one man's interaction with cultural meltdown

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LIFE IN THE WRONG LANE

 

Le mot juste

It is the fate of gymnasts to feature in Saturday afternoon sports programmes when almost nobody is watching. Occasionally - as, for instance, last weekend - they get to be the warm-up act for a major event. (I say 'major' using liberal sports-writer's licence, as the event in question was England v Israel at soccer, an attraction which could only ever involve the optimistically hopeful against the obviously hopeless).

The chaps and chapesses who commentate on gymnastics inhabit a reality which is entirely alien to me and, I suspect, most of humanity. Not only do they gain pleasure from watching tight-butt blokes and anorexic girlies twirling about on horizontal bars, huge grey carpets and torture ropes, they further imagine that there are millions out there in viewerland just as transfixed as them by such unedifying sights.

Like many folk still addicted to the idea of 3pm kick-offs, I switched on early for the footy - just in time to hear the gymnastics anchor-bloke utter these words:

"Well, he had his hand on a medal....but not on the bars"

Apart from confirming that Colemanballs is alive and well, this observation struck me as yet another reminder that if you stick a microphone in front of a sports reporter, he is very likely to emit the most appalling bollocks.

In a previous life, my partners and I employed a sports reporter to be in charge of new business. Don't ask why (we'd be here all night) but anyway we did. This fellow was actually pretty good at his job, until such time as the prospecive client asked him to say something knowledgeable about his business. It this point, the new business terrier would observe:

"Quite frankly squire, your guess is as good as mine"

Ever since, I have eschewed the route of expecting gymnastics commentators to say anything logical, let alone interesting. You see, a competitor can't have his hand on any medal if he doesn't have his hand on the bars, if only because the whole fucking idea is to have his hand on the bars.

But I digress: this was merely the curtain-raiser to yet another crucial England game.

This is the Big One

Every England game these days is The Big One. There's a very simple reason for this: we lose so many games, after a while we desperately need to win every match or go out. As suggested above, we were up against Israel - a team twenty-one ranks below us in the World. The occasion was an object lesson in English overstatement.

To make us all feel at home (for we were indeed playing at home) Motty and Marky were comme d'habitude in the commentary box. Our great white hopes up front were Emile Heskey (a retired donkey) and Michael Owen (a semi-retired brilliant striker roughly five years past his prime). They were in there because Wayne Rooney is suspended, and Peter Crouching-Beanstalk has tied himself in too many knots for any known Sea Scout to undo.

With ten minutes gone, Heskey received the perfect pass smack in front of goal, and narrowly missed the upper tier of the Stand. In turn, Owen just failed to reach, hit or control various balls played to him.

"Good grashus me" said John Motson, "That wash oh sho near and yet sho far Mark". Mark made no comment.

It was left to Manchester City's right-back Richards to show his very real class, using both impeccable control plus a perfect final pass to give Wright-Philips a clear chance at goal, which he duly took.

Pause at this point to consider that Israel were putting up roughly the same challenge to England as Italy did to the average American soldier during World War Two. They seemed to treat the period immediately after half-time as akin to Yom Kippur, and so Owen was able to take advantage of this with a very good goal on the turn. Or rather, it was a goal made to look very good because of the snail's pace of three Israeli defenders. To round off a performance that must surely mark him out as England's key defender, Richards rose superbly to head the third goal.

After the game, BBC's pundits decared Heskey the man of the match. "He was the perfect target" said Alan Hansen, forgetting that Heskey's job is to hit the target.

The real tragedy of England at the moment is that I want them to lose. I want this so badly because only by further disgrace can we finally get rid of Steve MacClaren, and perhaps - we can only pray - put someone of the quality of Martin O'Neill into the job. The week before, Villa's manager put Chelsea to the torch, and did what so few other managers have managed to do - outwit a serious Mind Games merchant like Mouhrino. Only with this likeable Irishman (or someone of his calibre) in charge do England stand a chance of even qualifying for the next World Cup.

Swallows and buzzy ones

Our resident swallows have produced another brood. Three of them this time, with fluffy heads and ever-open beaks that peek over the side of the nest when we go into the storage area beneath. Mum and Dad, needless to say, get somewhat irate when we do so, buzzing us and generally chattering away in an irritated manner. It is no doubt a sign of advancing age that I can sit on the garden furniture and watch the comings and goings for hours.

Once back inside the barn, however, it's impossible to sit still for long without becoming aware of millions of flying insects. The flies we expect anyway (when the fields are harvested and the cows moved back outside) but these new little 'weeeeeeeeeeeaaaaeeerrr' beggars appeared for the first time this year. They look, fly and sound exactly like mosquitos, but they don't bite: perhaps they're vegetarian mosquitos. Either way, if anyone knows what they might be, please get in touch. (Conspiracy theorists need not apply)

A dishonourable Draw

On and on and on, round and round in circles, goes the Madeleine McCann saga. After the latest 'revelations', I'd say the score is Portuguese Police 3, McCanns 3. And yet oddly, we are still no nearer to the faintest idea of what happened on the night in question.

