This Sporting Life

I have been taken to task by one of my nearest and dearest for having expressed mild irritation at the brouhaha over the English cricket team’s recent success. It had seemed to me that for the result of a game of cricket to feature for several days as a major item in every TV news broadcast was excessive; the spectacle of smirking newsreaders telling us over and over again how epoch-making it all was – Georgeous George Alegiah was particularly gruesome – must have palled even for some sport-lovers.

I was accused of meanly resenting the “general happiness enabling people to forget their miserable dull lives”. This is not true: I like people to be happy, and if all it takes is a sporting victory then good luck to them. What I do resent is the way in which the bullying majority assume that those who do not share their enthusiasms must be perverse, unpatriotic or effete, or all three; I do not demand that they  share, say, my passion for early Assyrian stringed instruments, so why do they think I ought to enjoy listening to them wittering on about their silly games?

I suppose it is partly my fault for having nowadays stopped concealing my total lack of interest in all forms of sport. For many years, while I was making a living in a field related to sport, I had to dissemble and at times actually pretend that watching some contest or other, when I didn’t understand the rules and didn’t care much who won or lost, was my idea of fun.

But, I hear you cry, why did you ever get involved in something so unrelated to your inclinations? The answer is simple: in many jobs, the end product doesn’t really matter too much. Suppose you are the CEO of a multinational employing 4,000 people making mild steel flanges; must you be devoted to mild steel flanges? Would you necessarily want to spend your leisure time watching TV programmes about them or discussing them with your friends? Of course not, but running the company could be fulfilling work at which you were fairly competent and which you thoroughly enjoyed doing.

So it was with me, but of course all my colleagues naturally assumed that I was as fascinated by sport as they were, and it would have been churlish (and a poor career move) to have let them know how much it bored me. Sometimes the pretence was a strain.

The first time I went to Beijing (or Peking as we called it then) my interpreter told me when I got off the train from Lo Wu that my hosts had decided to honour me the next day by granting me a rare privilege. I was already excited just to be in China and I tossed about all night wondering what this surprise treat would be: a confidential talk with some of the party leaders, perhaps? A private visit to part of the Forbidden City not normally shown to foreigners? Dinner with some of their top circus stars at the biggest of the famous Roast Duck Restaurants, the one that serves 5,000 meals every day?

No. It was a seat (admittedly a good one, with arms) at a football match. The Red Army versus Albania. Three hours in a scruffy sweltering stadium with twenty thousand spectators screaming, spitting and generally carrying on, while I tried hard to pretend I was having the time of my life.

In later years I devised various stratagems for keeping up the pretence of my keen interest in all things sportive; I picked up from experts a few phrases relevant to each sport which I could trot out when at some dreary event I was woken from a light doze by someone wanting to know what I thought about it. One of those for football, I remember, was: “…well, of course, they’re keeping it very loose in midfield, aren’t they?…” Or, for cricket, something along the lines of: "...just like Gooch, really; he was always flashing at rising balls on the legside... "

I had no idea what these things meant, but neither did anyone else and I said them confidently, so they usually went down quite well.

Bustling over large balls

For at least seven hundred years efforts have been made to stop people playing football. Sadly, this noble cause has never had much success.

In 1314 the Mayor of London issued the following proclamation on behalf of King Edward II:
For as much as there is great noise in the city caused by bustling over large balls...from which many evils might arise which God forbid: We command and forbid on behalf of the king, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in future.

In 1349, Edward III sent a letter of complaint to the sheriffs of London declaring that "the skill of shooting with arrows was almost totally laid aside for the purpose of useless and unlawful games such as football."  The danger attending the pastime occasioned King James I of England, in the rules drawn up by himself for the recreations of his son Henry Prince of Wales, to give the following instructions:
From this court I debarre all rough and violent exercises, as the foote-ball. meeter for laming than making able the users thereof; but the exercises I would have you to use, although but moderately, not making a craft of them, are running, leaping, wrestling, fencing, dancing, and playing at the caitch, or tennise, archerie, palle-malle and suchlike other fair and pleasant field-games.

