Commentators

An artefact of running a blog that is never apparent to most readers is the phenomenon of visitors commenting on old posts. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it is a common occurrence, and it always brings me up short.

To me, looking at my old posts are an indulgent excavation, too frequently a surprise for me to feel entirely comfortable about the state of my memory, but at least quite commonly a pleasant surprise. For the most part, any sentimental journeys I make into the archives are prompted by someone wandering past and dropping in a comment on some (to me) long-forgotten post. It’s always nice to be reminded that, once written, the words are not dead, even if they seem irretrievably distant from me-now. To whoever reads something you’ve written for the first time, the dialogue is taking place now, this very alive moment.

And so we get the curious encounter of some passing web traveller now with the ghost of me two years ago. Sometimes, as in this exchange on stone-sucking, it’s a Note & Query that can happily take place over the span of years. Sometimes, as in this shared journey back to beginnings, returning to the past feels very appropriate.

On other occasions, as with this ongoing and increasingly Byzantine thread on academic conferences spam, I feel as though it would be rude of me to step back in with my casual opinion when so many people feel so much more strongly about than me.

Best of the lot, the comment that asks or offers no explanation, but quickly sketches a picture of a place where, frankly, I’m very happy not to be.

Leaning

Why is it that when you’re struggling to retain balance, say, almost pitching off the log you’re using to cross a small brook that’s tumbling off the moors, you lean the wrong way? Imagine slipping to the left: you push your body weight out to the right. But this is your hips and your trunk. Your head and shoulders almost inevitably end up canted to the left, that is, the way you’re falling. More logically, you would make a simple pivot at the hips, angling your whole upper body away from the direction of fall.

I supposed that it must be more to do with the need for the head to feel as though it’s vertical, but this is completely wrong: the head ends up at a more severe angle than otherwise. I think it must be two things.

First, it’s about keeping your weight above your feet, reducing the likelihood of trying to maintain an impossible angle and slipping off entirely.

Second, once you lean your whole trunk over, you can’t correct: you’re committed, and you might just as likely overcompensate and fall over the other way. With hips out one side and head the other, you can perform that recognisable finessing wobble until you’ve recovered fully.

Me, I cheated. The dog, on a retractable lead, had already crossed, and was ahead and to my right. Fixing the lead and giving a sharp tug pulled me back upright and on over the bridge. Good dog, as I effused afterwards, to her bewilderment.

The sound of rubber on plastic

Father and son time in the park yesterday was enlivened by the overwhelming amount of play going on everywhere. Every twenty yards a little kickabout was going on, underneath a sky bright with frisbees and tennis balls. A raucous scratch game of rounders (Peckham rules, which is to say very few that I could make out) descended into fits of laughter every couple of minutes as someone slipped, dropped or ran in circles.

Most notably, from where we were sitting, I could see half a dozen small groups playing cricket, an obvious carryover from last year’s Ashes. A group of under tens played the unpredictable bounce with steely concentration. A dad bowled endless long hops to his straight-driving son. If we had been looking to fill out all the stereotypes, there would have been an asian father slowly unveiling the mysteries of spin to his sons. They were, in fact, off to my right, under a chestnut tree.

The only thing I couldn’t spot was a Flintoff Flame. The bats and balls were all cheap and cheerful, and I’m very glad.

Those toyboxes

The railway arches at Peckham Rye, overlooked by the waiting trains, are like huge spilled toyboxes. The trick of perspective is currently reinforced by the massive spotlights waiting outside an exhibition space: they look identical to the plug-in spots used in recessed domestic lighting, only magnified ten times.

Once your eyes adjust to this, you can see that the yard handling steel girders is no more than an unpacked box of Meccano. Looking down, everything else is stacks of building bricks, string, more and more toyboxes.

Suddenly I can’t remember which way round it works: are our toyboxes enthusiastic microcosms of the grown-up world, or are our factories and shops in the end wistful recreations of those idealised ones of our childhood?

Awards season

It’s not just the Weiszs, Johanssons and Lauries of the world that are getting excited about the prospect of reaping a few awards this week. This weekend is the third annual awards for my football (it isn’t a club, not really a team either, so it’s just “the football”).

This means my first evening out since the household increased in size about five months ago, to a local pub and then a meal. Weekly subs of one pound sterling mean that, after the costs of buying a new ball and pump every six months, bibs and corner flags (a bridge too far, some thought), we have enough in the kitty to stand everyone an annual slap up meal.

It would be unfair to suggest that a free meal is anyone’s prime incentive for playing, but it is noticeable that a couple of almost-forgotten players have crept out of the woodwork since Christmas, just in time for inclusion. Generously, we feign to believe that this is their New Year’s health kick in action, and not the siren call of a hot and heavily subsidised biryani.

One charming tradition of the awards themselves is that, in the tradition of kindly schools everywhere, there is a prize for everyone. The entertainment comes in constructing categories for achieving this. In the past, we’ve had the honest appraisal (”Most Improved Player”), the corporate vagueness special (”Best All-round contribution”), the award for Effort (”Most Appearances” and “Most likely to be on time”). The year I (jointly) won “Most likely to pick balanced teams” was a personal high-point.

