the brilliantly leaping gazelle

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June 19, 2014

Why I hate football..

 

I hate football or rather, what I’ve grown to hate is not the game itself, but rather all of the attendant nonsense that goes with it. And I suspect I’m not alone in feeling this.

As a boy I was in my primary and secondary school’s football teams. Playing football was great fun, and you quickly learned that despite every appearance to the contrary, you did have a fiercely competitive spirit.

As I say playing football is one thing, watching it is quite another.

The sponsors of the World Cup in Brazil wish, as all sponsors of sporting events do, that some of the reflected glory of a sporting event watched by billions will rub off on them and so give their brand an image of health, vitality and energy. Look at the sponsor’s of the World Cup in Brazil. And ask yourself how many of the logo’s are prominently emblazoned on screens that players stand in front of at post match interviews or press conferences, ‘How many of them have even the most tenuous connection with football?’

Aside of course, from the cost of staging such an event in the first place which is offset to some very small degree by the money the sponsor’s stump up. The most watched event on earth (according to FIFA – an organization that’s whiter than white – 715 million people watched the last World Cup final) – a marketer’s wet dream – will cost a staggering $14 billion. No wonder there are riots, with six out of ten Brazilian’s believing the money could be better spent.

Football is no longer what it was and that is both a good and a bad thing. We have seen the tragic consequences of terraces at football matches. The death traps that these could easily become have been replaced with all seater stadia – and prices to match – with the result that the average fan cannot afford the price of admission.

My brother supports Arsenal, always has done but he recognizes he cannot afford to go to any home game, as the cost of it is well beyond him. And he earns a decent wage, but given that footballer’s wages are no longer rooted in any discernable reality, the cost of admission has to go someway to pay their wages. On the subject of wages it is ironic that some players in the premier league earn as much in a week as a nurse or a teacher earns in a year.

What kind of society allows this to happen? I mean, ask yourself if you were in need of life saving medical attention would you ask a footballer to help? Likewise if you had a child, and that child required educating, who would you ask? David Cameron may not be everyone’s ideal choice as Prime Minister, but nonetheless, he does what thinks is right. We may disagree with his thinking but still, he juggles lot of balls in the air, some smooth and some covered in spikes. Balls that I for one have neither the time, nor the experts on hand to give me policy options necessary to soberly consider them and thence to make a reasoned evaluation. And nor, I’d wager, do you. And we pay him for making difficult decisions on our behalf, decisions with ramifications so potentially…potent that our heads would explode at the sheer enormity of it all, we pay him less, less,  in year – £142,500 – than some footballers earn in a week. I have no clue whatsoever to do about the Isis uprising in Iraq, the consequences for the region in general, global security in particular and our national security. Best if we ask Rooney what he thinks we should do.

As I say when I played football it was fun, but as soon as I stopped playing, I soon stopped being a spectator, because, as I said I hate all the nonsense that goes with it. England are playing Uruguay in the World Cup tonight. I could care less about the outcome, but only if I really, really tried very hard.

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June 18, 2014

My ‘recovery is akin to a sadistic version of ‘Groundhog Day’…

Each person, whilst embarking on recovering from some calamitous event in their life, will doubtless suffer numerous minor and not so minor setbacks offset by minor victories before – one hopes – an eventually glorious triumph. That, at least, is how the story goes. Or is meant to go.

However, the person writing my story drew inspiration from the small print of adverts selling financial goods. The ones promising spectacular, risk free returns from a modest investment in large print, whilst right at the bottom, in very small text that one almost needs a magnifying glass to read, a disclaimer disavowing the grandiose claims made earlier warns,

“Past performance is no guarantee of future results and you may not get out what you put in.”

It feels like that combined with a somewhat cruel ‘Groundhog Day’ element. For those of you unaware of the plot of ‘Groundhog Day’ – I use ‘those’ in the loosest possible sense of the word, but you never know, there might be one – it’s plot concerns itself with;

Bill Murray who plays Phil Connors, an arrogant and egocentric TV weatherman who, during an assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, finds himself repeating the same day again and again.

Walking is a good example of this rather sadistic phenomenon. Before the accident, one of the things I prided myself on was the speed at which I would walk. I used to think there should be lanes, like they have on motorways, for pedestrians in busy shopping streets, closed off to traffic and rigorously enforced. Dawdlers, tourists and school groups could faff about to their hearts content in the slow lane, safe in the knowledge that they weren’t being a cause of irritation to those who actually wanted to get somewhere at a pace considerably faster than an old person trying to wade through treacle. Bear traps at random intervals would get the message across. One of my favourite games with myself was to spot someone walking ahead in the distance, set myself a target of how many steps it would take me to overtake them and then to do it in far less. Which I usually did. Oh happy days. How I remember them, as remember them is all I can do now. I know I have a memory of it. The problem is that I just can’t remember how walking like that feels.

