Walking no dogs

The thing about dogs is that they get you out of doors. Which is just as well, because indoors they’re good at interrupting, or at least restricting, your work. You don’t believe me? Try typing with a dog resting her head on your elbow.

Luci being endearing. But making it hard to do much work

Getting me out of doors is a fundamentally good thing. I’ve taken to heart the injunction to take 10,000 steps a day, even though I’m far from convinced that this limited form of exercise does me all the good that’s claimed for it. In fact, because when I get one of these fixations I generally go way over the top, I try to do 15,000 steps. Even though, in my heart of hearts, I know that even that level is unlikely to be that beneficial.

Still, if you set yourself a target, the least you can do is try to hit it. For that the dogs are invaluable. Rain or shine, summer or winter, day or night, they have to go out. And when you’re out, well you’re racking up the steps. Great.

But what happens if you’re deprived of the dogs, even temporarily?

This happened when my wife, now happily retired, decided to take them to Ashridge Forest the other day. When lunchtime came around and I realised I was terribly short of my daily step target, I felt strangely embarrassed at the notion that I might go for a walk without the dogs. It felt as though I was proposing to go out naked.

How could I justify my presence in the park without Luci or Toffee?

It was only at the price of some serious soul-searching and internal debates that I convinced myself that people do, after all, often go out on walks. Admittedly, mostly they’re with friends, or family, or indeed dogs, but some of them walk on their own. ‘You’ll never walk alone’ the song proclaims, but the most enthusiastic singers of that song are fans of Liverpool Football Club, among whose number I have to admit I’m not to be counted.

What was there to stop me getting out there? Even alone?

So I went.

At least I could walk more quickly than I usually do with the dogs. I feel no inclination to keep my nose on the ground, or to dart off into the bushes in pursuit of a squirrel, the remains of a mouldy sandwich or, quite often, as far as I can see, absolutely nothing at all. That makes for significantly better forward progress.

It meant I could even see a few things that I hadn’t counted on. In Wardown Park, surely the most prestigious of the parks which are Luton’s best feature, I popped into the museum and, specifically, the room in which we attend occasional Sunday concerts. On this occasion, there were no musicians, but an artist, Nicola Moody working on a loom, creating a piece to be called Running with Thread.

Nicola Moody working on her jack loom
in Wardown House

Every Saturday, there’s a 5 km Park Run in Wardown Park. One of my sons, Nicky, has taken part three times, winning once and placing in the top three on all those occasions. A number of my friends also run, though they tend to place less far up the leader board, especially when pushing a buggy around with a child in it. It’s a great illustration of the joy of simply taking part. That’s something to celebrate, though I don’t participate myself as it happens, preferring to watch the illustration and celebrate it from the finishing line.

Nicola Moody’s weaving will produce three pieces incorporating the length of stride, heart rate and running time of three participants. She tells me that her kind of weaving is now recognised as a true art form. Indeed, the Tate Modern is running an exhibition of one of its major exponents, Anni Albers, right now.

Back outside, I went on to the old cricket field nearby. This was where, nearly a quarter of a century ago, I came to watch that same son Nicky playing a match against a team which, if I remember, consigned them firmly to the position of second best. But I was as always simply pleased to see the place, with its stone banks of seats on two sides and a pavilion on the third, and a perfectly even, smooth surface for this noble game between them.

For my recent dogless walk, I had chosen a fine day, with a clear sky and bright sunshine. There was however a touch of sharpness to the air that made me grateful I’d chosen to take a jacket. Autumn was definitely on us, summer was no more.

That was an impression confirmed by the sight that greeted me when I reached the field. In the winter, it’s given over to football instead of cricket. And, indeed, a game was in progress when I got there.

The cricket ground in its winter manifestation as football pitch

Ah, well. The tougher time for the walks is coming fast. But the thing about dogs is that they make you go out. Rain or shine, summer or winter, day or night. Soon it’s going to be a lot more rain than shine, a lot more night than day. The dogs won’t mind, because they just like to go out. For us? Not so much fun. But at least they’ll ensure we do our steps.

