PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
"We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are." - Anais Nin (French-born author/diarist, 1903-1977)
1. Keeping fit.2/.The dilemma of football. 3/. The nanny State.
Keeping fit, as newspapers tell us endlessly, is a very worthwhile thing these days. Fitness, not fatness, is my motto. I am not yet into those little plastic bottles of mysterious substances that enable you to put friendly buggy things in your body to help the process, but it might come. In which case you can describe me as a bit of a bugger. It behoves us all to be fit. Otherwise, how would we be ready for bird flu, deadlier strains of hospital bugs, terrorists with bombs and gases, old ladies with kicking shoes and rampant prime ministers wielding ballot boxes?It behoves us all to live a little longer so that we might sample the horrors as yet unleashed on society. I started my campaign with a pedometer.. It is a tiny thing that clips onto the top of my trousers, level with the crease, and counts the steps or miles that I take.
As it happens, I have been limbering up for some time for this moment. Each night, come gale or fine, I have walked the dog, fighting back the nagging pain in the hip and thinking of my heroes of the past: Nelson, Drake, Elizabeth 1, the headmistress with a moustache at junior school, and the fellow with one leg who kept the toffee shop near Stanhill. A splendid performance, I thought. I have returned to an immediate cup of coffee and the conviction that tuned athletes like us have to keep in trim.
Which is why I was to be found on the garden path taking ten brisk paces before measuring the distance covered, dividing by ten, and finding the average length of step. In my case, 32 inches. This knowledge is necessary before you can programme the pedometer. On, then, to the little blue book that came with the implement, full of encouragement, but slightly, well, obvious. For instance:
"There is no great trick to walking. It does not require any special skills or advanced conditioning."
I will go along with that, on the whole, since I have been walking for decades without employing any great tricks. When a great trick is required - leaving a public house after an extended stay, for instance - it is sadly missing. If there were a great trick at that point it would be to walk forward rather than sideways. I know a man who blamed a discarded slice of lemon for his toppling by the door of a wine lodge. He had no great trick. Not even a small one. All he had was a theory only he was able to accept.
But onwards and forwards...
Some benefits of walking, according to the book: Burns almost as many calories as jogging. Eases back pains. Slims your waist. Lowers blood pressure. Reduces levels of bad cholesterol. Reduces heart attack risk. Enhances stamina and & energy (note the ampersand here, instead of the word 'and'. We walkers have no time for verbal dalliance). Lessens anxiety & tension...
I did not proceed further because I considered that to be a sufficiently stimulating list. I wanted to get on and grill a few bits of cholesterol.. So I found myself, surprisingly, on turning a page, back with the theory of walking. "There is no need to buy expensive videos, computer programs, or manuals in order to learn how to walk.." You can say that again, I thought, adding: And you did.
On to lightweight, breathable shoes, loose-fitting clothing. Dress warmly. Wear a hat, since 30 per cent of your body heat is lost through the head. And keep the hat on in summer, too, because it wards off the sun's rays. (They should have asked me about this section since I am a hat consultant. A good cap can be used to lift hot pans from stoves, mark your seat while you go to the bar for a pint, fan soup, wipe crumbs or small puddles from table tops, and swat flies. You also have the wonderful bonus of being able to put it on your head.)
It is crucial that you stretch yourself both before and after walking. Suggested movements include calf and achilles stretch, hamstring stretch and quadriceps stretch. If you don't know where these things are, ask your butcher.
You should have five-minutes' walking warm-up. Then you are ready for your walking routine.I was ready for it before I read the book. I now find that I need an exercise programme. Worse, I have to see a doctor before attempting it. I will dispense with the doctor because surgeries are full of diseases and, by association, doctors must be, too.
Ah. Now, in the book, we have a suggested goal: 10,000 steps a day. If trying to lose weight, 12,000 steps. Right then. The dog was marshalled. The lead was secured. I was breathing easily after my five-minute warm-up tapping the keyboard. And off I went.
It was a zesty, cold night, with good visibility. The man normally to be found at the bus stop was missing, which was a plus point because his greetings might have impeded my 32-inch stride. Shoulders back. Head level, looking steadily ahead. Onwards, onwards, no problem. Breathing easily till some damned jogger upset me and the dog on a narrow pavement. Ignore. After a gruelling walk, we arrived back tingling with fitness and I stumbled towards the coffee pot thankfully before the revealing moment I had long anticipated - a look at the pedometer to see how many thousands of steps I had taken. It said: 638. Not thousands. Steps.
Six-hundred-and-thirty-eight! And they want 10,000 at one go! That's enough to wear down a leg to the ankles. What kind of nonsense is this? I note that the pedometer was made in China. What are they up to over there, wearing out the Western world with their wily doings?. For what? Where's the plot?
The book ended: "Enjoy, and make it a great day!"
I did. I went to bed.
Addendum: With persistence, I, at a later date, walked 4366 steps at one go, most of it on the level, and much of it on a canal tow path. That is 2.2 miles. Very wearing. After a cup of tea I fell fast asleep. And the dog, for once, ate all his dinner at one go.
