Why I Don't Write About Sports

At about a quarter to five, one Saturday afternoon in May, things started to go wrong. Lionel Scaloni didn't kick the ball into row Z, Steven Gerrard scored a thoroughly predictable wondergoal; extra time, penalties, and the end of West Ham's FA Cup dream.

Up until that point things were looking good. There was the World Cup to look forward to, and an England team never better placed to win it all again. Our incumbent champions at fifteen-a-side were rebuilding, Jonny Wilkinson was uninjured. The Ashes rested safe in NW8.

It's all turned to shit now, of course. West Ham are sure to be relegated, John Terry's boys will fail to qualify for Euro 2008, we won't make the semis in France next year, and the Ashes are as good as lost.

Sport is depressing, and writing about it doesn't help. If it's a kind of proxy war then it's one where you're always, eventually, on the losing side. Unless you're Brazilian, or Australian. We're tribal creatures, I suppose, and we attach part of ourselves, the part that's intricately interwoven with our self-esteem, to these players and these teams. And most of the time they lose.

It struck me as curious that although sport is a big part of my life, as a spectator, and only occasionally a participant nowadays, I never feel driven to express what I feel about it. And now I know why. It's depressing, and it's incredibly difficult not to talk in clichés, because that's how we tend to process sporting information. And I read a lot of websites that are written about sport, and most of them do it better than I could.

My name is Tom Miles. I am not a sportswriter.

Great Big Book of Everything

I've embarked upon The Recognitions by William Gaddis. It weighs two pounds in paperback and runs to almost a thousand pages. Recently I've been struggling to get through anything, bookwise, to the point where I might have abandoned Bonjour Tristesse mid-sentence, halfway through, for fear that there was something else I should rather have been doing. Anyway, I'm confronting this sudden incapacity with a blunt object; a vast, sprawling, apparently difficult book stuffed with erudition on Early Northern and Flemish Art and Calvinism. Three characters have already died (one of them a monkey) and I'm only fifty pages in. It's terribly overwritten, in a sense, no noun escapes an (obscure) adjective and no action an adverb. The overall effect is surprisingly convincing, however, and one suspects that perhaps the author is either pulling your leg, or aiming to tune the reader in to a kind of mediaeval metaconsciousness , with the gothic layering of modifiers.

I've had to buy a new sofa on which to read it, which makes it a pretty expensive undertaking. I'm optimistic that I'll succeed. Finishing a big book is one of those things that I need to do to reassure myself that things will be normal again soon.

In Which I Meet Another Slightly More Famous Actress and Am Alarmed By the Conversion of an Old Friend

Samantha Morton came into the shop today. She has a daughter a little older than my own. We talked about light switches, though, rather than parenting small girls, neither child being present. She was dressed down. I had WD-40 on my favourite cotton jumper - it's off-white so you could see the stain forming - which made everyone feel relaxed. Her husband-to-be might buy some castors from me. After she went I read about her.

Human chemistry is a curious thing. Morton has an edgy on-screen presence, her performances don't always seek the sympathy of the audience. The journalists who write about her seem to start off on the back foot, accordingly. Which perhaps makes her uncomfortable. Anyway she seemed jolly simpatico to me and not extraordinary in the least, which in itself is remarkable, because she is an extraordinary actress, I think.

The night that Tyson fought Bruno I was at Jake's house, not sleeping with a girl called Helen, whose face might have launched a small flotilla. I was at that cynical stage of late adolescence where I was prepared to overlook some serious character flaws in order to get some love during the holidays. Helen was slender, absurdly pretty, and deadly dull. No, not deadly dull, but not interesting to me other than in the way that any girl is interesting to a teenage boy. She had boring parents, so it probably wasn't her fault. If I'd turned out that way, or if my good friend Martin had, we'd have no alibi. While I'm busy not sleeping with Helen Jake has worked out that her sexy and interesting friend Jo who wanted to sleep with me but couldn't surmount my misguided crush on her prettier but decidedly less charismatic chum would probably make herself available to him just to spite me. (I found this out later). While we were talking about "Emma" and waiting for the fight to start Jake and Jo were upstairs fucking. Well, this is what we assumed. They rejoined us half-an-hour later. Jo was barefoot, and a pair of tangled knickers fell out of her turned-up jeans and rested on the tiled floor like an accusation.

I thought about that evening earlier today, so I googled Jake. He's a monk now, in the Army of Jesus, he's been celibate for years, and wouldn't you know it, he has a blog. Life, truly, is rich and strange.

It's Not My Home, It's Their Home...

