Bereft of anything whatsoever conceivably recognisable as inspiration, I am left literarily in the bitter cold of the dark outside.

Stark naked and shrivelling both inside and out, exiled in the suburbs of the nether regions of human imagination with nothing to clothe myself but Terry’s dispiriting list of PSM nominations as food.

This Whatsappp’d inventory, a sorry digital parasite narrowly clinging to its radio wave with dirty fingernails, a hollow plot senselessly pinged over 3 mobile’s countryside-scarring steels spires.

I look down at it and grimace.

There it is, a flimsy, barely explanatory tally of empty, meaningless designations thumbed out on an ancient tech sponge and served up in the guise of ‘help’, to maintain what little modesty the chosen candidate might have left parked within this sorry existence.

There it is, the only pitfuly option from which to hopelessly squeeze out some kind of workable prose. Digging hard into the frozen earth in search of something, however frail, to wearily push up front and somehow entertain its patrons.

Stress overwhelms in a mighty wave crashing across the vacuum, a pathetic ageing forehead dripping moistureless sweat, pooling below, far from the vicinity of anything representing a Mighty Greys match report.

I look down at it and grimace. The list begins to look like an actual sponge. I pinch the clammy forefinger and thumb of my wit hard into it expecting it to give and return to shape as sponges do. It doesn’t do that. It offers nothing.

A big bit falls off it into the sweat puddle and comes to rest near a whitening dog turd deposited on artistry’s pavement, unelegantly disgarded by some scum bag who thinks their dog has a right to smear it’s arse tubes anywhere it likes. Not on my match report. If it was one…

I look down at it and grimace. It’s not a list at all. It’s not even a sponge. It’s barely a thing. It’s a dehydrated crumbling blob-shaped cloud of despondency and disappointment, as far away from a sponge as is possible to be, in fact, no capacity whatsoever for anything bar its almost-existence. 

Barely maintaining a nauseous yellowy hue, its an arid chunk of space-filler incapable of serving its one and only inconceivably braindead, embarrasingly simplistic purpose. No sponge here. Its right to sluice is long-since departed, allowing both the liquid of its creativity – and its actual self – in the form of purposeless ochre dust – not even with mass enough to make like sand to the floor – to instead diffuse upward into the air, merely a weightless irritant for those susceptible to oesophagal allergies. It doesn’t even warrant a name.

How I have two, I am unsure. Hat. Rick.

I survery this social media’d event horizon, glaring back at me, aloof, as if an empty sagging washing line housing nothing more than rope-scum, dampening events as it sucks them all unwillingly into its dull, personality-less well of fear, hate and paranoia.

All of its sorry entries slowly greening before my eyes, infected amidst the porridge-grey downers that make up its surroundings, a forgotten, dripping garden devoid of sun, with little light at all, a broken mossy sprinkler, a slimy hose, leagues of tearful slugs, and nothing at all in its future capable of drying anything to wearability.

It makes me sick. I spit on my fingers for typing it as they type it. Thanks for nothing Terry.

No.1. ‘Hat Rick’s drive to boundary’ – Lost in its barely recallable gloom, it remains nothing more than a passing memory of some fortuitous slashing personification of hope delivered atop its fake green plastic springboard.

No.2 ‘Hatrick’s catch’ – The godforsaken moment that led me to this bottomless well of nothingness and nausea. I cast it off into the ether as if an odd hardened sock with a gaping hole torn into it, a demi-garment produced in a shade so indesribably colourless it hurts my soul.

No.3 ‘Terry classical cover drive’ – I briefly grit my teeth off centre, making a gross sound in my head and wasting a little bit more of my sorry life to consider why the word ‘classical’ was added on Tel’s list to Tel’s cover drive and not to mine. Was it Tel’s own hubristic addition I wonder to myself? Or was it offered in the initial nomination? Perhaps it was added to the nomination because it followed a nomination of a similar shot that made the rope, when it did not. Perhaps it was tagged on, nothing more than a pity adjective in an aresnal of sleaze, coughed up out of a beery, sloppy mouth crammed with half-cut opinions and desperately pushing against its pointlessness. My heart barely beats at its bringdown. I can only just muster embers of strength to move on.

I drag myself bleeding by my index fingernail along the dirty, infected floor of this thing towards…

No.4. ‘Ben not realising the batsman hadn’t changed’ – I assume this means something but stop caring instantly, wishing it had never been read by my precious drying blinkers, or processed by my brain. I slam back down to the uncompromising sludge of the report deck.

No.5 ‘Terry non-dom quip’. I cough it up out loud and hold back the puke. I was there for this one. I nominated it. No one laughed. Depression fingered my soul like a bald, horny, moneyed Grandma clutching hysterically at the fearful innnocence of her Saturday poolboy, a half-rotten mole dislodging itself from her forefinger onto his crisp, salmon-pink pineappple-logoed bermuda short strings – a present from his mum.

I am now Dr Awkward. The same both ways round. Sick and green, I’ve left the station.

No.6… ‘Dom cut for 6’. I don’t even read this, I just see a ghastly, gaping synthetic hole. My cries of ‘MAKE IT STOP’ echo back at me, laughing in my face, like pack upon pack of angry gangs poking rusty shanks in my ribs and clawing at my wallet in the decaying alleyway of experience.

No.7: ‘Ian being ready to bat one pad no gloves’. I feel yet another wave of full-on biliousness and wretch into the living room air in front of my kids. They scowl at me with agitated blackened eyes, before joining in the spineless chorus of dry sicking, grotesque raven-like hacking – unproductive, agonising. EO’s fungal stupidity plain for all to see. All of us reduced toi month-old bags of sick hanging in the muculent sauna of reality. Thank god I didn’t see it.

No.7: ‘Biff’s 3rd 4 in a row’ It’s almost jovial in its eagerness. I despise it’s repetition, it’s positivity duplicated to triple strength. Three deliveries miles wide, outside off, put away to the boundary, each positing a fist bump of sickening smugness. None of them resonating beyond a dropped McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish that’s somehow become lodged behind a rotting road sign on the peripheries of a nameless suburb, dripping pink strawberry milkshake onto an old, disgarded – losing – scratchcard. Forgotten forever, and then some, left to ungracefully rot glacially over the next 34,687 years unseen by anyone, a lost ecosystem as meaningless as gnat excrement that’s been slimed over on a sodden Monday by a wounded slug that was unaware it was about to be trodden on by a three-legged stray dog, itself unknowingly riddled with some uncared-about disease, one of it’s few remaining paws clumsily pinned in the grave. Dead dog walking.

No.8: ‘Robbie yorking Paul the left hander’. Smut.

No. 9: ‘Robbie’s 2nd clean bowled’. Big wow.

No.10: ‘Terry full toss pull’. Gag.

No.11: ‘Robbie wibbly wobbly celebration’. Heave.

No.12: ‘Dunc off drive down hill’. Whatever.

No.13: ‘Alex catch’. No.