Rugby Balls

A word about the rugby. England lost. But they lost fairly and with a lot of honour.

It’s easy to quibble about the try that wasn’t, but what let us down was the tactics. Kick, kick, kick. ‘Run,’ I kept yelling. ‘Remember Fiji.’ When you kick you gain territory, but lose possession, and there was no way we were going to steal their line-out.

OK, I know these were the tactics that got us took us so unexpectedly to the final, but couldn’t we see that South Africa were beating us at our own game?

The man I feel most sorry for is Jason Robinson, a player I’ve always found at least as exciting as Jonny Wilkinson. In the past, when Robinson got the ball I always leapt up with expectation. He would look around, wiggle his bottom and dart upfield like a rabbit chased by a pack of poodles.

And yet in the last few games he’s been told to kick the bloody ball away. It made this brave man look craven. A sad end, limping off early to watch Tait provide glimpses of what might have been.

* * *

And what now for South Africa? It seems that their government has decided that that their rugby team should descend to the level of Azerbaijan. Incredibly, just as their team becomes the best in the world, they wish to throw away the concept of selection on merit – is there ever any other concept of selection? – and choose the team to ‘reflect the make-up of the nation’.

So, what’s that mean? Ten blacks and five whites? What about ‘coloureds’? Asians; Jews. What about the division of ‘blacks’ into Xhosa and Zulu, not to mention all the other groupings? In any case, rugby is a class thing, isn’t it? Maybe you should be denied selection if you’ve got a degree. And why exclude women, children, OAPs, disabled people. You won't win anything, but what could beat that lovely warm feeling of sanctimony.

What a load of balls!

* * *

Talking about balls, there’s been a lot more in the news this week.

For some reason thinking about rugby reminds me of fat people. I know it’s not the case anymore that the game is characterised by beer-bellied boozers, but I can’t help the way my mind works.

‘Obese’ is the word these days for what were once called ‘fat bastards’. ‘Obesity’ is not the result of greed and sloth and stupidity, but a condition, we were informed this week by the Chief Medical Officer himself, caused by ‘the failure of human biology to keep pace with changes in society’.

I remember one of the would-be strippers in The Full Monty, sitting in his garden shed, his belly strapped with cling-film and eating Mars Bars, all the while bemoaning his weight problem.

‘The wife’s got anti-ageing cream and anti-wrinkle cream,’ he says. ‘What I need is some anti-fat-bastard cream.’

No use. It’s evolution’s fault. Now that theory raises some interesting possibilities. We need to do some selective breeding, mating people who seem to cope better with today’s lifestyle and diet. As it’s a matter of urgency – Education Secretary Alan Johnson thinks the problem is on a par with global warming – I would like the powers that be to know that I myself have a high metabolic rate and am at the nation’s disposal.

Now I’m talking a load of balls!

* * *

What else is annoying me at the moment? All right, I’m a grumpy old man, but these things must be said.

There were those kids who stoned an old bloke to death, more or less, and were tried at the Old Bailey. My complaint is not that they only got a year in some sort of detention – although it’s a travesty – nor that their parents, assuming they’ve got any, weren’t in the dock with them. No, it’s that we’ve been subjected since to the bleating of bleeding hearts that have crawled out from under those rocks called university social studies departments to tell us that these little bastards are too young to be held accountable for their contemptible actions.

The same characters are fretting about the desire of prison officers to use batons on violent young offenders. Give them water cannon, if not machine guns, I say.

They make me so cross that I mixed my metaphors back there. And for that I can never forgive them.

Of course these ‘children’ – funny how they’re called children sometimes and ‘young adults’ at others – know the difference between ‘right and wrong’. If a gang of middle class liberals were to get drunk and throw stones at a ten-year-old caught reading The Daily Telegraph, the little offender would soon start bawling, ‘It ain’t fair, mistuh’. Ergo, they know what’s wrong. In that silly little scenario is the essence of social morality.

Even Jesus Christ would agree with that, not that he’s much of an authority. In fact he talked rather a lot of bollocks himself. I’ll come back to that another day.

* * *

What else? Is there no end to the insanity of Britain today?

Oh yes. Apparently there’s an epidemic of ‘middle-class drinking’. Now this is not ‘binge-drinking’. That is the privilege of children or young adults or whatever they’re called in this case. Middle class people, whoever they are, indulge in ‘hazardous drinking’. Forgive me, by the way, for using inverted commas so much, but how else do I convey my contempt for the silly journalistic phrases taken up and parroted from newspaper to TV and back again.

