Am I Getting Old And Reactionary?

Of course I am. Indeed my friends will tell you that I used to be young and reactionary. No matter, I'm still going to go off on one about the state of three of my favourite sports, most particularly the way that they seem to think they can attract a 'new audience'.

These three sporting passions of mine may be on their way out, certainly in the satisfying manifestations that have enraptured me for most of my life. Let's start with cricket, the state of which I have lamented many times before. I watch the tedious Big Bash from Australia. The commentary is odious. Shouting does not make something more notable. This noise is rubbish.

Next, the sport nearest to my heart, rugby union football. The RFU thinks it advisable to pay its Chief Executive Officer over a million pounds per annum as he signs-off on a year in which the organistaion culled a load of staff and in which the grass-roots game is dying on its feet. The game struggles to make viable a top league which has only ten solvent teams. It denies itself, when fielding a team to represent our country, the services of anyone who has the audacity to ply his trade outside England. This too is rubbish.

And the game I play (very badly) these days - golf. I watched the utter drivel of the TGL indoor game that is being used to line the pockets of Woods and McIlroy. Professional golfers hitting a ball into a screen linked to a computer that traces where the ball would have gone. All the time the commentators roar at us and attempt the impossible of making golfers sound interesting. Good golf is plenty interesting, its practitioners have no need to be. This too is rubbish. 

Test match cricket. Well-coached top-level rugby. Proper golf played under pressure of terrain and climate. Mark my words, we will miss these when they have gone.       

Novella No. 1:4

There is a long path from his school to the gate on Home Lane. The path gets shorter with age. His age. Ice cream vans cram there parasitically. His first intimations of love and death live here. He cannot remember her name, much less her face, but his nine-year-old self held her hand as they negotiated the then-long path. He felt that tender fibrillation and knew he liked it.

He has twice been close to death. He once fell asleep at the wheel on the M5. He shudders that memory away. The car rolled. He walked away. The ice cream vans were the cause of the earlier, more tactable passing of the shadow. A dizzying game of tig. Flattered to be included in the game, the fat little boy evades over-keenly and runs behind the last van. Stop me and buy one. A lorry bears down on him, horn blaring. He can still see the driver's terrified face - it is that close. He is not hit. Nor is he tigged. Good at games.  

A god who looks over drunks? Could he/she/it tell even then that the fat little boy would become an unfat drunk. An early shift? Thank God.

On that long path, one of the cool boys (he was in the football team) shows him a pornographic magazine purloined from an older brother. It makes no sense, inspires no curiosity. Sex should be a practical matter, not theoretical. It is just like falling through a hedge - anyone can do it. The art is doing it well. Sex, that is.

In Defence Of The Meta-Text: Two British Examples

You have to give it to the BBC, its iPlayer streaming service is a treasure trove. I have just finished watching two Le Carre adaptations with quiet enjoyment: Smiley's People (better as television than as a novel); and A Perfect Spy (a notably good novel and a less satisfactory, though stil meritorious, television series). But that is not what I want to talk about. My main concern today is two films that can be found on iPlayer.

You won't (or at least shouldn't) need telling that the Beatles are brilliant. I use the present tense because their music remains as fresh as the proverbial daisy. I'm listening to it now. Their first venture into film, A Hard Day's Night (1964), is a stylish, bordering on brilliant, film about a band called the Beatles, played by (and credited as playing - that point is important - pay attention at the back) John, Paul, George and Ringo. The meta-text - it's about their trials and tribulations on their way to making a television show. It is consistently good-natured and Richard Lester's direction is superb. A real treat and, oh, that music. 75/100. 

An even more self-aware piece of meta-text is presented by A Cock and Bull Story. This is a film about the making of a film of a famously unfilmable metatextual novel, Sterne's Tristram Shandy. If this was done with anything other than a very deft touch, it would be in danger of disappearing up ts own fundament. It doesn't. It is very, very clever without being alienating. There is a great line (delivered by the excellent Steve Coogan) about Shandy being a postmodern novel written two hundred years before there was any modernism to be post of. Also 75/100. 

 

Nature Abhors A Vacuum

Great minds have debated this Greek nostrum, but don't worry I'm not going to suggest that I am qualified to add to the clamour. No, it just comes to mind when I try to summon up some optimism for the year that lies ahead of us and I see the moral and intellectual vacuums that so disfigure our public life.

Let's get Keir Starmer out of the way. I really don't care for this two-faced Mr Pasty but, bloody hell, he's a mile more convincing than Kemi Badenoch. Mind you what's really irking me about Starmer are not his policies (what policies?) but his predilection for having his photo taken jacketless and his sleeves rolled up. Here I am probably miles removed from the zetigeist but I like my statesmen to appear statesmanlike, not like some mealy-mouthed middle-manager.  

But let us talk of the far greater problem - the moral vacuum that emanates from America and threatens to pull us all into its nothingness. And I'm not (for today at least) concerned with that arch-shit Trump or his grifting British minion Farage. No, Elon Musk. Being the richest man in the world does not disqualify him from having opinions but the vile trash-talking he favours (much of it currently aimed, quite improperly, against Starmer) is an abuse of status. As Spiderman so often reminds us, with great power comes great responsibility. The Overgraduate does not, and never will, own a Tesla.

