You remember, I think, Harold Abrahams?

Well, there's your Semite, Hugh.

John Gielgud's summary line on the treachery of private coaching, as Master of Caius in Chari-ots of Fire, comes to mind as we commence our winter training on debauches of December. Some of us have not been playing fair, and we have proof. Some of us have been hauling columns on our back, knitting sleeker armstrands into pads of peachy prominence. Some of us did neckbridges instead of closing bars, or simply held the secret of a timelier escape. How uncollegial.

Of all the precious phrases we reserve for the winner of games, that he cares too much is probably the sweetest. Just when we thought collegiality might turn on commitment, we were handed this solution to the prestige of defeat. Yes; and isn't it all, in the end, so unattractive to exhibit one's ability, instead of harbouring its wealth in club chairs in the corner, unspokenly cementing lifetime bonds? It's the nature of true wit, after all, the difference between carrying Wittgen-stein to the coffee house, and opening him up. Somebody draws a First in Philosophy, and recognition is his punishment.

But I stray. The tradesman's son stands out for the perfection of his kit, the somewhat glossy shine upon it all, an almost continental way of saying, he is not our kind. It's a wonder you can get a cox to steer a boat with him, correcting for the power of his stroke. There's one in every eight, you know. Or, near enough.

.. Whichever saint calls out

of an awning is ours to succor and molest, else
why harp on the differences between us? Why castigate
what divides or loll on the boundary
that was almost always there?

John Ashbery
Cliffhanger
  A Worldly Country
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007©

My favourite clothespin ii

The readership of this blog has fallen off 20 percent in recent days, with the lack of boytummy. This daunting statistic calls to mind his trust officer's warning to Charles Foster Kane, that his newspaper was losing money. Well. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

I have always anticipated discussing the great masterpiece in film on what I regard as the most unremunerated rôle in life, Vittorio de Sica's awesomely beautiful Ladri di biciclette. I probably will do that, but (like everyone, I hope) I believe I was raised with the best of amateurs in the part in question, fatherhood. In his first boy, David, and in oneself, I remark more and more on the evenness of his hand, on his genius for not inflating a natural sibling rivalry. He was getting even with his past, and he won. We loved him and, vastly worse, we admired him. He was our winner of games.

In this portrait, my favourite among the few that survive of him, his cigarette is in one hand, his lighter in the other; and he would love to bring them together. His second boy has lately been born, and his mother has come to investigate this circumstance. She has not been an intimate of his since his 16th year, yet she commands great respect from him, and even love if she would like it. But now he is invulnerably happy, a flicker of play crosses his face, which she has begun to assimilate as the shutter is snapped. In the open shade of his own garden, he is a man in full.

Young father with his mother

Mid 20th C

San Marino 

Winner of games

He comes from Caerphilly, not the happiest part of Wales; 

and now he'd like his ball back, if it's all the same to you.










Aaron Ramsey