simplysorro

Remember when Guy Fawkes’ night was way ahead of Halloween in the opinion polls? Penny for the Guy, rockets in milk bottles and dangerous bonfires were institutions which celebrated gunpowder, treason and plot. How wonderful to have a party to remember the nearly-blowing up of Parliament. Now witches and warlocks, pumpkins and trick-or-treating have invaded our shores. Much less radical.

Remember when sportsmen didn’t cheat (well not much)? In those far-off days when sporty types were only rewarded with sweat and certificates, there wasn’t much point in bending rules. Now power and money have brought the reward of corruption. And it’s not the just the performers – coaches, governing bodies, politicians – so many seem to have noses in the trough. Oink Oink.

Remember when the Times and Sunday Times used to be newspapers rather than extended gossip columns? With bags of national and international news to report yesterday, the S.T. led with Footballers Face £100m Meltdown – a story about overpaid soccer players getting bad investment advice. The stunning sub-lines were: 1. Top players accuse advisers of mis-selling and 2. They feel aggrieved, they feel duped – humiliated.

So much for Remembrance, Aung San Suu Kyi, dead Russian tourists, dead Russian athletics reputation for that matter etc. Luckily there was a nice picci of David Furnish kissing Elton on the front of the magazine while Michael McIntyre was on the front of the Culture. About right. I avoided the 4 page investigative pull-out on the soccer story. The S.T. has decided that anything to do with the seamy side of sport is worth throwing megabucks at to ‘reveal all’. As a sporty type myself I offer the once estimable organ this advice: don’t bother.

Remember Remembrance? Well there’s a great deal of it about with VE and VJ Days and all the rest. The British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall on Saturday was the usual brilliant Huw Edwards,  stage-managed affair with Rod Stewart improbably but effectively crooning and Pixie Lott strangling a nightingale in Berkeley Square. The poignant individual stories, as ever, brought the house down with tears and trumpetry. The following morning things continued at the Cenotaph with muted pomp. The media spotted that JC – the Corbynator – barely bowed his head after he laid his wreath. He mumbled the National Anthem as would Wayne Rooney at Wembley. Corbs had similarly half-mouthed the Lord’s Prayer the night before. Jezza – either go for it or look respectfully indifferent. Either is preferable. Toffs know how to carry off hypocrisy so much better.

St. Nicholas’ Church, Thames Ditton. 21st October 2015.

My mind wandered and I shifted uneasily as Tony Pritchard’s coffin was lowered onto trestles. I was in the third row of pews; my old form master’s eco-basket-casket was not quite close enough to touch.I glanced down at the order of service and a healthy, florid, memorable faced smiled back at me. Antony Cowles Lowther Prichard. I had never thought that the C and L of A.C.L. Prichard would reveal such deliciously odd names. How little we know of those who inhabit our lives.

As the service got under way I reflected on my first day at Kingston Grammar School. September 1962. A new boy in shorts and striped orange blazer was told to stand in the 1C line as my name came after Q in the alphabet. The access to 1C’s formroom was down a small flight of stairs, giving the room a cave-like quality. The desks were Victorian wrought-iron and wrinkled oak scored with the etchings of former inmates. A prefect loomed over our silence as we waited for a teacher to arrive. And there he was, ‘Prickles’, begowned, youthful, fearsomely smiling and agile as he pattered lightly down the form steps. Gown became cape as it billowed with his forward momentum. Batman had arrived.
I became fond of this strict but clever life-force of a teacher. He taught Latin in the rote style, banging a carved walking stick (Belshazzar) to a rhythmic beat as we conjugated verbs. Amo/Amas/Amat etc. Plenty of memories washed over me but as I sat in my pew it was the first batman meeting, that first encounter that returned so easily. A snapshot.

