Sporting Authors

They say great authors should always be capable of surprising you, and it was certainly a surprise to find one of my favourite authors, subject of a couple of thesis chapters and numerous blog posts, announcing her love of football in the Observer this weekend:

I watch for aesthetic reasons. Some are to do with real dramatic tension. There is a story, and the end is really unknown until it comes. I have worked out that I also watch as though I was watching a kinetic sculpture or abstract light show. The things I watch are all contained in quadrilaterals, concern the movement of round balls, and the shifting lines of force and energy made by the players' movements. The games I care about are snooker, tennis, and football. The rules of rugby have changed to make the movements more fluid and exciting for the TV viewer so sometimes I watch that too. But I cannot get interested in, say, motor racing or golf.

Watching Spain win Euro 2008 last night certainly had both the aesthetic and the dramatic in abundance. If England are the perennial whiners of world football, Spain are genuine underachievers, but this made it more remarkable that there was in them a certain confidence or self-belief, of a greater depth even than Germany, who were coming to this final whilst being technically an average team. There was a real sportsman's satisfaction in watching Spain set up their intricate triangles, but the fluidly "shifting lines of force" also provided a dramatic satisfaction: as they knotted and weaved the ball around German defenders, the final gave the same sense as the tying up of the loose ends of a Shakespearean sexual comedy. There would have been nothing more untidy, more unfitting, than a German win, neat and efficient though it would no doubt have been.

But in spite of the way in which yesterday's final gave me a sense of pleasure both as a fan and an aesthete, I fear I cannot help but feel snooty about A.S. Byatt's enjoyment of football. Writers should, certainly, enjoy cricket, with its slowly accumulating tension lending itself to a day spent reading (or writing) a novel in the sunshine of Lords. However, I simply cannot imagine A.S. Byatt, cultured and eloquent as she is, shouting at the television or applauding a dive that wins a last-minute penalty kick. Of course, I am entirely guilty of stereotyping, and reading Byatt's piece I am forced to recall a comparable passage from her novel, A Whistling Woman, in which Frederica (the character most analogous to Byatt herself) records her fascination with her first television, on which she watches "Tennis on green grass with white figures and the geometry of the court contained and constantly in movement in the geometry of the box."

As I am writing this immediately after watching Andy Murray beat Richard Gasquet in the fourth round of Wimbledon, I am more easily inclined to see how Byatt's love of tennis might reflect and inform her artistic interest. We have, of course, become used to "Henmania," with its temporary congregation believing that it is better to come close and lose nerve at the last, than to maintain a sense of self-belief throughout the match. Henman certainly evoked fear and pity, but they were not quite the right kind for the tragic hero they felt he was. The fear was more that we were deluding ourselves in maintaining the belief that he could reach a Wimbledon final; the pity was not for how far he had fallen, but for how far he had yet to climb to reach our annual expectations.

As Henman was ensconced in the commentary box, however, it became clearer how superficial Henmania had been. Certainly, Murray too looked to be down and out after losing the first two sets, before he began his comeback. However, there is in Murray a bloody fierceness that Henman lacked in his white costume, and it manifests itself in his ability to play brilliant tennis not just with the occasional volley, but with a sequence of five or six points that are breathtakingly audacious.

For all that Murray's tennis broke Gasquet's powerful returns, shattered his rhythm, and set the pace deliciously and relentlessly on his side, there was still a possibility of a fall lurking in the background - or, rather, later in the ticking clock. It was Henman's unconscious presence that took it from mere excitement to a total Aristotelian drama. For as the evening light began to draw in, in the back of everyone's mind was, surely, that match in 2001 against Ivanisavic, when Henman had come from a game down to win two sets through astonishing tennis, only for rain to push the game to the next day, at which point he capitulated.