Football is an insanity posing as the working man’s sport. It is so riddled by inconsistency that it is difficult to know where to start.
The first football game in England is said to have been played by locals of the eastern part of the country, where they kicked around the severed head of a Danish prince defeated in a war. . Later, when they ran out of Danes presumably, honour and team spirit were the ideals. That no longer applies. The modern extension of the game across the world where different standards are evident have introduced deception, cunning, physical violence, intimidation and play-acting and a celebrated battle between Manchester United and Arsenal was a high-point of tension, more like High Noon than Soccer.
Let us start, then, with the supporter, whom I would define as one who actually pays to watch his team. He is probably ploughing his way through life on a modest income and when Saturday comes he forks out a stinging proportion of that income to watch players paid - oh, think of any number - £60,000 a week, or £120,000 a week, as a reward for taking part.
That is the supporter’s “team” - a polyglot collection of people, some of whose names he can not pronounce without first listening to a commentator to see how it is done; a hotch-potch with no affinity for the area the fan lives in gathered from wherever a ball has been kicked with due reverence.
The fan supports this team. He will fight for this team. He will go to work and discuss it all week. But at no stage does he understand it. He expects loyalty where there can be none (unless the player, unusually, is local to the club, and not necessarily then). He is supporting merceneries, who sell themselves to the highest bidder in this unrelenting, highly-paid war. Mercenaries, in football as in war, have allegiance only to themselves. How could it be otherwise? Yet Everton fans boo Rooney when he returns with Manchester United. Why do they boo? Why do they expect allegiance from Rooney? Because they mis-read what the game has become. It is a nonsense for fans to jeer at players who move on. The fan will become embroiled in fierce arguments about his team and it is no more his team than the town’s next door.
It belongs to the cheque-book people, those shadowy captains of commerce who decide that it would be a nice thing to sit at the head of a board and shovel millions of pounds around. They are the equivalent of medieval generals. They are people who have already made their money doing something else and it pleases them to have a diversion. When they observe fans it is through thick glass. That glass divides vastly different and separate worlds. At one side is power; at the other, hope. Even trust, heaven help us. In effect, the fans are just ornamental.
We have moved a long way from the days of Bob Lord of Burnley, a meat tycoon of modest means by today’s standards, who bawled his way to a transient fame, and now we are in the stratosphere.
Mr Albramovich’s deep pockets sustained the highly talented Jose Mourinho (£5m a year) as manager and first team coach. Few will have heard of those employed with Mr Mourinho: Baltemar Brito, assistant manager, Silvino Louro, goalkeeping coach, Andre Villas, assistant coach/scout, Rul Faria, fitness coach, Ade Mafe, assistant fitness coach. Of the rest, four have English-sounding names.
Through this very considerable combination, Chelsea rode, on merit and money, at the top of the Premiership, and fans were, and are, devoted to their team. But even the most cursory examination of the facts above show that it is not, nor was it, their team in the slightest degree. * . It is Mr Albramovich’s team and about as relevant to Chelsea as Omsk.
Mr Ken Bates was at Chelsea before him and is now lording it over Leeds, which, he had noted, stood in its financial isolation like a bishop unfrocked. Again, it is money to the fore and the fans can only wait for the dusts to settle before being told which particular players are going to be assembled for them to cheer and fight for.
His message: “If we are to go forward we need to generate extra income and reduce costs, so creating cash to invest in the team. I am no Ambramovich. Chelsea apart, all successful clubs succeed because they are run on proper business lines”
All true, of course. Business lines are paramount and you won‘t find any of those in the boot cupboard. Business lines are the means of acquiring the leading players, bought off the shelf.
If the fan is soured by the cost of his watching his team, he can always turn to television. And here, Sky, again with the big cheque book, dominates the scene. You watch it here or miss it could be the slogan of Mr Rupert Murdoch. The BBC limps along behind with its highlights, and when it gets a match, it tends to rely on Scots to explain to us what we have just seen for ourselves. The additional slogan could well be: Who pays, wins.
Here is the dilemma.
If I am a supporter of Wheelton Physicists’ and Allied Workers FC (Wheelton, in Lancashire, is where Ken Bates came from, incidentally), I will watch the games on Saturdays with a supporter’s fervour (men go mad even watching their kids).
And all the players will come from the same locality. Until someone like Mr Ambramovich hoists himself out of Russia, appears at the Golden Lion at a quiet moment, and says: “I’ll buy it,” meaning the club.
I tell you this: within three years Wheelton Physicists’ and Allied Workers FC would be in the Premiership and would top it within four. There would be a stadium for 150,000 people where the Golden Lion used to stand. And all these people would chant, “We shall not be moved” without noticing that they had already been moved.
Is it right? It used to be said that success had to be earned. That is no longer true. Success is bought and assembled like cars or any other commodity.
There is no sanity in this. To return the clubs to fans and still leave room for the cheque-book holders to indulge themselves would be a fine thing. But will it ever happen? No, it won’t. Because fans can be bought like players. They can be seduced by a dramatic signing, the firing of a manager, the sight of a cup. Football as the likes of Tom Finney knew it is totally, utterly dead.