A segway to poetry. Teachers sometimes try to outsmart pupils by asking them to define poetry or verse. It’s impossible of course. However, by collecting several responses a teacher can point a class in interesting directions. One such definition was offered to me by a smartie-pants boy many years ago. A moment caught forever. Nice answer. Lots more to say, perhaps but when we think of the poems we know well, a line often stands out. The host of daffodils, kingfishers catching fire, the blast-beruffled plume, the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle, the albatross, the sound of revelry by night. Tread softly through your memory and half-forgotten lines can emerge and a door left ajar is opened again. And the poem often becomes the line and vice-versa. A representative of the whole.

So it was, a couple of weeks ago, that Tony Prichard was distilled in the moment he became Batman on first meeting. As I shifted in my pew I thought of those near and dear to me and conjured up moments, images, gestures which represented them. Gerard Manley Hopkins called it inscape – the very essence, not just of people but the entire natural world. For him it was proof that God existed through the uniqueness of his creations. It’s a romantic view which powered his poetry but I wouldn’t base my view of creation on it. But I do enjoy a bit of inscaping every now and then.
RIP, ACLP 16/11/1927 – 21/9/2015

Let’s hope that Craig Joubert’s infamy will soon be relegated from the cause celebre it appears to be. The rugby ref who made a mistake which arguably cost the Scots a quarter final victory has been vilified unforgiveably. His name is being spat upon by the tartan rugby army and many others who should know better.

Craig’s international career appears to be in tatters. Let’s examine what happened. In the final minute of a game in which Australia had dominated, scoring 5 tries to the one opportunistic interception try of the Scots, CJ awarded a penalty for offside against Scottish prop John Welsh. JW had caught a ball in an offside position in front of his team. Joubert had not seen the Aussie Nick Phipps’ contact with the ball which would have rendered the offside as ‘accidental’. A scrum, rather than a penalty should have been given – to Australia. They might have scored from the next phase of play. Who knows?

Joubert ran from the pitch. The speculation is that he felt intimidated and wanted safety. Perhaps he knew he’d cocked up. He didn’t used the video-ref (TMO) because it wasn’t a decision that warranted it. He could have asked his linesmen for advice. Radio and TV commentators ‘called it’ the same way as Joubert before they had the hindsight of slo-mo replay. OK, he made a mistake.

Had the error happened at any other time in the game apart from  the final minutes, I wouldn’t be writing this and thousands of column inches and media invective would not have been expended. Of course the Scots have a right to feel hard done by. There are countless occasions in sport when bad luck plays a part. But rugby had a proud tradition of respect – and in particular respect for referees. The game has pioneered the use of video back-up. There may be a little way to go but this latest, unsavoury witch hunt threatens to place professional rugby union alongside its far grubbier neighbour – soccer.

The Captain of Wales, Sam Warburton tweeted a nauseating  ‘we know what it’s like to be hard done by’ message. The England camp were too busy enrolling heavyweight judges for the trial of Stuart Lancaster. If only Robshaw had opted to kick the final penalty..Luckily the Irish had a dignity level which befits the emerald isle. They just said that the better team (the Argies) won.

Rugby is a sport. Winning is important but other things count, they really do. There are plenty of better targets for vilification than the hapless Craig Joubert. Armstrong, Blatter…the Frenchman who spat on Chris Froome. There are cheats everywhere and corruption in far too many high places. But on the rugby pitch there are players…and referees…and mistakes. Vilification is wrong.

This is sport. It’s not Syria.

To help celebrate my birthday I gave up biting my nails. 64years of chomping had reduced my slender fingers to unsightly, mutant stubs. I managed to conceal my carnivorous self-abuse with a range of tactics: unusual grip of cutlery, hands in pockets, fists balled when others were close. Only close observers and nearest and dearest – or manicurists – spotted my phalangeassaultism. It’s a common enough ailment. Check out hands on glasses at your local pub. Since smoking was banned, nail-biting has taken over as the go-to tension release.

The emerging beauty of those things at the end of my hands has given me a different world-view. Much has changed. Driving, watching TV, films, reading..all activities where my default was to chew my nails to the quicks. Now I have developed a deliberate ‘show’ of my hands, ensuring that others are drawn to checking my nails because, for the first time, I can allow them so to do. I have developed extravagant gestures, flaunting my new appendages. Pinkie fingers with wine.