It seems that professional people are going home after a day’s work and drinking a bottle of wine. Every day. Shock horror! What is the point, I ask, of aspiring to a middle class income, if not to be able to afford a decent bottle of wine on a daily basis?

Dawn Primarola, a health minister with impeccable Stalinist credentials, has warned that ‘this must stop.’ God help us.

Personally, I wish I could afford it. But I’m not complaining. What with the reasonable rates at Wetherspoon’s pubs and ASDA I’m at this very moment finishing my week’s government-allocated quota of alcohol.

Not bad, considering I started yesterday morning.

What the hell. Do you live and put up with all this balls forever?

Sorry to be so boring

IT IS PETTY and perverse of me, I admit, to look around my local pub and observe with complacent satisfaction the empty chairs, the bored staff, and the increasingly desperate special offers.

I read in the local press that pub trade has reduced by 10 per cent since the smoking ban and backstreet boozers with no opportunity to provide outside facilities are facing a harsh commercial winter.

I got up from my table the other day, where there was a smug conversation going on about the administrative cock-up that is ‘Smoke-on-Trent’ to order another drink. I noticed a sign on the bar offering a steak at half price. ‘Vegetables of your choice,’ it promised. ‘Just ask our friendly staff.’

‘Are you one of the friendly ones?’ I asked Molly, the barmaid. ‘I’m never quite sure?’

‘What?’

‘Well, it says here, ‘’Ask our friendly staff.’’ I don’t want to ask any one unfriendly by mistake.’

She expressed doubts about my grip on reality and advised me to absent myself forthwith. Except she didn’t bother with the circumlocution.

Now that’s the thing about the English language. It’s so gloriously imprecise in some ways. In other ways it’s quite the opposite, because it’s got twice the number of words as, say, German. It’s a great mongrel of a language – and my father always told me to avoid pedigree dogs – unlike French, which even has an Academy to maintain its incestuous decline.

But French can’t be accused of being imprecise. I wouldn’t have been able to make my joking remark about ‘friendly staff’ in that language. Because French allows you to put an adjective before or after a noun, depending on the sense. Take ‘green grass’, for example. If you want to distinguish the green grass from grass of another colour, you would place ‘verte’ after ‘l’herbe’. If on the other hand you were just using green as a standard description of grass – all grass is by default green – it would go in front. This was the purpose of ‘friendly staff’, I presume.

I LEFT MY PINT on the table and strolled along the outside of the pub, to smoke a cigarette. I paused to light it and realised I was by an open window. What, I thought, if my smoke were to waft inside the pub? Would that count as ‘smoking inside a confined public space’? This thought took me back to my Latin lessons. Well, it would, wouldn’t it?

I had to ask myself if ‘confined space’ is in the ablative case or the accusative. If the former, ‘smoking in the pub’ would have the sense of ‘inside the pub’. If, on the other hand, ‘in’ is followed by the accusative case of the noun, it would mean ‘into the pub’. I would therefore be on the wrong side of the law (except in Stoke, that is).

Surprisingly, for such a language as English, flexible if you like, vague if you prefer, people will insist on being pedantic about it. Lynne Truss famously, and very profitably, wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a combination of diatribe against poor punctuation and manual of correct practice.

Interestingly, if the New York Times is typical, the Americans were not impressed. This article not only disagrees with her rules of punctuation, but criticises her prose style, her grammar and her syntax.

I REMEMBER the fuss when the Ministry of Transport had a campaign about the dangers of falling asleep at the wheel of the car. ‘Don’t Drive Tired’ was the slogan.

‘Tired’ is an adjective. A verb must be modified by an adverb, must it not? What kind of message does it send when a government department propagates bad English? Etc . . . etc..

The criticism was misplaced, of course. The slogan may not be very elegant, but it’s more elegant, and certainly more effective, than ‘Don’t Drive Tiredly’, or ‘Don’t Drive While Fatigued’.

If I wanted to get into syntactic analysis, I could prove that the adjective, ‘tired’, is qualifying the understood ‘you’, part of the understood phrase, ‘while you are’. And in any case, if Dylan Thomas could write ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, why can’t we say ‘Don’t drive tired’?

(Should that question mark come before the quotation mark, I wonder? After all, Sir Roger Casement was hanged on a comma.)

The imprecision of English leads to inadvertent humour – ‘I see chickens are going cheap in Asda;’ bawdy humour – ‘I wonder if you’d be so kind as to introduce me to your wife;’ and poetry – ‘Now does he feel his secret murders sticking to his hands.’ Is any other language so prone to punning?