More fruitful, in general, are the slightly (or significantly) sarcastic categories (”Most likely to be late”, “Most entertaining goalkeeper”), sliding towards the downright pointed (”Most likely to cause an injury”, “Most likely to cry on the pitch”, “Most likely to cause an argument”, “Biggest risk to own defence”).

I’ve written most of this year’s awards, and it seemed like a good idea to use the shining examples of our modern day professional footballers to give the categories an extra incentive. Some examples:

The Rio Ferdinand award for forgetfulness
The Emile Heskey award for balance in front of goal
The Little Mickey Owen award for goalhanging
The Alan Smith award for leg-nibbling
The Craig Bellamy award for on-pitch gobbiness
The Teddy Sheringham veteran’s award (although none of the current players are quite of Mr Sheringham’s vintage)

Normally I’d be aiming for the “Best Winger” award, on the basis that I can occasionally cross the ball left-footed, which my colleagues regard as some kind of voodoo, but I understand is due to my actually being left-footed. Unfortunately, I forgot to put in a winger category, so my hopes this year rest mainly in the Emile Heskey and the Steven Gerrard (for defence-splitting passes, of which I helpfully unveiled a couple for the benefit of the voting constituency last week). I’m only grateful that there’s no Lawrence Dallaglio award for “best use of rugby-style handoffs”, for which I retain an unfortunate and confused aptitude. Wish me luck!

Oily noog

Some miniature delights.

The author of the hoax Betjeman letter mentioned below has identified himself, and to nobody’s great surprise, it was rival biographer Bevis Hillier. A literary banker if ever there was.

Football, which I don’t talk about much, but do follow, rarely offers up memorable lines. Savour then this from France manager Raymond Domenech on the increasingly irritating Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho:

He is the best coach in the world, he said so himself.

Finally, from Jared Diamond’s enthralling Guns, Germs and Steel, which for 378 pages has been patiently scientific and relentlessly prosaic, this moment of inadvertantly Carollian verse:

Most [plants domesticated in the Sohel zone of northern Africa] are still grown mainly just in Ethiopia and remain unknown to Amercians - including Ethiopia’s narcotic chat, its banana-like ensete, its oily noog

The oily noog goes right on the list of things that I must see.

Scribal errors

The little boy’s grandma returned from Poland having scoured the place for a suitable toy to bring back with her. I’m told that everything was cheap plastic ‘western’ tat.

In the end she got hold of some properish wooden Russian dolls, which on closer inspection turn out to be the seven dwarves (claimed by the region around Krakow as their own). Someone has carefully painted on the names of Disney’s seven dwarves near the bases. Gloriously, however, these names seem to have evolved as they have been handed down from doll-painter to doll-painter’s apprentice, so the set now reads:

[blank]
Sleepy
Grimpy
Basheol
Happy
Sneezy
Dog

Hurrah, my boys, we're homeward bound

I have reached that stage of my life when it becomes absolutely apparent that I do not know enough sea shanties. It’s not good enough to know words to just “Dance to thee daddy”, “Homeward bound” and “Blow the man down” when there’s an overflowing squeeze-box of songs that would bring the salt water to any man’s eye.

Hurrah then for collectors of sea shanties and other songs of the sea. Aside from raising the question of why I should have even a vestigial memory ofAbdul Abulbul Amir (and his foe, Ivan Skavinsky Skavar), every tune listed here contains either a shiver of excitement or a glimpse of the bottomless sadness that only the sea can produce in a man.

Due to the consistency of the trade winds, the destination of the ship would have a large impact on the type of shanty being sung. Joyous outward-bound songs such as Rio Grande would even be associated with a specific action (in this case, turning the capstan, which raised the anchor):

An’ we’re bound for the Rio Grande,
Then away, bullies, away!
Away for Rio!
Sing fare-ye-well, me Liverpool gels,
An’ we’re bound for the Rio Grande!

Most of the shanties, of course, are treasure chests of heartbreak and longing. Who could not tremble at the siren call of Van Diemen’s Land?

Come, all you gallant poachers,
That ramble free from care,
That walk out of a moonlight night,
With your dog, your gun, and snare;
Where the lusty hare and pheasant
You have at your command,
Not thinking that your last career
Is on Van Diemen’s Land

Finally, Lord Franklin, a song not a shanty, but one of the very few songs guaranteed to make me shed a tear, as much for its comradeliness as its equally noble and foolish subject. It also holds perhaps the most plaintive opening stanza I know, particularly when heard in Bert Jansch’s unforgivably lovely version:

We were homeward bound one night on the deep
Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep
I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew

Enigmas and keepers

What Christmas present to get for the spy who has everything? Why, anEnigma machine of course. [Actually, a Nema machine, the Swiss knock-off, but still. Contents may settle in transit.]

Elsewhere, I am clearly going to have to start a ‘goalkeepers’ category, if only to properly capture this delicious winter anecdote about the goalkeeper booked for building a snowman.

Soap, soap, soap

“Just remember this one golden rule,” he said. “It’s all soap opera. They may say its a classic serial, they may call it a cutting-edge drama, they may bill it as cops, they may set it in deep space, but actually it’s all just soap, soap, soap.”