Early on in my road to recovery – which at times feels like a dead end – I was able to manage 610 steps unaided. Admittedly, they were small steps, required frequent stops, took what seemed to me a long time and were so smooth and fluid that they made Frankenstein’s monster seem like a ballerina. You might think I’d have increased the distance, that between then and now my motivation to constantly exceed my goals would have been re-energised. This is the where the financial advert’s small print crossed with a sadistic element of ‘Groundhog Day’ kicks in, because what happened yesterday has no bearing whatsoever on what happens today. It’s all reset to zero, so it seems. A lot of effort – even getting out of bed some mornings seems a task akin to Sisyphus’s fate for scant reward. The effect is such that a prisoner on death row has more motivation than me.

One of the recurring themes throughout this blog will be the seemingly perfect storm, of a seriously depressed mental state with no optimism whatsoever coupled with a fatigued and ultimately tired of it all disposition. Added to that a couple of years of trying various strategies and employing numerous professionals to facilitate them to seemingly no end.

I feel it incumbent upon me at this point to draw your attention to the not inconsiderable fact that I am not the best person to dispassionately evaluate my ‘progress’. As I am given to compare me as I am, against me as I was, which is not, as has been oft pointed out to me, such a wise idea, fateful folly that it is. Much more prudent is perhaps comparing me when I got out of hospital against me as I am now. One might think this is clear-headed and sensible advice of the first order. But that thought has to be tempered with the knowledge that the same person repeatedly suggesting this also thinks broccoli ice cream is an idea worth pursuing.

You may well ask ‘How come if his mental state is as bad as he claims, how then is he able to motivate himself enough to write this blog?’ Which is a fair question.

Firstly, it passes the time. It’s as pure and simple as that. And I think, as I hope you’ll discover if you follow with this blog, that I have a somewhat…idiosyncratic way of expressing myself.

And secondly, I live in a house share, and I pride myself on being considerate of others, so in order to achieve that – to me – laudable objective, I try and subjugate as far as much as possible my depression. Which isn’t easy but neither would living with me be if I didn’t. Hopefully this blog will provide a suitable outlet for my varied pet peeves. And new ones, of which I’m sure there’ll be many.

My next entry won’t be as depressing, unless of course you’re an England fan. It’ll be about the World Cup and football generally.

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June 11, 2014

I put the ‘me’ into mean……

The first and most important thing to bear in mind about me is that I am not a nice person.

Admittedly my friends might disagree with that statement. They would say that I could be both witty and generous and, on occasion, loyal. Whether I chose to be, or not depended on my mood at that exact moment. But as I have only a few friends left, that isn’t saying much about me. (How I lost the rest of my friends will be a subject I will return to. Frequently).

Just to be clear about things; I put the ‘me’ into mean. It will help you no end, if when reading the words that follow, that you are not fooled into thinking I am a nice person.

The second thing to know about me is that I don’t enjoy living. I realise that that statement might require some clarification. Not enjoying living is not the same thing as wanting to be dead. As John Cougar Mellencamp’s song ‘Jack and Diane’ has it, “Oh yeah, life goes on / long after the thrill of living is gone.”

Not enjoying living is a somewhat unpalatable fact to have in one’s head all the time. Sometimes right at the front, sometimes edged out of to the middle or the back, but always there, like a spot in-between your shoulder blades, which you can’t get to and a friend has to squeeze, and when they do, you know it will return.

Which it does.

Life in itself is a problematic word, given that I don’t consider myself to have one. An existence, certainly. But life? Strictly speaking, yes I have one inasmuch as life is the interval between when you are born and when you die. But what transpires during that interval is what most people would consider life.

Given that I am a citizen of one of the top ten wealthiest countries in the world, with a functioning democracy, independent judiciary and rule of law, and all the benefits that that accrues, not to mention the benefits I now subsist on, I can’t grumble. I am fortunate to have been born here when I consider I could have been in Afghanistan, Somalia or America.

But I do grumble.

To quote the French philosopher, Jacque Liverot “ An optimist sees half a pint of milk. He says it is half full. A pessimist sees half a pint of milk. He says it is half empty. I see half a pint of milk. I say it is sour.”

This blog will be about the ‘sour milk’ of existence. It will also try to be entertaining and sometimes funny. It will be original and you may well, on occasion, disagree with what I write. If you didn’t, and agreed with everything I write, then you would share my rather jaundiced view of things, which would be a pretty sad indictment of your character. So what, you may well ask, is the reason for wasting your time reading (and hopefully continuing to read) my blog?

Well, some time ago I suffered – what was to me at any rate – a life ending brain injury. I went out for the evening and woke up, some weeks later, from a medically induced coma, during which time my vital organs had seized on this opportunity, afforded them by my tardiness, to pack up one by one.

I awoke to a radically changed me; a me that no one ever took the time to explain exactly what had happened to me and, more importantly, what it might mean. Although, as I soon grasped, what it meant, was that my vague dreams had suddenly become an all too real living nightmare. My ability to walk, to talk, seemingly gone. I had to become outwardly nice. Despite thinking that Sartre was right, when he said “Hell is other people”, circumstance prevailed over conviction. It has to, if you depend on others. But inwardly…. This blog will be about my reversal of fortune and my ability (or more often not) to cope with it. It will also contain my thoughts on what I find both irritating, inane or both about modern life. Suffice to say, there won’t be a shortage of the latter…..  

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