Richard II in 1389 and Henry IV in 1401 tried again to little avail.

In 1424, under James I of Scotland, an Act of Parliament was passed outlawing the game:
It is statute, and the king forbiddis. that na man play at the fute-ball under the paine of fiftie schillings, to be raised to the lord of the land als oft as he be tainted. or to the scheriffe of the lands or his ministers if the lords will not punish sik trespassours.

(On the other hand, in 1526 Henry VIII ordered a pair of football boots of leather, handstitched by the Royal Cordwainer; they cost four shillings. But perhaps he was more serious about footwear than football: at the same time he ordererd seventy-seven other pairs of boots, buskins, shoes and slippers.)

It is regrettable that our later sovereigns did not attempt to continue this salutary if fruitless campaign, and it seems unlikely that the Windsors will ever renew it.

The flannelled fools at the wicket...

... or the muddied oafs at the goals. Kipling's 1902 poem The Islanders was written towards the end of the Boer War, which it calls unnecessary while denouncing the sending of ill-equipped troops to fight it. This has some contemporary resonance; perhaps less so, but still worth considering, is Kipling's condemnation in the same poem of a nation rendered complacent by bread and circuses: he was suggesting that excessive devotion to sport twists our priorities and enfeebles us.

Six years later, G K Chesterton took an equally disparaging view of sport, in an essay entitled Patriotism and sport:

...The Englishman with any feeling for England will know that athletic failures do not prove that England is weak, any more than athletic successes proved that England was strong. The truth is that athletics, like all other things, especially modern, are insanely individualistic. The Englishmen who win sporting prizes are exceptional among Englishmen, for the simple reason that they are exceptional even among men.
...The particular kind of evil that arises from our English form of the worship of athletics is that It concentrates too much upon the success of individuals. It began, quite naturally and rightly, with wanting England to win. The second stage was that it wanted some Englishmen to win. The third stage was (in the ecstasy and agony of some special competition) that it wanted one particular Englishman to win.
...The genuine English patriot will know that the strength of England has never depended upon any of these things; that the glory of England has never had anything to do with them, except in the opinion of a large section of the rich and a loose section of the poor which copies the idleness of the rich. These people will, of course, think too much of our failure, just as they thought too much of our success
....But the real historic strength of England, physical and moral, has never had anything to do with this athletic specialism; it has been rather hindered by it. Somebody said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on Eton playing-fields. It was a particularly unfortunate remark, for the English contribution to the victory of Waterloo depended very much more than is common in victories upon the steadiness of the rank and file in an almost desperate situation
....It was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields. But it might have been fairly said that Waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket. In a word, it was the average of the nation that was strong, and athletic glories do not indicate much about the average of a nation. Waterloo was not won by good cricket-players. But Waterloo was won by bad cricket-players, by a mass of men who had some minimum of athletic instincts and habits
....The difficulty is therefore that the actual raising of the standard of athletics has probably been bad for national athleticism. Instead of the tournament being a healthy mêlée into which any ordinary man would rush and take his chance, it has become a fenced and guarded tilting-yard for the collision of particular champions against whom no ordinary man would pit himself or even be permitted to pit himself. As long as the game was a game, everybody wanted to join in it. When it becomes an art, every one wants to look at it.

Chesterton wasn't actually making the point that the desire to watch sport has become infinitely stronger than the desire to participate in it but he might have been. Much of what he wrote a hundred years ago sounds quaint to us: nowadays we cannot distinguish quite so blithely between the tastes of the rich and the poor, and when he spoke of sport he meant riding to hounds, shooting, rowing and cricket; the idea of a millionaire footballer worshipped as a national hero would have been unthinkable to him.

What immortal hand or eye could frame thy tearful apology....?

Grumio has announced that he is calling a press conference at the O2 Arena to apologise to his family, his friends and their children, and his country for having eaten some of George's pork pie in 1978 when George wasn't looking.