So my walk without dogs made clear what awaits me with them. Far, far too soon. But that didn’t stop me enjoying it.

True commitment: football the Shankly way. Or Brazil's.

‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that,’ said Bill Shankly, legendary manager of Liverpool Football Club.

Bill Shankly, football legend and model of commitment

England has won the Football World Cup just once. Brazil has won it five times. That record suggests the Latin Americans have a different mindset from ours, one that corresponds rather more closely to Shankly’s. One can be forgiven for thinking they display a level of commitment usually reserved for world religions, major political movements or making large amounts of money (or are all those the same thing?)

Recent events shown the Brazilians are capable of all of that and then some.

I’ve heard of referees who take a dim view of the behaviour of certain players, and penalise them harshly in consequence. But stabbing them? Fatally, to boot? That’s really impressive.

Equally, I know that it’s easy for spectators to lose their rag with referees, demanding their expulsion (or at least that they visit the opticians). Another legendary manager, Alex Ferguson, who stood down at the end of last season from over a quarter of a century in charge at Manchester United, famously denounced refs in lurid terms on numerous occasions and was disciplined more than once in consequence.

Decapitating the ref, however, as happened to the unfortunate who stabbed the recalcitrant player? Generally, in England we like to reserve our mob decapitations for kings.

Brazil: serious enough about football even for Shankly

But, hey, the Brazilians have true commitment. The kind that makes you realise that Shankly was literally right and football is much more serious than mere life and death. Which, in this case at least, truly made it a matter of life and death. 

The results speak for themselves. Five world cups. To our one.

Hangover

It was such a sad sight, as I climbed off my train at St Pancras yesterday morning. A couple in their thirties, she wiping away his face-painted flag of St George.

The morning after the night before. We hadn't even had the party. Not really. But now we had the hangover (a state, incidentally, characterised by Dorothy Parker as ‘the wrath of grapes’).

England had yet again been knocked out of a major international football competition – on penalties. No-one had indulged many illusions about England’s chances in the European Championship, but such as they were, by yesterday morning they were crushed and bedraggled.

There are still a few cars sporting those flags some people like to jam in their windows, but even they were looking disconsolate. A mildly embarrassing reminder of a celebration that never happened, or even worse was indulged in too soon.

Disconsolate reminder
Like the empty bottles after the party. But there wasn't a party

Of course, I blame the game itself. Two hours it took, to score not a single goal, by either side. How can people sit through such a game? The players rush up to one end of the pitch to achieve nothing; then they tear down to the other end to achieve nothing more. Finally, they decide the outcome on something only marginally superior to the toss of a coin: a penalty shoot-out.

But I’d go even deeper. What is the point of a knock-out competition? I mean, in just plain utilitarian terms, it makes no sense. The greatest good for the greatest number, as good old Jeremy Bentham told us. But a knockout competition does exactly the opposite.

The European Championship finals included sixteen teams. Without even counting those who didn’t qualify, that means that fifteen nations are going to end up disappointed. Just one will emerge triumphant (and unbearable).

Where’s the percentage? With our Camerons and our Merkels, we need cheering up, not demoralising. What we need is the kind of game where everyone wins a prize. So we can say to the Germans ‘you may have won the most matches, but we had the prettiest team coach.’ Salvage a bit of pride. We need it.

Well, at least that competition’s all over for now. For us. Though of course the next disappointment is under way already. Wimbledon. Apart from the rain, we’re going to get the usual failure to break through of the British players. And worst of all, we Englishmen are going to have to get enthusiastic and then despondent about a Scot – the only Brit with even an outside chance of achieving anything.

And then – the Olympics! More silly flags. More face paint. More unrealistic expectations. More shattering disilllusion.

All against a background of the wettest summer since the Ice Age.

Oh joy.

