San Francisco Sports

Although my job is to be 'Executive Assistant' to the CEO I also took on recruitment fairly early on and so now could legitimately call myself a part-time recruiter. My sister does this as a profession and was once bought a brand new Mulberry handbag by one of the recruitment companies she worked with. I hadn't expected to be quite so handsomely courted but I did find myself offered tickets to the baseball last week, and so along I went.

AT&T Park is just around the corner from where we lived when we first moved here and the crowds on match days (which are about 4 days every fortnight) are something every native San Franciscan learns to avoid while still slurping mother's milk. For this match the SF Giants were playing the NY Mets and there is something of a historical rivalry. It was still very friendly though and I found myself in a sunlit stadium just in time for the game.

The seats were very good and I watched, bemused, as all the pre-match preamble went on. There were bagpipes. There was the presentation of two of those ginormous cheques to charities. There was a big cheer for Firefighters. And then a man from a local church came out and sang the National Anthem. Now this was none of your British operatic warbling - it was more like a soulful baptist sort of thing - and the crowd all stood up and duly assumed the position.

Look at all those arms on chests. Amazing. I had always thought it was a Hollywood thing or possibly something WWE promoted to get people to buy Jack Swagger's t-shirt.

But no, they actually do stand there with their hand on their heart. Amazing. Anyway, after that they suddenly started to "play ball" and off we went.

It was at this point that I began to wish I had brought an American with me. Baseball, it seems, is a lot like teenagers and television. They like to be in front of it, but they're more likely to be looking at their phones or talking to a friend than watching what is going on. I had NO idea at all about what was happening. I thought the sides swapped when three people went out. But I couldn't spot people going out and it seemed like they were changing sides every couple of minutes on a collective whim. In fact it was a lot like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party where they all had to randomly move to a new place at the table when the butter knife got crumbs on.

I stuck it out for half an hour but then politely made my farewells. I was the richer in terms of experience and more importantly, from a handbag point of view, to the sum of one black hoodie with the company that invited me in small letters on the front and "San Francisco" written large on the back. Printed though, not machine embroidered. Machine embroidered freebies are my goal for the next rung up the recruitment ladder that has that Mulberry handbag waiting for me at the top.