About sport

I’ve never really been enthusiastic about sport. Maybe it’s because I’m not particularly competitive by nature, so I’ve never quite got the point of it.

There are of course two kinds of sport: participatory sport and spectator sport.

Let me start with participatory sport.
I was always a pretty weedy kid with minimal hand / foot / eye / ball coordination. As most sports in which I was obliged to participate seemed to involve a ball I was not very good at any of them. Consequently, when it came to picking teams, I was the one who got chosen second to last just before the fat kid with glasses.
“Games” as they were called at school were an exercise in ritual humiliation. They were an opportunity for classmates who were resentful of the fact that I was good at lessons to get their own back.
There was no instruction, you were just expected to get on with it as something natural that boys knew how to do. Nobody even bothered to explain the rules. The idea that with some words of explanation and practical example it might be possible to improve technique, even in an apparently hopeless case, was just alien to those in charge. Most teachers just “took games” on a voluntary basis; they had never actually received training on how to provide physical education. It was something of a bold innovation when my grammar school hired a new master specifically for sport who had actually studied it at teacher training college. His services, however, were mainly dedicated to coaching the school teams. Sport at school was about winning. If you were a loser, you could be dispensed with, but still forced to go through the motions even if largely ignored. It was a non-education.
I particularly loathed rugby - I went to the kind of posh school where boys played rugby during games and football in the playground. I tended to be left at the back, which was a blessing as it meant not having to participate in the scrum, and was expected to stand in the way of someone twice my size thundering down on me with a funny shaped ball under his arm. I soon learned to take evasive action at the last moment having feinted a vague interest in stopping him. Mercifully in third year you could opt out of rugby and do cross-country running instead, which I also hated, but at least it didn’t involve being pushed face first into the mud.
In the sixth form assorted wimps, wusses, intellectuals and obese kids were allowed to spend games inside out of the rain in the gym playing volley ball or anything else they fancied with no supervision at all. This was actually fun. For a start we were all equally bad and many of these kids were my friends, and then there was no quasi-military pressure brought to bear. We had a laugh and enjoyed playing as a team, not that it mattered partciularly who won.

I took up playing squash at university and for a few years after that. I was consistently bad at squash too, but enjoyed it all the same when someone else was happy to give me a thrashing. When my last squash partner did his back in I sort of let it drop; it’s not a particularly healthy form of exercise anyway, it’s far too jerky and abrupt.
I am known to partcipate infrequenty in not too serious scratch games of football, cricket and volley-ball when the opportunity presents itself and I appreciate the aspect of shared activity, but I don’t really seek it out. I guess I was turned off team sports and not properly educated for them as a kid, which is a shame as they perform a great social function I think of that as a failure of my school education, a missed opportunity, though I accept I’m now a bit too old and out of practice anyway for the rough and tumble of many sports.
The long and the short of it is that I exercise a lot but not in the form of what you would term sport. I like to cycle, walk, swim and ski but in a strictly uncompetitive way and more often than not by myself. I don’t even compete against myself. I’m not really interested in how fast I can do something, though I am interested in how far I’ve been and for example will keep a record of how many km I do on my bike. If while out cycling someone else overtakes me I feel no urge to chase them, catch them up and overtake them to prove I’m fitter - partly because I know I just couldn’t catch them if I tried.
I suppose over the years I’ve rationalized my usual tendency to lose at any physical sport into an indifference about the outcome.

I”m not sure whether my lack of interest in spectator sport stems from my lack of interest in participatory sport. There are after all plenty of people who never practise sport themselves yet have a consuming interest in watching other people do it.
This has apparently always been so. Ancient Rome famously kept its people happy by offering them “panem et circenses”, free bread and the circus games, such as gladiatorial fights and chariot races which at that time were popular spectator sport. As a ruse to keep the people sweet, this would not have worked if the people genuninely had not get excited about the games. Come to think of it, in its gory fascination with death, perhaps ancient Roman sport was actually more exciting to watch than snooker is today.