So you want to know what's going to happen in 2012?

As a public service, here are my predictions for the new year:

• There will be a lot more talk about the likelihood of the Euro failure. It will either fail or it won’t fail. The Eurozone will still be in crisis at the end of the year.


• The London Olympics will take place. Everyone responsible for organising them will describe them as an outstanding success. Everyone caught up in the jams in London will describe them as a major pain in the backside.


• Obama will be re-elected to the White House in November. Or he will be beaten by Mitt Romney. The US will still be in crisis at the end of the year.


• The ratings agencies will make a whole series of baseless judgements about different national economies. Because the people who make the markets will slavishly follow the ratings, they will all be proved accurate. Governments will continue to allow the agencies to dictate their policies.


• The Chinese will discover the hard way that ‘overheating’ really is a phenomenon and you can’t sustain unsustainable growth indefinitely. Or they will have another boom year and that painful but salutary lesson will be postponed again.


• Germany will win the European football championships. Or they won’t in which case one of the other teams will. It might be Spain but then again it might not.


• In other football-related news, a leading star, faced with his 25-year old supermodel showing her age, will make a fool of himself with a seventeen year old mesmerised by his figure - the athletic one he shows on field and bedroom or the one in his bank account. He will try and fail to block publication of the story. Eventually he’ll find it cheaper to pay off the teenager, who will make the easiest 300 grand of her life, and the wife will stand Tammy Wynette-like, by her man’s earning potential.


• The Queen will celebrate her diamond jubilee. It will all be jolly wonderful. People in countries round the world who take joy in poking fun at the British monarchy will be glued to their TV screens to enjoy the pageantry. 


• David Cameron will do all he can to take credit for the jubilee as he’ll have no other achievements to his name. He’ll get a three-point bounce in the polls.


• The pope will piss off the followers of one of the World’s great religions. It might be the Catholics.


• The Tea Party in the States will continue to delight us by achieving that ideal and elusive balance, sought by our best dramatist in some of their finest plays, between side-splitting caricature and and naked menace.


• Sticking with the States, the day of rapture will be announced, will be prepared for by believers and will pass without their leaders offering a word of apology or learning an ounce of humility.


• And on the ounce of humility front, starting in mid-December forecasters will tell us what’s going to happen in 2013 without the slightest mention of what they previously told us was going to happen in 2012.

Happy New Year!

The saints of the football pitch

Some character called Wayne Rooney has recently been in the news a bit in this country. His is one of those names which, annoyingly, is vaguely familiar, that you feel you ought to recognise, despite the suspicion that its owner doesn't deserve to be hauled out of obscurity – you know, like Sarah Palin or Victoria Beckham, well-known without having done anything useful.

Then it came to me. Rooney is the footballer who gave us his autobiography when he was about twenty. He didn't actually write it all himself, of course, since many of the words had multiple syllables. At that age, getting out of nappies is still a major event, so you can imagine how gripping the 300 odd pages are.

He’s been talked about these last few days because he used foul language to a cameraman from Sky TV. The only surprising thing about this is that anyone's surprised. Sky TV belongs to the international philanthropist, Rupert Murdoch, so even thinking about it without swearing is hard. 

Rooney showing his rigid adherence to the best of good manners

It’s true that Rooney had just scored his third goal in a match between his side, Manchester United, and struggling West Ham (theme tune, ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’. Presumably their fans were blowing raspberries on the night). He’s employed as a striker and, in my limited understanding of football, this means that he’s supposed to score goals, he’s paid to score goals, but perhaps he just hasn’t got that used to doing his job yet so it makes him excitable when he does.

The Football Association is apparently most upset with him and is taking disciplinary action.

Can they be serious? Do they think that swearing at a cameraman is going to bring football into ill-repute? What reputation do they think football already enjoys?

There may be people out there who think that football is run and played by a bunch of saints. That the game is a stranger to bad language or other forms of unsuitable behaviour, including subservience to big money, corrupt practices and self-obsession. That it is played by individuals dedicated to athletic excellence and managed by people exclusively concerned with the entertainment and edification of the public.

