I met a guy recently who went to a posh school in England, went “up” to Oxford and got a double first and got a job in the sort of broking house in London that was once seen as the epitome of upper class high life, but is now being portrayed as the root of all the world’s troubles. He told me that when he lived in London, he would entertain clients in the sort of restaurants were the portions were tiny and the bills massive. At 9pm he would make his excuses and pretend that he had an art opening to get to. But actually he was sneaking off to his secret pleasure: Dog racing at Walthamstow greyhound track. “Chav horse racing” he calls it. He had to don an old anorak and roughen up the edges of his polished accent just to fit it.
Well I feel that way about Rugby, except in reverse. Rugby Union is a posh sport, despite what people in Limerick will tell you. As a general rule of thumb (and this applies as much in New Zealand and Australia as it does in Ireland), Rugby is played in schools that charge fees while Football, of varying codes, is played in schools that don’t. My school was firmly in the non fee paying camp. The only way most people in my school could have afforded to pay for education was if they robbed a bank, a trade many of them later went into.
So I played Gaelic Football and Hurling at school. During break time we would play 30 a-side games of soccer in the yard with a tennis ball and duffle coats for goals. Rugby only intruded on our lives a couple of times a year when the state television service would broadcast the games in that years five nation’s championship. We watched because we were so starved of live sport that we’d watch anything (I spent many happy hours watching wrestling for example). We didn’t really pass much notice as the rules seemed convoluted and Ireland were crap.
I did play three games when I was ten after the local Rugby club decided to go all liberal and invite the poor schools into the local inter schools competition. We played our first game against one of the other poor schools. After a whistle dominated affair that contained two hundred penalties and one successful pass, we beat each other into a 0-0 draw. We lost the next match 4-0, after our full-back thought tripping their winger would be easier than tackling him and we conceded a penalty try. The unfairness of that decision still pains me as we assumed the ref would make them kick at the posts and the previous two hours proved that no one from our schools could kick one of those funny shaped balls more than two feet in the air.
In our final match, we played the local Grammar school and they spanked us 57-0. My career thus ended. Played three, lost two, drew one. For 0, against 61. That was in the 1970’s and only Manchester United had a worse sporting record back then.
Afterwards, I was happy to leave Rugby to people with money and odd shaped balls. My roots were solidly working class and I had enough real sport to keep me happy. In the 90’s however, I decided to class up and started hanging out with people who knew how to pronounce ‘th’ and who got out of the bath when they wanted to go for a pee. Not being one to start at the bottom, my first match was the World Cup Final at Twickenham in 1991. My ex girlfriend managed to score eleven tickets for the game (she probably slept with somebody for them, but the less said about that the better) and we distributed as many as we could to Australian friends. We didn’t know many Aussies then and I was damned if I was going to give any to English people. So if you watch an old video of that game, you might notice seven empty seats in the West Stand.
To my great annoyance I was hooked. I started sneaking into club games and even took part in a sevens competition, where in tribute to my school history, my team yet again failed to trouble the scorer. With the passion of a convert, I threw myself into the rules and studied the differences in style between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. All to no avail unfortunately, as it became clear to me that only a tiny proportion of the people who watch Rugby actually understand it.
They certainly don’t understand it here in Melbourne, but then again they don’t watch it either. This place is a desert for Australian Rugby Union, never mind the European Six Nations stuff that I favour. So we diehards are forced to fork out for Setanta Sports and subscription TV. That’s bad enough but the games tend to start at 4.30am as well. As somebody who struggles to get up for work during the week, this has provided a real challenge during this campaign. However, success provides its own stimulus and Ireland’s performances this year made it increasingly easy for me to get out of bed early on Sunday mornings.
That was capped off this morning when Ronan O’Gara finally broke a sixty one year old hoodoo and Ireland won the Grand Slam. In the great tradition of sport, we almost threw it away in the end when Wales kicked a penalty that would have won them the game. Thankfully the kick fell short and I leaped from my early morning sofa to punch the air and do a self conscious jig of delight. In the process I stood on the remote control and turned the TV off. Thus I missed the final few seconds of Ireland’s historic season.
Outside, the sun was rising above St Kilda and I walked down to the pier to watch the City wake up. Nobody seemed to notice that an historic sporting event had happened on the other side of the world. But that was fine with me. Rugby is my guilty secret and that’s the way I want to keep it.