Various psychological, sociological and philosophical explanations can be offered for this constant phenomenon of spectator sport in human history. There is the uncertainty of the outcome during the competition which lends excitement to the watching of it, possibly enhanced by the financial stimulus of betting. There is the impressive display of technical skill by the athletes that commands admiration. There is the identifying with a champion who vicariously fights one’s life battles. There is even the fighting of wars by the proxy of a national team. There is the clarity afterwards of an unambiguous result, a winner and a loser, which is much simpler than in real life.

The key to all of this is the notion of competition. The narrative of capitalist society requires us to see competition per se as a good thing and Darwin is adduced to suggest that it is the mainspring of natural progress. However, many species succeed by dint of cooperation rather than competition among themselves, though species do compete with each other for scarce resources.
The competitive thing has also a strong residual sexual aspect to it, especially in the male, in the sense of competition to secure the best mate. Competitive displays of strength and skill are frequent amongst the animals to this end.
So, some would have it, competition is healthy and exciting, because after all life is about winning and losing. Actually, I don’t really see life in those terms myself and I offer this as a partial explanation as to why, frankly, most spectator sport on the TV, which let’s face it is where most people watch sport, bores me rigid and I’d rather be watching a good film.

My problem is that I don’t really care who wins or loses. Whether England loses again at football or cricket is a matter of profound indifference to me. So as a spectator this leaves me with having to find some interest in the actual sporting action itself.
In many individual sports, where every competitor is pretty well at the same level, you just end up watching the same thing again and again. After the admiration of the athlete’s skill the first three times, the interest becomes whether someone makes a mess of it (as when a slalom skier falls). The Olympics tend to be particularly tedious in this respect. For me the ultimate boring sport to watch, which in my book is not actually a sport at all, is Formula 1 where cars go round and round in circles and someone occasionally crashes.

Like any other field of human activity, I’m sure familiarity with the technicalities enhances the viewer’s experience and what I superficially see as sameness would become infinitely varied. However, I’m really not sufficently attracted to make the effort. Actually one thing I do find quite fascinating is to watch a sport I don’t know the rules of in a language I don’t understand: eg sumo in Japanese or pelota in Basque. It really demonstrates how curious a phenomenon spectator sport is with crowds cheering and commentators getting excited for no obvious reason.

Sports involving opposing teams and individuals potentially make for better viewing as there is the psychological dimension of opposing tactics and the consequent greater scope for variation in action and randomness of outcome.
I admit that football works well in this way and I occasionally watch the odd important game in company as a shared activity. I wouldn’t bother to watch a match by myself though.
In our modern age of politicians who would be a man of the people (and indeed woman in the case of Mrs Merkel) who the people can relate to and want to elect, it is politically correct to like football and make intelligent or witty comments about it. As I work a lot for politicians it is useful for me to be aware of football as of any other current affairs, so I do listen right to the end of the news broadcast and leaf through the last pages of the newpaper for the results, but it’s certainly not the bit I read first.

Another thing which puts me off spectator sport is the obscene amounts of money some of it, especially football, involves - again my parallel with Ancient Rome holds good. There is no justification whatsoever for the salaries of some football-players, nor indeed of certain merchant bankers. In both professions, since the financial interests in winning are now so big it has become acceptable to cheat to get the desired result. But I digress. In sport there are not only incidents of cheating like Thierry’s hand-ball that clinched France’s place in the football World Cup, but there is also the much larger and less obvious area of doping. Doping is rife in all professional sport and shows just how far we have come from original ideals and the setting of good examples for healthy boys and girls.
I did go through a period of watching the Tour de France, being a cyclist myself, though admittedly more for the pretty pictures of the landscape ridden through than any notional “action”. I was naively full of admiration for the superhuman effort of their riding hundreds of km day after day in all conditions. Now I know that they’re all on drugs which has somewhat tainted my admiration for them and I have stopped bothering to follow the Tour.
I’m sure if the truth be told, cheating has always been an integral part of competitive high-level sport, it’s just what happens when the stakes are too high. Most people prefer to ignore it though, unless it is really blatant, as in Thierrry’s hand-ball and then they get really angry about it, because for them it is “more than a game”. I find all this a bit sad myself as ultimately it’s really not that important and utterly ephemeral. I can’t see what people get so excited about, but they do.