Taking the bigger slice

Last Sunday's's edition of a terrible TV game show called Beat the Star (originally Schlag den Raab; sixteen episodes on German TV since 2006 and still running) featured a game which, unlike the show, deserves to be more widely known.

It is played with two identical lengths of salami, and I should mention at once that it is in no way connected with the constant references Kenneth Williams used to make to his old friend Maudie Fittleworth (Fun-With-A-Frankfurter), particularly in a radio show called Just a Minute in which he starred together with assorted drolls such as Derek Nimmo, Clement Freud and Peter Jones, who vied with each other in keeping up a flow of off-the-cuff conversation, displaying great erudition and wit.

But I digress. The salami game is for two players, each of whom chops off a slice of his salami: the one whose slice is the heavier wins the round. A game consists of five rounds. These are the only rules.

Can tactics in this game involve mathematics, or can you win when you have played many games with the same opponent by recognizing and exploiting non-random behaviour, as it is said you can in Rock-Paper-Scissors?

After a game, of course, you can celebrate its conclusion by eating the consumables. You just need to add a baguette, radishes, butter (you already have the knife for spreading it), parmesan, salad, and a bottle of wine; this is not true of other games like croquet or bowls. You can do something similar when you have been using chocolate chessmen or playing Go with jelly beans, but it's not so much fun.

I suppose if Maudie Fittleworth's cryptic subtitle referred to some sort of game one could finish a tournament in the same way, but Kenneth Williams has left us, alas, so we shall never know.

Fitba' crazy

After being caught (momentarily) last Wednesday by a hoax news item, I merely smiled indulgently when I saw in the same edition of the Guardian a rather silly joke in the last paragraph of an article by their Arts correspondent about an exhibition of Henry VIII's armour and weapons at the Tower of London:
Another quirk to the exhibition is the display of what is thought to be the oldest football in the world. It was discovered in the 1980s in the roof above Mary Queen of Scots' bedroom at Stirling Castle, and it is thought that Mary—a keen football fan and possible player—may have put it there to ward away demons.

It was cheating a bit, I thought, to slip an April Fool joke into the last paragraph of a perfectly serious and accurate, if boring, article. But I was wrong, for it was not a joke: Mary's love of sport has been quoted by her biographers since the sixteenth century, though it is definitely not true that she was the highest scorer ever for St Mirren.

The song from which I took the title of this post goes as follows:
Noo ye a' ken my big brither Jock,
His richt name is Johnny Shaw,
We'll he's lately jined a fitba' club,
For he's daft aboot fitba''
He's twa black een already
An three teeth oot by the root,
Whaur his face did come in contact wi'
Some ither fellow's boot.
CHORUS
He's fitba' crazy fegs,
He's clean stane mad,
His fitba' capers robbed him o'
Whit wee bit sense he had'
It wid tak a dizen servents
His clase tae patch and scrub,
Since Jock's become a member o' the Dooley fitba' club.

This is the first known song about organised football but it was written by one James Curran in the nineteenth century so Mary couldn't have sung it on the terraces.

Deng Yaping

I am to sport what Amy Winehouse is to post-structuralism, but I did make a living from it for some years (sport, not the other thing) and in the course of my work had the opportunity of meeting a number of top sportsmen and sportswomen. I got the impression that some of them had difficulty with joined-up writing, leading me to the conclusion that academic and sporting prowess do not always go together. When they do, in spades, it is worth saluting.

I never actually spoke to Deng Yaping but I watched her win two of her four Olympic gold medals and several of her other gold or silver medals at World Championships and World Cups. When she retired at the age of 24, she had won more titles than any other player in the sport and was voted Chinese female athlete of the century.

After her retirement Deng gained a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University, a master's degree from the University of Nottingham, and in 2006 studied for a PhD. in Land Economy at Jesus College Cambridge. She was professionally involved in marketing, management and development of the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a member of the Beijing Organizing Committee.

It is pleasant to reflect that Ivor Montagu, the Communist youngest son of a Jewish peer, was also at Cambridge (though not at Jesus) when he first played pingpong. It was he who made Deng's sporting career possible, for he had a leading role in popularizing the sport by establishing and financing the first world championships in London in 1926 and initiating the creation of the International Table Tennis Federation, serving as its first president for 41 years until 1967.