Today, then, eyes flicked between the court and the umpire. Even if the players on the former were finding it hard to see visually, could the latter not see or feel the aesthetics of the event, the lines of force building and curving it towards a climax just as the curtain of night fell? Did he not realise that putting the game off until the next day, with a new crowd and fresh players' legs, would be equivalent to dropping the curtain mid-way through Lear's final speech? Luckily, the umpire (and Murray) held his nerve, and with what would have been the final game of the night the young Scot came through. Though I am sure she would have expressed it with exceptional acumen, A.S. Byatt will not have been the only one attuned to the drama of this Wimbledon act. In its greatest guises, as in the European cup final or Murray's fourth round win, the players alone must write the script.

Riverdance

What is it about a beached boat that attracts so much attention? Why do I learn of one man who has spent a week in penitential observance, standing from 9.00 to 3.00 in the bitter cold, before dashing to the nearby petrol station - the shop of which is now doing an incredible trade - for tea and a toilet?



The grounded Riverdance certainly stands out, a wart on the skin of a beach otherwise unblemished for several hundred yards out to sea, and for several miles up and down the coast. It is the incongruity of its 6000 tons just waiting there that fascinates. The tempting metaphor, is, of course, to describe it as a beached whale. And it is a hard image to resist: it is whale-like, with the curved hump of keel presented to the shore giving it, from this angle, a strangely organic quality. There are no radar masts or portholes to mark it as machine, just a bulk of ruddy steel, fringed by green around the Plimsoll line, speckled with tendrils of weed. Indeed, the only thing to break this animal analogy are its propellers and rudder silhouetted against the sky.

Although they are stuck fast now, it is possible to imagine the struggle of rudders, flapping from side to side like aimless fins, to hear screws slapping the air between cresting waves, as the captain battles against grounding; then the engines' roar turning to a churn, and an ominous grind of sand. In fact, it is this, too, that seems out of place: the timing is all wrong. For those who come to watch it now, it is hard to reconcile the immobile hulk of it all with the violence of the night in which it stationed itself there: gales, high seas, a mayday dashed off through static bursts, the relief of floodlights and flares, decisions taken, a boat abandoned, lifeboats and chattering helicopters. Even on a day like this, with knives in the north wind, the boat seems too stolidly resistant to have ever suffered drama, to have carried cargoes of fear rather than to have attracted merely prurient spectators.



Though it is not the ship alone which draws vistors. Prevented from getting closer to the ship than 200 metres, the exclusion zone that rings it paradoxically generates excitement. The round-the-clock presence of security guards and bemused contractors advertises it as loudly as the neon lights on Blackpool's sea front herald the fairground and the arcade. "It's official," they flouresce in their yellow jackets, "it's an event, a danger, a problem, a puzzle. Something could change at any moment. Watch and see!" Nothing will happen, of course, at least not with the drama the officaldom proclaims and the watchers expect. With its own, slow but incessant grace, all that is happening is a...tilt. Having grounded at a five degree list, the vessel has now tipped through over ninety degrees, toppled by the weight of its superstructure, now half-buried beneath the sand.

It is nice to imagine that it could be sucked completely away, a slow-motion magical trick performed by the cape of quicksand. It would then become the mirror to the shipwreck that lies a few yards from it, the Abana, sunk in 1894 in a similar winter storm. Just a few ribs of black wood - charred black by salt water rather than fire - poke the sand at low tide. But whereas the Abana can be left peacefully to rot, the Riverdance cannot be allowed to just vanish. In a fluke of global positioning, it is settling over a major sewage pipe, so as of writing the current plan is to break it up in situ, before this curiosity becomes an environmental catastrophe.

A Medical Pioneer: Double Red Donation

Long reading for research about scientific revolutions, I have myself become a modest pioneer in the field of medicine. Attending my regular blood donation session, a nurse at the welcome desk looked me up and down - all 6 foot 2 inches of me - and called over a colleague, and asked me if I would like to do a special donation and jump the queue. "Ha, going to take two pints of blood off me," I joked. "Well actually..." came the serious reply.

And so it was that I found myself hooked up to a £100 000 blood separation machine, the first person in the whole North East region to donate in this way. The device separates red blood cells, white cells, and plasma as you donate, and then returns the latter components (plus a saline solution) to the donor, who is thus able to give double the amount of red blood cells than at a single, regular donation.