Mark Ravenhill’s lament over the sudsing up of contemporary television drama is, to my sorrow, very right. He offers the words of a bored scriptwriter annoyed that “what they really want is a little half-hour or 50-minute morality play”.

Ravenhill even offers a few of the commandments of the new soap morality: “Be true to yourself”; “talk about your feelings”; “learn to forgive and move on”; “accept difference”; and “you’re still family even after the murder/arson/substance abuse”. He’s right, though he might add that emotional displays are more virtuous than stoicism.

What I find interesting is that Ravenhill, a playwright himself, identifies these values as a perniciously homogenous liberal orthodoxy. The worst thing here, by far, is that lack of variety, the lack of dissent, the lack of angry engagement with a world. This is a morality of withdrawal from the larger world, a focus instead on the self-aggrandising individualism of the post-sixties middle classes.

And yet, what I see here is not in fact an echo chamber for the incorrigibly empty self-interested, the reverberating clamour of which drowns out legitimate, different voices. No, what leaps out at me is that this ultra-liberal porridge is a perfect fit for the requirements of soap, of any kind of regular drama.

Let’s look at those commandments again.

“Be true to yourself”: drama not only needs strong and readily identifiable (even caricatured) characters, it needs characters who will pursue their beliefs beyond the point of reasonable disagreement, necessarily causing conflict.

“Talk about your feelings”: Television drama is based on talk, no two ways about it. Inarticulate, reticent or inexpressive characters need not apply. I remember well leaving Mike Leigh’s (excellent, emotionally articulate, Palme d’Or winning, and very soapy) film “Secrets & Lies” thinking that all it lacked was Bob Hoskins popping up at the end telling us, on behalf of BT, that “it’s good to talk”. Leigh, a proper artist, managed to do this with a story essentially about characters who were variously bad at talking. Soaps and TV dramas cannot afford such subtlety with the basic mechanisms of the genre. The least of the cast must be gabbier than the most annoying person you ever sat next to on the train.

“Learn to forgive and move on”: You can’t, as you would in real life, endlessly rehash the same problems and complaints in minutely differentiated forms over the course of weeks, months, years. You have half an hour or 50 minutes at most to state, develop and resolve the problem. Next week we need to be onto the forgiveness and the next problem, so you’d better forgive him/her/them/it now and scrub the slate clean in order to be disappointed and angered afresh next week.

“Accept difference”: Ah, the greatest liberal nostrum of all. A Good Thing, particularly if you’re a drama writer seeking to set up odd couples, cultural conflicts, and misunderstandings galore.

“You’re still family”: Blood and marriage are the two clearest ways to keep warring characters in close proximity.

The warmly liberal values produced by this orrthodoxy, are, I think, more to do with the shapes required by regularised drama, and less to do with an political or sociological intent.

Cold storage

I walked into my kitchen the other day to hear the end of a conversation. I caught only the phrase “…in a fridge, with her handbag”.

I was rather proud of myself for guessing correctly that this was a recollection of the rumour, back in September 2001, that the Queen Mother had inhaled her last G&T, but that the news was being held back on account of all the September 11th business.

These things always set my idling mind spinning at the origin of these rumour tropes. Who first was alleged to be kept on ice; gone, if you like, but not defrosted?

To me, it sounds terribly Cold War: I recall the fate of more than one Soviet leader (Brezhnev, the fleeting Andropov) being speculated upon while they failed to make any public appearances for a while. Popes also seem to be favourite targets for this rumour, hence, I suppose the sad malarkey this year with the late John Paul II having to put in reassuring appearances at his hospital window.

The movie ‘Dave’, a presidential version of The Prince and the Pauper, using a life support machine to keep the President of the USA technically alive and governing for its mainspring, but this is comparatively recent, and I don’t know of any other American instances.

I suspect that the assumption that the Russians would flash-freeze their leaders is a slightly shocked reaction to the mummification of Lenin, with all of its confusing intimations of saintliness. Otherwise, the trope seems to operate on the ancient assumption of some kind of connection between king and land: even a wounded king is better than a dead one. It could hardly express more clearly the common belief amongst the rest of us that it’s the possession of power that counts, not the ability to use it. The practical mess that a frozen leader would mean for the government of any country should make us dismiss the idea out of hand, but there’s no denying the power of the symbol of the indestructible leader.

Finally, I wonder if the myth of the frozen leader isn’t, at heart, a consolatory fantasy as seen in the myth of Avalon. Although Arthur is gone, we hold onto the slightest promise of a return should things really require it. I wonder if every apparently callous rumour of a frozen, unburied, aristocrat or politician is really our fear of letting them go. Does anyone these days depend on the Once and Future Queen Mum?

Hot tea when you need it

On those occasions when I’m struggling to comprehend the behaviour of my own countrymen, there’s one object that I only have to recall in order to reconnect myself to the innermost soul of the Brit: the teasmade.

Tea itself is the cliche of Britishness, but I think it’s the Heath Robinson madness of the teasmade that truly opens out the true desire of the typical inhabitant of this dyspeptic isle. Think of it: given the choice of any luxury, any convenience to make life a genuine pleasure, we chose to build a machine that ensures that you have your morning cuppa the moment, no the moment before you wake up. It doesn’t matter that it’s weak, pumped through uncleanable tubes, with night-old milk and effortfully lukewarm at best. It’s a cup of tea, and you didn’t have to make it yourself. Joy almost unbearable.