My new world view also includes noticing the Corbyn effect. Jezza may turn out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing as he deselects those who don’t share his open and honest approach. For now, though, he has helped us look at politicians and politics afresh.

The migrant crisis has also pushed Europeans to examine our ‘We’re alright Jack’ smugness. We’re rethinking on the hoof – and we’re unsure quite which way our moral compass is pointing. Magnetic north?

The World Cup might be bathos in this context but having watched the four quarter finals this weekend shouldn’t we English be ashamed at our scapegoat-searching, grubby, finger-pointing press? Of course England punched below their weight but the cheap, soundbite-grabbing, dirt-peddling journos who sought out smear-stories with which to discredit Lancaster and his men made a serious miscalculation. The rugby public, after a day or two of bereavement, really do like watching good rugby, whoever is playing it. This year it’s the southern hemisphere which dominates. How brilliant were the Kiwis against France? And the pulsating Springboks tie against Wales was an edge of the seater. Now Argentina have put on a bravura performance against the lovely Irish. David matching Goliath. The effort, pace…the sheer brilliance was breathtaking. Rugby at this level should reveal the grubby intrigues of Premiership soccer as another country, another planet. The media were in danger of demeaning themselves further. The quarter final matches, so far, have put them in their place. Now I am settling down for Aussie v Scots. New nails, new view. Less of the emperor’s new clothes.

Well done Argentina. Don’t cry for us.

Source: Smokin’ Vienna

I had not been to Vienna before last week. Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914, sparked the First World War. Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938 – the Anschluss – was a murky prompt for the 2nd WW. The Austrians were major players in the 20th Century and their last Emperor Franz Joseph with his superstar wife Elizabeth (SiSi) were the darlings of late 19th century Europe. Now where is all this taking me?

Well Vienna, I thought, would be a rather upright, uptight formal place – you know riding schools, big boring buildings and plenty of cake and waltzing. And don’t mention the war – or at least don’t scratch away too much at the surface.

Not true. Well -there are plenty of nods to a grander past. Yes – huge show-off buildings built by this Kaiser or that. The Hofburg Palace complex alone outsizes anything we have in dear old Blighty. Even Blenheim seems like a poor relation in terms of large-scale masonry. But the cultural diet is an affecting blend of old and new. We stayed in the museum quarter where the chic Leopold museum and  The Mumok gallery, all black modernity, sits a stone’s throw from the enormous, palatial neo-classical Art History Museum (Kunsthistorisches). Along with so many of Vienna’s grand buildings the big K was commissioned by old Franz Joseph in the 19th Century to celebrate and cement the longevity of the Hapsburgs. When you get over the fact that each street corner heralds another edifice of concrete at which you’re supposed to click your heels and salute the Kaiser, you discover that there’s a bar which has old-world charm and cheap Gosser beer running like water. Student dives abound and the babble of conversation and the great mix of ages makes stopping off regularly to get a buzz of modern life an infectious habit.

My favourite moments were mostly in bars and restaurants where people-watching and the unaffected charm of the Viennese made the wine or cocktail-  or even the overrated weinerschnitzel – go down so well. My clothes took an unexpected battering, however. Every bar – and we tested plenty – allowed all inmates license to chainsmoke. At the delightful Alt Wein Bar, the punters on the bar stools stacked up several  packs of 20 on  the assumption that a long Sunday lunchtime session would see their weedy resources decimated. And our jovial host had his lips clamped to a roll-up as he spat instructions to an overworked chef. The latter had the manners, at least, to have his fag in an ashtray at the kitchen door. The place heaved with life – families, oldies having liquid lunch, students, blue-rinsers…you name it. And two old friends who smiled and sank Gossers and Riesling all afternoon – long may the euro be subdued against our mighty £.

Two more mentions. The underrated ‘Arsenal’ – the Vienna War Museum – is a must. And at only 5euros a cheap shot of history. And what history. The first room has the car in which the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was travelling with his wife Sophie, in Sarajevo on the fateful day in 1914. Opposite is his tunic, still spattered with his blood. Wow. Worth the entrance money. There’s much more and Austria’s darker moments during the second WW – and after – are given a natural light touch.