But presumably they live on a planet unknown to the rest of us, where the only other inhabitants are the senior exeuctives of the football authorities.

Is it time for me to come out of the closet?

Let me say at once that I have little or no interest in football.

It’s so unimaginative. Players rush up and down the pitch without anything that resembles a strategy or sustained effort to build a position. Rugby is so much more interesting a game. Teams occupy ground, move forward through phase after phase of play, and then suddenly break free or find themselves losing the ball and facing a counter-attack. The score, too, tends to build. A lead, a big lead, a reduced lead, sometimes a reversal of the lead. In football, you can go ninety minutes and it’s still 1-0. The big yawn, basically.

My aversion also owes a great deal to my dislike of the players, with their space-programme salaries and appalling behaviour both on and off the pitch. When it comes to moral values, they seem lower in the scale of things than even politicians and journalists, and not a lot above bankers.

If my views of football are qualified at all, it’s by the fact that I’m fond of Alsace in Eastern France. My wife comes from the deep south of the province and we lived for the best part of ten years in or near Strasbourg, in the north. Great place.

One of the today’s outstanding football managers is Arsène Wenger. He was brought up in a village not far from Strasbourg, where he lived over his parents’ bar. Football got into his blood from the telly constantly on in the corner and the conversation of the regulars. His long career in football eventually took him to the London team Arsenal, where he's still manager today.

Arsène Wenger: a legend in London with his roots in Alsace

Back in the early 70s, I spent some time in South Yorkshire, at a time when English football was dominated by Leeds, based only a few miles from where I was living. Their great and despised rivals were Arsenal, perceived as dull, uninspiring and ruthless. Leeds were at least as ruthless, but in so far as football can provide inspiration at all, they were far from uninspiring. Some of the contempt for Arsenal rubbed off on me: it was the team that everyone but its fans loved to hate.

Then I saw, and read, Fever Pitch, the Nick Hornby tale of a fanatical Arsenal supporter. I couldn’t help feeling a sneaking sympathy for the protagonist (that’s what good writing can do). Then Arsène took over the club and I began to feel a shamefaced wish to see them do well.

They have, of course, done fine for ages. In the last few years, though, they’ve tended to come in the top three or four of competitions, but never quite top. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Last week they pulled off a bit of a coup. Having trailed for eighty minutes of a Champions League match to one of the most overpriced teams in Europe, the current title holders Barcelona, Arsenal hit back in the last ten minutes to win 2-1.

I couldn’t help myself. ‘Good for you,’ I thought, ‘and I hope you can hold onto that slender lead for the second leg away in Barcelona.’

The next evening, as I reached the platform for my train home, I saw a man in a jacket with an Arsenal badge on it.

‘Good badge to be wearing,’ I told him, ‘after last night.’

The Gunners: badge of shame or badge of honour?

He smiled at me and began to talk about the fortunes of his team. It was a brief conversation, as my train arrived a couple of minutes later, but it was cordial and warm. It amazed me. A complete stranger had lightened up the dull business of travelling home, had brought me a spark of human contact, had revealed himself as a person in a crowd. And all thanks to the Gunners.

‘Know thyself’ it said over the entrance to the oracle at Delphi. I’m beginning to have to face up to an ugly truth about myself, or a truth that maybe isn’t that ugly but about which I still feel a prick of shame.

Am I perhaps turning into a bit of an Arsenal fan?

I think of that seventeen year old I once was, in the mining village in Yorkshire, swept along by the tide of enthusiasm for Leeds, when no-one could be lower in human existence than an Arsenal supporter. Lower than bankers even, if that's believable.

Oh Lord. Am I going to have to come out as one of them?

Still, perhaps it’s worth it for a stranger’s smile and two minutes of his time, on a grim and unappealing railway platform in the rush hour.