I don’t think I’ve seen a teasmade since staying at my granparents’ as a kid, where, in a rare display of youthful good taste, I refused the machine’s strange brew. My feelings were mixed, then, when I chanced upon the inevitable web community on teasmades. I fear that these are thin times for teasmades. There are only three models available now (read all about them in the marvellous Teasmades in the news) section, but showing that blitz spirit, the home page has a link to eBay for chasing up second-hand models.

London, pop. 7 million

She had taken a correction pen and written across the back of her wheelchair:

LONER
Don’t rush me
Leave me lone

Visions of Joe Allon

In this sore and sorry world where old men may shout “nonsense” at the prime minister, and kids are to have their crack and sherbert dips confiscated at the school gates, there’s one aching deficiency that hurts more than any other: the miserable lack of comic writing conflating football with folk music.

I shudder to think where we’d be, then, without that genius Harry Pearson:

[Bob] Dylan’s musical roots too had prepared him for what he saw. Country music had a long tradition of football-related songs though these tended to focus on match officials rather than players. Johnny Cash, for example, dubbed himself “The Man in Black” in homage to his idol, the referee Arthur Ellis, and recorded I Walk The Line, arguably still the classic song about the life of an assistant ref. Cash wrote from personal experience. At one time many US pundits considered the man behind hits such as Rock Island Line and Folsom Prison Blues as a future World Cup linesman. Unfortunately Cash’s Old West attitudes to discipline inevitably led to trouble. In a Nevada State Cup match he shot a man in Reno just because he didn’t retreat 10 yards quickly enough and was stripped of his flag.

The world is probably full of people who don’t find that funny. But then, the world is also full of woe, disappointment, and people who don’t listen to old Dylan records while Final Score witters away in the background on a Saturday afternoon.

To save me just quoting the whole piece at you, just go and read it, the perfect close to unofficial Bob Dylan week.

Bob Dylan's Dream

Everyone’s favourite Bob Dylan story is surely the one where Bob got lost on the way to Dave Stewart’s north London home, knocked on what he thought was the right door and asked if Dave was there. A Dave, as it happened, did live there, but was out. So Dave’s wife invited this rather odd looking tramp into the house to wait, ensuring that Dave, a huge fan, got the surprise of his life when he returned home to find Bob Dylan drinking tea on his sofa.

It seems that the universe has arbitrarily decided to celebrate Dylan this week, so it’s good to know that there’s at least one more excellent Dylan story to be told:

Despite his total lack of acting experience, Dylan was hired for a substantial fee, brought over to the UK and put up at one of London’s poshest hotels, The Mayfair. He was in London for three weeks.

Then

But, come the day itself, Bob simply lost his nerve. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he is supposed to have burst out. “These guys are actors. I can’t act!” Saville, no doubt worried by having to explain the situation to the chap in BBC accounts, brokered a deal whereby he would employ another actor to speak the lines while Dylan himself played and sang a few songs between speeches. (Dylan would later be turfed out of the Mayfair for strumming his guitar in the corridor.)

Dylan headed back to the US and towards global stardom, the TV documentary was broadcast the following year, and the whole thing became just another thing that happened to have happened. Except for one thing. The BBC wiped the tapes.

Inevitably, given that the story is being told (Arena, BBC Four, Wednesday night), it means that some bootlegs of the Dylan’s performances on the show have been unearthed. Another Bob Dylan dream come to life.

Five sights to behold

1) Kevin Pietersen cross-bat smashing Brett Lee back down the ground on the way to his prodigious, Ashes-securing 158.

2) Pietersen, belatedly bowled by the mighty Glenn McGrath in his last Test in England, is intercepted on his walk back to the pavilion by Shane Warne, the greatest spinner of all time, also on his last tour of England. Warne congratulates Pietersen on effectively securing the Ashes. Pietersen thanks him gracefully, one in a series of sportsmanlike gestures throughout the series.

3) The averages. Adam Gilchrist, the finest wicket keeper in the game and universally acknowledged as the most destructive batsman in the world, entered the series averaging over 55 in Tests, and 62 in 2005. In this series, he took 18 catches, 1 stumping, and scored only 181 runs at an average of 22.62. His opposite number, Geraint “Dropped” Jones, took 15 catches, 1 stumping, and scored 229 runs at 25.44. Jones’ runs didn’t win England the Ashes; it’s arguable that Gilchrist’s lack of runs did.

4) Jeff Thomson: “England will lose the five-Test series 3-0 and the margin will be worse for them if it doesn’t rain. If you put the players from Australia and England up against each other it is embarrassing. There is no contest between them on an individual or team basis.”

5) Tomorrow’s papers. All of them. Especially the Australian ones.

Enlightenment reading

So much time is spent bemoaning the tiny things that irritate or depress that I suspect far too little is spent celebrating those tiny things that increase joy by a quantum.

So.

Downstairs, in the main room, there are four ceiling height bookcases, all down one wall. This is the first pleasure.

The end ones were already here upon arrival. I fabricated the middle two to match, though I fear not from the same riotously expensive old wood. They look, however, about right.

