Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and in the Mind

Product Information

We are treated to tasty aperitifs of both Wittgenstein and Bion, and appetising entrees into their work. We hear of Brearley’s admiration for Wittgenstein’s unsparing, iconoclastic thinking, and above all his fearless drive to go his own way. Still, the watchful and the playful converge for Brearley; he artfully stitches together a memory of the aptly named Cambridge philosopher John Wisdom, visiting Brearley at UC Irvine, delightedly admiring kites in the sky: “Look how high they are!”, and echoing Wittgenstein’s “capacity for awe and reverence”. ‘“Don’t think, look,” [Wittgenstein] wrote’…’Looking, really looking and really seeing connections, is like hearing music.” But the path of wisdom and insight is not all one kind, easy gradient. Brearley applauds the unremitting quest for deep understanding in Wittgenstein: ‘What is the use of studying philosophy if it doesn’t improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?’

Studies show that when we reflect on past challenges, we increase our self-efficacy and resilience, thus helping us make progress and overcome challenges in the future. That impression continues here in this singular memoir that eschews the traditional model of linear life narrative, boldly going where few memoirists have gone before along a meandering route, free associating about life, experiences, literature, figures in philosophy and psychoanalysis (especially Wittgenstein and Wilfred Bion), all the while identifying the meaningful threads in the warp and weft, drawing them together into a pleasing weave. Ben Stokes in the third Test against Australia at Headingley in August 2019. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: Throughout these Memoirs, there is a refreshing use of language being employed in the way of everyday expression (perhaps a nod to Wittgenstein?). Liberal use is made of abbreviations such as: it wasn’t only, I don’t, I can’t recall, I’d read, we’ve all…Perhaps it is something that Brearley absolutely insisted on. Other publishers ought to follow suit: it’s far overdue!

Philosophy didn’t hurt either. Both for what it said and what it provoked in Brearley. Wittgenstein’s image of philosophy as a way of showing the fly out of the fly-bottle is unsatisfactory, says Brearley. “It sounds as though it might be done once and for all simultaneously. Reality is more complex; our reasons for being trapped are more deep-seated, and the ways in which resistance to insight and to change occurs are multiple.”

All of those are good reasons to spend some time in self-reflection and refresh your plans for the next six months. The title of this book comes from a remark made about Brearley’s conversational manner by an American sports journalist. Brearley, he wrote, spoke “as though he had been turning over pebbles, searching for the clearest, most precise [...] opinion to plop into the pool of conversation.” Brearley’s accounts of half a life in sport followed by another half as a psychoanalyst share that quality. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?Yet for all those acclaimed man-management skills, this cerebral man, whose three-week stint as a carpenter’s mate was spent reading Anna Karenina, struggles with practicalities. “Making things with grandchildren is usually beyond me,” he laments.

Can life ever be perfect? Of course not: that isn’t the point of life, but that shouldn’t stop us learning from and enjoying the ride. Towards the end of this hugely enjoyable book, we have a pithy anecdote on Wittgenstein: ‘Shortly before he died, [he] said, “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” He also said that fear of death is a sign of a life not well lived.’ Turning Over the Pebbles is not as other memoirs. On the one hand, Brearley reveals little of himself. Who does he vote for? How does he spend his days? What of friendships and enemies? On the other, he reveals everything. We know who he is now – or, at least, in our own minds, we think we do. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. The psychoanalysis came later, after three years as a lecturer in philosophy. In retrospect, however, everything seemed to point towards a career in psychoanalysis. Brearley links his life experiences, his academic training, and his wide reading with this eventual profession. “This valuing of the examined life,” he writes, “is what most obviously links literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis.” In another place he says, “In moves towards complexity or simplicity, music and analysis can mirror each other.” Brearley lauds the fact that Stokes and McCullum don’t seem “to care too much about losing”. Would freedom from the fear of defeat be rooted in the fact that Stokes, especially, has coped with harrowing mental health problems? “Yes, I do think that has something to do with it.”Deeply thoughtful, erudite and elegantly framed, this book seamlessly blends all aspects of Brearley’s life into a single integrated narrative. With wide-ranging meditations on sport, philosophy, literature, religion, leadership, psychoanalysis, music and more, Brearley delves into his private passions and candidly examines the various shifts, conflicts and triumphs of his extraordinary life and career, both on and off the field. His philosophical detachment from his 2019 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis makes for a brief but telling episode. In lesser hands, equating his illness-induced disdain for a baked potato with Napoleon’s soldiers dying on the return from Moscow would be faintly ludicrous. In Brearley’s, it is desperately poignant. Mike Brearley and Ian Botham walk off as spectators rush on to the outfield during the sixth and final Ashes Test in August 1981. Brearley remained undefeated in 19 home Tests. Photograph: Getty Images He invokes Eliot when considering the necessarily compromised yet effective nature of one who attempts to heal out of their own injury: ‘The wounded surgeon plies the steel/ That questions the distempered part./ Beneath the bleeding hands we feel/ The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.’ We then proceed down another fascinating avenue, where Brearley fondly recollects his first reading of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, recommended by a university contemporary. As with so much else here, we soon move beyond easy appreciation, with Brearley considering the telling tensions between involvement and observation within James himself. It is highly probable that James wrestled with homoerotic urges for the whole of his life. His resolution of those urges was to become the eternal watcher, sublimating and reconciling his own and others’ challenged psychologies within the labyrinthine introspection of his (in)famously lapidary prose.

The Latin word for ‘pebbles’ gives us ‘calculus’, the study of continuous change. It may not be a coincidence that it figures in the title of the book. Why do we do this? Well, whatever your intentions were at the beginning of a year, six months later, any one of the following could have happened:If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find Us We amble out into his sun-filled garden and it does not take long for our talk to return to McCullum and Stokes, a transformed England and the delicious uncertainty of how they will perform against Australia. As the days lengthen and another English summer begins, Brearley knows there will not be many more Ashes for him to savour and so this series feels meaningful. It sounds contrived, but Brearley’s skill as a knowing – although never self-deprecating – narrator makes it work. He admits to being regarded as an “odd fish” in a testosterone-fuelled dressing room, whether taking his blokey teammate Fred Titmus to see Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (“Fred was taken with it”) or bearing the brunt of Geoffrey Boycott’s temper: “I don’t want any of your egghead intellectual stuff,” the Yorkshireman growled at him.