It gets more and morelike a grisly Whodunnit being acted out in real time by real people - with nobody knowing what is truly real or not.

DNA, forensic and dog-handling experts have rubbished the Portuguese evidence; while some of Mrs McCann's responses, the parents' overt global sympathy campaign, and one or two disturbing UK website postings about the McCanns give cause for concern.

I have the oddest feeling that in time, the McCann Mystery will be on a par with the Lindbergh kidnap and the Anastasia riddle. In the meantime, pretty much anything could happen.

But on a broader canvas,it is weird how quickly all we proud EU member states revert to stereotypical descriptions of ur neghbours: the French see the English as perfidious invaders, the English see the Portuguese as incompetent coppers, and the Protuguese see the Brits as feckless parents.

One gets a sense of the European project gradually falling apart.

Useless research No 382

I am indebted to a local nby reader for the news that the 1,056 top chart-busting UK and American musicians between 1965 and 1999 have just been thoroughly researched by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The research 'found' that in the first five years after becoming famous, pop stars were three times as likely to die as others of a similar age. In the next 20 years, they were twice as likely to reach an early grave.

Well I never. You know, I wouldn't mind betting that Gladiators didn't live as long as Senators either. Perhaps someone should go back to the primary sources and see if I'm right.

Don't make me Laugh

If things carry on at this rate, DMML will need a column all of its own. Here's this week's crop:

* The Government's position is still that there will be no precipitate withdrawal from Iraq. A further 500 troops left Basra last Friday, adding to the several thousand who left last week. Rather more pointed was the comment of local murderer Abdul Sattir a-Bahadi; he said "The British are running away because we are killing them". You and I know that's daft, but the Iraqi in the street doesn't.

* The Government will insist that all immigrants must learn to speak English - only seventy years after the USA insisted on the same thing. An exception has been made, however, for foreign soccer stars 'for practical reasons' says the Home Office. How does that work then? All they need to know are the swear-words? While professionals arrive from abroad to double their salaries, young English soccer academies are starved of funds. Obviously that's an impractical consideration.

* Ruth Kelly's money-saving, streamlining Home Information Packs are costing sellers an extra £600, adding to the length of conveyancing processes, and are condemned right across the board of property experts ranging from surveyors and architects to builders and estate agents. The RICS issued a statement at the weekend saying there was 'absolutely no evidence' that the packs were either needed, or would produce any savings at all. The significant absentee from the criticism is....The Law Society. Just fancy that.

Incowatch

There's no way a swipe at government incompetence could become a regular feature, as my domain hosts have a limit on content set way below the 400 gigabytes one could write about the subject every day. A couple of belters were, however, in the news this week.

With a flurry of wings and a hi-ho Silver ha-way, the Monoscopic Trouser Snake announced five years ago that £60 billion of our money would be 'invested' in the NHS. I am sad to announce that five years on (says former NHS Patients' Tsar Harry Cayton) patient care has gone backwards while GP salaries have rocketed.

21.5 billion, of course, went on the hapless Hewitt's tin can and string IT system, which still doesn't work - not even a little bit. A further 1.7 billion went on the new application system for hospital doctors - a system that caused chaos and was eventually reversed.

Sixty billion quid, up in smoke.

But if the NHS is fond of employing the odd consultant, the Minstry of Defence seems to need an awful lot of these reptiles on a regular basis. Since New Label came to power, they've fired £2.3 billion into the sky. The Sunday Telegraph (in an outbreak of Frostism) pointed out that this would have paid for an aircraft carrier and 51 helicopters - or 239 Generals. I didn't even know we'd got 239 Generals (no wonder we need general management). But if you laid them all end to end, they'd still be twenty miles behind the front lines.

I confess to finding this consultant mania more hysterical than irritating. One wonders what the briefs are. Perhaps for the MOD:

"Right-ho, now look here - we need a bit of advice about, as it were, sticking it to the enemy. What's your feeling on the subject?"

Or for the NHS post-Hewitt:

"Umm, we're in a spot of bother in that we gave GPs all this money and they've spent it on cars, and we gave them more time whcih they've spent on allsorts of things, up to but not including patient care. We, ah, wondered if you could, you know, come up with a scheme for getting the lolly back and forcing the quacks to, erm, work weekends again. What?"

And finally....

As we trained historian chappies have known for some time, far from being a miserable old bat dressed forever in black crinolin, Queen Victoria was something of a party-going flibberty-gibbert before she met the dour Albert and fell madly in love with that dour Prussian. None other than Julian Fellowes (a man with what must be the broadest and shiniest bald head in show business) has at last set the record straight, and scripted a new film to be called (unbelievably) Young Victoria.

You are all commanded to go and see this movie, for it stars the lovely and infinitely talented Emily Blunt, who by sheer chance and no bias intended just happens to have been a school chum of my younger daughter. She also has a very amusing silk called Oliver for a Dad, and is generally an all-round good egg.

We are back to French ADSL as from Wednesday, so goodness only knows what will happen next.

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