Monday 23 March 2009
Thursday 19 March 2009
Henry Holt is Swimming with the Sharks
Harold Holt is out there somewhere with Elvis, Shergar, Lord Lucan and Reggie Perrin. Having a beer no doubt, while laughing at the poor deluded world. Although as he would now be 99, Harold is unlikely to be a heavy drinker.
His clothes were found on the beach at Portsea in Victoria in 1967. And Harold wasn’t in them. He was last seen wading into the surf and heading for Tasmania. This would be a strange enough course of events in normal circumstances. But as Harold was the Prime Minister of Australia at the time, his disappearance is even stranger. This was the time of the Vietnam War and the swinging sixties. Australia was a different place back then, uncertain about where it fitted into the new world order. The old connections of Empire were fading as war in Asia made the Aussies look towards their back yard.
Holt was the first leader here to reach out to the Chinese. So much so, that some people began to think that he was an agent of Chairman Mao. This led to many conspiracy theories such as Chinese submarines taking him away, or the CIA doing what the CIA does best.
But as Sigmund Freud (or was it Grouch Marx?) said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. And the sad truth is that Harold probably just drowned and was gobbled up by the multitude of murderous aquatic life that patrols the seas around Australia.
You can imagine my surprise therefore when I stopped outside the “Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool”. The guy drowned, so they called a swimming pool after him. It is as incongruous as the “JFK Memorial Rifle Range”.
Henry Bolte is another interesting character. He was Victoria’s longest serving premier, having held that post from 1955 to 1972. By all accounts, Henry liked a drink or two, despite being the man who introduced breathalyser tests in this part of the world. Long after he had retired to his sheep farm in Ballaret, he was driving home one night when he smashed into his neighbour’s car. Henry was pretty badly injured and woke up later in hospital to find that the nasty doctors had taken a blood sample which they were planning to pass on to the Police.
Somehow (and I’m conscious here of the risk of libel, even if the man has been dead for nearly twenty years) Henry’s blood sample was switched with one from a non drinking unknown party and came back clean. He was found to be pregnant however! Actually I made that last part up, but something did tickle the suspicions of the local constabulary and before long, Victoria’s most famous citizen was up in front of the judiciary to explain why he had tampered with samples. He ran a sort of Bart Simpson defence, along the lines of “It wasn’t me, even though I’m the only one who could benefit from the crime.”
Needless to say Henry got off, which I’m sure is totally unconnected to the fact that he would have appointed all the judges in the case while serving as Premier. But his reputation in the eyes of the locals was forever stained. He is the most famous drink driver among Australia’s political elite, which is saying something when you look at the likes of Bob Hawke. So how is he commemorated? They called a bridge after him! What better way to remember a drunk than to name a piece of roadway in his honour.
This leads me to think that Australians have a dark sense of humour when it comes to remembering their politicians. They certainly don’t hold them in high regard, encouraged no doubt by the behaviour of politicians towards each other. Question time in the Australian parliament is like feeding time at the zoo, except the animals there don’t call each other ‘drongos’ and slag off each other’s wives.
So it comes as no surprise that when they die, the country tries to find the most inappropriate object to remember them by. But I think it also points to the difficulty Australians have with naming places. In Europe, names developed organically from the places ancient herdsmen forded rivers or the shade of a particular glen on the day Stone Age man first walked there. That’s why in Ireland we have places that literally translate as “The Valley of the yellow furze in the moonlight of a bright October night”. In Australia, the white man arrived to find that the locals had named everywhere already. Showing the same care and attention for the traditions of the indigenous population that they showed them in normal life, they promptly discounted all these names and set about calling every nook and cranny after their beloved homestead back in blighty.
But Australia is such a vast country that they soon ran out of “Little Ramsbottoms” and “Surrey Hills”. So they took to being literal. So that’s why you end up with the Blue Mountains (which look green to me but don’t say that to an Aussie), Mount Beauty, The Snowy Mountains and the Big River. The early inland explorers were clearly not men of imagination either. You can imagine Burke and Wills coming over a mountain and seeing a vast desert in front of them.
“What will we call it, Robert?” said Wills.
