Tuesday, 8 March 2016
Performance enhancement...
Maria Sharapova has failed a drug test for meldonium, a medication which she has taken, on her doctor’s advice, for the last ten years… but which was added to the list of banned, ‘performance enhancing’ drugs in January. It must be difficult to keep up with the latest findings (especially as the drug she took had the brand name of ‘mildronate’). A drug that is acceptable today might be banned tomorrow, and the whole concept of ‘performance enhancement’ can seem a bit random. We don’t penalise athletes for choosing a healthy diet, for example, or training at high altitudes. The promises to “rid the sport of drug cheats” can sound a bit hollow when it’s routinely acknowledged that “winning is all that matters”…
Sunday, 6 March 2016
Saturday, 5 March 2016
The Peregrine...
The Peregrine, by J A Baker, is a strange book, like nothing else I have ever read. Robert Macfarlane wrote the introduction to this 2005 edition (the book was originally published in 1967). Macfarlane is a writer who puts himself centre stage; I find it a tiresome trait, though his books sell very well. He rifles through the thesaurus for new ways to describe the landscape, yet is curiously incapable of summoning up the spirit of place.
The determinedly unprolific Baker stays in the wings, and mentions people only when they are driving tractors or hunting with hounds or burning stubble in a distant field. They are like the figures who populate the background of a Pieter Breughel painting. He reveals nothing about himself, except his obsession with peregrine falcons. He mentions no place names, giving directions only as points of the compass - north, south, east, west - applied to the natural landforms of the flat East Anglian terrain: estuary, sand-bank, ridge, marsh, wood, pasture, river, sea.
The book, in diary format, covers a single winter, from October to April. Baker describes the natural world, with intense concentration, through the eyes of the peregrines. Even when he can’t see them, he monitors their presence by the behaviour of the other birds. His observations are acute, and he knows his birds (though I can’t help but wonder at swallows still being around during the last week of October!). The peregrine “dived, and the island birds were flung up like spray”. The peregrine’s wings “flicked the wind gingerly, like fingers lightly touching a hot iron”. “A moorhen walked stealthily across the frozen brook, with hushed, arthritic tread”.
He is an unsentimental witness to many kills. “The hawk lands on the softening bird, grips its neck in its bill. I hear the bone snap, like barbed wire cut by pliers”. And he identifies with the peregrines to a startling degree. “I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becomes the thing he hunts”.
His style can be lyrical. “The beagles are going home along the small hill lanes, the huntsmen tired, the followers gone, the hare safe in its form. The valley sinks into mist, and the yellow orbital ring of the horizon closes over the glaring cornea of the sun. The eastern ridge blooms purple, then fades to inimical black. The earth exhales into the cold dusk. Frost forms in hollows shaded from the afterglow. Owls wake and call. The first stars hover and drift down. Like a roosting hawk, I listen to silence and gaze into the dark”.
His descriptions are necessarily repetitious, as he returns to familiar haunts. The repetition works, up to a point, emphasising the rhythms and cycles of the birds’ behaviour patterns (he shows little interest in other wildlife), and the changes in the seasons. Eventually, though, I found myself speed-reading, and skipping a page or two. There are only so many ways to describe a flock of lapwings, or the flight of a peregrine, especially as the book has no narrative progression. It’s not a long book, but it could have been shorter still.
Baker only wrote one other book, then ‘disappeared’. Macfarlane suggests he worked as a librarian; he may, instead, have taken wing, like the falcons with which he identified so closely.
The determinedly unprolific Baker stays in the wings, and mentions people only when they are driving tractors or hunting with hounds or burning stubble in a distant field. They are like the figures who populate the background of a Pieter Breughel painting. He reveals nothing about himself, except his obsession with peregrine falcons. He mentions no place names, giving directions only as points of the compass - north, south, east, west - applied to the natural landforms of the flat East Anglian terrain: estuary, sand-bank, ridge, marsh, wood, pasture, river, sea.
The book, in diary format, covers a single winter, from October to April. Baker describes the natural world, with intense concentration, through the eyes of the peregrines. Even when he can’t see them, he monitors their presence by the behaviour of the other birds. His observations are acute, and he knows his birds (though I can’t help but wonder at swallows still being around during the last week of October!). The peregrine “dived, and the island birds were flung up like spray”. The peregrine’s wings “flicked the wind gingerly, like fingers lightly touching a hot iron”. “A moorhen walked stealthily across the frozen brook, with hushed, arthritic tread”.
He is an unsentimental witness to many kills. “The hawk lands on the softening bird, grips its neck in its bill. I hear the bone snap, like barbed wire cut by pliers”. And he identifies with the peregrines to a startling degree. “I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becomes the thing he hunts”.
His style can be lyrical. “The beagles are going home along the small hill lanes, the huntsmen tired, the followers gone, the hare safe in its form. The valley sinks into mist, and the yellow orbital ring of the horizon closes over the glaring cornea of the sun. The eastern ridge blooms purple, then fades to inimical black. The earth exhales into the cold dusk. Frost forms in hollows shaded from the afterglow. Owls wake and call. The first stars hover and drift down. Like a roosting hawk, I listen to silence and gaze into the dark”.
His descriptions are necessarily repetitious, as he returns to familiar haunts. The repetition works, up to a point, emphasising the rhythms and cycles of the birds’ behaviour patterns (he shows little interest in other wildlife), and the changes in the seasons. Eventually, though, I found myself speed-reading, and skipping a page or two. There are only so many ways to describe a flock of lapwings, or the flight of a peregrine, especially as the book has no narrative progression. It’s not a long book, but it could have been shorter still.
