A Modest Proposal

Today I channel my very own inner Jonathan Swift. Before we start, a dim thought; would Swift have been a blogger? Of course he would.

Anyway, this latest idea of mine has been thoroughly road-tested. It went through a meticulously assembled focus group, specifically the group of ex-rugby-players seated around a table at Royal Pype Hayes Golf Club yesterday evening after our weekly thrash. 

Today's guest editor

Important background. Casa Piggy (where the groupie and the Pig live) is, modesty must not prevent me admitting, in a fairly salubrious area. It is larger than your average homestead though not, I would venture, obscenely so. It is nice. We are lucky. We are on the edge of the countryside - the point where green belt and suburbia collide - at least for now. If you go to the top of our road and turn right you will pass some right old gin palaces before you descend into agricultural land. On the road that passes the fields there is an unmetalled lay-by. In that lay-by some unspeakable low-life has abandoned a fridge. This is a frequent occurrence. Fly-tipping. We are only ten minutes away from one of the City of Birmingham's excellent public tips. Take it there you unforgivable wanker. The saddest part of all of this is that it is now so commonplace that it almost passes notice.

So here is my modest proposal. A select few in society (chosen by me - we could start with the seven of us sat around that table yesterday) would be issued with firearms and single bullets. We would be authorised to shoot and kill any perpetrators of fly-tipping, pour encourager les autres. After each summary execution we would report the locus of the event and the City would clear up the fridge and also the body. A new bullet would be issued.

I am no more serious than was Swift with his own modest proposal but, bloody hell, this stuff can make you mad. By sheer coincidence I today read the revised Terms of Use of blogger.com - this includes the prohibition of revelling in or encouraging violence. I take the readers of this blog to be people of inestimable discernment (as any fule kno) but just in case I have missed in my aim - this is a joke , and like all the best jokes it reveals a serious point. And it does make a nice change from me banging on about Trump.    

Played quite well yesterday in case you're interested and this morning I went for a run down the lane towards the fridge. I'm feeling jolly chipper - now where's that gun?    

Things I Hold Dear

From an early age I have been a sports obsessive - player and spectator. I still play golf (frustratingly badly and I'm afraid there is no false modesty at play in this) and I still run and cycle for fitness. However late middle-age (I suppose I ought to admit that it is really early old-age) affords more room for spectating. I ought to add that I also still enjoy reading good sports journalism and books. All of which brings me to some recent realisations that the land I eventually leave behind (I'm in no hurry) risks being very different from the one I inherited from my forebears.

Association football is the great and beautiful beast that threatens to swallow the sporting landscape whole. We have the continuing saga of Manchester City and their legion of uber-expensive lawyers trying to wriggle off the hook of the dubious Financial Fair Play Regulations. Regardless, the beast lurches on breathing fire and burning cash. 

Cricket may just about me my favourite game to watch and I think it spawns the very best writing on sport. One of my most cherished possessions is the 1960 Wisden, given to me on my fiftieth  birthday by two dearest friends - 1960 was the year of my birth. It records first-class cricket in the age before the birth of one-day cricket. It records a civilisation gone with the wind. And yes I know that things had to change but something seen on television today brought home to me that test cricket, that magnificent yet frustrating animal, is dying on its feet. Today is the first day of the South Africa v Australia test at Durban. There is hardly a soul in the ground. Sad, sad, sad. I fear a world peopled by 'franchise players' trailing their coffins around the shrinking world at the behest of television and playing nothing more spiritually sustaining than glorified pub cricket. 

My greatest love as a player was rugby union. The game has been savaged by professionalism. the fifteen man code, at its monied levels, has become a twenty-three men per side cauldron of collision. Meanwhile the amateur game is tragically diminished. I can foresee a not too distant future where the amateur game hardly exists. This pains me but I have no solution to offer. The world is becoming a lesser place.

And all of this in the week when the greatest nation on the modern Earth (it just about still is despite Trumpian privations) announces that it will stream the execution of a murderer for public consumption. That atrocity does, I suppose, put my sporting woes in context.    

There Ought To Be Rules About This Sort Of Stuff

I know it's silly but I do wrestle with my mind's meanderings on what constitutes a great film. For today I will say that as a minimum qualification it must be a first-class piece of work, that is to say that it must score at least seventy out of one hundred on the OG ratings - yes this is all about me - why else write a blog? That much is simple but lots of very good films qualify by this route, films that I would not call great. My current prejudice is to demand re-watchability as an additional signifier of greatness.

What got me thinking about this (it may be pathetic but it's better than worrying myself to death about that cultural vandal Trump) was watching Winchester 73 the other day. Anthony Mann is overshadowed by John Ford in the pantheon of Western directors (or dare we call them auteurs) but the five such films that he made with James Stewart are important. Winchester 73 is concise, taut and brilliant - film noir meets the Western. 86/100.

By that grading I am suggesting that Winchester 73 is, by some comfortable distance, a first-class piece of film-making. Rewatchable? Decidedly. 

