It struck me on the train this morning that the recent hospital photo opportunity where a camera crew got thrown out of a ward by a senior surgeon, is a metaphor for Cameron’s premiership thus far.
Dave goes along with some new enterprise without really stopping to think through the consequences. Angry mob (or man) intervenes. Dave says he agrees with angry mob, tells colleague to buzz off and rethink, and executes U-turn.
Just a thought.
I never got hats. For starters, I look a right tit in any hat, so that rules out me ever wearing one. Women’s hats were equally baffling to me. The word ‘fascinator’ only entered my vocabulary during the recent royal wedding ceremony (thank you Jackie), but even then, I never understood why women might actually want to wear a hat – until today.
It’s Ascot this week, which means… ladies in hats. More specifically, ladies in hats on my train, getting off at Waterloo East. And this morning I saw a young woman on her own, the sole racegoer on a train full of a bunch of schmucks, me included, on their way to work.
It was a revelation.
Her hat was – forgive my hamfisted description – a flat black disc with white polka dots. On top of this was a pink floral arrangement with 1 or 2 mad fronds firing off into the air to one side. Her lipstick exactly matched the colour of the flowers. She was wearing a simple black dress. She looked stunning.
She lowered her head slightly to one side and I realised that the way her hat partially obscured her face was very alluring. And you can’t do that with a fascinator.
I’m not sporty – and I always had sympathy with the small child in the Alan Partridge sports headlines on The Day Today and On The Hour who caused turmoil at major sporting events by pointing out that golf, for example, was just a load of men in daft sweaters knocking balls around with sticks. The crowds dispersed in dismay that they could have been so easily duped. I also like Jasper Fforde satirising the national obsession with sport by imagining a world where literature has tribal fans.
The FIFA business got me thinking though. Football seems like a bit of fun – not for me, you understand, but if people want to spend their spare time playing it, I think that’s great. I understand why people would want to do that. Even I can see that you might want to pay a few pounds to watch a local team of talented, committed amateur players play the game against another team. But pay thousands for a season ticket and kits? Nah, I don’t think so.
Sport is entertainment. It relies on a mixture of skill and an element of luck to pull people in – the luck is important. I can understand the thrill of watching a minor league team have an amazing FA Cup run, getting to Wembley. I get that. Although some think even luck is not enough:
But corruption, of the whiff of corruption, undermines sport’s entertainment value – or it should do. If there’s more to sport than skill and luck – why bother watching it?
I used to follow F1 – until I got the sense that a certain team used to get a suspicious number of judgements in its favour. It seemed like a fix. Its entertainment value evaporated for me. I suspect cycling lost its appeal for many a few years back after doping scandals. Athletics?
Will the same happen with football? Will people wake up and realise that organised, professional sport has failed. Sport should be a hobby, best left to the amateurs.
I’ve just finished reading Jar City by Arnaldur Indriðason – desperate to finish it so I can watch the film back. It’s another bit of ‘Nordic Noir’, so fashionable at the moment: Scandinavian crime fiction in the mould of Wallander or Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole novels.
I thought Jar City would be a bit different though; the excellent BBC Four documentary on Scandinavian detective fiction painted this as being a bit stranger. It’s set in Iceland, for one thing, and the story was underpinned by what sounded like a sinister plot for a private company to collect the DNA of every Icelandic citizen. This sounded like an otherworldly mixture of police procedural and thriller.
But it’s not. It’s a detective novel, like any other. The DNA plot only comes to light at the end and is skated over – which is a pity as Arnaldur Indriðason really could have done something that mixed Wallander with Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown and been better than all of them. The format is staggeringly typical of a large amount of detective fiction: the main character is a middle-aged man with health issues and an unhealthy lifestyle. He is divorced. He has a troubled relationship with his grown-up daughter. He is just the same as Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander. He is Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks. He is Ian Rankin’s DI Rebus. He is not an escapee from The Sugarcubes or Lazy Town.
So much for my preconceptions of Iceland.
I’m going to watch the film though – mainly because one of few odd things about Jar City is that we don’t know if one of the characters is male or female. I want to know how they tackled that on screen.