Secondly the Film and Novel The Third Man is a Viennese favourite. The central cinema reruns the Joseph Cotton/Orson Welles classic each Friday night. And my buddy, the eminent historian Terry Charman, took me on the famed Ferris Wheel ride where Harry Lime (Welles) was confronted by Holly Martins (Cotton). This is the main attraction at the revamped Prater, Vienna’s Tivoli. The views, the rattle of a century old rotting wooden cabin and thoughts of Harry Lime were a treat for my birthday. Happy hour martinis later in the day completed a memorable excursion into Graham Greene’s murky world.

Back to smoking. Vienna airport – all modern and shoppy, in the Dubai give-us-yer-money sense. Cheek by jowl with Versace are smoking booths. Telephone boxes redesignated as cancer coffins. The chic bar at our departure gate had a smoking pod into which two people could squeeze. It was Perspex so as its inhabitants drew on their fags the windows fogged up The incumbents disappeared in the mist of their own nicotined carbon monoxide. Extraordinary. Just an element of ‘Whatever they tell us to do in Brussels, we’ll do what we bloody well want anyway.’ Nigel Farage would love it.

Getting things in proportion is never easy. The first week of Wimbledon tests my patience. Amongst many irritations here are some lowlights:

1. Bling. It’s bad enough that most sprinters have chains like anchors flapping madly as they heave their steroided torsos over the 100metre stretch but it surely can’t help the uncoiling torque of a service if 18carat’s worth of a love memento is bouncing round your chest.
2. Andrew (this year Sue Barker is calling him Andy – probably confusing him with a sour-faced Scotsman) Castle, another ex-wannabe tennis-player, now commentator, is saucepan-screechingly annoying. ‘She was on her game from the Get-Go.’ Agh! ‘Her stats rack-up impressively.’ Aaarggh! Bring Barry Davies in from court 18 and give McEnroe more air time. He’s full of impenetrable jargon but I’ll forgive a genius anything.
3. Players who walk off court without waiting for their opponents. Bad winners and bad losers. Get over it.
4. Henman Hill. It’s a hill not a shrine to a nice man who never won Wimbledon.

There are plenty more where these came from but these annoyances don’t rank with what has happened in Tunisia nor the escalating situation in Greece. As my mother used to say when I wouldn’t eat my greens – there are millions starving in Africa  – but Africa was a place we were never likely to visit so starvation was abstract. Greens were not. They were horrible.

As I ventured out for a spot of shopping, I groaned at the parking sensors beeping when I was miles away from any obstruction. They play a serenade when I brush a daisy but if Bruce Springsteen is on full volume I can crash into a brick wall. Then some jackass was bumper-close behind me on a winding country road. Naturally I slowed down to annoy him further and had to endure the single finger salute as he roared past me on a tiny straight bit before another bend. I didn’t reciprocate. He had tattoos.

Back in my hutch I got a text from a friend who has just broken his tibia and fibula, if you know where they are. He’s blogged about it(Compleatbirder – wordpress) – well you would wouldn’t you? Then I opened a letter revealing the annual accounts of my esteemed bank: Nationwide. Gosh they’ve made some money, even though they call me a member rather than a customer. I turned to the remuneration of the board. Four executive directors (all men) and eight non-exec. (2 women). Chief exec. Graham Beale’s package, including legacy (ie pension payments) is a staggering £2.4 million! The four top boys get £6.5mill. between them.  The non-exec. (ie he doesn’t even work there) Chairman, Geoffrey Howe (don’t laugh) only gets £310,000. They tell me you can’t get this sort of talent just anywhere. The explanatory blurb was so confusing I couldn’t work out if these guys got even more through bonuses. I would quote from the document but I must keep a sense of FUCKING proportion.

I haven’t moved my money yet but my flexi-super saver account is bouncing along at .45% interest and falling nicely behind inflation while the Nationwide board get fat on my enormous contribution.

