I love the Craven week, but not the cold

 

I Googled it, the phrase “in the bleak midwinter” comes from a poem by Christina Rossetti, later set to music by Gustave Holst, and sung as a Christman Carol.

 The opening verse paints as good a word picture as any you’ll find: It’s enough to make you want to spend the day in bed, but then you remember that Midwinter’s Day – June 21 – is on Friday, and they are prediciting weather much like today (June 19): a bit nippy to start with, but with a short-sleeves 22 degree peak at 2pm.

Here's how it goes:

'In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.’ 

And three days later, on June 24, the Craven Week begins. I attended more Craven Weeks than most people – a colleague in the media once declared that I was at more them than anyone alive, although I’m quite sure that isn’t true – and while I miss those days awfully, I’m not that sad that I won’t be cold when I watch the games on my TV this year.

I remember the words of two of the great characters around the week in my early days, both long departed. Piet Kranouw reminded us as we were planning to travel one year that “two things are true – there’s no such thing as weak SE Transvaal (now Pumas) team, and that you never go to the Craven Week without a coat.” Then I remember the inimitable Zandberg Jansen speak of Bloemfontein’s “eiesoortige vrek koud” (unique deathly cold).

There are hordes of boys and girls and parents and officials in the City of Roses over the next two weeks for the SA Schools hockey IPTs, and I thought of them this morning when I turned on another panel on the gas heater.

The U18 Craven Week is at Monument this year, where it will probably be quite balmy, and I know the hospitality in Krugersdorp will be the customary country-town Craven Week warm, but I don’t know if I’ll be going there – the prospect of two hours in the traffic each day on Ontdekkers Road or Hendrick Potgieter (take your pick) is as bleak as that winter’s day that Rossetti so brilliantly describes.

Still, the Craven Week is one of the very best in the year, I will miss it.