Pain

My back went again on Sunday during five-a-side football. Ten minutes in. It’s a muscle strain which goes a couple of times a year and when it does I know immediately. I went straight off and pressed myself against a wall to wait for the medical miracle that would allow me to play the second half.

At half-time I talked about giving it a few minutes, see how it goes.

“Don’t bother mate,” said Dave, who recently spent eight weeks out with a calf injury. “You’ll wreck it.”

Ian, who was playing his first game for a month after ankle problems, rummaged around in his bag and offered me a choice of Ibruprofen tablets, Ibruprofen gel or Deep Heat. “It’s ok,” I said. “I’ve got all that at home. And diazepam.”

“Yeah, good stuff diazepam,” said Paddy, who is ten years older than most of us and has suffered his own chronic lower back problems for at least the last five. “Couple of those and a few beers, you’ll have a lovely afternoon. Watch the cricket. Just don’t for f**ks sake try to play on.”

They were right, of course. If you’ve played football with any group for any length of time you’ll know that nobody ever really changes their playing style, they just get gradually slower and craftier. Ian is a combative, elbowy dribbler, Dave is a selfish goalhanger and Paddy is a beautiful, calm playmaker. I watched through the glass as they started the second half without me. Even though I only played ten minutes it was enough to drench my kit in sweat and it would all have to be washed as after a proper game. I will be essentially crippled for a couple of days. It doesn’t matter, there are far worse kinds of pain.

Colly! Jimmy! Monty!

Ah yes, now I remember what Ashes cricket feels like: the miserable business of being both unable to watch and unable to take your eyes off it.

Here’s the first Test: one day of hope and then rude disillusionment. One morning of fun. Two and a half days of grinding tedium and black despair. One day of unbearable tension. A moment of ecstatic joy, at a draw.

It’s a sad sporting fact that prolonged tension and pain are the norms, but prolonged joy is impossible (because a comprehensive thrashing quickly becomes ennui). Test cricket takes this truism to its limit in a way that no other sport can. Ashes cricket is the worst because of the weight of a warped history.

I hate the bloody Ashes, and I hate the fact that I have to wait three whole days for the next Test to start.

Nature notes

Having resolved to turn my back on materialism and reconnect with the soil, I have been strolling contemplatively the lanes hereabouts, spotting birds’n’shi’.

I work in a nice place. Here’s a picture I took on my phone:

If you turn right out of my office and follow Lansdown Lane up its steep course, it turns eventually from a reasonable road into a very narrow road, and then from a very narrow road into an undrivable dirt track before finally spending itself in a field. There is a pleasing symbolism about this steady ascent into rusticity (and conversely, the homeward decline into civilisation). The field at the Lane’s peak is stuck to the side of a valley spread with hedgerows and very noisy sheep. The multiplex cinema on the Bristol ring road is only 10 minutes away. Bath’s Roman remains are 15 minutes in the other direction. But here, nothing but greenery and sheep. Ah, England. England, eh?

Anyway, having already wowed Nige with my accelerating expertise in British wildlife – just the other day I spotted and catalogued a veritable menagerie including: a pair of small dark randy butterflies, a hovering kestrelly-kite sort of bird and a small black tweety bird – I have been continuing to record for posterity the local flora and fauna.

Yesterday’s walk yielded successful identifications of:
- a very small brown bird, shrieking intolerably
- a magpie!
- a robin!
- three largish cows
- two white, very flappy butterflies
- a dog

And, most thrillingly, this:





This, I can only assume, must be the famous ‘shitbird’, of which they speak so often on The Wire.

Tragic life stories

WH Smiths now appears to have a policy of hawking sweets at the counter. The assistant points to an array of untempting chocs and tries to force an impulse-buy out of you. What next, pushing fishing magazines door-to-door? Hustling for Panini football sticker trade on street corners? Smiths used to be respectable. Now, like Woolies, it has lost its identity and become a place that sells a bunch of things which, when you want them, you buy somewhere else. It will soon die.

It also has a book section called ‘Tragic Life Stories’. I was dimly aware of the existence of the ‘misery memoir’ genre – I understand that Irish nuns and fakery are heavily involved – but I had no idea it was so crowded. They all have similar cover art so that you won’t mistake them for real books.



It is, as Worm suggests, time for grunge. Come on, lads, we’re taking to the hills. Start all over again. Burn Brown and Balls on a bonfire of tragic life stories. The Malls are over, the cities are all up. It’s finished. Time for the countryside, time for the soil.

