Some times you just have to lay your head back and... LOL!

No, that is not 'loll', meaning "To move, stand, or recline in an indolent or relaxed manner" or "To let hang from the mouth, as the tongue."

No, I mean "Laugh Out Loud" -- the LOL of email.

In this very specific case, I laughed out loud mid-afternoon today when I heard the score in cricket match series for "The Ashes" 2006-07 series (Australia v England).

I know that a game that goes 5 days is not something that a non- British Commonwealth person can even conceive of: It just "does not compute".

Now, today was a day when my brother-in-law, one of his sons, and his soon-to-be son-in-law, attended the match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and saw the Australian side slide into partial ignominy in the morning by losing 5 batsmen in fairly quick succession -- to be 5 out for 84 runs -- then watch a cracking fight-back by two batsmen to get between them three times that number of runs by late in the day's play, and so rub the nose of the England team in their season-long seeming lack of glory.

Today, I had regular updates from my wife as I did other things around the house; but, equally, I was glued to the TV and radio coverage at other times.

There is something about listening to a game played out over days. You can leave the media coverage for a minute, or a day, and the drama seems just as real: A crucial few minutes like in the afternoon today when two Australian batsmen were 'out' in quick succession after a rousing day of free run-scoring; or, a 'lost' day such as 15 December (second day of the 3rd Test) when it was a day of "grinding" through the bowling and batting before the flashing days that followed.

For a humorous poem about Australian cricket, see the Thomas E Spencer poem, which a friend of mine can recite from memory! (along with some other epic Aussie poems.)

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Peter