Sport

This has recently been brought up to date. Or rather, sport has been brought up to date: the entry for this word in the OED is one of the revisions which were made to the Dictionary on 11th September. (A few new words or meanings have also been added; you can see them here.)

The word sport has a different feel today than it had a hundred years ago. Sport was becoming 'organized' in the late nineteenth century. Before then, the term was largely used in the sense 'entertainment' (betraying its origins in 'disport') or in the narrow sense of hunting, shooting, and fishing. The semantic movement of the word over the centuries is demonstrated in the various senses it develops, but also in the evolution of phrases and compounds associated with its various meanings (early period: in sport, to make sport; 18th century: the sport of kings; modern period: sports clothes, sports centre, sports psychology, sport utility, etc.).

The entry for sport and its associated phrases, compounds and derivatives, together with the quotations, runs to over 19,000 words. For the benefit of those sad people who have no access to the OED Online I would have liked to have cut and pasted the entry here, but this would have made an over-long post. Anyway, the annual subscription is only $295; many institutions all over the world have it, or you could move to England where a (free) subscription to a public library will enable you to log on to it at home.

It has be said that many of its half-million entries do not make particularly engrossing reading. Under sport, for example, we can find a note about sportswomanship: The performance or practice of a sportswoman; skill in, or knowledge of, sport; conduct characteristic or worthy of a sportswoman. It includes a quotation from Tait's Magazine indicating that the first recorded use of the word was in 1833; all this is, I suppose, quite interesting, but not tremendously interesting and not really very useful to know.

Injuries bravely born

I see that last weekend yet another footballing big girl's blouse received a bit of a knock and collapsed writhing in pain until he was comforted and put on his feet again.

Back in the fifteenth century sportsmen were made of sterner stuff. There are several versions of a ballad called Chevy Chase (i.e. a hunt in the Cheviots) celebrating a dispute over hunting rights which led to a mighty battle. After a careful start....

The bowmen mustered on the hills,
Well able to endure;
Their backsides all with special care
That day were guarded sure.

....the fighting was fierce and long, and at close of play only 108 had survived out of the 3,500 huntsmen and warriors involved. Both team captains were slain, the Scottish Earl Douglas by an arrow and the English Earl Percy by a spear.

I doubt if there were any among all the grievously wounded who collapsed in petulant tears like footballers; typical of those who didn't was one English squire who was perhaps the inspiration for an incident in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

For Witherington needs must I wail
As one in doleful dumps.
For when his legs were smitten off,
He fought upon his stumps.

[Or, in an earlier and more elegant version:
For Wetharryngton my harte was wo,
that euer he slayne shulde be;
For when both his leggis wear hewyne in to,
yet he knyled and fought on hys kny.]

Beijing: the great show begins

The Olympic Games opened last Wednesday with the Women's Association Football tournament.

FIFA, which governs women's football as well as men's, may have hoped to upstage the opening ceremony of the games by putting on the women's Olympic event two days before, but although there were some nail-biting matches—notably the one in which a goal by Canada's Candace Chapman sent her side on the way to a 2-1 win over Argentina—there was little doubt that it was Friday's show which had the edge for spectacle and excitement.

The organisers of London 2012 will have difficulty in matching it, but no doubt they will do their very best. Rehearsals are already taking place for Great Britain's part in the handover ceremony which will take place after the end of the Beijing games, and, as the picture shows, this promises to be something really special.

Then when it comes to the opening ceremony in four years' time we can expect something on the scale of Churchill's funeral or even the Queen's coronation. Plans are still under wraps, but those in the know are fairly certain that the ceremony will feature, among many other colorful symbols of our history, culture and achievements, top personalities from the Women's Institute, the College of Arms and Coronation Street, the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards, the Yeoman Warders of the Tower of London, and, of course, Cliff Richard.

