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Memories to Savour, Blog 5 - December 2012

Good old Mr Kipling

 

I'm a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be
(Lennon & McCartney 1964)

 

A message to all sport haters. This is not simply a Blog about sport. It is about life itself and what is written below is just an appropriate introduction. But wow, this is some symmetry!! Three twenty sixes; simply irresistible.

 

Record football defeat in England

                                    F.A. Cup: Preston North End 26 – Hyde 0                   1887

Test Cricket lowest ever score

                                    New Zealand 26 all out v England                                 1955

Michael J Hodkinson Tennis record in Dordogne League for Issigeac 2^nd Team

                                    Singles matches:  Played 26.  Lost 26.                          2010 - 2012

 

Loser is of course the antonym of winner and there is no doubt that as words go, it is most unattractive. Pronounced ‘looooozer’, it is favoured by those who inhabit football terraces and is used by teenagers in particular to indicate something quite derogatory about a member of their peer group. Even mature adults are not averse to hurling the insult. Beggars with dogs sitting in the high street, those who struggle to make and keep friends, under-achievers generally; all of these can become labeled with this particular epithet.

Unless you are betting against yourself to lose (as a number of sports persons actually have – didn’t you Bruce Grobbelaar?*), I find it difficult to envisage anyone entering anything even slightly competitive with the intention to suffer defeat. Alright, maybe parents playing games with their young children might lose on purpose as a form of encouragement to disillusioned off-spring, but I have also read autobiographies of famous people who claim that their ‘old man’ would do anything to win at all costs; even when playing Snap. Very character building; obviously successful on occasions.

Winning and losing is not confined to the sporting arena. You can be involved in an interview process at work and lose out. A position comes up at the level above your current one. You and a colleague apply and catastrophe strikes; you finish second. Even more common is the focus of the 1964 Beatles song. John (he was the composer although it is accredited to Lennon & McCartney) was writing about a love lost. ‘She was a girl in a million, my friend’, but there was to be no happy ending. Lennon’s reaction was to ‘laugh and act like a clown’, but this was just a front he fabricated to hide the tears; to hide the fact that he was ‘a loser’. Incidentally, some music critics have remarked that this was possibly the first time that there was depth to their compositions; a moving out of their ‘you know I love you / I want to hold your hand’ period. This was hello real world, good bye fantasy world, focusing on the hypocrisy of putting on a brave face when your world is crumbling about your shoulders.

Of course to be a loser, you first of all must compete. You cannot finish last in a race that you do not enter. You cannot be rebuffed by someone you fancy or be ditched by the love of your life if you have made no effort to woo him/her in the first place. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous line….

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ ....

may have become one of life’s greatest clichés, but those words from 1850 are still true today. In an age where instant millionaires are created every week, Dale Winton’s ‘you have to be in it to win it’ may lack the poetic genius of Lord Alfred, but the messages have striking similarities.

So it would appear that losing would not be high upon anyone’s wish list for Christmas, but I believe that to compete and lose is preferable to sitting on the side lines, safe and secure from the potential humiliation which defeat can bring. When Hyde FC travelled by train to Preston in 1887, they probably knew that they had no chance. It was the year before the Football League commenced, but North End were already beginning to look like the top club in the country. In the following season they became the first (and only) side to win every game played, winning the league and FA Cup in the process. Those amateur footballers from south-east of Manchester (incidentally a town made infamous recently by Dr Death himself, Harold Shipman) could well have been excused for refusing to board the train at Victoria Station and walking home. They did however manfully turn up to witness their own execution. I am certain that they did not enjoy the experience but history tells us that they tried their hardest and shook their opponents’ hands at the end of ninety minutes.

For a society which denigrates losing, we certainly go to massive lengths to experience it. With possibly fourteen million lottery tickets being sold every week, almost a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom must be well-used to sighing deeply before slowly tearing up the ticket. But a lottery set-back is impersonal, whereas even a game of darts in front of half a dozen beer guzzlers in your local can be extremely embarrassing. There you are, double twenty to win and you completely miss the board. Equally we will all have memories of eyeing up someone we found extremely fanciable, plucking up courage for an age before approaching to effect an introduction. In my day, I was likely to receive a polite brush off, but I suspect words like ‘shove off, I’m drinking my Bacardi Breezer’ may now be the order of the day in certain circles. Either way it is a dent to the ego and can seriously affect your confidence level the next time.