The benefits are many. As a double donor, I am requested to give blood every eight months instead of every four (and, I checked, this does count as double on your donation record, meaning you accumulate the same number of points to get the pin badges). Although I'm a regular donor, the double system is excellent if it can capture from one-off, casual drop-in donors. The patient - particularly those with anemia or haemoglobin deficiencies, which demand red blood - receives a double dose of red blood cells from one donor, reducing their risk of reacting to antibodies. And, the blood being separated "live" on site, it can be directed straight to hospitals rather than via blood banks.

The donation itself lasts longer than normal (about 30 minutes), and there is quite an administrative rigmarole to go through, as the machine requires data about your height and weight (you have to be above 70kg.); because you need high iron levels to compensate for the loss of the red blood in which it is contained, you also need to do a separate iron test which involves drawing blood through a needle, rather than the simple thumb prick. However, the needles used in the donation are smaller, and therefore less uncomfortable. Indeed, there is (for me at least) a pleasant diversion in seeing your own blood separated before your eyes, with the data about my insides projected onto the machine's screen. The only disconcerting aspect is when the fluids are returned to you, which induces a slightly cold tingle in the arm. But, at the end, I felt as fine as after a regular donation. Then again, with six nurses surrounding the bed monitoring my progress and training on the machine, who wouldn't!

Double red donation has been established in the US, though it is only recently being deployed here, as my pioneer work attests. The UK Blood Service has some information about it in their recent leaflet, as does the US Blood Service.

Whitby Reflections

Powerful songs of innocence are those of waves on a shallow beach, sucking sand in their greedy tows; of children shrieking in fun; of the bleep of arcade machines; of the clatter of unfolding deck chairs. Songs of colour and pattern, too, are those of the bright yellows, reds, and blues of spades, and kites, and rubber boats and, as the evening and the tide close in, of the temporary archaeological shapes of a day's activity: names in the sand, mounds of collapsed castles, holes, paw and footprints. These are the songs of my childhood holidays in North Yorkshire, a monastery of happiness visited ritually every year for the thirteen years of my pre-sexual youth.

Try as I have to recollect some chord of anxiety that might once, just for a moment, have been played on me, lodging itself in my unconscious like a chip between the teeth, irritating this harmony of happy activity, I cannot. And so, returning now, a decade after my last visit, experience kicks me in the gut. Maybe it was naivete, or the fact that when younger my eyes were for the shore only, ignoring the periphery of the town through which we had to pass, but Whitby today is busier, harder, greasier than I ever remember.

Seagulls, sirens wailing, police the skies, whilst pulled up on the kerb real CCTV vans observe stags stagger, stripped to the waist, raising arms in bold, gorilla-like movements of mating when their group intercepts that of middle-aged women, with their disintegrating fairy wings, here for a hen weekend. A puppeteer plays his puppet playing a piano, his call for "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands" answered by a drunk, who sways and stomps, to the applause of an elderly couple on the bench behind him, and eyed by their grandchild standing warily in front. Suddenly, a cheap plastic football lands amongst the performer's wires, kicked by a group of lads across a busy main road. He barely looks surprised - probably he had seen them coming with a well-trained peripheral eye - and carries on. The child cries.

Then something else catches my candid eye, one which merges the two perspectives of innocence and experience I had falsely constructed in my mind. A burly man, tattoos vining their way up his arms, tips his Oakleys back onto his shaved head, leans back against a white wall, closes his eyes, and licks at a fluffy ice cream. Retrospectively, I realise that the seaside is a place where habitual guards come down, less because of alcohol than because of the common denominator of the childhood holiday, in which the ties with which parents hold their kids slacken in that hundred-meter space at the fringes of our country; it is this memory that relaxes the muscular divisions of class and sex, and the regular rules of social engagement, that govern life inland and in older age; this is why in seaside towns people seem to lose all road sense, crossing brazenly in front of traffic, as if they expect still that mother's hand to tug them back if they take a risk too far.

Cheap Beer

Saw this recently in my local branch of a well-known supermarket chain. Now I know every little helps, but is this not a wee bit stingy?