Andy Murray managed a beaming smile yesterday. He’s getting things in perspective. Me too.

Tunisia. A minute’s silence at Wimbledon today. The bling takes a back seat.

‘The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.’ Oscar Wilde

As Justin Gatlin, the much-banned drugs cheat won the grand prix 100 metres in Rome last night, equalling Usain Bolt’s track record of 9.75seconds, Oscar Wilde’s prophetic words echoed round the sporting world. Cheats really do prosper, it seems.

Of course it’s easier to gain advantage where brute strength, lung power and ignorance are involved – rowing cycling, track and field, weight lifting etc. If subtlety, team-play, decision-making, versatility and complex tactics are involved, testosterone alone won’t do the job. If it did we might have a shout in the World Cup. Mind you footballers and cricketers have been pretty good at throwing games or no-balling for cash in recent times.

Which, of course, brings us to FIFA and Blattergate. And Alberto Salazar. The recent Panorama programme questioned the purity of Alan Wells’s meteoric rise to the 100metres gold medal in Moscow. And so it all goes. As scandal succeeds scandal why are we so surprised that cheating is pervasive, universal?

We use the word cheat from a young age. Kids cheat at party games, board games, in exams. We lie quite a lot too. Lying and cheating are integral parts of some cultures – they are a part of trying to achieve the best result. But sport should be different shouldn’t it? We revere the Corinthian values of sportsmanship and fair play. Our recent sporting icons are unimpeachable – Hoy, Redgrave, Ennis-Hill, Farrah…ah, are we sure about this? A previous generation had team players who carried the banner of integrity – Charlton, Moore, Cowdrey, Brearley and we liked those with spunk, a bit of devil – Botham, Best, Gazza – flawed geniuses. Now money is power and you cheat to get the best result.

Ever since Tommy Simpson fell off his bike I have thought that cycling was cursed with cheats. Athletics has been plagued for just as long. There are different types and levels of cheating too. FIFA adopt the bribery/money laundering approach, Lance Armstrong the medical – but in 21^st century competiton humans will go to extraordinary lengths for glory (ie fame and riches). Nice guys do come second and it’s such a pity that this is the case. I want to believe in free and fair competition. When, in January, New England Patriots deflated their footballs to get one over Indianapolis Colts, I laughed. It was absurd. I should have cried.

I hope, still, that sport can rise above the general culture of cheats prospering. Daily, however, examples abound of those in positions of trust and power, abusing it. Whether it’s Libor-rate fixes, tax dodges, MPs’ expenses, Phone tapping, Rolf Harris, killer-nurses, Hillsborough police-chiefs, …gosh it’s a never-ending list. Even Bill Clinton regained his Presidency after giving Monica one.

Bobby Charlton and I share a birthday. Now there was a real, world class, unimpeachable, nice guy – who won without cheating.

Didn’t we all think that Blatter the chatter’s main message was: morals don’t matter, let’s go for Qatar. Any rhyme with Blatter makes for poor patter – scatter, shatter, batter, twatter, fatter-catter…and so on.  Fancy calling yourself Sepp instead of Joseppp. Domination of world football was inevitable. An irony that the Yanks blew the gaff on the bungs and bribes of FIFA, since it took them light years to expose Sir Lancelot Armstrong and that tidal wave of sprinters, now reinstated, who pump performance powerdrugs into their already-supercharged bodies. No matter, the world gets more curious daily. Aided of course by the ineffectual carping of Greg Dyke and David Gill and Prince bloody William who all cry ‘foul’ while Blatter gets fatter on the votes of delegates whose nests are nicely feathered.

Take the dogs who have just won BGT  (we aficionados use the acronym on the assumption that everyone was glued on Sunday night). Take the SNP. Take the Gooners winning the FA Cup and Bath losing to Saracens. Take England’s dropped catches. Take petrol prices going up again. Austerity. Dennis Skinner. Bercow. The rest.

It’s April and Day 2 in Sorrento breaks warm and cloudy. Vesuvius is ominously brooding across the water . Our  rep. James wants his team to muster promptly at 10 for a walking tour of the town. We could probably do without but what is there to lose?