Modern-day motivational speakers will doubtlessly carry ‘there are no prizes for coming second’ in their box of incantations. Very true (apart from Olympic silver medals) and it will no doubt fire up the recipients of such rhetoric. However it has a downside. It increases a fear of losing, induces a state of nervousness, indecision often rules big time. Failure knocks confidence, success doubtlessly enhances it, but you cannot have winners without losers. They are a part of life’s massive supporting cast, but are essential to society.

As educators as well as coaches of young footballers, we always believed that it was important to teach youngsters to win and lose in a sporting manner. We followed the same mantra at all times. ‘Go out there, relax, enjoy yourselves and try your hardest to win. When it is all over, irrespective of the result, you congratulate your opponent. Only once back in the dressing room do you let your emotions flow. There you can cry your eyes out or shout, sing and dance as much as you want.’ John Lennon would have called that hypocritical but I believe that a certain old poet would have nodded in approval.

In his immortal 1895 poem “If” (recently voted the best poem in the English language), Rudyard Kipling’s advice to all competitors, whether winners and losers was.....

if you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

The great man, using the language of the day, concluded with ‘you will be a man my son’.

The Victorians of course were short on political correctness, but even if the twenty-first century translation may read ‘you will be an adult my child’, the point is still made. Only a few can win, so why get your knickers in a twist if you come second or even last. Someone has to and jolly well done for trying. As a fully paid up member of the ‘Honourable Union of Runners Ups’, I am asked why I continue to play a game where it is evident that my opponents are fitter, stronger, younger and (being French) have been coached in the correct techniques from a young age. I suppose I love to play more than I dislike losing. I try my hardest each time I go on to the court and I genuinely feel quite miserable for a couple of hours after the game.  But I do feel some pride about still going out to compete at my age and the bottom line answer is that I still enjoy it.

So, if you want a new year’s resolution and there is something you really would like to do, something you would like to try and achieve, try this one for size. Take a tiny risk or two in 2013, feel good about being competitive, grab the chance to show what you can do, take the bull by the horns, get off your bum, sod the result and give it a go. Even though ultimately ‘yours may not be the earth and everything in it’, you will feel a bloody lot better about yourself. On a good day you may just be able to join in with The Pogues’ Shane McGowan when, in his lament to Christmases past in the Big Apple, he sings........    

Got on a lucky one
Came in at ten to one.

Have a wonderful Christmas.

Michael J Hodkinson

*Grobbelaar was eventually found not guilty of match fixing after two juries were unable to reach a verdict. Damages of £85,000 were awarded against The Sun newspaper, but on appeal The House of Lords decreed that although no verdict had been returned, there was adequate evidence of dishonesty for the damages to be reduced to £1. The Liverpool goalkeeper had also to pay The Sun’s costs of £500,000, thus bankrupting the Zimbabwean.

Memories to Savour, Blog 4 - November 2012

Memories to Savour, Blog 4 - November 2012

Social systems, Downton Abbey and Joni Mitchell

 

I've looked at life from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

 

Coming from a family with shopkeepers on both my paternal and maternal side, it was inevitable that I would be brought up to vote Liberal. When my mother had told her grandma that a particular young man was showing an interest in her, the old family matriarch immediately responded with a …. “Well don’t bring him round here if you start courting him, because his family is all Tory and I’ve never met a decent one yet.” Local legend also has it that when a prospective Conservative town councilor knocked on her door one evening to canvas her support in the forthcoming election, my great grandmother responded with a ….. “I would sooner vote for a donkey wearing a Liberal rosette than thee, so be off with you”. My mother must have listened because she married a Liberal-voting fruit and vegetable vendor and perhaps it was fortuitous that the grand old lady had died before I was eligible to cast my first vote. When I announced that I intended to put my cross against the name of the Labour candidate, it was not a move calculated to make me popular. Watching Downton Abbey on ITV on Sunday evenings has reminded me of why I became a socialist.

