‘ Battle of Britain ‘… are you serious?

One was a last-ditch battle against the odds; young men putting their lives on the line in the skies above south-east England to deny a fascist aggressor for whom the invasion of Britain was a done deal.

The other is a football match in Glasgow this evening, where young men will doubtless don gloves and tights to keep out the cold, spit like peasants, perform goal celebrations that would look mildly embarrassing in a kindergarten and waste no opportunity to cheat each other and the spectators who pay their wages.

One concluded with a moving and timeless tribute. The other will probably conclude with a brilliant, yet curmudgeonly manager berating officials for playing too much injury time or too little, depending on whether his team were leading or trailing at the time

One was about unimaginable self-sacrifice; the other – part of a bloated competition blatantly engineered to prevent small clubs from interfering with the earning potential of large ones – is about rampant self-interest.

Yet still, people in the media so shallow they cannot function without a trite cliche to fall back on, insist on labelling both contests ‘The Battle of Britain‘. Without irony or a shred of self-awareness.

And no-one seems to find this crass hijacking of a label that should resonate in our history, in the least bit inappropriate.

Ten days after ‘lest we forget’, we have already forgotten.

Big band sound strikes the wrong chord

Image via Wikipedia

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Playing Big Band music in the den today.

“I like this,” says Younger Son, “it reminds me of Tom and Jerry.”

Somewhere a million miles away, Glenn Miller drives the heel of his hand hard against his forehead.

If you see me walking down the street and I start to cry…

Image via Flickr

I always thought it was the pay-off for being athletically inept in my youth.

Not for me, I consoled myself, the gnawing anguish of the once-gifted sportsman who feels his grip loosen or his feet grow weary and realises that age has conquered in a way his opponents never could.

What you never had, you never miss. Only we all have something, to some extent.

To my dismay, I have noticed in recent weeks that the long-legged walker whose confident stride once left so many trailing in his wake, has now himself become the trailer.

Past me they all go now, zealous young turks with calves and appointment diaries that bulge in equal measure, while I, like some doddery trout, shuffle into the haven of a quieter backwater at the inside edge of the pavement.

On the bright side, I am at least spared an audience of 50,000 people telling each other I’ve lost it.

Harry Carpenter, RIP

Proof of my old boss’s belief that one of the perks of talent is knowing when to break the rules, Harry Carpenter‘s finest moment comes at about 5.55 in the following clip and when learning of his death on Monday, I was delighted to learn it had made as much of an impression on others as it did on me.

It tells you everything about Carpenter’s understated professionalism that he remained mortified by that ‘lapse’. Too many of those who benefit from television’s current obsession with hiring former stars over broadcast journalists to anchor its sports coverage would be smugly proud of the moment.

To those of us standing in bars and hotels watching the Bruno-Tyson fight on new-fangled satellite TV 21 years ago, however, the ‘lapse’ did what good commentary should do – drew its audience fully into the drama of the moment. I still feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck when I think of it (just as I do with “here comes the Rock” – not one of Harry’s but another example of the right words at the right time).

Steady, undemonstrative, helpful yet never intrusive, Harry Carpenter was like a favourite uncle and because Sportsnight was always his baby in my eyes, I’ve thrown in the second clip, from 1982: testimony to the power of music to transport you back in time faster than a speeding bullet. Just like the occasional magnificent lapse…

Italian news and a boyhood dream

For years, I lived in hope that it would happen. All those background drones on Grandstand or World of Sport forgetting themselves and their setting in one glorious outburst of emotion.

But it never did. For that, we must rely on Italian TV…

Mille grazie, Italia.

Like it or not, big screen now the norm

He looks up from his monitor and casts an eye around an office full of people doing just what he was doing until a second ago. Staring at a screen no more than two feet away from their faces.

“All those years,” he says out loud to no-one in particular, “our parents said ‘don’t sit so close to the telly; it’s bad for your eyes’.

“Now look at us…”

Last day of term

Amid the festive excitement, a brief moment of sad remembrance last Friday.

“And what kind of day do you have ahead of you?” a radio presenter asked a junior school headmaster during a phone-in.

“Not too bad,” was the reply. “It’s the last day of term, so we’ll probably play a few games, show some DVDs…”

And suddenly I was transported back 40 years to the most magical day of the the school calendar. The end of Christmas term.

No DVDs back then, of course, but we brought games in to play while mellow teachers wrapped up their admin, we had Christmas lunch and were ushered into the hall to watch movies on cine film.

Reality was suspended and an eight-year-old kid was probably just one of many struggling to get his young head around the fact that life could be as gloriously, relentlessly happy as this.

If I often reflect on the past it’s usually merely as a yardstick – the realisation of how far away it is and how fast it’s travelling. Now and again, however, the reflection is tinged with hankering: the flickering, futile desire to step twice into the same river.

And this was one of those times. For just a few moments, I ached to go back.

[pic courtesy of hockadilly]