“Well it’s in the middle of the country, so why don’t we call it ‘The Central Desert’”
And so they went on, naming things after dead white men or the first thing that came into their heads. It’s a big country so many of the original indigenous names have survived. Wagga Wagga (so good they named it twice) comes to mind as do many tongue twisters that I can’t even pronounce never mind type. But if something new is built and they can’t find an inappropriate dead politician to name it after, the locals seem to struggle. Last year, they opened the newest bridge across the Yarra River in Melbourne. They ran a public competition to come up with a name and the winner, from thousands of entrants was “The Yarra Bridge”.
Henry and Harold, wherever they are, would be proud of that lack of imagination.
His clothes were found on the beach at Portsea in Victoria in 1967. And Harold wasn’t in them. He was last seen wading into the surf and heading for Tasmania. This would be a strange enough course of events in normal circumstances. But as Harold was the Prime Minister of Australia at the time, his disappearance is even stranger. This was the time of the Vietnam War and the swinging sixties. Australia was a different place back then, uncertain about where it fitted into the new world order. The old connections of Empire were fading as war in Asia made the Aussies look towards their back yard.
Holt was the first leader here to reach out to the Chinese. So much so, that some people began to think that he was an agent of Chairman Mao. This led to many conspiracy theories such as Chinese submarines taking him away, or the CIA doing what the CIA does best.
But as Sigmund Freud (or was it Grouch Marx?) said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. And the sad truth is that Harold probably just drowned and was gobbled up by the multitude of murderous aquatic life that patrols the seas around Australia.
You can imagine my surprise therefore when I stopped outside the “Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool”. The guy drowned, so they called a swimming pool after him. It is as incongruous as the “JFK Memorial Rifle Range”.
Henry Bolte is another interesting character. He was Victoria’s longest serving premier, having held that post from 1955 to 1972. By all accounts, Henry liked a drink or two, despite being the man who introduced breathalyser tests in this part of the world. Long after he had retired to his sheep farm in Ballaret, he was driving home one night when he smashed into his neighbour’s car. Henry was pretty badly injured and woke up later in hospital to find that the nasty doctors had taken a blood sample which they were planning to pass on to the Police.
Somehow (and I’m conscious here of the risk of libel, even if the man has been dead for nearly twenty years) Henry’s blood sample was switched with one from a non drinking unknown party and came back clean. He was found to be pregnant however! Actually I made that last part up, but something did tickle the suspicions of the local constabulary and before long, Victoria’s most famous citizen was up in front of the judiciary to explain why he had tampered with samples. He ran a sort of Bart Simpson defence, along the lines of “It wasn’t me, even though I’m the only one who could benefit from the crime.”
Needless to say Henry got off, which I’m sure is totally unconnected to the fact that he would have appointed all the judges in the case while serving as Premier. But his reputation in the eyes of the locals was forever stained. He is the most famous drink driver among Australia’s political elite, which is saying something when you look at the likes of Bob Hawke. So how is he commemorated? They called a bridge after him! What better way to remember a drunk than to name a piece of roadway in his honour.
This leads me to think that Australians have a dark sense of humour when it comes to remembering their politicians. They certainly don’t hold them in high regard, encouraged no doubt by the behaviour of politicians towards each other. Question time in the Australian parliament is like feeding time at the zoo, except the animals there don’t call each other ‘drongos’ and slag off each other’s wives.
So it comes as no surprise that when they die, the country tries to find the most inappropriate object to remember them by. But I think it also points to the difficulty Australians have with naming places. In Europe, names developed organically from the places ancient herdsmen forded rivers or the shade of a particular glen on the day Stone Age man first walked there. That’s why in Ireland we have places that literally translate as “The Valley of the yellow furze in the moonlight of a bright October night”. In Australia, the white man arrived to find that the locals had named everywhere already. Showing the same care and attention for the traditions of the indigenous population that they showed them in normal life, they promptly discounted all these names and set about calling every nook and cranny after their beloved homestead back in blighty.
But Australia is such a vast country that they soon ran out of “Little Ramsbottoms” and “Surrey Hills”. So they took to being literal. So that’s why you end up with the Blue Mountains (which look green to me but don’t say that to an Aussie), Mount Beauty, The Snowy Mountains and the Big River. The early inland explorers were clearly not men of imagination either. You can imagine Burke and Wills coming over a mountain and seeing a vast desert in front of them.
“What will we call it, Robert?” said Wills.