London Pride

It is heart-warming to know that millions of people all over the world watched the TV pictures of the Olympic Torch Relay through London yesterday, though to get a real lump in the throat you had to be there.

Even foreigners who despise the English have to admit that when it comes to putting on a spectacle we are among the best in the world. It really was a splendid sight: trolling along the streets came this colourful swirling mass: an outer ring of dark-clad riot police in their stab-proof vests, inside them more police in bright yellow jackets and those quaint cycling helmets ("in case they need to use cycles", though they didn't seem to have any with them), then a ring of Chinese heavies in rather fetching powder blue shell suits and baseball caps and finally, at the centre, a mêlée of assorted characters pushing each other about, falling over and generally carrying on.

An effective touch was provided by the flicker of flame which could occasionally be seen among the writhing bodies, and the merry cries of the spectators added to the fun.

All this excitement, contrasting with a very quiet and moving handover ceremony featuring about four people and taking place in the middle of an otherwise empty stadium, made a terrific show aptly symbolising whatever it was intended to symbolise. The opening ceremony in Beijing cannot but be an anticlimax.

Waewae takahia kia kino!

Céline Graciet is one of the best English-French translators in the country, but she is clearly not much good at translating from Te Reo Māori to English or, probably, to French. Having no knowledge of the New Zealand language, she merely made a guess at what the All Blacks might be trying to convey with their pre-match Haka, and has had to confess that it was wide of the mark.

What the chant actually means is apparently:

Slap the hands against the thighs! Puff out the chest! Bend the knees! Let the hip follow! Stamp the feet as hard as you can! It is death! It is death! It is life! It is life! This is the hairy person Who caused the sun to shine! Keep abreast! Keep abreast! The rank! Hold fast! Into the sun that shines!

How surprising! Apart from one bit this is quite gentle stuff, the sort of thing with which my sister might have used to encourage her class. Not a bit terrifying.

On Céline’s website there is the original, a YouTube clip of them doing it, and her translation. Hopelessly inaccurate this may be, but to my mind it is much better than the original in that it conveys the right spirit and has the desired effect on the listener. The All Blacks would do well to translate it back and use it to replace the existing rather feeble words.

But I suppose it doesn’t matter since no-one understands the words; if they were actually a quotation from Lady Windermere’s Fan the performance would be just as intimidating. However tough and menacing other teams’ players may look, they could never compete with this: Men of Harlech, say, even with what they call in the valleys a nice bit of 'armonising, wouldn't cut the mustard. It might be better for them to take an entirely different approach and come mincing on to the pitch singing, falsetto, “Shine Through My Dreams” from Glamorous Night. This wouldn’t frighten the other side, but sure as hell it would make them feel puzzled and uncertain, and thus put them off their game.

Kickflips for God

This year the Jesus Skateboarding Classic, the event of the year for those who are into skateboards, baggy shorts, God and crucifixes, is being held in Reigate. Organised by Christian Skateboarders UK, the competition started small but is now one of the most popular events in the skateboarding calendar.


There are Christian Skateboarders all over the country, from the heartlands of Surrey and Hampshire to the Outer Hebrides. There is even a one-member chapter in West Hartlepool, but most chapters have several members. Some traditional churches remain uninterested or suspicious but others believe that through skateboarding they might attract a younger crowd to their congregations.

Arthur “Big Wheelie” Wilmington. national director of Christian Skateboarders UK, said the group was concerned with drawing skateboarders in to Christianity and also introducing Christians to the joys of skateboarding. He said: “When you are sitting out there with the ramp dropping steeply down in front of you and you are looking at the skatepark all around you, I think a lot of people wonder where this all comes from”.

He had to admit that his faith was sorely tested this week when heavy rain was forecast and other competitions were being cancelled. “I did wonder whether we should call it off but I felt God was telling me to keep going,” he said, “In the past we have suddenly been sent fine weather in the midst of a downpour”. When he got up on Saturday morning and saw that it was raining—in his own words—“Ollies and Hippiejumps”, Mr Wilmington thought perhaps God had got his timing wrong. But then brilliant sunshine started to roll down Reigate High Street and, to borrow skateboarding terminology, he was “popped over”.

