Stop the Week 8

I admit it. I put my hand up – as we were taught in class – and confess that I was quite wrong. All those sports pundits who predicted a 2-1 or even 3-1 series win for England, all those pundits whom I thought of as optimistic buckeejits, got it dead right.

I failed to appreciate just how poor the Strylians have become since losing their greats of the last two decades and just how good, how well-oiled the English team has become. The Ashes series of 2010-2011 was planned and executed like some military campaign of yore: Pompey v Mithridates, the D-Day landings, that kind of thing.

They sure as hell teach those public school boys to be leaders of men. Eton or wherever it was that he was a pupil must be justifiably proud of our Andrew Strauss. He kept our boys focused on the job at hand. Each and every one of them, even our two adopted South Effricans, seemed prepared to rush headlong into a hail of machine-gun bullets for their modest leader.

Anyway, I was delighted to be wrong. It has been tough to get on with anything resembling work this week. I’ve been reading every bulletin available on the BBC and Guardian home pages. Writing in the Grauniad this very morning, Joseph O’Neill – author of the brilliant Netherland – talked of the therapeutic bliss of victory against the dread Strylians.

I can’t bear all that football-speak about ’20 years of pain’ or ‘two decades of hurt’, but looking back over the last few decades and the ritual humiliations we have suffered Down Under, my euphoria this time round has brought it home to me that I have shared in a kind of national trauma. But lo! I am cleansed. I can pick up my blanket and walk among my fellow human beans once more, proud in the knowledge that I am English. No sir, we don’t always get beaten.

Excitedly, I have been relaying bulletins to my daughter, who has been off school all week with the grippe. A dose of flu. She probably doesn’t give a monkey’s, but smiles with forbearance and, sweet child, says something that she knows I like to hear, like ‘Oh that’s great, dad. That’s brilliant’. It has been nice to have her around while I play the role of solicitous dad, nursing her through it with some homeopathic cough medicine and her mum’s essential oils.

Vincente Minnelli and
quite famous daughter

Continuing her course on ‘Great Minor Classics of the Cinema’, I proposed Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful the other evening. It’s a stylish ensemble piece built around three characters’ reminiscences of a Machiavellian film producer, played by the great dimpled one, Kirk Douglas. It’s not a comedy and it’s not a thriller, it’s just that: ‘an ensemble piece’ – in the same vein as Citizen Kane and All About Eve. It’s quite delicious and our girl loved it. Minnelli repeated the formula a few years down the line with Two Weeks in Another Town, but it didn’t work anything like as well. What’s more, it didn’t co-star the gorgeous Gloria Grahame (she who once had scalding coffee thrown over her face by a particularly vicious Lee Marvin in The Big Heat).

Fortunately, I didn’t have my daughter with me the other day when I was wheeling my shopping trolley out to the car. A white-haired man was standing by an adjacent car, staring into space as he took a Jimmy Riddle. I tried not to be transfixed. There he was in broad daylight, the Lad hanging out of his open flies, peeing over the car and, no doubt, his shoes. I know that the French are very liberal about this kind of thing, but this… Shurely shome mishtake, I thought. Certainly not for my daughter’s innocent youthful eyes. Then the man’s wife (or daughter) emerged from the supermarket and I realised at once that the poor guy must be suffering from Alzheimer’s. Shame on me for my disdain.

There but for the grace of God go I. For the time being, anyway. What was that line from The Who's 'My Generation'? 'Hope I die before I get old...' When I was a teenage fan of the 'Orrible 'Oo, I dug the sentiment and identified with the youthful bravado. Now I understand, though, what it means. What it really means.