… but several years ago I had a glitch on my PC and had to contact Orange (remember them?) to fix it. The Mr Fixit was Sanjay at an Indian call centre.
After the “I’m Sanjay, may I call you Jeremy?” pleasantries he proceeded to take control of my PC as we chatted.
“Are you a cricket fan?” I naively inquired.
“Oh yes Jeremy, very much so.”
“Well,“ I said, “You are speaking to a man in Yorkshire, England, the place where Sachin Tendulkar learnt how to bat properly!”. I was, of course, joking. We continued Sachin banter until he fixed things on my PC.
Some months later I had to call Orange again and, truly, guess what … I copped for the same Sanjay and he actually remembered us ‘talking Sachin’! This time I politely said,
“There are over a billion folk in India and I cop for you again and, nice as you are, in this case at 50p per minute I’d rather you just fixed my PC!”… he was ok with that.
Another Yorkshire/Sachin moment was at the Trent Bridge Test against India in 2002 when Tendulkar came out to bat in the 2nd innings. A group of us were sitting in the Carr stand with some Indian supporters close by. We had good friendly banter with them.
When Sachin came out to bat his name on the scoreboard was shown as T’dulkar. One of our group, the late David Brown, a very dry Sheffield architect exclaimed
“I see they use his Yorkshire name!” to considerable hilarity.
Oh, and by the way, I’m sure you recall how his wicket fell …bowled by a cracking off-spin delivery by Yorkshire’s Michael Vaughan that is still on YouTube. I think that it was his first test wicket?
Jeremy Biggin
The Honorary Tyke is available from Vertical Editions https://www.verticaleditions.com/shop