The house is up for sale. That'll be the house where I was born. Where my sister was born. Where I grew up. Where I slept with my first two girlfriends (and some subsequent girlfriends - the ordinal details are a little hazy). Where we all got terribly sick last Christmas. Where we held wakes for two departed parents. Just when you think everything is final some new finality comes up and smacks you in the face. My sister has cleared the place of much of its clutter and doubtless some of its charm. It looks different in the photos, apart from the shed, bastion of banished males - my father and I, essentially - on Sunday afternoons. We'd go down there and burn things. It was beautiful.

Twilight approaches

It got cold in a hurry. The skin on my hands and lips is drying and rupturing in protest. My bladder is confused. I am obliged to wear either a rollneck, which makes me look old and chunky, or a scarf, which makes me look affected and possibly homosexual. Not that I think there's anything wrong with that, necessarily, as long as you are. Gay, that is. Apparently my brain is feeling the chill too. There are some obvious consolations, of course. You can retrieve your winter coats from the dry cleaners, there are fireworks, which last a month, it seems, nowadays, and the dipping sun in a clear sky casting fabulous shadows on the buildings around where I work. Sometimes, as the afternoon turns into evening, I get five minutes to watch the light creep up the church and disappear.

Barceloneta

For the past few mornings I've woken up and walked perhaps a hundred yards to paddle in the Mediterranean before breakfast and rinse my feet under a boardwalk shower as the sun climbed over low cloud. I've climbed the narrowing, steepening stairway to our apartment with groceries that taste sweeter having been bought in a foreign currency. There's an old joke about a guy hitting himself over the head with a hammer; when asked why he's doing it he says "It's great when it stops." I don't think I was ready to come home. It isn't great now it's stopped.

Dirty Protest

Our premises, despite their location on one of London's more picturesque streets, are decidedly low-rent. There's no heating and the water supply is limited to a pipe projecting crudely from a wall downstairs. I'm obliged, therefore, to cross the market to the public toilets when nature calls. I went in there earlier, and in one of the cubicles someone had stuck yards and yards of paper to the walls using their own excrement as paste. A can of Tennent's Super stood empty, presumably, by the bowl. The whole thing was a tableau of hopelessness.

Which is not to say that my own attempts at self-expression here are of any greater value. But I am at least trying to communicate my sense of anomie without getting shit under my fingernails.

Arson, considered as a method to expedite probate

I'd love to burn it all. Carpets, linen, white goods, furniture, everything. Leave just the bare stones or better still knock that down and shift the land only, and see what that fetches. I hate the whole business and once again wish it could happen without me. It's irresponsible. It's not the way things are done. But I'm pretty sure, given the circumstances, that I'd get away with a few hours of community service. The back lawn never took; an intense fire, fit for Guy Fawkes, wouldn't matter at all.

The Suppositious Angler

Izaak Walton, Freeman, Ironmonger, my Stuart counterpart (if you'll permit the conceit), looms large in my consciousness today, as if the imaginary catgut that somehow connects us down through the centuries has been tweaked by an unseen hand. This weekend I shall venture out into the Hertfordshire countryside and perhaps breathe the air on Amwell Hill. Then I'll contemplate a stream, and look for a flash of pike or grayling. The stream is life, flowing endlessly. I will strive for a gentler, more pious life. I will live long and well. I will accommodate changes of rule without compromising the core of myself. I shall not be a scoffer, witty or otherwise.

Ignorance

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

I once attended a lecture given by Noam Chomsky, but he wasn't discussing the iniquities of U.S. foreign policy, he was talking instead about his main sphere of expertise, linguistics. He used words I was familiar with and discussed concepts I thought I understood (I had some grasp of the structure and development of language, or so I believed.) However it was impossible to follow what he was saying. My friend, Ian, attended the same lecture. Emerging from the auditorium into a bright Oxford afternoon that seemed to mock our own lack of brilliance we realised that we had shared an experience. We were unused to not getting it. It was too hard. Ian said "Every time I thought he was saying something I recognised and agreed with he would dismiss it as an example of inexact or idle thinking." It felt like we'd been reprimanded, but neither of us were sure what for. Ian completed his degree and is a partner in a firm of patent attorneys. I never fully recovered.

I click on Big Bang on the Wikipedia home page. I should explain - I used to take an interest in physics, in the wondrous massiveness of it. Astrophysics, cosmogony, the whole thing. My interest shifted to particle physics, practical physics, if you like, as I progressed through my twenties. There were enough external factors making me feel insignificant, I didn't need further reading to reinforce the idea that I was no more than a blip on a blip and that all my endeavours would disappear into the baseless fabric of this vision like footprints in wet sand. What's new, I wonder, in the world of extraordinarily clever men trying to figure out why and how the universe became, what gives?

