Good things about being Welsh: No. 5
a) Grand Slam.
b) Singing and shouting like a loon.
c) Soaking it up afterwards.
Odds and ends
Here’s a salutary tale. The past few days Blanco’s Blog has gone viral, thanks to the occurrence in a one-off post last summer – a film review of Hobo with a shotgun – of the word penectomy. Shit, I’ve done it again.
There are thousands of people out there, it seems, who get terribly excited when they get a sniff of a word like ****ctomy, and they then let all their chums know, and on it goes. A few of the more specialist sites, it seems, advocate different forms of self-mutilation, including auto-castration.
I don’t know what other clinical terms I should be avoiding, but no doubt if people send in suggestions, we might between us break my new all-time record.
On second thoughts, please don’t.
On a lighter note, I have been spending a lot of time toing and froing to the fair city of Birmingham these past two weeks. What friendly and plausible folk those Brummies are! Why on earth do they get such bad press? It can’t be due to their irrepressible chirpy good humour. It must be that, in sociolinguistic terms, they speak the most maligned and ‘disfavoured form of British English’, according to all opinion polls and surveys carried out since time began. According to one source:
A study was conducted in 2008 where people were asked to grade the intelligence of a person based on their accent and the Brummie accent was ranked as the least intelligent accent. It even scored lower than being silent …
Oops. People are such bigots. An entertaining and fair account intended to dispel negative stereotyping of all things Brummie can be found here.
Meanwhile, as we in Cardiff gear up for the Grand Slam showdown with France on Saturday, the London press goes on an adoration fest for the ‘England’ rugby team. Sure, the defeat of France on Sunday was admirable, but do The Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent really need to spend pages and pages describing the Sweet Chariot revival, and only a few column inches on the champions-in-waiting, when, after all, the best the Saeson can reasonably hope for is second place?
Blanco’s Sunday Round-Up
I am leafing through a notebook and I find a terrifying quotation from John Cheever, and though I have no idea when I copied it down, it would seem to come from Cheever’s journals:
When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand. It is a headache, a slight case of indigestion, an infected finger; but you miss the 8:20 and arrive late at the meeting on credit extensions. The old friend that you meet for lunch suddenly exhausts your patience and in an effort to be pleasant you drink three cocktails, but by now the day has lost its form, its sense and meaning. To try and restore some purpose and beauty to it you drink too much at cocktails you talk too much you make a pass at somebody’s wife and you end with doing something foolish and obscene and wish in the morning that you were dead. But when you try to trace back the way you came into the abyss all you find is a grain of sand.
Although reflecting a certain kind of mid century American machismo – ‘you make a pass at somebody’s wife’ – where the working day would characteristically end in cocktails, there is a truly awful angle to the idea that the tiniest thing, the smallest discomfort or inconvenience might send a person reeling into oblivion. How many times has that happened, and how many times have we told ourselves it cannot, must not happen again?
And that image of the grain of sand is so entrenched in our consciousness, because we are used to regarding the grain of sand as the minimal unit of matter (which, along with the speck of dust, it was before the advent of atomic physics) and we reduce every small beginning to just such a tiny item. ‘To see a world in a grain of sand’ according to William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’, is a familiar allegory to every armchair mystic.
And what Cheever is saying is not confined to the experiences of a recidivist drunk: it applies to anyone who has ever felt that quiet sliding out of control, the slow-motion disaster that the smallest, slightest disharmony begins to offset, and the offhand remark (or the not-so-offhand remark) the spillage, foot placed firmly in it, the unforeseen riposte, the fist raised, the threat made, the words that appal, the moment at which you take a step that cannot be retrieved, definitively.
Though, on the upside, that can be quite refreshing. Walking out on a job, while giving one’s boss an earful, might be the most gratifying thing that ever happens to some people.
Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the economy and the leaders of Europe all mouthing off about how we must do this and can’t do that, and the demos in Madrid and Nueva York (with Naomi Wolf in her evening gown, for whom I can’t feel too much sympathy, although I agree with her in principle) and the poor Greeks at the end of yet another bollocking from the Germans, and meanwhile the bankers, the bastards who got us in this mess, all have their snouts back in the trough again as if nothing had happened.
Harrumph.
Which brings us logically to the rugby world cup final.
I never thought for a moment that the French would get ‘blown away’ in today’s match as Wales’ outstanding scrum-half Mike Phillips predicted in the heat of the moment after his team’s unlucky defeat in the semis. And on the day les bleus came good, playing more positive rugby than they have all tournament. I must confess, after indulging in a week of blatant francophobia, I was egging them on to score in that final onslaught before New Zealand regained possession of the ball. Maybe it was just a perennial desire to support the underdog. But it would have been a bitter irony for France to have walked away with the world cup, after losing to Tonga in the group stage.