On each bookcase sits one of those pebblish lights from Habitat. This is very much the second pleasure.

In fact, the lights are what Habitat called ‘Pebbles’, and are just the sort of off-round that invites an appreciative stroke of the hand. Habitat, in their wisdom, replaced ‘Pebbles’, with ‘Eggs’ a couple of years ago: taller and clearly ovoid, the new shape exudes a slightly pointy unapproachability for reasons I can’t really pin down.

Thus, the awareness that the pebbles are not eggs, coupled with the wrongness of the decision to replace one with the other, invests the former with all the additional qualities lacking in the latter. This is, if we’re counting, pleasure 2 b).

The third pleaure, however, is simultaneously the smallest, and the one we’re gathered here to discuss.

One of the pebble lights is cunningly set up to light up at the gentlest nudge of a book. This childish joy is no doubt the product of too many childhood hours reading stories of espionage, or watching venerable horror films in which creaking bookcases open onto vistas of wonder.

The cataloguing of the tiny delights is nearly complete, but the alert among you will have already leapt ahead to the final joy, the ever-important Pleasure No. 3 b).

The identity of the book.

The initial set-up was, of course, accidental, and I took an appropriately incidental pleasure that the volume involved at that stage was The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing. This foursquare acknowledgement of the effect’s proper place gently amused me for a few months. Finally, a wholesale rearrangement of the bookcases was required, resulting in the shelf in question housing slightly smaller books.

This left an interesting question. Where, thematically, to go from here? I quickly ruled out the most obvious candidates: anything about the Enlightenment, the Bible (forcing the internal pantomime of “fiat lux” every single bloody time).

The second round of choices were far more interesting.

First up, I spotted my copy of Harry Houdini’s fraud-busting Miracle Mongers and Their Methods, which appealed for its Wizard of Oz implications, but slipped by because the book itself featues intemperate expositions of fraudsters long since forgotten.

Then, I looked to see what blind chance had provided, as I had stacked along the shelf books that were simply of the right size. The historically inevitable consequence was that Collected Writings of Karl Marx had control of the means of illumination. Hm. Workable, and useful for winding up the neighbours, but otherwise dubious. In fact, anything political, up to and including Blair’s Wars is just not a good long-term bet.

Swiftly, the ground seemed to open up. What about Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World for its spotlight on flannel? Leprohon’s The Italian Cinema because cinema is all about shining a light into the darkness? What about sheer illumination: Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (I swiftly discovered that I had no Hume). Darwin’s On the Origin of Species? Gibbon, Plato, Randi or Popper? Borges, Sciascia, DeLillo or Nairn? Science or art? Ancient or modern? A work of philosophy or one of Alan Moore’s comics?

A decision had to be made, not least because it was becoming increasigly difficult to explain why, with piles of books almost if not literally everywhere on the floor, I was dithering endlessly over the precise position of one. Ultimately, I plumped for the book which seemed to fulfil the demands of thematic aptness while being the least immediately obvious choice to hand.

I chose John Man’s Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection, because Genghis is a lazy byword for the bringing of darkness, when he was more like the Alexander or Napoleon of his time, the builder of an empire nearly twice the size of Rome’s. I also chose it because I have a primitive joy in the way the very name Genghis Khan is recolonising the Mongolian lands: as families forcibly dispossessed of their tribal names three or four generations ago are encouraged to pick them up again, where they simply can’t remember they almost inevitably decide that they must be Khans. The equivalent is every Arthur in Britain deciding that his surname should be “Pendragon”.

Finally, because the book is the right size, and let no man ever deny the progress of a good book when it is made to be the right size.

Picture me pushing Genghis Khan’s nose every evening, and smile as I smile.

Post Freddie ergo propter Freddie

One of the most appealing of logical fallacies is to suppose that two closely sequential events are somehow related. I think I’m falling for it.

The level of anxiety on the tube network has measurably fallen this week. The polices are visibly relaxed, fewer shoulders tense at the mere sight of a backpack, the normal atmosphere of mildly exasperated boredom has crept back in at the corners like the vile but somehow reassuring malodourousness of the local farm.

On Monday, we were all reading about how Freddie Flintoff had almost single-handedly rescued the second Ashes Test for England, prompting a famous (and squeakingly close) win. On Tuesday morning, the front page of the non-cricket-loving Sun had the earth-shaking news that Freddie was swearing off the beers in order to win us the Ashes. (As Andy pointed out last night, this amounts to laying off the lash for a whole four days between back to back Tests, a heroic feat clearly worthy of the front-page screamer ‘From Beero to Hero’.)

This morning, as those of us at work prepare to monitor the score as best we can, even grotty freesheet The Metro was offering a full-page explaining cricket to its many new followers.

The day before the bombs on 7th July, London was partying because it had unexpectedly won the right to host the 2012 Olympics. It’s crass, I know, but it does feel almost as though the wholly welcome distraction of the cricket has returned us, to some extent, to the unconcerned joy of 6th July.

A piece of paper can be held upright if slightly curled in the hand. If too straight, it collapses: it has no backbone. There is no real backbone here either, but we simulate it well enough, even through something as silly as winning a game of cricket.

