you have to bowl the ball and whack the ball away and one girl is holding the bat up in the air and I said ‘No, no you hold it down like this to protect your wicket. Get your elbow up and you’re going to whack the ball like that. So remember, put the bat down.’ So she just lay it down on the floor! And the workmen said ‘You’ve got your work cut out there Miss!’

Precis

The beauty of being in a company of older performers is the kaleidoscopic range of real-life experiences that they bring to the table. These experiences cover everything from the vivid and strange world of childhood, to the unexpected late awakenings of old age. Take our newest batch of anecdotes, for example. These new stories are delightfully diverse: from the earthly, sensual joy of baking bread, to the cosmic dreams of outer space; from an unnerving encounter with a poltergeist, to the risqué glories of adult pleasure products and burlesque. Running as a rich theme throughout, is the possibility of love, and the simple wonder of human connection. As one writer tells us, in her story of funeral rites and flirting, “Amidst death, life goes on”, and indeed it does, delightfully so.