So take this in the way of a confession: spectator sport leaves me cold. I am ready to engage in pleasant conversation about it in the way of social nicety, as indeed one might talk about the weather, only I find the weather an intrinsically much more interesting subject as it actually has a bearing on my life.

About novels

What is a novel ? These days I suppose we mean any long prose work of fiction (let’s say longer than 100 pages). Ultimately though a novel is anything the author wishes to call one. There have been plenty of experimental novels over the centuries, but the best loved and most successful novels tend to be straightforward in their story-telling.
The novel is the dominant genre of new fiction, what most people read. I read a lot of novels myself. On a rough estimate, I must have read about 400 novels, which is probably about half the books I have ever read. I read a fair number of recent novels in English so as to stay in touch with present times, but mainly I read the classics.

By classic, I mean a novel which is quite a bit older and has stood the test of time, transcending its immediate contemporary relevance so that it is still read for its enduring quality. This, for want of a better word, we may call its universality. These novels are by common critical and popular consent the best and there is no shortage of them. It seems to me to be a bit of a waste of time, when you can only read so many books in a lifetime, to take the risk of being unsatisfied with something recent and insubstantial when you could be reading a novel that has proven its value and staying power. Since writers willy nilly write within a tradition, it is also not a bad thing to be familiar with the major works of it, if only to catch the references. My preferences also have a lot to do with my having studied literature at university.

But you may ask: “Why bother to read fiction in the first place when there is so much to read about real life ?” The answer is that good fiction is a sublimation of real life. We believe the story because somehow it rings true. This also holds for fantastic and mythological stories that still require some truthful representation of human behaviour and the human psyche if they are going to work for the reader. Even some of the superficially most escapist novels are actually taking us on a journey into rather than away from ourselves.

Whether the account is factual or fictional, what the reader really craves is a good story that is well told. In the end, much biography and history is also the selective telling of a good story. “And what happened next?” is what keeps the reader turning the pages. The essence of a good novel is that it is a good story, most often with an end which is not immediately apparent, or even, in larger works, several good stories interwoven. Without that the reader’s attention will wander and the book will be put down.
Sometimes that story may well not be an exciting ‘adventure’ in the usual sense but rather the story of how a character grows older, how he is affected by life. It’s more a case of “what happened to so and so?” which is again a driving force of human curiosity, namely to see, of all the possible outcomes, how people turn out, what makes us what we are.
The real stuff of a good novel, then, is how the characters are shaped by their lives, their experience and environment, their interaction.
A novel therefore has to take the time to set its characters in context and needs a certain descriptive, material, tangible thickness to it, without which it can seem abstract and insubstantial. This “real” surface is important and attractive. It is the film-like quality that makes books of the film and films of the book so popular. However, it has to be said that the literary genre in many ways best suited to the film adaptation is not the novel but the short story; there is just too much going on in a proper novel to be done justice to in a film. A novel after all takes several hours to read and digest, a film just one or two.
It’s that extra depth behind the surface which gives the novel its added value; in particular the thought processes and motivations of the characters, in whatever way the author or narrator seeks to convey them. This goes so much further than just the dialogue. Dialogue is a crucial part of any novel but represents only the directly mutually perceived and possibly misunderstood tip of the psychological iceberg. “Why did he or she do that?” is a very important part of the story, and perhaps in adult books, the most interesting part.

So what are my favourite novels?

I am an inveterate re-reader of books. It’s not unusual to watch a film a second time, or to see a play or an opera a second time (even in the same performed version) and of course the essence of enjoying music is to hear the same piece several times. It just takes longer to read a novel, so some may baulk at the idea of doing it twice. However, in terms of quality rather than quantity, I believe you get more out of reading the same good book twice than out of reading four indifferent books once. I guess that’s paradoxical when I say elsewhere that one book read is several others you’re never going to get round to, but re-reading remains a valid choice. Also even if the book is the same, we are not, and at intervals of ten, twenty years, we react differently to it in the light of our experience. Many people make the mistake of reading the classics as set books when teenagers, when they are actually too young to grasp them fully, and then don’t bother to re-read them because they “know the story”.
In my own case, it’s odd, but there are so many things cluttering up my brain that frequently I can’t remember the names of the main characters and whole aspects of the plot, but I do remember if I thought it was a good novel. This means that I derive a lot of pleasure from re-reading novels I have previously enjoyed.