Carbolic smoke balls 2

Buying stuff isn’t fun anymore

They’ve built a great big new shopping whatsebob in the middle of Bristol called Cabot Circus. It’s really quite beautiful though empty because everyone is at the Banksy exhibition.

Before Cabot Circus stole its crown the pride of Bristol shopping was a three-level indoor job called The Galleries. In a misguided attempt to fight back The Galleries has recently rebranded itself 'The Mall.' I went into 'The Mall' on Saturday morning and it was a bleak experience. Something called Head has taken over what used to be Zavvi (and before that Virgin Megastore) to sell off all the stock at bargain basement prices.

In Head I had a moment of crisis. I was stacking up the CDs and DVDs in a kind of buying frenzy (£4 for Tom Waits, £3 for Van Morrison) when I had a sudden flashback to my student days. Back then buying a CD was a big deal. I worked through the summer holidays and allowed myself just one weekly luxury: on my day off I would cycle to Barnstaple and buy a CD from Our Price. It would cost between £14 and £16 and I would agonise over the choice, then take the prize home in triumph and excitement. I would absorb every note, study the lyrics and place the case carefully in my small collection. That was only fifteen years ago but it was a different world. No mobile, no Ipod, never used the internet. Grabbing handfuls of CDs in Head stands in the same relation to those Our Price purchases as an All-You-Can-Eat-for-a-Fiver buffet does to fine dining: gluttonous, desperate, cheaply decadent.

In 'The Mall' Woollies has still not been replaced so the prime location sits empty. I don’t know what they’ve done to WH Smiths lately but it’s nasty; in fact, it’s turning into Woollies. The High Street clothing retailers are trying to be as cheap as the supermarkets but also pretend that their stuff is superior. Waterstones is hanging on there somehow but on Amazon you can buy nearly any book for a penny plus postage, which also takes the fun out of bookhunting.

It’s not just recession, it’s fin de siècle. Sous les pavés, la plage. Buying stuff isn’t fun anymore. I think I might try to work out how to do gardening and what have you. Something tells me we all need to reconnect with the soil.

The Bright Lights, the Desolate Shores

Without thinking too much about it at the time, when I wrote the lyrics for Abba's songs the message I wished to convey tallies well with campaigns launched recently by humanist organisations in the UK, US and Australia: “There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Thus spake Bjorn from Abba in the Guardian. Suddenly the devastating anti-ecclesiastical implications of Dancing Queen become clear. He also reckons the teaching of agnosticism should be compulsory in schools, in order to guard against the dangers of indoctrination. He’s battling God-bothering headmasters over this:

The headmasters also put it to me that there were plenty of famous free-thinking, prominent figures who had gone to Christian schools. But really this just annihilates their own argument. These people learned to be free thinkers despite, not because of, their Christian schooling.

One of them is particularly topical this year, 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Charles Darwin may have gone to a very Christian school but it didn't prevent him from coming up with the "best idea in the world". Nor did it prevent him from abandoning his faith.

I don’t really follow Bjorn’s logic in the first paragraph there, but his vision of a post-religious world is intriguing. A world where everyone feels like Darwin did after he abandoned his faith. What a lark, eh?

Middle distance-gazing professionals gather in conference centres to discuss painless suicide techniques. Reclining in First Class on the Eurostar we eat Asian Fusion food from recyclable boxes and tap secret, bleak poems into our Apple notebooks. A thin couple consummates an illicit affair in a wintry Norfolk beach hut; they make cold love by the Bright light of a low-energy bulb then read each other Radiohead lyrics. A botox-bloated former lapdancer stabs a fork into her poached free-range egg and hums Does your mother know? The yolk dribbles over her perfectly pink organic smoked salmon. Geoffrey Hill stops worrying and enjoys his life. A defrocked priest hangs a framed print above his Ikea bed; it depicts the London Tube map. Fluorescent tubes buzz in the clinic. A headmaster explains that existence precedes essence. The pupils respect each other’s individuality then sing the new national anthem:

Sensitive, Seldom and Sad are we,
As we wend our way to the sneezing sea,
With our hampers full of thistles and fronds
To plant round the edge of the dab-fish ponds;
Oh, so Sensitive, Seldom and Sad
Oh, so Seldom and Sad.