It is not just in the UK that skateboarding and Christianity are increasingly closely linked. There are many Christian skateboarding organisations, of course, in the US, the biggest of which is called The Four Wheels of Hiram (from 1 Kings 7:32 And under the borders were four wheels; and the axletrees of the wheels were joined to the base; and the height of a wheel was a cubit and half a cubit.) Its founder, Ziggy Simpkins, said, “I think Jesus was a rebel, a radical. That attracts many skateboarders who tend to be revolutionaries and, sometimes, misfits”.

In Britain, skateboarding commuterbelt towns report bigger congregations. In Reigate and Redhill, the three churches are all thriving, and in nearby Westerham the Wesleyan chapel got a boost this summer after rebranding itself The GodBoardPark and replacing pews with a skateboarding ramp.

Acknowledgements to today's Guardian.

What is cricket?

Martin G in the excellent Really Magazine reports that a new book, due for release later this year, At the boundaries of Cricket : Philosophical Reflections on the Noble Game (abstracts HERE) will attempt to answer this question.

Noble Game, eh?

NOBLE: (1) of an exalted moral or mental character or excellence; lofty; (2) admirable in dignity of conception, manner of expression, execution, or composition.

I suppose The Noble Game fits cricket as well as The Noble Art fits the activity which has as object the reduction of your opponent’s face to a pulp and his brain to a jelly.

Anyway, Martin G notes that the book will be of interest alike to those who feel that cricket can be seen from “Consequentialist, deontological, and virtue ethics perspectives”, and those who simply see men hitting a ball with a piece of wood. It asks whether “cricket is a language-without-words-game” and if, over the years, it could be said to show “an evolution from Lockean to Smithean liberalism”. Also discussed is the idea of ‘non-attached action’, as referenced techniques of mental preparation and mental hygiene, and the last chapter presents a strong argument against functionalism, in other words against those who might feel that :“ . . . the aesthetic appreciation of cricket, and sport more generally, can be reduced to or is subordinate to the putative purpose of the game, namely winning*”. [In other words, it’s better to read Wisden than to actually play the silly game.]

It all sounds like a cracking good read.

Keeping the mud off their balls

Pétanque is reputed to have been invented in 1907 in the village of La Ciotat near Marseille. The name is derived from the term pés tanqués, which in the Franco-Provençal dialect means "stuck feet", because in Pétanque the feet have to remain fixed together within a (small) circle. Pétanque has become so popular that the term Jeu de Boules (game of balls) is often used to refer to it, even though Pétanque is only one of several variants of boules. Many French villages have a special stadium for the game called a Boulodrome.

In recent years we too have taken to the Jeu de Boules in a big way, and a crack team of retired accountants from Much Wenlock is said to be hot favourite for the next World Championships.

I am indebted to an anonymous correspondent who has informed me that the French, always eager to express their affection for Anglo-Saxons and their admiration for our sporting prowess, have paid us a pretty compliment by adopting an English name for one of the accessories used for the game, the thin mat which often needs to be laid down at Boulodromes when the heavy rain so common in the south of France causes the pitch to become too wet for play and may cause pés tanqués. This useful piece of kit comes in sections which are zipped together to cover the entire area, and they call the whole thing a complete Boul’-sheet.

How about a Beefeater newt?

It is easy, but pointless, to say rude things about the London (or rather london) 2012 logo: everybody knows that if you give world-famous brand consultants Wolff Olins a year and £400,000 to design it then you are likely to get a piece of laughable rubbish. So no surprise there, though the animation of it which causes epileptic seizures, the unrecognisable 2012 and the fact that it suggests a swastika were unpredictable bonuses. It was apparently designed to "attract the internet generation", an objective both deeply sad and clearly not achieved: an online petition to get the whole thing ditched attracted nearly 50,000 signatures within a couple of days, while a "Support the 2012 Logo" list was struggling to make it into double figures.