Twelve Films At Christmas - 12 & 13

Yes, yes, alright, I do know that thrteen is a number greater than twelve. However I have watched a couple more films as the holiday eked out its last few days and both are so good that they deserve some analysis. Ignore my heading and think 'A Baker's Dozen At Christmas'. 

Back in 2012 the delightful movie Sideways made its way into that year's Christmas dozen. It was directed by Alexander Payne and starred Paul Giamatti. That same director/actor combination is now seen to brilliant effect in The Holdovers. I strongly urge you to watch this film. It deserves to become a Christmas classic but will be superb whenever you consume it. Warm and funny without being saccharine this is one of the best films I have seen this year. 84/100. I will not say any more.

From the hinterland of teen stardom, Ron Howard has long since shaken off the dust of being Richie Cunningham in Happy Days, and has become one of Hollywood's most reliable directors. You imagine he would have thrived under the old studio system, churning out routinely engaging pictures. If you have doubts, watch Parenthood (1989) in which he draws out fine performances from his ensemble cast. Most notably he is well served (and they by him) by the juvenile actors. It is all about the trials of parenting and of being parented. It will make you smile. 79/100. 

Twelve Films At Christmas - 7 to 11

Another year is nearly done and I have been keeping up my diet of films. Just one more needed to complete the requisite dozen. We shall start with a good film of a very good book, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. The movie (1949) won the Best Picture Oscar and is undoubtedly very good as it comprehensively makes its point that all power tends to corrupt and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Not quite in the same league as the source novel, though probably more accessible. 76/100. Not to be confused with the 2006 remake which the critics hated.  

The industry engaged in attempting to make a tele-ready Christmas classic is a vast one - for evidence one need look no further than the dedicated Christmas film channels that pop up from September onwards. A Boy Called Christmas is thankfully a good few steps ahead of the general dross. It is captivatingly filmed and, a few limp attempts at liberal politics aside, it marches on rather nicely. It has Maggie Smith and Jim Broadbent in it, always reliable signifiers. Not a great film but miles from being a bad one. 62/100.

I was reluctant to watch the BBC's prize offering on Christmas Day, the final ever Gavin and Stacey. I had an uneasy feeling that it would not be up to the standards that had preceded it in this admirable comic sequence. I was wrong, it was superb. Anyway, the reason I mention this is that the other pillar of the Beeb's Christmas Day schedule was Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. This too transpired to be a joy. The patience of the stop-frame animating is awesome and the quiet wit at play in the script has you smiling throughout, that is when you are not plain laughing. 77/100. 

In amongst all this joy (my reviews thus far have been generally favourable, I think you would agree) a little rain must fall. Cromwell (1970) is a failure of a film. The source history certainly has potential for drama but what we get here is an austere plod through the Civil War and an awful lot of Richard Harris (Cromwell) being bad-tempered and Alec Guinness (Charles I) being effete. There is potential in both of these characters but these fine actors are ill-served by the pedestrian script. A pity. 54/100.   

Let us finish for today (indeed, unless a I get a sudden fit of imagination, let us finish for 2024) with the joyous interlude that is Field of Dreams. Unless you understand something of the American obsession with the poetry of baseball, you may find this picture slight and rather silly. It is not. All of us who obsess over silly games and couple that obsession with a love of literature will find something redeeming in this film. 77/100.

And now we shall leave it until 2025. Thank you for humouring me with your presence. Happy New Year.

Advent 24

Volume 24 (Index and Atlas)

This is where it all started when I had the idea for this year's calendar. And this is where it all ends. Page 63 of the atlas bears the disarming legend, 'Palestine showing the 1949 armistice boundaries between the Arab States and Israel'. A lot of water and too much blood has passed under the bridge since that time. 

My uneasy notion was to take Bethlehem as my key and there it is, slap bang in the middle of page 63.

There has been a far from cogent thread of spirituality in these calendar entries. That is good as it gets with me I am afraid. It is not for the want of trying that my ideas are still unformed, or perhaps I should more accuarately say are re-formed on a daily basis. I am of an age when the impermanence of existence weighs heavy. 

What can be said is that Bethlehem is where the greatest story ever told has its near beginnings. And as evidence of my agnostic eclecticism I will, despite my voluntary attachement to the Catholic church, quote, not from an accepted catholic scripture but from the King James Bible (a 'Proddy' bible if ever there was one) since that is a beautiful deployment of the English language. One might say that I am guilty of having my communion wafer and eating it. All of this, in its grandeur and its silliness, proclaims for me the mystery of faith.

And Joseph also went up from Galileee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (Luke 2:4)

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. / For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. (Luke 2:10-11)

 And this encapsulates my meagre faith:

For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. / No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. (John 1:17-18)

That's all folks. Thank you for reading. I will leave you with words of those two sages, John Lydon and Dave Allen: may the road rise with you; may your god go with you.