“Well it’s in the middle of the country, so why don’t we call it ‘The Central Desert’”
And so they went on, naming things after dead white men or the first thing that came into their heads. It’s a big country so many of the original indigenous names have survived. Wagga Wagga (so good they named it twice) comes to mind as do many tongue twisters that I can’t even pronounce never mind type. But if something new is built and they can’t find an inappropriate dead politician to name it after, the locals seem to struggle. Last year, they opened the newest bridge across the Yarra River in Melbourne. They ran a public competition to come up with a name and the winner, from thousands of entrants was “The Yarra Bridge”.
Henry and Harold, wherever they are, would be proud of that lack of imagination.
Sunday 8 March 2009
Home thoughts from abroad
I was good at Economics when I was at school. You had to be when your mother gave you a pound a week pocket money and strawberry milkshakes (which at one stage eclipsed women in the pantheon of my affections) cost 70p while my home town football team charged me 50p every fortnight for admission to their games.
Follow that regime for a year and you’ll become an expert in deficits, budgeting and the cruel realities of supply and demand.
I was so good at Economics in fact, that my teacher, Mr Dunne, was astonished when I tried to drop the subject before my final exams. The school principal had designed a timetable entirely focused on providing the teachers with as much time as possible in the staff room. As a result, I was faced with the sort of choice that no sixteen year old should have to take. One that shapes the rest of your life. I had to choose between History and Economics. Choose the former and I would have a lifetime of reading interesting books and engaging in exciting dinner table conversation. Choose the latter and I would spend years searching for a personality, but would have a greater understanding of the crisis the world now finds itself in.
In the end my decision was easy. Mr Dunne pleaded with me to stay in his class, but made it clear that he was doing so for his own needs. I went to a mixed school. Not in the religious or gender sense, we were strictly an all boy’s Catholic institution, staffed by musty brothers with barely suppressed urges. Our school was mixed in that 50% of the pupils were idiots and they thought the other 70% were smart kids. Without being too big-headed, I fell into the smart kid category while Mr Dunne had been cursed with a high percentage of the simply bewildered. He needed me to get his numbers up. In economic terms, our class was in long term recession and I was a loan from the International Monetary Fund.
Thankfully, I had a spark of romance in me at that age and wasn’t going to allow myself to become a commodity. I spent the next twelve happy months in the bosom of my history buddies. I ended up with a much worse result in History than I would have achieved in Economics but it’s a small price to pay for principle.
Now in 2009, I wonder which subject would serve me better. My homeland is in a mess of Dante proportions and finds itself in the unenviable position of being the worse performer in a school for dunces. The whole world is suffering but there is a temptation to focus on the most extreme case so that everyone else can feel better in comparison. It’s a game we Irish have been playing for centuries, when no matter how bad things got, we could always say, “well at least we’re not English”.
The rest of the world is now saying, “Well at least we’re not Irish”.
As a student of History, I could see that the current crash was entirely predicable. The past is filled with tales of bursting bubbles and queens who insist the rabble at the gate should eat cake. Every period of excess and greed has been followed with sackcloth and ashes, as though the Gods conspire to bring a little ying and yang.
A better understanding of Economics would, I suspect, bring me to the same conclusion. We live in a finite world but yet we fool ourselves that some things like growth and prosperity can be eternal. And when anyone tries to tell us otherwise, we shun them and call them doom seekers.
There were people in the dog days of Ireland’s boom years who warned of the impending crash. But the Irish were too busy buying apartments in Bulgaria or test driving the latest BMW to notice. As a nation, we adopted the pose of the three monkeys who wanted to see no evil, hear no evil or speak no evil. Now those monkeys are being mocked by the rest of the world.
In the past week I’ve watched a feature on Australian TV about Ireland’s economic woes and read a report on how the Germans are shocked that we blew all the money they gave us to build motorways on beer and fast women. The world is watching Ireland at the moment like a bitter old nun taking pleasure in the news that the kids who smoked behind the bike shed have now got lung cancer. There were many who resented our prosperity, who saw us as brash new kids on the block that acted like lottery millionaires from a council estate. They are lining up now to put the boot in, even though their own economies are in a similar mess.
I escaped of course before the whole thing went belly up and now feel like those passengers who got on the Titanic at Southampton and then got off at it’s last stop before New York (Cobh on Ireland’s South coast) because they felt a bit sea sick. I left Ireland for Australia for many reasons, but chief among them was a feeling that the country was heading for an ice-berg. While I occasionally feel smug that my predictions have come true, it really is no fun to watch your country implode in the way Ireland is now. I used to surf Irish websites to check on football scores and to enjoy the eclectic pleasures of the Irish Times letters page. But lately, it has become impossible to log-on without being bombarded with stories of redundancies and foreclosures.