In the shambling shades of the shelving shore,
We will sing us a song of the Long Before,
And light a red fire and warm our paws
For it's chilly, it is, on the Desolate shores,
For those who are Sensitive, Seldom and Sad,
For those who are Seldom and Sad.

Sensitive, Seldom and Sad we are,
As we wander along through Lands Afar,
To the sneezing sea, where the sea-weeds be,
And the dab-fish ponds that are waiting for we
Who are, Oh, so Sensitive, Seldom and Sad,
Oh, so Seldom and Sad.


That’s one of Mervyn Peake’s Rhymes without Reason. It is, I think, slightly better than Matthew Arnold.

Rhymes without reason

Over here Patrick Kurp plays a listy, desert island discy game. “Name the fifteen books that have most influenced your thinking, that you have found yourself referring to most often in reflection, speech, and writing.”

His list is quite worthy. I thought about having a go but these things are hard to do unselfconsciously. Strangely, the first one that popped into my head was ‘Rhymes without Reason’ by Mervyn Peake, which is now out of print, I think.

This surprised me, I must go and dig it out of the attic.

The Devil's Dictionary - Some missing entries

Science: the process of finding ever more specific ways of being wrong.

Prediction: postponement of the revelation of your ignorance until it matures.

Synergy: neutrality that occurs when two opposing idiocies cancel each other out.

Facebook: global back-scratching competition.

Parkour: jumping frogs.

The wage of consistency

Over here Nige notes some of the Ps from that wicked work, Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.

Here’s one Nige didn’t mention:

Predicament: The wage of consistency.

Concise, insightful and brilliant. I suspect that consistency might be greatly overrated as a virtue. Consistency, after all, is why free speech champions always find themselves in such predicaments as defending scumbags like the BNP. Fortunately I’m becoming consistently less consistent with every passing day.

On rugger

Gaw, who is rapidly establishing himself as a most excellent addition to this corner of the blogosphere, writes here about the British and Irish Lions’ narrow loss to South Africa on Saturday.

Although I will watch international rugby and enjoy it, inasmuch as I enjoy virtually all sports and am a sporting patriot (the 2003 World Cup win, led by Johnson and Wilkinson, was terrific stuff), I confess that I have trouble with the game. That is, with Rugby Union specifically– my objections don’t apply to League, which is a simple and exciting game to watch (though must be absolute murder to play).

Partly my troubles with rugby could be attributed to my childhood. I grew up initially in Portsmouth, which like all urban areas is footballing, but moved later to Devon, which like many rural areas is rugby-playing. School rugby thus irritated me by wasting valuable footballing time. Rugby shouldn’t take this personally, mind – at that time I considered most things that didn’t happen in the cricket season to be a waste of valuable footballing time. But rugby was particularly frustrating because there we all were, out in the school playing fields on perfectly good Wednesday afternoons and virtually wearing football kit, but chasing around after an absurd, skill-defeating oval ball, instead of a round one with which I could show off. And have you ever seen schoolboy rugby? It’s farcical. Futile mud-wrestling amongst the forwards (all of whom are picked purely on the basis of their physical shape and size), and endless knock-ons, ill-directed kicks and ball-droppings amongst the backs. And nobody has a bally clue about the rules, it’s all stop-start-stop-start, trudging from line-out to scrum while the backs stand and catch pneumonia a mile from the action. There was one game at our school once that finished 0-0. Imagine how dismal a spectacle that must have been!

Anyway, I forgave school rugby ages ago, but I still have three major objections to Union which prevent me from fully enjoying it. The first is the all-pervading pomposity. Of course, other sports such as soccer and boxing are massively overhyped, primarily by competitive television companies – but no other sport takes itself quite so seriously as does Rugby Union. No other sport’s pundits are as eager to pronounce players, even after just one or two matches, as legendary and one of the All-Time Greats. No other sport’s commentators are as quick to push the Epic button, or to describe a successful incident as For the Ages. Even as the winning South African penalty was sailing through the air yesterday, Sky’s man was asking not “Has he won the match?” but “Has he written himself into the history books?”

