@ken delighted to hear from you again Ken and so sorry yo hear about your latest hospital experience.

That was certainly some Ashes series and, although I hate myself for it, I think the Aussies were good to tie the series. We lost it (well lost the chance to have won the series that is) with that controversial declaration....!

Millwall by the way .... Boro's opener on Saturday, at the Riverside 😉 

Keep posting.

Glad to see you made it back for the cricket. It's been a fantastic series. 

A personal cricket and matter of life and death story. Back in 2005 my mum was struck down with autoimmune liver failure. In early July she was moved to the Queen Elizabeth hospital to the specialist liver ward. They couldn't find out what was wrong and she was going downhill fast. She was added to the liver transplant list then bumped up to the highest priority but it looked like she wasn't going to last long enough. She was largely comatose when a viable liver was found and the transplant done. 

After a 14 hour operation then several days in ICU (including her birthday) she was moved to a high dependency heart failure ward on 6th August.

The 7th of August was the last day of the 2005 Edgebaston Ashes test. There we were, in Birmingham, in a ward full of people recovering from serious heart failure and the television in the ward was switched to the cricket.

Everything stopped. the ward round. The food trolley came round and didn't leave for an hour.

There's nothing quite like test cricket to your stress and heart rate through the roof. It's a minor miracle the whole ward survived. There were people losing tubes from places you don't want to think about.

My mum lived another 10 years after that. She finished a degree at the Open University and became a grandmother with that extra innings. 

But I'll never forget that day on the ward as it filled with staff, family members and people propped up on multiple pillows, and those final overs where people could hardly watch between their fingers.

@deleriad    Memories are a fantastic thing to have in one’s life. When you can look back and regale those special moments.

There is a saying that is so apt.   It is better to live with memories than dreams. How true.