So that’s done. It was all a bit of an anti-climax here in Cardiff, as everyone was rooting for a New Zealand-Wales final (and I had money on it). But despite losing to South Africa, France and Australia, the Welsh players have nothing to be ashamed of; in fact they done us proud.
Blanco is very much looking forward to the Wales-France match at the Millennium stadium next March, and will certainly be there, although he will not be dressed as a daffodil.
Field of broken dreams
'Neutral' referee Alain Rolland
Here is the man who wrecked the rugby world cup, referee Alain Rolland, wearing his jersey of choice. The French team were utter shite. Sam Warburton’s tackle seemed, at worst, a yellow card. We were robbed of victory by bad refereeing and some unlucky place kicking, but the French were dire and in no way deserve to be world cup finalists. A ludicrous refereeing decision by the half-witted, half-French ref.
But look at this crewage who stopped off for a fag outside the Yoga club opposite The Promised Land. Do they look as if they are here for the yoga? Do they give a fuck? Should I? Should we? What a day. Oh fallen hopes. Oh crushed dreams. Blanco is bereft.
Swan in an Ikea bag
On my way back from The Promised Land yesterday evening – that’s right, there is a way back – we passed under the railway bridge between Tudor Street and Taff’s Mead Embankment and there was this swan just sitting on the pavement. Who knows what induced it to leave the river and go walkabout under Scary Bridge, but there it sat. A council worker was in attendance, who phoned for help from the Swan Rescue Service, so I went home for my camera, and when I had returned Swan had started to waddle a little further along the pavement, in no particular hurry, and with a slight limp.
The Swan Rescue Service man arrived next, skilfully grabbed Swan with a gaff, and wrapped him in a swan-wrapping bandage (seriously, see picture). Thus packaged, he popped Swan in a handy Ikea bag, and set off for his car, parked on the corner of Pendyris and Taff’s Mead, where he explained to me that they would take Swan in for a couple of days and see if he needed attention to his leg, then drop him back to the river. Meanwhile, a straitjacketed Swan was attempting to sip up some gruel left out in a bowl in the back of Swan Rescue Service man’s estate car. Good thing too. I asked him if it was true that swans were really the queen’s property and he said that was a bit of a myth and only applied to an area of the Thames around Henley. So it’s all right to eat them then? I asked. No it is not, he said, quite emphatically. Good thing too, I said, if you think about it.
The other high spot of the last twenty-four hours was of course Wales’ sweet victory over Ireland in the Rugby World Cup, predicted by Blanco, who placed a bet on Wales winning by 6-10 points at rather good odds, and was, shamefully, rather hoping for an (unconverted) Irish consolation try in the last minute, which would have left him well over two hundred quid better off. But his patriotic fervour easily overcame his disappointment. There were moments in the match, when Ireland were pitched within the Welsh 22 for hours, days, weeks on end, when Blanco’s exclamations and profanities sent Bruno the dog scuttling for his basket.
Six o’clock in the morning is well within the bounds of reasonableness for TV viewing, and Blanco is relieved not to be watching all the matches at stupid o’clock, as was the case in Argentina. As for tomorrow, Go Pumas!
Good things about being Welsh: No. 3
We are so kind and noble we allow other teams to beat us at our national sport. I am not absolutely certain this is an asset, but it indicates true strength of character and I am sure the Japanese have a word for this kind of motiveless self-sacrifice.
In today’s Rugby match against South Africa (which I watched at 5.30 a.m. local time despite only returning to my hotel at 2.oo following a reception at the Dutch Embassy in honour of the novelist Cees Nooteboom), the Welsh team played with a conviction and courage that was barely recognizable, and they probably deserved to win, whatever that means. (It means nothing in sport actually, which is the whole point). Ych a fi.
On another note, I was chatting with the Dutch ambassador’s wife last night (I really wanted to use that line, please forgive me) and it seems the British Ambassador is a Welsh woman.That must surely count for something, honouring the bardic tradition etc. However nothing at all has been set up at the fabulously impressive British Embassy to celebrate Blanco’s arrival in Buenos Aires, which Blanco feels is rather remiss.
British Embassy, Buenos Aires
But then Cees Nooteboom is famous (as well as seeming a very nice man) and Blanco is not. Apparently when Hanif Kureishi came over they gave him a proper bean feast. Blanco is clearly not important enough. I am not sure how I feel about this, but probably it doesn’t compare with what our national Rugby team will be feeling today