I’ve decided to leave those stories to the overseas journalists who are now dancing on Irish graves. I’ll keep checking out the History ones. They are my first love after all and somehow the past is a much more pleasant place to be at the moment than the present.
Follow that regime for a year and you’ll become an expert in deficits, budgeting and the cruel realities of supply and demand.
I was so good at Economics in fact, that my teacher, Mr Dunne, was astonished when I tried to drop the subject before my final exams. The school principal had designed a timetable entirely focused on providing the teachers with as much time as possible in the staff room. As a result, I was faced with the sort of choice that no sixteen year old should have to take. One that shapes the rest of your life. I had to choose between History and Economics. Choose the former and I would have a lifetime of reading interesting books and engaging in exciting dinner table conversation. Choose the latter and I would spend years searching for a personality, but would have a greater understanding of the crisis the world now finds itself in.
In the end my decision was easy. Mr Dunne pleaded with me to stay in his class, but made it clear that he was doing so for his own needs. I went to a mixed school. Not in the religious or gender sense, we were strictly an all boy’s Catholic institution, staffed by musty brothers with barely suppressed urges. Our school was mixed in that 50% of the pupils were idiots and they thought the other 70% were smart kids. Without being too big-headed, I fell into the smart kid category while Mr Dunne had been cursed with a high percentage of the simply bewildered. He needed me to get his numbers up. In economic terms, our class was in long term recession and I was a loan from the International Monetary Fund.
Thankfully, I had a spark of romance in me at that age and wasn’t going to allow myself to become a commodity. I spent the next twelve happy months in the bosom of my history buddies. I ended up with a much worse result in History than I would have achieved in Economics but it’s a small price to pay for principle.
Now in 2009, I wonder which subject would serve me better. My homeland is in a mess of Dante proportions and finds itself in the unenviable position of being the worse performer in a school for dunces. The whole world is suffering but there is a temptation to focus on the most extreme case so that everyone else can feel better in comparison. It’s a game we Irish have been playing for centuries, when no matter how bad things got, we could always say, “well at least we’re not English”.
The rest of the world is now saying, “Well at least we’re not Irish”.
As a student of History, I could see that the current crash was entirely predicable. The past is filled with tales of bursting bubbles and queens who insist the rabble at the gate should eat cake. Every period of excess and greed has been followed with sackcloth and ashes, as though the Gods conspire to bring a little ying and yang.
A better understanding of Economics would, I suspect, bring me to the same conclusion. We live in a finite world but yet we fool ourselves that some things like growth and prosperity can be eternal. And when anyone tries to tell us otherwise, we shun them and call them doom seekers.
There were people in the dog days of Ireland’s boom years who warned of the impending crash. But the Irish were too busy buying apartments in Bulgaria or test driving the latest BMW to notice. As a nation, we adopted the pose of the three monkeys who wanted to see no evil, hear no evil or speak no evil. Now those monkeys are being mocked by the rest of the world.
In the past week I’ve watched a feature on Australian TV about Ireland’s economic woes and read a report on how the Germans are shocked that we blew all the money they gave us to build motorways on beer and fast women. The world is watching Ireland at the moment like a bitter old nun taking pleasure in the news that the kids who smoked behind the bike shed have now got lung cancer. There were many who resented our prosperity, who saw us as brash new kids on the block that acted like lottery millionaires from a council estate. They are lining up now to put the boot in, even though their own economies are in a similar mess.
I escaped of course before the whole thing went belly up and now feel like those passengers who got on the Titanic at Southampton and then got off at it’s last stop before New York (Cobh on Ireland’s South coast) because they felt a bit sea sick. I left Ireland for Australia for many reasons, but chief among them was a feeling that the country was heading for an ice-berg. While I occasionally feel smug that my predictions have come true, it really is no fun to watch your country implode in the way Ireland is now. I used to surf Irish websites to check on football scores and to enjoy the eclectic pleasures of the Irish Times letters page. But lately, it has become impossible to log-on without being bombarded with stories of redundancies and foreclosures.
I’ve decided to leave those stories to the overseas journalists who are now dancing on Irish graves. I’ll keep checking out the History ones. They are my first love after all and somehow the past is a much more pleasant place to be at the moment than the present.
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