It's a depressing exercise. I get halfway through a series of sentences but keep having to click on further links to ensure that I've understood the concept of the sentence from which I've linked. But the new article often contains ideas that are beyond me. It's like looking up an unusual word in a dictionary where the definitions employ still more obscure words. I descend, spiralling into an inescapable pit of unknowing. Philip Larkin, whose great facility was to communicate the panic and despair of the 20th century with a degree of calmness and well-concealed optimism comes to mind.


Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge - for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions -
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.

Last Goodbye

We went down to the river. Sons, daughter, mother, sister, grandchildren. We threw the ashes in. It was early afternoon, but as autumn gathers the sun never gets very high. As we tossed handfuls of the burnt remains into the water the dust caught the light from the low sun. The stuff itself isn't very dusty, it's surprisingly coarse, and somewhat crystalline in texture, but I suppose that the crematorium consumes things at very high temperatures, producing this strange matter. Only her sister was too squeamish or perhaps too sensible to join in. The grandchildren all grabbed a handful, threw it as far as they could and threw a flower in afterwards. My grandmother, old but still not frail exactly, made her way out over the edge of the riverbank. "Goodbye Sal," she said, quietly, unhysterically, and threw away the last grasp of her daughter she'd have.

There was enough of it for another dozen mourners, but we were in a public spot, and unsure of the legality of what we were doing. The last third or so of the container I upended over the water, enjoying the dust surrounding me. That would wash off. Self-evidently you can't wash away memories. The river ran clear there, and you could see the ashes colouring the river bed.

The whole scene had a kind of awkward suburban beauty to it. My wife took a picture. Then we went to Ikea. Life will go on, so you may as well go with it.

Hurt

I stabbed myself in the chest with a chisel. This was not some Gothic exercise in self-harming as therapy, you understand. I was carrying out some basic joinery work at home, and the blade of the chisel, which I was too idle to sharpen, failed to bite into the wood and bit into me instead, just north-east of my breastbone. If you've ever wondered what it feels like to stab yourself with a chisel-type object, perhaps even considered trying it, I'd say:- don't bother. It's an unpleasant sensation. It leaves you feeling winded, and a little panicky. There wasn't a great deal of blood - it's not a fleshy part of the body - just a gentle rusty seepage. I wondered about getting a tetanus booster, but then couldn't be bothered. I have had enough of all things medical recently to last me into the next decade.

The loft is almost finished. This is a good thing because we'll get our house back, but I'll miss the excitement of coming up the stairs to see what sudden reshapings of space have occurred while I've been at work. What I love most about what's been done so far is that it hasn't really altered the character of the place. It's still somewhat shabby, somewhat chic, and it's still home. Once the builders depart, of course, the real work begins; dealing with my daughter's prolonged and irrational grief at their departure, decorating, flooring, moving furniture and all the associated DIY injuries I'll inevitably sustain.

Kid Fears

When I was a child I was convinced that a nuclear war was imminent, that the entire Northern Hemisphere would be destroyed, and that the only sensible course of action was to move immediately to New Zealand. You couldn't drag me there now, of course. Unless I could go there in stages. London-Boston-Seattle-Hawaii-Auckland or something along those lines. There's no way I'm spending 26 hours on an aeroplane. Looking back Carter and Brezhnev were a pretty stable pair to command their absurd respective arsenals but it didn't feel that way to my eight-year-old self. I was not sophisticated enough to appreciate the niceties of Mutually Assured Destruction, but I knew that hiding under a table would not protect me from a nuclear winter. I read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction - The Chrysalids, I remember, made a particular impression - and worried away in bed.

So, how do I protect my daughter from the night terrors? She is too young to recall the events of 9/11, but was affected by the London bombings in an oblique, childlike way. Kids don't forget anything of course, but I hope that once she becomes aware that the "Bombs" don't set themselves, and aren't an abstract evil, she won't grow suspicious of the Muslim classmates she now plays with without prejudice. I hope that she'll communicate her fears so that we can reassure her that they have no foundation. (This is a kind of hypocrisy, of course. When her godmother is away in Iraq or Afghanistan we fret about her, although she is probably more likely to sustain serious injury crossing the road in Sunbury.)

I'll tell her that it's Martians she needs to worry about. That'll do the trick.

What If We Give It Away?

I have a new profile photo. I'm still looking irritated, because the passing years have not been kind to me. A couple of weeks ago I went to give blood at the Bishopsgate Institute. This is not an exercise I enjoy, it hurts, and the rewards are somewhat abstract, unless you count the biscuits and weak squash available after your donation.

The phlebotomist asks me my name and date of birth.