Baker only wrote one other book, then ‘disappeared’. Macfarlane suggests he worked as a librarian; he may, instead, have taken wing, like the falcons with which he identified so closely.
Friday, 4 March 2016
Snow...
I drove east on the M62 yesterday, from Lancashire into West Yorkshire. In the Ryburne valley, near Ripponden, I saw someone dressed as a snowman, with a carrot for a nose. He (or she?) didn’t seem to be advertising anything… just trudging along the pavement as though this was a routine occurance. When I woke up this morning, in Sowerby Bridge, it was snowing heavily, and, to judge from the colour of the sky, there’s plenty more to come…
Thursday, 3 March 2016
Rugger...
More than seventy doctors and academics are calling for a ban on tackling in rugby matches played in UK and Irish schools, focusing particularly on public schools where playing rugby is part of the curriculum, and boys can’t opt out. I remember the winter months at public school - having to turn out to play rugby, on frozen pitches, and hating every minute of it. My modus operandi was to run up and down the touchline, hoping that the people who were watching would think I was playing, and the people who were playing would think I was watching.
The ploy worked - fitfully - then someone on the pitch would throw me the ball. I’d start to run, with the ball clutched to my chest. After a couple of seconds I’d wonder if, despite my antipathy to the game, I might be spectacularly good at rugby. My reverie would be brutally interrupted, as a tackle sent me head-first into a pitch as hard as concrete.
One day, during a game, I hurt my wrist in a tackle, so I went to see the house matron. She took my hand, gave it a waggle, and pronounced me fit to carry on playing rugby. It took three weeks before anyone realised that my wrist was broken; for the rest of that term I was in a plaster cast…
Moon Marina, on the Lancaster Canal...
The ploy worked - fitfully - then someone on the pitch would throw me the ball. I’d start to run, with the ball clutched to my chest. After a couple of seconds I’d wonder if, despite my antipathy to the game, I might be spectacularly good at rugby. My reverie would be brutally interrupted, as a tackle sent me head-first into a pitch as hard as concrete.
One day, during a game, I hurt my wrist in a tackle, so I went to see the house matron. She took my hand, gave it a waggle, and pronounced me fit to carry on playing rugby. It took three weeks before anyone realised that my wrist was broken; for the rest of that term I was in a plaster cast…
Moon Marina, on the Lancaster Canal...
Wednesday, 2 March 2016
Paddy Power...
Gambling company, Paddy Power, has been taken to task for encouraging a ‘problem’ gambler to bet so much money that he lost his five jobs, his house and access to his children. A spokesman for the Association of British Bookmakers shed crocodile tears, predictably. He knows - as we know - that ‘problem’ gamblers are good customers for bookmakers… if by ‘problem’ we mean punters who lose more money than they win. Any punter who wins regularly - through good luck, skill or, more likely, inside knowledge - will quickly have his account terminated. Bookies don't gamble; almost every transaction is a 'sure thing'.
The bookies’ target customers are likely to be poor, luckless, desperate, lacking in self-control, with an addictive personality, who remember the occasional wins and forget their losses. The shops are in the poor parts of every town, alongside the pawnbrokers and fried chicken take-aways, and gambling adverts monopolise the ad breaks in every televised sporting occasion on Sky. The ads present gambling as a fun lifestyle choice for gregarious young men. Winning, according to the ads, is as simple as pressing the ‘cash out’ button on a smartphone. Persuading people to spend money they can ill afford to lose is what the bookies exist to do.
Paddy Power has been asked by the betting regulators to make a voluntary payment of £280,000 to a “socially responsible” cause. According to the Guardian, “Paddy Power has posted a record annual pre-tax profit of €167m (£130m) and the £9bn business is set to enter the FTSE 100 index of Britain’s biggest listed companies this week after increasing its size by merging with rival Betfair”…
Delivering beer in Wigan...
The bookies’ target customers are likely to be poor, luckless, desperate, lacking in self-control, with an addictive personality, who remember the occasional wins and forget their losses. The shops are in the poor parts of every town, alongside the pawnbrokers and fried chicken take-aways, and gambling adverts monopolise the ad breaks in every televised sporting occasion on Sky. The ads present gambling as a fun lifestyle choice for gregarious young men. Winning, according to the ads, is as simple as pressing the ‘cash out’ button on a smartphone. Persuading people to spend money they can ill afford to lose is what the bookies exist to do.
Paddy Power has been asked by the betting regulators to make a voluntary payment of £280,000 to a “socially responsible” cause. According to the Guardian, “Paddy Power has posted a record annual pre-tax profit of €167m (£130m) and the £9bn business is set to enter the FTSE 100 index of Britain’s biggest listed companies this week after increasing its size by merging with rival Betfair”…
Delivering beer in Wigan...
Tuesday, 1 March 2016
Skelmersdale...
I was going to stay in Skelmersdale last night, though I'm still not sure whether I found it. I parked up next to a health centre, assuming I was in town. But I couldn't find anything that resembled a town centre. So I decided to stay somewhere else. But leaving Skelmersdale wasn't as easy as it sounds. There were lots of roundabouts and no signs; worse, I had given the satnav lady the evening off. I passed the same place not twice but three times, and drove up one cul de sac after another. It was turning into a Kafkaesque nightmare when, more by luck than good judgement, I found the way out. I won't be in hurry to go back...
The Lancaster Canal at Garstang...
The Lancaster Canal at Garstang...
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