Being the first session on the first day of Atomou’s three day test.

Ahhhhh , the Ashes! THE Ashes! THE reason for holding our collective breath all year until this time – every year! An ever-renewing celebration of death!

Now, NOW, we’re getting into the serious stuff. The true adoration of ashes! No longer the celebration of the life of an entertainer who died “youngish” but something far more important! This is a celebration that affects the very valves of Oz’ thumping heart!

Kerrrthump! Kerrrrthump! Hear that? That’s not the sound of the bat hitting the little red stone; no, it is the sound of every aussie’s heart every time they hear the word “ashes” and every time the aussie warriors come out of their bunkers to do battle with those pommie bastards! These valves, the valves of their belligerent hearts – they open and they shut and in their opening and in their shutting, they spurt out ever thicker venom, ever more poisonous hatred for THOSE horrible creatures who brought us down here, down to the antipodes, to Oz, an act they did not for tourism and entertainment purposes but as a form of vile punishment. Horrendous punishment for diminutive crimes. A crust of bread tucked under the apron of a starving woman with a dosen starving fledglings!

I ask you!

Vengeance, then is all the more urgent and victory over THOSE Pommie Bastards is always ever sweeter!

The hatred is so powerful all the more because it so undeniably valid. The history between our nation and THEIRS is clogged with THEIR disdain and hatred for US! Us, the real men! Us, the real women! Us, the pioneers of a race of mortals who… in turn will themselves behave just like those pommie bastards (but let’s not allow real history get in the way of a good myth here, ey?)

“Pommie Bastards,” we yell, as we throw our plastic cups full of sparkling Moet at them, our enemy! Pommie Bastards, they shout at the Barmy Army, the Pommie cheer squad, who must, by law, sit on the benches across the opposite side of the field.

The cricket played for the urn is not cricket. It is a brutal war that echoes its mother war, the ten-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans!

There’s a reason why we call Warnie a hero and it isn’t his prowess on the Garfield of cricket, formidable though that might be. No it is because of the first three letters of his name for one and then, for added grunt, the letter following them. War! Warn! The stuff that myths are made of!

But ashes are tricky things!

When real, they are the end matter of all mortal and creatures and things. But they don’t have to be real. They can be imaginary, symbolic, mysterious, mythological.

In fact, so far as the cricket trophy is concerned, they are pure myth and, so far as myths go, it is an uninteresting myth, at that! A bloody and gruesome rivalry over a mere myth, a nothing! Or over something that may or may not exist inside a funereal jug! “Bah… humbug!” as the good doc, on Unleashed once remarked.

Orestes’ ashes, though! Ah, there’s a myth! A real myth, so far as myths go. A myth and a half! It’s a myth full of passion, a myth of two brutal murders, of filial love and filial hatred, of a tear-jerking recognition scene, of a shocking scene where a mother pleads with her son for her life. A myth in which the unsteady and ever-altering will of the gods plays havoc with the lives of a house. The whole house, from its first seed to its last………………