To some extent we can put this hyperbole-disease down to the relative scarcity of international fixtures, especially compared with the endless, cheapening treadmills of football and cricket. And certainly the Lions tours, which only take place every four years, are the apotheosis of the ‘historic’ shtick. But it’s primarily about the culture (by contrast, cricket is undercut by self-deprecating humour, while football is determinedly stupid and anti-pretension). The annual Six Nations is no different, being at base the only genuine sporting outlet for anti-English fervour amongst the other home nations (the presence of France and Italy in the competition is a mere distraction; years when France win don’t really ‘count’). The pre-match build-ups to Wales-England matches are nauseating. Damp-eyed moustachioed Taffys wax lyrical about JPR (“ohhhhh, he could rrrun like the whind, could Jay-pee-arrrrr”) while smirking English rugger-buggers tell homoerotic tales of each other’s gigantic balls.

Part and parcel of this rugby pomposity is - my second objection - a sneering disdain for football. Rugger, with its World Cup, tries to be a global game but makes an even feebler attempt than cricket (which can at least boast the sub-continent as well as the white ex-colonies). But the fact is that football is the international game, and it is also the national game, and rugby copes with this brute fact by cultivating a huge superiority complex. Soccer has fans; rugby has ‘connoisseurs’. Soccer players are pansies, whingers, cowards and cheats. Of course, rugby players gouge each other’s eyeballs and stamp on each other’s throats under the cover of rolling mauls, but only football commits the unforgivable sin of Diving. And then there is the rugger bugger’s ultimate trump card: unlike spoilt, obnoxious footballers, rugby players respect the referee.

But this brings me on to my third and final problem with rugby. For the fact is that, unless players did uncomplainingly accept every refereeing decision, the game would cease to function. Complexity and subjectivity are the critical flaws in rugby as a spectator sport; no other game is so utterly determined by the whim of the official. Have you ever watched a match live? Without explanatory TV commentary (which is nearly always as confused as the rest of us, but feigns understanding), penalties are just an unfolding series of mysteries. Like the supposed tactics, the officiating is wholly impenetrable to the outsider. For the most part, there’s a big melee and then, apparently arbitrarily, the referee awards a penalty kick and the game is decided. And then some damp-eyed Jock or Taffy describes it as ‘historic’.

All that said, there’s still a lot to be said for Union. The players are almost insanely physically courageous and close matches can be thrilling. But cricket wallops it for genuine tactical complexity and depth, and for excitement, skill and unpredictability you can give me the footballing pansies over the wet towel-whipping rugger buggers any day. Sorry, Gaw.

After the freak show is over

What is there to say about Michael Jackson then? We might never know what really went on in that strange, sad little world.

But I've often thought that I Want You Back is the best pop song ever made, and Billie Jean isn't too far behind. All complete rubbish after Bad... but before that, dear me, he really was a star, wasn't he?





Afterthought: In fact, perhaps the finest Jacko moment was provided by Jarvis Cocker. Heh heh, rarely have I felt more proud to be British than then. Maybe that time we threw stuff at that tedious fool David Blaine when he was in the glass box, that was good too.

Carbolic smoke balls

Spammers are trying to sell me the Acai Berry. This remarkable foodstuff will, among other things, help me lose 20lb in two weeks, rid me of my fear of the measuring tape, make me look better in a bathing suit this summer and enhance my virility ‘like a rabbit’.

So much for progress and so much for Dawkins. Science can’t kill off even the crudest quackery, never mind bonedeep religions. And technology has only given us ever more effective ways to distribute horoscopes and absurd urban myths.

A couple of years ago I went into one of those little health food-type stores to buy some tea. I waited at the counter while the owner, a tubby man with cropped grey hair, exploited a vulnerable member of the public. She, it seemed, had been trying to conceive but was running out of time and options. He sold her at least four items of ‘alternative medicine’ all the while keeping up a classic quack’s patter about ‘some people have found this to be very effective’ and 'one lady came in here just like you, tried this and the next week she was pregnant'. All smothered in a screed of soft-voiced pseudoscience which I don’t have the will to recreate here.

I felt myself becoming surprisingly angry. When he sold her the silver ‘health bracelet’ I chucked my packet of tea on the nearest shelf and stormed out, vowing never to set foot in the place again. Afterwards I wished I’d said something to him or her, but what? I even thought about coming back at midnight and smashing his windows and daubing ‘Quack’ on his door, but of course I never did.

Spotting the spotters

Do you ever book rail tickets via thetrainline.com? Prices are totally random, aren’t they? I travelled to London first class the other day – two single first class tickets worked out cheaper than a standard return. But then goddammit nothing really makes sense any more and everything that used to be true and safe and reliable has been warped or lost in the great postquantum interflux.