A LITTLE LATER, once again outside indulging the pleasures of the flesh, I stopped to read the notice warning against smoking in the pub. What a contemptible little scrap of card, and what execrable English. What a perfect feast for lawyers, so perfect an example of imprecise English it is.

‘These are no smoking premises. It is an offence to smoke or knowingly to permit smoking in these premises.

‘If you observe someone smoking here, a complaint may be made to the manager.’

‘These are no smoking premises.’ That could mean that ‘these premises don’t smoke.’ And if you’re not going to say ‘NON- smoking premises’, shouldn’t you at least put the hyphen after ‘no’.

‘Knowingly to permit . . .’ Well, at least the writer didn’t split the infinitive. But does this mean that other customers are obliged by law to prevent smoking? Are citizen’s arrests permitted?

‘A complaint may be made.’ Does this mean that there is a possibility of complaint or that you have permission to complain? Or could it mean that a complaint may be made about you observing smoking?

You see what nicotine deprivation does to people.

And if you’ve reached the end of this blog, you’re a sadder man that I am.

Words I hate

Institutional

It all started with that judge's report into the Met, which introduced the phrase 'institutional racism.' At the time I thought, 'what's he mean, institutional'? Was racism official policy? Did interviewers have instructions to ask racist questions or use racist screening techniques?

OK, maybe there was 'cultural' racism. In other words, a laddish, working class attitude to blacks, Asians, etc, among police officers. Maybe - no, certainly - a tendency to assume that if you're black and driving a big car you must have nicked it. But 'institutional'? It's a misuse of the word.

It hasn't gone away. I've recently heard it about in connection with women executives, or lack of them, in the City. And with the scarcity of female judges.

Community

This is connected with 'institutional'. The fact that it is used so widely shows how the sociological method has infiltrated all government and media pronouncements. On other words, everyone is defined by some group that they belong to. It shows lazy thinking to talk about the gay or Muslim or grey or hunting or scientific or international (!) or whatever other 'community' you invent to give the impression that there is a solid block of people with a single view.

It also allows self-appointed 'community leaders' to emerge, claiming some sort of spurious authority for their individual opinions.

It also links up with the idea that only members of a community can represent it. So we must have a proportional number of disabled, women, black and young MPs. Rubbish, I want a proportional number of MPs to represent my politics, not my age, sex, race or religion.

What is a community, after all? It's a village, a small group of people of all sorts living in the same place at the same time. All other uses are merely metaphorical or analogous, not factual.

Offence

Another link here. This morning I hear that employers are forbidding the decoration of offices with Christmas baubles and tinsel 'for fear of giving offence to members of other faiths.' don't they realise that most people who celebrate Christmas are of another faith, namely totally agnostic, practising non-Christians. Normal people don't belong to these groups, so beloved of the press. So why do intelligent people take notice.

Intelligent people, since I mention them, are always giving offence. Because they ask questions, because they doubt and refuse to take things for granted. 'Offence' is in the ear of the listener and shows intolerance, insecurity and intellectual backwardness.

For Christ's sake, I'm offended by a split infinitive or a refusal to use the subjunctive where appropriate.

Oh, Originality,where art thou?

The clocks went back last night, and every time it's mentioned on TV or radio, there's always some comment about having an extra hour in bed. If I hear one again I'll scream.

Excuse me a moment. I need to scream.

And, of course, as usual, we have the demands from 'concerned parents' for BST to become standard, because they're worried about their children coming home from school in the dark. Apparently they are not bothered about their children going to school in the dark.

Wayne Rooney scored a hat-trick yesterday. Everyone commentator says it was a belated birthday present. Today Teddy Sheringham scored a goal for West Ham and everyone said, 'Life begins at 40.'

Some vicar is on about the Satanic influence of Hallowe'en, as he does every year, and a pagan 'spokesman' has been talking about discrimination. The health and safety police have been trying to get bonfire night banned, animal protection groups are trying to get bonfire night banned, the firemen's union is trying to get bonfire night banned, the Roman Catholic church is trying to get bonfire night banned.

Virgin Galctic are planning holiday trips into space and the TV is talking about 'the final frontier' and people boldly going there.

The weather forecasters are alternately apologising for rain and patting themselves on the back for providing hot weather in October, the last thing we want.

I've heard enough cliches, platitudes and logical fallacies to keep a whole weblog going for a year.

And I haven't even bothered listening to Radio Lincolnshire.

Malapropism of the day, courtesy of Mr Pardew, manager of West Ham: 'Losing eight matches on the trot was a milestone round my neck.'