There will also be a London 2012 mascot and we can be fairly sure that its unveiling after the Beijing Olympics will evoke similar contempt and ribaldry. In recent years many Olympic venues have settled for awful sub-Disney cuteness as in Moscow’s Misha and Seoul’s Hodori.

An honourable exception was Barcelona’s Cobi, but then they had taken the extraordinary step of giving the task of creating it to a real artist-designer (Javier Mariscal), who was responsible for the corporate identity for the Games; their logo was one of the best ever.

Few will be much impressed by the charm and originality of Huanhuan, the mascot for Beijing 2008 now being promoted to the world.

[Note that it is a microphone that the gentleman on the right is holding.]

Here they come

Reproducing a cartoon from a magazine in your blog is a fairly contemptible thing to do, so I must make it clear that it is only in order to let American readers know of the fun in store for them in a few months' time that I offer the following, which appeared this week in Private Eye:

WASHED-UP ENGLAND STAR
LATEST

Don’t try this at home

Given my total lack of interest in the tedious activities which are called sport, it is surprising that I seem to have written, so far, around twenty posts with this tag, but this is because I use the word very loosely*, applying it to any pastime which can be indulged in competitively (like growing a beard) or which involves physical exertion or danger without any real point (like sewer exploration).

Here is another, which is certainly dangerous but does have a real point, or several.

This may look like Ricky Gervais, but it is not; it is a man called Brad Byers, who claims to be the current holder of the World Record for Sword Swallowing; he is also a top man at Hammering a Nail Into One’s Face. However, it should be noted that, according to The British Medical Journal, Matty "Blade" Henshaw swallowed a total of 3,782 swords in 2003 (not, I suppose, all at once), 50 swords were swallowed simultaneously by 19 individuals at a swallowers' convention in 2002, and a belly dancer has swallowed 11 swords at the same time.

Really Magazine has further notes on all this and tells us that the BMJ’s December edition carried a study on Sword swallowing and its side effects.


* Probably none of the sports I have mentioned here is highly esteemed among sports people. For a note on which sport has the highest status, see HERE.

One for the diary

I unaccountably missed the European Beard and Moustache Championships which took place last month in Germany, hosted by Der Ostbayerische Bart- und Schnauzerclub.

There was competition in all categories:
Schnauzbart: Naturale, Englisch, Dali, Kaiserlich, Ungarisch, Freistil
Kinn- und Backenbart: Naturale, Chinese, Musketier, Kaiserlich, Freistil, Kinn
Vollbart: Verdi, Garibaldi, Naturale, Freistil

The first World Championships were held in Höfen/Enz, Germany, in 1990. I shall certainly not miss next year’s, which will be hosted by the Handlebar Club of London on 1st September at The Brighton Centre. Details here.

As with so many other major world sports, we English led the way in early days—the Handlebar Club celebrates its sixtieth anniversary next year and claims to be the oldest club of its kind—but nowadays we are often outclassed; Germany won gold in 14 of the 17 categories in the 2005 World Championships and Beard Team USA will be strong contenders next year in Brighton, though they seem to have a certain lack of gravitas which may count against them.

I am sure that the distinguished Swedish photographer Tobias Nilsson will not mind me reproducing here this excellent photo. It shows Heinz Christophel of the Palatinate Beard Club who travelled from Germany to the New York City Beard and Moustache Championships last May and came first in the Full Beard Freestyle category.

Keeping it loose in midfield

I normally take the feeds from around twenty websites or blogs, though I look at the updates only occasionally, in idle moments.

I was depressed today when I logged on to my reader to find that no less than nine of them, all of which I had previously believed were being written by people with whom I had something in common, and which I had found to contain generally interesting or amusing matter, featured comments about the World Cup, as if the writers felt that they needed to add to the millions of words on the subject which are currently sloshing around the media. And, what’s more, some of them are women, a species I generally admire for their immunity to male obsessions.

Of course, male and female lads alike have every right to go into print with their thoughts on football, if that is what turns them on. Farewell, and every good wish for the future to those nine; time to thin out my feed subscriptions.