The Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave

I have long conducted a love affair with the United Staes of America, consummated in that long hot summer of 1981 when I worked at Camp Half Moon. It helped shape me and I soon learned to forgive my host country's many faults. Of late (which means the last ten years) the romance has gone cold as America committed (serially) the offence of electing Donal J. Trump - this I have never come close to forgiving. This week Americans have gone some way to undoing the harm of this little, spiteful, venal, larcenous administration. The last two years of the presidency will proceed without the backing of Congress, the Democrats having finally woken from what seemed an electoral suicide pact with mediocrity. Good luck to them as they attempt to root out the grift. 

I am not blind and it is worrisome to see some of the entryist socialists who are attempting to take over the reins of the Democrat wagon. But that is tomorrow's problem and the minds surely exist who can re-implant intellect and decency into the American left. 

I have not been to America while Trump has been Commander-in-Chief. My boycott is an empty gesture I suppose (just like my refusal to buy a Chinese car) but I will keep it up until the White House has a worthy occupier. This need not be a Democrat but Trump apologists need not apply. Can one buy one's soul back from the Devil?      

The Self-Inflicted Pain Of The Long-Distance Runner

I was getting all virtuous about my running and the schemes I concoct to distract myself whilst out on the mean streets - that, at least, was the general tone of my last blog. Well, I good and proper learnt a lesson on Sunday. I was thirty-eight minutes into a sixty-two minute outing (taken alone this is a good thing) when I glanced over my shoulder to make sure I was clear to cross Lichfield Road. Fate chose that moment to test the Pig with a raised paving slab and, the Pig being the Pig, he tripped over it and catapulted himself to the floor. The Pig fell on his left side. Some blood but not much. Chortley Chuckles immediately resolved to laugh it off and carried on. Net result, the Overgraduate has bloody painful ribs and can't play golf, can't cough, can't sleep comfortably, etc. Bloody idiot. As you can imagine, all three of us are being brave soldiers.    

The Pensiveness Of The Long-Distance Runner

My recent aims with my running have been to attempt an improved time on my measured short course one weekend and to add duration the next. I have had a few setbacks, just the usual crap, calf strains etc, but the past three weeks have been good. On the faster runs I am not so daft as to think that the sixty-six year old Pig can run as fast as his younger self but I am measuring up to the post sixty-five records I keep. As for the longer runs, you might recall my target to get back up to an hour on the road by late Spring. I managed that and then the injuries came along. So now I am working my way back up. Today's target was fifty-five minutes. I find this the most difficult target because it feels like you are wimping out on going for an hour. Anyway I managed it and touched that elusive feeling - the runner's high.

I have to distract myself when I am running. If I do not do so, I become mired in the sheer monotony of what I am doing. I gave myself a number of things to think about today - early on I cultivated a hatred for the dog that went for me without any admonition or apology from his owner. C*** - and that's just the dog. Better thoughts soon intervened. I had a brief conversation with one of the elderly householders on  my route. He always makes an effort to greet me. This is nice. I envisaged a perfect fairway wood shot that I am hoping to deploy in my next game of golf. This is nice. And then I turned to thinking how I was going to create for you, dear reader, a perfect summation of all that Trump has been up to in the past few weeks. I failed. Venal and mendacious, he is a scar on the face of humankind. This is not nice. So I finished my run by humming Joe Walsh to myself - life's been good to me so far.     

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.