The Tornado Test

I don’t know how you thought I could let the day pass without mentioningthe most thrilling Test match of recent times. There is a very simple check for this, by the way. If the cricket makes the back page headline of the tabloids, it was a great game. If it makes the front page headline, as today, it was immense.

On Sunday morning, as England’s firebrand pace attack set about the allegedly simple mopping up operation of the last two Australian wickets, I reluctantly turned off the TV coverage and headed off to the park for the regular Sunday morning football. It must have made a peculiar sight. What appeared to be an egregious act of goalhanging was instead the opposition striker loitering around our goal so that he could listen in to the score on a portable radio. Every time one of the Aussie tailenders thumped or scraped a boundary, the gasp from our goal would bring play to a halt, much to the bemusement of the several Turkish brothers who turn out regularly for the Peckham Rye Commoners.

Communications were hampered by the general fuzziness of the reception, meaning that we were clear when something was happening (a four, a dropped catch, a wicket?) but not exactly what it was. Matters came to a head when, the Aussies having heroically reduced the deficit to a mere 15, Lee was dropped on the boundary by Jones, S. On hearing the initial flurry of exclamation from the commentator, our goalie leapt for joy (carrying a knee injury, very ill-advised). By the time we had made ground to hear for ourselves, he was head-in-hand disconsolate.

After hearing the deficit tick down from over 100 to 15, it crept agonisingly down again, as it became horribly, inescapably clear that the Australian tailenders had pulled off one of the greatest tail-wags in history. Defeat, demoralising defeat, was nearly upon us. The football continued distractedly. Players stopped asking the score. The familiar feeling of impotent fury at sporting defeat welled up, choking every throat (except, of course, the Turkish brothers, who were wound up by the whole thing for entirely different reasons).

Finally, when the last optimist in the park had finally fallen silent, bowed to the inevitable, Harmison mopped up that last wicket with a typically brutish bouncer (drifting leg-side, also typically). The radio hummed out an incoherent blast of white noise. The keeper was leaping. Defender and striker were hugging. Lions were laying down with lambs. I, fetching the ball back from a hoofed clearance into touch, was running onto the pitch throwing it into the air like a well-celebrated catch. Down the pitch, there was some muttering in Turkish to the effect that now, please, might they get their striker back?

Of course I wish I’d been there. There was something rather wonderful, though, about the not-there where I happened to be.

Nothyng but beastely furey

Whether you choose to believe it or not, the Scottish football season has just begun, and the English season officially begins this weekend with the Charity Shield. So much for the summer (and so much for the Ashes, but there’s a different story for you).

So when I stumbled across Joseph Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (first published 1801), which naturally covers everything from dice to mummery via cricket on horseback, I immediately looked up what he’d put together on the people’s sport:

Sir Thomas Elyot, in his charming little work entitled The Boke named the Governour, first published in 1531, says of football that it “is nothyng but beastely fury and extreme violence, whereof procedeth hurte, and consequently rancour and malice do remayne with thym that be wounded, wherfore it is to be put in perpetuall silence”.

What can Elyot have been thinking?

I have a marginal connection with Strutt. At my school, in Strutt’s home town, by way of aping public school traditions the boys were divided into four houses for the purposes of inspiring an insipid version of manly Victorian competition, more than a century too late to prepare us for the Boer War. My house was named for Strutt, which I had neglected to remember until now.

Before we leave, please also note Elyot’s nicely Carollian book title. The Boke named the Gouvernour is a contradiction in terms, as it is not named the Gouvernour. More confusing than one of Shane Warne’s flippers, if you ask me.

Police presence

Disembarking from the tube this morning, I looked down the train and saw six yellow-jacketed police officers pop their heads out of the door almost as one. They exchanged some silly grins as they acknowledged this curious version of peekaboo.

At the exit of the tube station, six more yellow-jackets were busy checking passengers about to go through the ticket barriers. A white man is having his holdall searched. An asian lad is waved to a stop by a WPC before she clocks that he’s carrying no bag whatsoever.

The parades of sirens bugling down the streets are too common now to even raise prickles on the neck. The low panic of life in London at the moment becomes indistinguishable from a kind of black festivity.

On goalkeepers

Albert Camus, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Vladimir Nabokov, Pope John Paul II, all linked by one important characteristic: they were goalkeepers.

We have talked of goalkeepers before, and we will again, perhaps in comparison to wicket-keepers.

To this short list, of famous net-minders, I’m pleased to note that we can add Niels Bohr, Nobel prize for physics and all.

Novel without words

Word reaches us of the most Oulipan project imaginable: a novel consisting entirely of punctuation. Woops are heard from the direction of the last resting places of Calvino and Perec.

On closer examination, the ‘novel’ by Hu Wenliang consists of 14 Chinese punctuation marks. Barely a novella, you would feel, but I suspect that the standards in word-free writing are rather different. There is one stunning advantage to this brevity, of course, news reports can carry the novel in full:

：？
：！
“‘……’”
（、）·《，》
；——

Hm. Really. Hm.

