I'm Only Saying

a good thing

I'm only saying that I think Salman Rushdie is a good thing. I find him difficult to read but the whole fatwa business and his survival of it is a parable of western decency in the face of infantile religiosity. There's plenty of infantile westernism and religious decency to keep the books balanced elsewhere but I just thought I should say.

And of course something else which is a good thing is red cabbage, a portion of which I had with belly pork for dinner yesterday. Mm,  Mmmm. Washed down with Ned sauvignon blanc since you ask. In Four Oaks that's bloody close to rock n' roll.

I refereed a game of rugby yesterday. One sided but players from both sides seemed to have got something out of it and were kind enough to thank me. I didn't have a great game but nor did I have a bad one - I've been around and in rugby a long time now and I'm actually a pretty good judge of these things. I wasn't bad. So why was the winning coach so carping? I've thought about this a bit and I'm afraid there is a problem with the modern phenomenon of the nomadic professional coach - he has to be seen to find fault as a means of demonstrating to his employers that he knows oh so much more than the poor old referee. He feels an ownership of the game which in truth he does not enjoy. The game belongs to its participants and these sorts of coach are not participants, rather they feel themselves above the game, puppet masters. Now not everyone is like this, indeed there are glorious exceptions whose considered criticism I welcome. But there is just a tendency favouring the blustering rootless nomad which obliterates another little beauty spot on the lovely flawed face of the most wonderful game. I'm only saying ... haven't got an answer. Ah well.

C.H. Sisson -
a good thing

As I have previously said, there ain't half been some clever bastards (lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders) (well Ian Dury said/sang it of course) and another one has crossed my radar - C. H. Sisson, poet, translator, Anglican, very high Tory and arch despiser of my mate Walter Bagehot whom he rather marvellously termed ' the founding father of the apologetics of "fact". ' Now my problem is that I can see where Sisson was coming from in hating the apologetics of "fact" (for which look no further please than the usurpation by the technocracy of Italian sovereignty), but I'm not sure poor old Walter should get all the blame for starting us down that road. But it always is the damnedest thing when people cleverer than you start disagreeing with you. I'm only saying.

An early example of Sisson's art:

A Death

We dare not mourn
And will not look upon the face of the dead
Our inattention turns
Away the head
Our inattention spurns
Grief, love and death.