There is much talk in newspapers about asylum seekers. They have no need to seek. All they need do is go to a football match. They’ve found it.
Three consecutive items in a television newscast I listened to were concerned with nannying. Nannying is the curse of the age. It encourages indolence ("The State will pay"). It encourages outright fear (a full 20 minutes at the beginning of a night-school course was spent pointing out the potential pitfalls of actually sitting there and how to avoid them). It encourages false litigation, in the sense that part of the population seems intent on finding a kerbstone to fall over. It discourages self-reliance and enterprise - both the essential foundations of a successful society.
The three items were, first: smoking.
I do not smoke and I find cigarette fumes disagreeable in confined spaces. And smoking is not good for health in spite of the fact that the government gave us 50 cigarettes a week free when I served in the Forces. Fine so far. What I disapprove of it the way the medical profession, in its fervour to ban smoking, throws its opinions at us once a fortnight, supported by figures I find very doubtful indeed. If, for instance, you find that 60 per cent of all deaths in, say, Liverpool, are the result of smoking, how do you prove it? The air is full of pollutants. There are petrol fumes, diesel fumes, chemicals of various kinds, smoke of various kinds, and for all I know nuclear throw-offs of various kinds. How do you separate smoking from the other things? There must be some very clever lads in laboratories. A pity they can't eliminate the common cold.*
(* Most childhood cancers are "probably" caused by exposure to pollutants while babies are still in the womb, Professor George Knox, emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham, claimed. He said the most dangerous pollutants were produced by industry or transport. Daily Telegraph, 17 January, 2005)
What's the answer? Educate people out of smoking, if possible; but if that proves impossible, allow them places where they can smoke. Pubs are obvious places. Instead of banning smoking there, designate a room for smoking and install a good air extraction unit. Smokers are misguided. They are not criminals to be hounded out of every place in the land. It is noticeable that the government does not ban tobacco. No government on earth has banned tobacco. Why, I wonder, if it is so harmful? They ban drugs. Tobacco is a drug. Is this stance surprising or not? Is it something to do with income from taxation?
Second item, drink. Another favourite of thin-lipped little people who think their view of life is correct; therefore, everyone else must follow it.
Drink is what you make of it - a peril, a pleasant lubricant for conversation, an actual aid to health, a destroyer of homes. Now why is it necessary after these hundreds of years to put a warning label on a bottle? Who thought up that piece of stupidity? Drink requires common-sense as walking requires it. Drink is not an evil in itself although a fool can turn it into an evil. : it is an ally if treated with respect. The current obsession with "binge-drinking" is part of nannyism. All young people drink. The sooner they are violently ill from drinking the sooner they learn sense. I speak from experience. Even heavy drinkers today are virtual abstainers. In the old days, drink was necessary because the water was deadly.Montaigne wrote," I have seen a great lord in my time who, without effort and in the course of his ordinary meals, used to drink scarcely fewer than ten quarts of wine, and showed himself on leaving only wise and circumspect." As for England, the household accounts of the Earl of Eglinton for 26 November 1646 document his consumption of ale: "To your lordship's morning drink, a pint; for my ladie's morning drink, 1 pint; to your lordship's dinner, 2 pints; more, 3 pints; to the latter meal, 2 pints; after dinner, 1 pint; at four hours, 1 pint; another pint; to your Lordship's supper, 3 pints."
Calculations based on the statistics in Giovanni Villani's chronicle of fourteenth-century Florence suggest an annual per capita consumption of wine between 248 and 293 liters, averaging about 2/3rds of a litre per day. At the same time the amount of wine entering Siena was enough to provide each person with 1.15 litres a day
The women around Elizabeth 1 drank ale copiously, starting with breakfast. So what's the fuss now? As with smoking, drinking is a matter of experience and education. Discourage the young by all means, but allow them to discover for themselves the error of their ways. Lecture them on what to do and they will always do the opposite.
(You will note that, as Christmas comes around, a great deal of public money is spent warning motorists what will happen if they drink over the odds - but there is not a hint of what constitutes over the odds. No guidance whatsoever.)
Now to that favourite term of nannyists - the environment. In the name of the environment, we have to separate all our disposable things to dispose of them. We have to be frugal with paper (which eats forests), and we must separate plastic, and tins, and bags that have contained groceries. And that is fair enough - if it were not for the vast industry in unnecessary packaging which floods the country in the first place. What of them? You don't blame the ground for the flood: you blame the clouds. How much do package manufacturers pay for environmental needs? Why do supermarkets give you free bags for everything every time you visit? Why is something first cushioned by bubble-wrap, then encased in cardboard, then covered in shrink-wrapping? Why does a magazine at the newsagent's merit a paper bag, even when encased in shrink-wrap? Packaging is a major industry and they don't complain at their end of the chain. It is at dustbin level that people are scourged for their impertinence in having too much waste.
I would cull the nannyists of this country. They are a curse to daily life with their constant admonitions. In all things there is only one way: the middle way. Therein lies peace. Beyond it lies the extremes. And there you have the tragedy of our times.
Geoffrey Mather © 2008