Hu is offering a prize to anyone who can get the novel (which, he says, has character descriptions and a proper plot - a love story) 80% right. So, leaving aside the fact that we’re looking at an English transliteration of punctuation in one or other Chinese script, let’s give it a crack:

Colin says ‘Well?’
Coleen says ‘Well really!”
He talks, she talks, he talks. Once inside, sex, full, stops. Gradually they fall silent.
Her parent(hese)s are com(ma)ing back with a bullet - she(v)runs one way, she(v)runs the other.
See my Colin? He too dashes.

[Translators note: I can’t guarantee that the characters will represent properly on this page. Please refer to the China Daily news article for the definitive English punctuation. By far the most difficult line was the third. I was determined that I could get something like ‘everything points to sex(six)’ from six full stops in a row, but it proved intractable. So I fell back on a cheap pun, sexual frisson and some poetic license. Who would have thought punctuation could get so explicit? For the fourth line, I couldn’t determine the correct name for “、”, so I lazily went for ‘comma back’. I knew you wouldn’t mind. Improvements most welcome. For what it’s worth, this could well be a hoax. The China Daily hack’s name, you will have noted, is Ng Ting Ting. For that on its own, I hope this is real.]

St Swithin's Day

There’ll be more than the usual amount of looking to the skies today. Rain on St. Swithin’s Day threatens forty more days of rain to follow. It also, let us remember, promises forty more days of sun if, as today, it shines.

For me, the day brings to mind perhaps the most beautiful of the Bard of Barking’s songs. Billy Bragg’s St. Swithin’s Day:

Thinking back now,
I suppose you were just stating your views
What was it all for
For the weather or the Battle of Agincourt
And the times that we all hoped would last
Like a train they have gone by so fast
And though we stood together
At the edge of the platform
We were not moved by them

With my own hands
When I make love to your memory
It’s not the same
I miss the thunder
I miss the rain
And the fact that you don’t understand
Casts a shadow over this land
But the sun still shines from behind it.

Thanks all the same
But I just can’t bring myself to answer your letters
It’s not your fault
But your honesty touches me like a fire
The Polaroids that hold us together
Will surely fade away
Like the love that we spoke of forever
On St Swithin’s Day

Songs are difficult, and often embarrassing, to discuss. How to explain why I find the clunking metaphor of the train charming in its ungainliness? Looking at the lyrics, there’s something to gloss over in each of the three verses. So why do I love it?

First, it’s one of those rare pop songs that does without a chorus. Instead, we have the awkwardly long final line of each verse, jutting out like a painful memory at the end of each act of reminiscence. These lead with a tremulous logic to that exquisite introduction of the light final line: “On St Swithin’s Day”. Incidentally, the penultimate line, “Like the love that we spoke of forever”, is perfect, machined to millimetric precision. Clever lad, that Billy.

Then, naturally, the question of what it’s all got to do with St. Swithin’s Day. Sunshine and rain; very good. More interesting by far is the way the song is canted backwards, always backwards. Everything is angled towards that last line, all the spent passion, regret and pain tightly bound up in that one day, kept back until the end of the song.

Most beautiful of all, this careful unfurling of the song is reflected in the music. Dig it out now and give it a listen. Remind yourself. The song is built on such a simple chord sequence that, as so often with Mr Bragg, you pretty much ignore it at first as you pay more attention to the words. But you’re wrong, as you discover in one of those neck-shivering moments as the song lilts to a close. The song was built from those simple harmonics outwards, not from the words inwards. What’s more, the chord sequence, which gently reveals itself to be church bells pealing in the distance, is completely and devastatingly the emotional heart of the thing.

Dammit, Bragg, this gets me every time, and it carries with it a disarmingly deep truth: it’s not just looking back to intense feelings that carries emotional power, the very act of looking back itself is emotionally loaded. This isn’t a beautiful song about looking back, it’s a song about the beauty of looking back.

Our misanthropic media

I was reading how the Daily Mail will soon be Britain’s biggest paper with its fiery compound of middle class aspirations (a thinner body, house prices rising, moving abroad) and anxieties (trying to get a thinner body, house prices falling, foreigners moving here). A jaunty sidebar to the article made plain how we have moved from the unremitting optimism of the thirties (epitomised by the Daily Express), through the unionism and welfare statism of the Mirror of the fifties, through smash and grab years of the Sun, to the bleak apocalypticism of the Mail.

I don’t think it’s adequate to raise an eyebrow and tut that, you know, things these days are pretty comfortable for most people in Britain, so whingeing about house building and transport policy as if the country’s about to collapse is a little self-indulgent. I think the point is that the moaning Mail thrives precisely because its readership is very comfortable indeed, and therefore feels that it’s got a great deal to lose.

The newspaper readership of the fifties was still, to a significant extent, looking forward to indoor toilets. For Mirror readers then, things were visibly getting better, hence the solidarity and positive outlook. Today’s Mail readership, by contrast, sounds bored, soft, uncertain and directionless. If you’re not on the rise, they seem to say, you’re heading for a fall.

Coincidentally, I noticed one of those exclamatory weekly magazines on the newstand. I can’t remember if it was Now!, Heat!, Help! or Cobblers!, but it had the most wonderfully expressive coverlines:

Blind? Who cares?

Breast cancer? Who cares?

and

Games that make kids go psycho

Which last is a promotional offer that surely can’t be beat.