The dining room is awash with Euro accents east to west. Snake-hipped Luigis slalom through the tables with a loud, warm insincerity which makes us all feel good. I remember seeing the startling décor of the Hotel Admiral on arrival. There’s a plastic green-and-white American retro thing going on in the entrance lobby and bar. An emerald Statue of Liberty is frescoed on sparkling white wall.  The interior decorators haven’t got to the dining room yet but that disaster can’t be far off. Vesuvius frowns at all this. It’s hardly in keeping with the grandeur of the ancient sites up the road or the elegance of Sorrento itself.

When James calls the roll, I’m somewhat hyper from the repeated cups of highly caffeinated low-grade hotel sludge-coffee. We troop out of the hotel, a somewhat chaotic and self-conscious band of brothers and sisters, all hoping that we can get the bonding thing over with quickly. The nut-brown, weather-wrinkled fishermen stand around their battered boats waiting, scowling resentful of…I’m not sure what.  Cars parked along the quay are all, without exception, battered by careless and expert dents and scrapings. No bumper, door, hub cap or wheel arch is unscathed it seems. The narrow, cobbled lanes and tight coastal roads are only partly to blame. The arrogance of speed, the devil of the Neapolitan is evident. A little collision and the resulting abrasion is a calling card greeted with a shoulder shrug. The other car is at fault, even when stationary.

The sky is brightening as we climb the cobbled steps up, up to Piazza Tasso, the heart of Sorrento. The scent of lemons is everywhere. Huge fruits fill baskets and decorate displays of the ubiquitous spirit Limoncello. The tight bazaar running up to the Piazza is a blast of colour- scarves, hats,fruits, confectionary, cakes, books, glass, ceramics – each stall and shop with a smiling, insistent invitation to sample and buy.

The hectic crush of the narrow market streets give way to the elegant main square, Tasso, named after the great poet. Here the traffic is snarled – a gridlock made inevitable  by the sinister, unsmiling officiousness of a policewoman issuing a ticket to the driver of an enormous pantechnicon. The two are locked in voluble argument. The seem oblivious to the wonderful anger of the horns, the gesticulations, the shouts of drivers and pedestrians. The cacophony is fabulous. And the tourist season is only just beginning.

We head for the Limoncello ‘Cave’ just off the square. A chilled one mid-morning is just the ticket. We down a couple of freebies served by a gorgeous Sophia Loren-type whose English is incomprehensible but fluent. The liquor slips down a treat in the mid-morning haze. I’m tempted to buy several bottles but space in the case is limited and I fear that the sick-yellow firewater will gather dust in the less romantic surroundings of my dingy lounge.

James leads us on, umbrella aloft to guide his flock past the majestic cathedral tucked away down a sidestreet to a shopping plaza and into a furniture store. Cuomo’s Lucky Store – the name didn’t inspire excitement – but within was a vast cavern of expensive and intimidating objets d’art. A floor of flooring – ancient and modern rugs of oriental provenance; a floor of ceramics – pottery of every shape and size, from bright, gaudy Italian peasantware to more muted but chic tureens and plates. All was ultra-modern or ultra-retro. The basement floor was the Aladdin’s cave. Here the signature woodwork was on display. Cuomo’s, we were told by a charming Paolo was world renowned for inlay marquetry-work. All around us from chessboards  to wardrobes to throne-like chairs to vast dining tables, the craftsmen’s wares gargoyled at us. Impressively kitsch and garish – the stuff could have been made for Chelsea- if not in. Essex might suit better. Perhaps Richard Branson could find space for it in his rebuilt pad on that island of his. I shouldn’t splutter on too much – the skills involved in the artwork, the creation and fashioning of the ebony, boxwood and sycamore; the veneering processes…

Paolo directed me to a modest dining table. I affected curiosity, then keenness. I checked the price – £20,000. My shoulder shrug seemed to encourage him. I comforted myself with the thought that it’s so hard to tell one oligarch from another these days. We’re all designed-stubbled and have Barbour quilts.