In compiling a list of my favourite novels the acid test then has to be “Have I read it twice ?” That gives a starting short list of about 40, from which I have to discard some only read twice for the purpose of study (a few German and French titles here), some read twice because read aloud to my children (eg “Harry Potter”, “Lord of the Rings”) and others that fall short of my 100 pages (notably , “Animal farm”, “The old man and the sea” and “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”). From the ones remaining I shall choose twelve.

Tolstoy War and peace
Dostoyevski Brothers Karamazov
Dickens Great expectations
Flaubert Mme Bovary
Woolf the Waves
Joyce Ulysses
Garcia Marquez 100 years of solitude
Conrad Heart of Darkness
Orwell 1984
Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s lover
Hardy Mayor of Casterbridge
Bulgakov Master and Margarita

“War and Peace” - can justifiably be claimed to be the greatest novel ever written. This huge and actually un-put-down-able novel is ultimately about how everyone’s lives are shaped by the vast unstoppable sweep of history.

“Brothers Karamazov” - Dostoievsky explores the darker side of the human psyche and belief. He shows us the disturbing truth that man does not pursue happiness alone but demands his share of suffering.

“Great expectations” - Dickens is probably the best novelist in English and this his best book. That’s because compared to his other novels its structure is tighter, its language more direct and the narrator’s, the older Pip’s, take on his own life refeshingly unsentimental for Dickens, as he reveals how his expectations are disappointed.

“Mme Bovary” - is on the face of it an unpromising story of adultery in the French countryside. Yet Flaubert observes everything acutely and weighs every word carefully (he used to shout them down his staircase to check they sounded ok read aloud); So there is a constant tension between the tawdry mediocrity of rural life and the aspiritational, but clichéd dreams of Emma who attempts to escape her surroundings but inevitably cannot.

“the Waves” - is the inner monologues of six childhood friends caught at key moments as they grow older framed in a description of the passing of a day. For me, the poetic beauty of the heightened language of Woolf’s masterpiece makes it endlessly re-readable.

“Ulysses” - Joyce’s book is to be savoured for the wonderful use of language. Every chapter explores a different style. It is a celebration of the everyday and all of life in one day, with Bloom notably attending a funeral and visiting the maternity ward as he navigates Dublin in a modern version of the Odyssey before returning home to Molly.

“100 Years of solitude” - is the great work of magical realism but at the same time it is a distillation of all that is Latin America. Garcia Marquez enthusiastically lets his baroque imagination run riot in a way that is totally engrossing. I love the way the plot finally works out.

“Heart of darkness” - all right, I know this is too short, but it is Conrad’s best and most powerful book, a tale of the sordidness of empire and the futility of some of man’s endeavours.

“1984” - is the greatest novel of science and political fiction, a truly prescient work, whose invention is now so familiar that we too easily take it for granted.

“Lady Chatterley’s lover” - is a much maligned book and is far from being just about sex. I think it’s Lawrence’s best novel as it covers efficiently and directly his favourite themes of the suffocating and dehumanizing nature of modern industrialized society and how it may be possible for the individual to rebel against it.

“Mayor of Caterbridge” - the opening scene where Henchard sells his wife, thereby triggering the whole story, has to be one of the most striking in any novel. The plot is beautifully worked out with a tragic logic in the true sense of the word that it all stems from the hero’s flaws.

“Master and Margarita” - describes a surreal visitation of the Devil to Bulgakov’s contemporary Stalinist Moscow alternating this with a realistic account of what may have been the last days of Christ. It is original, funny and profound.

I’m not making any claim here for this being a list of the greatest works of prose fiction, they are just my personal favourites which given time I would actually read a third time (if I haven’t done so already).