Like a fiery envelope

Given that I (reputedly) have about four books on the go at once, I really ought to love exercises of turning books into blogs. There’s a new one out of Stoker’s Dracula. The gimmick is simple: post novels in diary form as diaries, with the posts synchronised to appear on the date they’re supposed to in the novel. You can try your own too.

It’s a charming game, and I applaud it for pushing some classic works (such as Pepys’ Diary out in a fresh format. However, the novel-as-diary format just doesn’t work well for me. It may be that Pepys’ Diary, which is appearing with helpful annotations, is better suited to daily installments. A novel surely is not; Alexander McCall Smith’s recent attempt at a daily novel for The Scotsman is typically elegant, but rather unsatisfactory in novel form, and I suspect was unsatisfactory for parallel reasons in its original newspaper version.

Dracula is surely not meant to be read in daily paragraphs. The momentum of the story will not take it. The intensity of the thing, let alone the reader’s retention of storylines, will be stretched beyond reason.

Perhaps I am being unfair. I can only comprehend reading the thing in batches in the monthly archive: I haven’t reset my world to accommodate reading daily dispatches from these sites, although perhaps I should give it a sincere effort.

Surely, though, Dracula, with its mix of journal items and letters from different hands, would be better served by being emailed: subscribe to the email-novel and you will receive a chronologically arranged stream of emails from the various narrators over the course of the novel. I’d far prefer to spot a little envelope in the corner of my screen alerting me to an urgent missive from Mr Harker. If you’re going to do it, do it properly.

I say that, and I know that Andy in particular will now be thinking of the logical extension. Reset the novel as a series of letters, postcards, phone calls, emails, parcels containing journals, anything and everything necessary.

Imagine a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses that arrived as a keepsake box full of letters.

It would be the devilish offspring of Dennis Wheatley, Nabokov, Nick Bantock and BS Johnson. It would be tremendously expensive, tremulously arcane and terribly good fun.

Only one question remains: which novel to do first?

How low?

For the past week or more I have been vaguely searching (or searching vaguely; or, now I think of it, both), for a lost Thing around the house.

This happens to me all the time. I think it happens to most of us. I’m sure, o best of readers, o noblest of the members of the shadow republic, that it has even happened to you.

I’ve even got a queasy feeling that, books aside, most of my world consists of Things that are actually lost around the house. Of course, most Things being sufficiently large, and the house sufficiently small, they can quickly be found if and when really needed.

However, this Thing (a Bert Jansch CD, as it happens), is small, and so its lostness has managed to persist for a near record-breaking number of days.

Things get lost. This is not my point. My point is how low I have sunk, how far my arms (metaphorically) have shrivelled. I caught myself a few minutes ago thinking brightly to myself, “I know! I’ll search for it on Google.”

Results of your search for “Bert Jansch”
1. Main bookcase in the front bedroom, third shelf down, underneath an atlas

Now that would be a search engine.

Peackock tails and back-page tales

The tail of the peacock is a redoubtable example of the importance of sexual selection in forming the physiology of animals. The theory goes that the elaborate plumage of the male peacock developed first because the choice of partner rests mainly with the female. The male’s ability to produce and support a strong, colourful display implies health, or plentiful strengthm, or perhaps, indirectly, dominance of other males in the area.

Sexual selection in evolution is a curiosity, though. It develops over long periods of time into a form of evolutionary arms race, where increasing amounts of energy are expended by males in sustaining these elaborate and potentially debilitating sexual displays. However ridiculous the display, however, because it is an agreed sign, it continues to function effectively in promoting the male, and so, by permitting the showy male to father more offspring, the situation is perpetuated.

These thoughts were running through my mind, as they were no doubt yours, this morning in the papershop, when I noted the back page headline of The Sun:

Big Hits of the Seven Tease

Jaw dropped. Tumbleweed bounced past. Across the land, the sound of nobody laughing.

The story, it transpired, was that there had been a football match, in which the Woolwich Arsenal had beaten Everton FC by seven goals to nil. These things happen, and I’m sure everyone thought this was as notable an achievement as I did.

So what the hell was going on with the headline? Why the pun on ‘Big Hits of the Seventies’ (which does exist as a compilation album, but is hardly well-known)? I see where the ’seven’ comes from, but ‘tease’? Would a trouncing ever be considered a ‘tease’ if it didn’t help the pun home?

It’s not even a good pun, which, like a good crossword clue, should work on both the superficial and the cryptic levels. An example would be The Sun’s modern classic when Inverness Caledonian Thistle upset the mighty Celtic:

Super-caley-are-fantastic-Celtic-are-atrocious

So why, when they are capable of touching the heights of punnery, would The Sun’s subs allow such a stinker to be published?

The answer is because they have no choice. The laws of sexual selection in the Great British Tabloid mean that you must pun, because punning is what the readers expect. No matter that nobody in the country could possibly have even raised an internal smirk at this morning’s effort. Puns are the battleground; rather, they are the secondary sexual characteristics of the tabloid, and they must be as big and bold as possible.

No matter that they’re as debilitating, irrelevant and ridiculous as the largest peacock’s tail that you ever did see. It’s in the genes; and breeding will out in The Sun.