For years my line in the sand for either starting or stopping something I didn't wish to was "I'll do it when Richie Benaud retires".
In other words, never. Now I will have to learn how to cook, quit drinking and keep a budget in this lifetime because the great man is retiring.
I say "great man" because one has to about someone that senior and insufferably knowledgable. Annoying though his nasal observations could be, Richie contributed immensely to the national experience of cricket for several generations.
It was he who came out with the pearlers "Captaincy is 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent skill but don't try it without the 10 per cent" and "A cricket ground is a flat piece of earth with some buildings around it". His earnestness meant that no-one ribbed him when he opined, "The slow-motion replay doesn't show how fast the ball is really going."
Richie was the grumpy old man of cricket, an unlikely symbol of summer. He will be missed, but I'm glad he's going. Richie Benaud had come to represent for me the Beige Brigade - that stuffy society of set-in-their-ways seniors who think that people lose quality with each generation, and that everything worthwhile has been invented.
The Beige Brigade find young people impertinent, their ideas frivolous. "Long-haired louts" and "brazen hussies" are their favourite phrases. The stolen generation wasn't an honest mistake; it never occurred.
Richie wasn't necessarily a card-carrying member of the Beige Brigade, nor are the vast majority of senior citizens, but one did catch a hint of superciliousness in Benaud's voice, especially when he spoke of modifications to the game, new technology and hot-headed young players.
There was never any doubt Richie was born in the Great Depression.
Speaking of which, the current "depression", as many are calling it, is a tad disappointing. There's the dull economic conjecture about whether we are in a recession, a depression or, as Richie might have said, a major form slump.
Then there's the lack of poetry, by which I mean the dearth of artistic expression traditionally borne of abject suffering. The Great Depression made people mad as hell. They wrote books, painted political murals, penned movie scripts and composed sweeping musical scores.
"If it's true that adversity and hardship can bring out creativity, then the Great Depression was one of the great creative periods of our time," literature academic Miles Orvell noted last year.
Despair, poverty, corruption and industrial strife inspired John Steinbeck to write The Grapes of Wrath; George and Ira Gershwin to Strike Up The Band and Irving Berlin to plead God bless America. Hollywood went into overdrive to cheer up "depressed" audiences, parading a "Golden Age" of matinee idols including Bette Davis, Clark Gable and Shirley Temple. It was the Great Depression that put magic in the toes of Fred and Ginger.
But what of today? What of our diabolical global financial crisis? Where is the creativity hatched in the gloom? I see precious little on at the movies, nothing world-changing at the bookshop, and only rap-crap playing on the radio.
Oh God. I think I've become Richie Benaud.
Carrie Cox is a journalist, author and mother who one day hopes to finish a cup of coffee while it's still hot.
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