"Tom Miles, third of May, nineteen seventy-one," I tell her. She's young and attractive and slightly offhand. She has short dreadlocks which she swishes for emphasis.
"Three days before mine," she says. I laugh a small uncomfortable laugh. She looks young enough to be, well, my significantly younger sister. If I were black. I can't help but ask:-
"Nineteen seventy-one?" She nods. Having already, actually stabbed me in the arm she has now poked a metaphorical needle into my heart. I murmur something feeble along the lines of "You look very well on it," and she smiles in a way that makes it perfectly clear that she's thinking "And you really don't." She doesn't say it aloud, at least. She swishes off instead to attend to another donor, in that young, attractive, offhand way of hers.

I pout at her when she comes to remove the needle, but then thank her (for hurting me and siphoning away my lifeforce!) and hobble off towards the refreshment table, silent and aggrieved.

God Save The Green

There's a magazine called Golf Punk, I saw it on a newsstand, as I hovered between trains. It's marketed, presumably, at that sliver of society which enjoys an archly alternative lifestyle and, well, golf. Alice Cooper and Jesper Parnevik, essentially. Seems unlikely they'd actually purchase the magazine as they must appear in it every month, or so you might think. It turns out that Golf Punk distinguishes itself from other, more earnest, golfing publications not through a distinct anti-establishment editorial policy, but by including a section on "Bunker Babes" (scantily clad) interviews with female golfing celebrities, or "Swinging Sirens" (scantily clad) and a regular clinic with the "Golf Nurse" (not wearing much). Golf Punk then, is not simply a golf magazine with a new angle, it is instead a dreadful chimera; part hobbies periodical and part Lads' Mag. I've never understood this sort of thing. It's not that I'm prudish, it's just that for me golf and pornography make for an uneasy mix. It's the same with fast cars and motorbikes. Do you want to fuck the girl or the Kawasaki? Cindy, 22, from Eastbourne, or Colin Montgomerie?

I could get precious about the subversion of the meaning of "Punk", but as "Punk" at least in part was about this kind of subversion I'd be arguing against myself. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

Printed media will dwindle, I hope, to a sensible level. Golf Punk will disappear. I read a novel recently, for the first time in weeks, and enjoyed the experience, but generally any piece of prose I read, under 3000 words long, and over 50, I will read on a PC. The more abstruse ends of printed publication are losing their legitimacy in the face of the internet, I think. I hope. Golf Punk will disappear.

It's not easy being a nice guy

If enough people shout "Killing people is wrong!" at you, often enough, and for long enough, I don't care if you're Gandhi, you're going to want to kill someone.

Autopilot

I need a fucking good cry. Some snotty hysterical sobbing, complete with inadvertent dog noises. Because the numbness is starting to trouble me. I have forgotten how to be in a mood. I'm neither upbeat nor downbeat. I'm just beat. And it can't continue. I need somehow to access the little pocket of pain that I've squirreled away just beneath my consciousness. Because, I suspect, you can't get over something without getting it in the first place.

I am Martin Blank. It's not me.

Gin hasn't worked. Imagining how robbed my grandmother must feel is now an intellectual exercise. I should be in pieces; in fact I feel pretty together, but at the same time take no pleasure in this sensation. Perhaps, at thirty-five, I'm turning into a hard-boiled little orphan. I hope not. I'm too old to start smoking other people's dog ends and throwing stones at empty buildings - I don't think I could carry it off. Anyway, let the tears rain, because it's not me.

Home Improvement

It's raining in my living room. Like in the Outkast Miss Jackson video. I thought that perhaps the tarpaulin protecting the exposed roof had shifted so accordingly I confronted my vertigo and climbed the scaffold ladder. I get vertigo on a horse, so climbing forty feet up in a storm was no small endeavour. It was a futile one, however. The tarp hadn't moved. The tarp has holes in it, rendering it useless. A tarpaulin with holes in it should be called something else. A perfaulin, perhaps. Or a roofaulin.

The builder is not returning my calls.

The Eulogy

"If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly."

I've decided to keep it brief (thus minimising the possibility of me breaking down while delivering it), not too mundane, not too poetic, we'll see.


Our mother loved us hard. She couldn’t help but do so. Not that we were easy to love, with unwashed faces, and the chartered disobedience of children who are free.

And her love was steadfast, in the face of various small disasters and disappointments; bloodied knees, torn clothing, unsatisfactory school reports.

Her love was with us everywhere, mindless of removals, upheavals, or the breadth of oceans.

And her love was timely, buffering us from the reversals of romance and sporting endeavour, reminding us that the job we didn’t get was the job we didn’t want.

Her love was proud, proud of our quick-wits, our strong teeth, and our sense of right and wrong.

Her love was grateful, for the grandchildren we had who ran around her feet and whom she could love as fiercely as she loved us.

Her love is never-ending, so while she can’t put her arms around us anymore we should all remember that she still loves us hard, because she can’t help but do so.

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