All of which brings me to the title of this post. I am suggesting that aggrieved Hollywood stars might assert that there ought to be a limit on how many truly great films any one actor can be in. Stewart is in four I can reel off: The Philadelphia Story; It's a Wonderful Life; Winchester 73; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And yes I know I am wilfully striking out the four he made with Hitchcock, the Hitch not being quite my cup of tea.

Winchester 73 - great film.

A Funny Old Week

It may not always be apparent but I'm a sensitive soul, a fact that made what happened on Wednesday all the harder to take. No names, no pack-drill, but I found myself roundly attacked and, this being the bit that really hurts, my morals and my intellect were questioned. As I say, I'm a sensitive soul and such things wound me. That is putting it mildly - by Wednesday evening I was feeling as low as I have been for a long time. But it transpires that it really is darkest before the dawn.

The Groupie was, as ever, marvellous and I permitted myself a couple of glasses of the good weekend red as a solace. Even so I was not exactly full of the joys of Spring as I made an early start on Thursday to play for Pype Hayes Seniors against Marston Lakes Golf Club. After four hours of better-ball match play the Pig and his partner (IC - much better golfer than the Pig) emerged triumphant by 2 and 1. The result does not matter, it was the company of nice people that lifted me. No side, no agendas, just civilised fun. Thank you to IC and to the two Johns who opposed us.

Golf as therapy. Yesterday got even better. I played again yesterday morning - this time a quarter-final knockout against our estimable captain and fellow left-hander, PS. Poor old P had to give me a generous batch of shots and I eventually prevailed on the 18th after a career six-iron set up a clinching par on that final green. We had played a ding-dong match but were round in a shade under three hours in autumnal sunshine. Life is good. As the Groupie so wisely reminded me on Wednesday evening - don't let the bastards get you down. 

I'm Sorry Dave

'I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that'. Plenty of keyboard warriors will have got there before me I know, but those words spoken by the supercomputer HAL 9000 in 2001: a Space Odyssey do now look brilliantly prescient. 2001 is a film I've spent plenty of time slagging-off in the past but it is, whether this weary writer likes it or not, the lodestone to which all sci-fi movies are compared. The HAL quotation is getting plenty of air-time at the moment as the eager beavers of Silicon Valley suddenly come to the realisation that shoving genies back into bottles is bloody hard work. There we have the dilemma of Artificial Intelligence in a nutshell. But don't worry, that prize tosser Donald Trump says that the AI scare is a 'hoax'. So that's ok then.

On my favourite (well nearly) subject of Trump, what follows is Stephen Greenblatt's estimation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Who does this remind you of:

Here we are dealing instead with an overgrown child's narcissism, insecurity, cruelty and folly, all unchecked by any adult's supervision and restraint. The adult who should have helped the child achieve maturity has either been completely missing, or if present at all, has reinforced the child's worst qualities.

There is a difference. Coriolanus, I would argue, has redeeming features, not least stupendous martial valour. No bone spurs. Coriolanus is killed by his erstwhile allies - last night Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders shared a platform to advocate for curbs on AI. To jump to another realm of the Bard - misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. 

On a brighter note, I ran four miles this morning. So when the end of the world is nigh, at least I can run away from it.

   

I'm Back

A good few weeks have passed since I last loaded my prejudices upon you - thank you for your patience and, for that matter, for ever reading this drivel. It helps keep me sane.

The cause of my absence was the health of the materfamilias. She is much better, thanks for asking, but has now taken up permanent residence at Casa Piggy. The big move was last weekend which led to some comical bad driving of the hire van by your correspondent the Pig. Van and contents(with the exception of one lamp shade) survived unscathed. We are all now settling into the new normal. Part of that normal will hopefully be some decent regular exercise for the Pig. I did attempt one run in August but contrived to agitate my delicate right calf muscle after only seven minutes of exertion. I was a good boy and only sulked for a day or so. Getting old is a right sod.

Pig at the wheel

Well, today I struck out again on the mean streets of Four Oaks and managed a gentle 5k. I feel well and unreasonably virtuous. A particular pleasure was being greeted cheerfully by one of the residents of Dunton Close who was kind enough to say that he was glad I was well and that he had noticed my absence. People can be really nice - I sometimes forget that.

Pig out for a run

    

Musings On Romcoms

The Groupie and the Pig have been apart for much of the last month - this for reasons connected to the health of the Pig's materfamilias (pleased to report she's much better thank you). Anyway, last weekend the Pig's estimable brother (I only have the one) was on Mum-watch, so the Groupie and I watched Notting Hill. I've said this before but I rate this film as better than two of Richard Curtis's more trumpeted offerings, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Love Actually. Notting Hill is wry, as amusing as it is implausible (the charm easily defeats the implausibility) and sent this punter off to his bed in a right good mood. You have to admit as well that Hugh Grant very efficiently cornered the market for foppish charm. 70/100.