The advantage of first class over standard is that you get free stuff and legroom, but the drawback is that the phone conversations of your fellow passengers are more annoying. A lawyeress talked all the way from Temple Meads to Chippenham about what she was going to put to the people ahead of the meeting with the other people before they met with the people from the States.

Then, as soon as she finished, some suit started up about selling something or other. His conversation was sprinkled – peppered, if you like – with food references: there’s a real appetite for this out there; I don’t see any hunger for a career there; let’s put it out there and see if anyone bites. I don’t think he actually said anything about eating someone for breakfast, but he may as well have, you get the idea. Aha, I thought, this man is hungry and his subconscious is messing with his conversation. So when he finished I peeped round to see if he was availing himself of the free firstclass grub. And sure enough, he wasn’t. Oh well.

Anyway, the point of this post is that at Didcot Parkway I spotted some trainspotters. Nothing unusual about that per se, but something about the scene made me uneasy. Eventually I twigged what it was, and was so struck by it that I took this photo.





Can you see it? They were all standing at equidistant intervals along the platform, about twenty feet apart. Just enough, in other words, to be separate from each other, individuals rather than a group, and to spend the entire day spotting trains without the need to converse or acknowledge one another’s presence.

And this, presumably, is the really significant symptom of their peculiar mental illness. The actual trainspotting is a relatively minor one.

A Greater London

London again. My niece is over a year old now and endlessly mischievous. I spotted her carrying one of her father’s work shoes down the hall and secreting it carefully in a corner amongst many miscellaneous items, where it would be a challenge for him to find in the morning. Deed done, she caught my eye. I nodded approval.

Had dinner in Bayswater with a couple of old codgers, scandalous conversation about elephants and flamingos. The next morning, with almost a whole day free to be an entirely selfish tourist in London and only a mild hangover, I decided to head to St John's Wood and have a look round Lord's, the Home of Cricket.

The tour guide, a member though at least two decades less crusty and decrepit than the average, showed me and a bunch of disappointingly deferential Aussies around the place: the museum and Ashes urn, the dressing rooms and famous balcony, the Long Room, the Real Tennis court and the spaceship media centre, ending, inevitably, at the Gift Shop. Another member tagged along with a female guest and he had the most extraordinarily lengthy and conspicuous nasal hair I have ever clapped eyes on. It was most distracting, at least for me, but the guide was commendably unfazed and reeled off an entertaining spiel riddled with stats. How he remembered all the dates and run rates and five-fers is beyond me, but cricket is a game of artistry and drama which floats on a great sea of statistics. As a fan, you can choose to cruise along the surface of that sea or to dive in and utterly immerse yourself. I’m a cruiser, but each to their own. Wonderful, wonderful place Lords, but as well as being the Home of Cricket it's the Home of Almighty Priggishness. I’m ambivalent.

Having done the tour and bought some expensive tat, I bussed down to Oxford Circus for a pub lunch and wondered how to fill my remaining couple of hours before I had to head to Paddington. My mind wandered back to the sight of my niece carrying her father’s shoe and in a flash I knew what I wanted to do… exactly the same thing I always do in London!

I tubed to Charing Cross, dashed across Trafalgar Square, through the portico entrance of the National Gallery, up the steps and turn right, past the Van Goghs to gaze once more on my favourite painting. For the shoe my one year-old niece was wielding was exactly the same as the ones in the middle of Seurat’s seminal work of pointillism, Bathers at Asnières.






I cannot tell you why this is my favourite painting, it just makes me happy. I have a print above the mantelpiece but the original is so big and glowy. Having drunk my fill of it I flopped onto the leather seat opposite the quartet of Turners including The Fighting Temeraire and, my second favourite painting, Rain, Steam and Speed.

A swarm of humanity flows through the National Gallery. To my left a middle-aged Mancunian lady called out excitedly for her friend to hurry over, because she had found The Hay Wain. Of course there was no need to hurry, The Hay Wain wasn’t going anywhere, but still, this is humanity swarming at its best.

Some people feel underwhelmed when they view extremely famous masterpieces at first hand (it was only a bunch of sunflowers, Whistlejacket is nice, but it’s a big horse). Not me. I always find it tremendously moving to see these things; first because one is reminded that there have lived on this very planet humans capable of creating them, and second because they are right here, given to us to look at any time we have a few hours to kill before the train leaves, free of charge.