Corey Lane 

On 7 June 1957, a bus doing 40 miles an hour in Datchet changed the life of a 17 year old boy who wanted nothing else in the world but to play Test cricket for England. Henry Blofeld was cycling to nets that morning. He never really got there, not in the way he had planned it in his head. He spent 28 days in coma. 17 operations on his skull and face. A cheekbone gone flat, a jaw broken in more than one place. The same boy who had scored 104* at Lord's for Public Schools, who Middlesex were circling, who Arthur Mailey himself sent a telegram to, woke up as someone else entirely. His cricket was finished. Blofeld tried anyway,Cambridge took him because his family had history there. He made a hundred against MCC at Lord's in 1959, which sounds romantic until you know he called himself the worst opening batsman for either university since the Boer War. Eventually he stopped trying. That is when he became Blowers. He became a voice instead of a bat. And what a voice it turned out to be! For 45 years he sat in that TMS box and refused to just call the cricket. He described the red buses passing The Oval. The cakes listeners sent in. The pigeons! He forgot names, confused Monty Panesar with Monty Python, called Yasir Hamid Yasser Arafat and survived it all because he sounded like a lovely old posh uncle who had wandered in from another century. He said "my dear old thing" because he could not remember your name and made it sound like the warmest thing in the world. But strip all that away and what is left is a boy who lost the one thing he was truly gifted at on a road in Datchet & then spent 60 years making sure nobody, himself inclyded, ever noticed the loss. He would drive past that exact spot later with his wife Valeria and laugh about it, telling her she was lucky the driver was paying attention. It tells you about the man who decided long back that if the bus could not finish him off, the memory of it certainly never would. He never played for England. But he gave lonely people, drivers, housewives, old and bored, the feeling that someone was keeping them company on a long summer afternoon. That was the real job. Happy birthday Blowers! 87 years old now and somehow still remindind rest of us that a broken jam roll can turn into the sweetest innings of all, if you just keep talking through it.