``Cricket match cancelled due to rain'': that's the sort of non-headline which local papers up and down the land are forced to extend into half-page stories. A pretty forlorn task to be sure -- after all, what can one say about something that didn't happen?
Maybe some sort of link to the futile nature of the human condition, with a cruel universe washing away even the most harmless of pleasures in a Saturday afternoon downpour? Or possibly a mood piece suggestive of twenty-two grown men thrown back into childhood afternoons trapped inside, the trickles of water down the living-room window cross-fading into the bars of a prison cell.
Or maybe the story lies in what activites filled the six-hour vacuum left by the game that wasn't. For one of our number it was, in large part, taken up by an inadvertant country drive: Rod made it all the way from north Cambridgeshire to Helions Bumpstead (or ``Hell Bum'', as I'd intended to call it) before finding out the match had been called off.
And then, in a piece of reflexive irony, just as the story suddenly finds its theme -- we're back at the futility of the human condition again -- it seems to have run its course: what's left after we have spend a few minutes empathising with Rod's pointless two-hour journey trying to get the car-radio to lock onto X-FM?
The answer is the only one that any self-indulgent writer could give: to make the descent from an offer of empathy to a demand for sympathy. Enough time trying to bring my fellow human's pain into sharp relief: now feel mine! Oh sure, poor Rod driving all that way, but what's two hours in a comfortable car bopping along to . . . Baby One More Time when compared to a forty-hour odyssey that encompassed two continents, four cities, four modes of transport, six timezones, thirteen hours in various airport lounges, some internet-stalking by a crazy cat-lover, and a dinner of M&Ms in a soulless hotel room in North Carolina?
I'll tell you about it some other time, but for the moment I'll leave with the thought that there's always a story hiding in there somewhere.