 

I do like the programme; it has become compulsive viewing for me. Its every scene is so professional, it has a credible story line, the characters are so well drawn and the detail is spot on. There are aspects of the society it portrays however which make me cringe. The obvious class divide between upstairs and downstairs, the sheer snobbery and formality, the obvious hierarchy with the head of the family being the master whereas the butler’s word is law amongst the serving classes. Even in a poor industrial town such as Blackburn, wealthy mill owners employed ‘live in’ servants and I can remember as a child, at least two elderly distant relatives regaling me with stories from when they were ‘in service’ during the inter-

war years. When I moved to Leeds in 1964 to study to become a teacher, this was   

the type of society that I longed to see the back of. I yearned for the arrival of the

great day of reckoning when, metaphorically speaking, the rich would rot in hell.

Bob Dylan’s ‘The times they are a changing’ from the album of the same name

became my anthem of choice.

 

But how did this island become so encumbered with such an inequitable system is a question worth asking. The answer in actual fact is quite simple. When Duke William landed in Pevensey Bay in 1066 and defeated King Harold of England at the Battle of Hastings, he had to reward his fellow Normans who accompanied him across the Channel. As a consequence, each of his noble friends was allotted a piece of England and, to make their presence felt, they quickly constructed wooden motte and bailey castles. Later to be strengthened with thick stone walls and a keep, they were located at the highest point in the village. Each time a peasant farmer looked up from tilling the fields and tending the crops, the shadow of the enormous bastion reminded him that he had no status whatsoever. His position was to be subservient to his foreign master ……. forever.

Throughout the middle ages, there was scarcely a change to the social stratum. The barons would occasionally have skirmishes amongst themselves and King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 on Runnymede, an island on the Thames close to Windsor, thus limiting a number of his rights and privileges. (If you did not know that, you are in exalted company. Neither did David Cameron when recently asked about it on the Letterman Show in America.) The Tudor monarchs of the sixteenth century distanced themselves from the power of the barons by relying more on the new ‘middle classes’; bankers and civil servants who were well paid for their services, but none of these changes remotely affected the working classes. The execution of Charles I and the subsequent setting up of a republic headed by Oliver Cromwell gave far more power to parliament. However, as few men (and no women) had the right to vote, it made little difference to the lives of the masses, particularly as following Cromwell’s death, the Stuart monarchy was restored when Charles II returned from exile.

The Industrial Revolution changed the face of Britain and there was much more social movement as the demand for labour in the North and the Midlands increased rapidly. For the first time we saw economic immigration as Irish navvies flooded into Liverpool, but in terms of freedom for the ‘great unwashed’, they simply exchanged one overlord (the Lord of the Manor) for another (the mill/mine owner). Slowly during the nineteenth century, more and more males were given the vote but it was not until 1929 that all adults over the age of twenty one gained this particular privilege. By this time, the first Labour government had been formed, Trade Unions were accepted and while the rich young things danced the ‘Charleston’, the poor became poorer as the ‘Great Depression’ began to bite.

I was educated at a ‘working class’ grammar school and had mates from the local secondary modern. The offspring of Blackburn’s elite however either went to public school or a fee paying grammar school, established in 1509 and eventually named after the first Queen Elizabeth. Until I was in my twenties, I cannot remember meeting anyone who could be even vaguely referred to as upper class. This of course suited me real fine and I genuinely hated the concept of a generation living privileged lives simply because their family had done so for many generations. I did not want them to prosper and believed that they brought no benefit to the country.

Somehow, without really realising it, I must have watered down these feelings, because that anger in me has dissipated. However, it was only when watching this current series of Downton Abbey that I came to the conclusion that I did not quite have the full picture back in the sixties. The Dowager Countess of Grantham (it means widow of the previous Lord by the way) and magnificently played by Dame Maggie Smith, was pontificating.

“These people have no idea of what the aristocracy has given to this England. Without us there would be no employment in the countryside? No, they never think of that’

She was correct, I never did. I was unaware that many of them actually cared for their staff and the inhabitants of the village. Some would go out of their way to help them if they were in trouble, believing that they had a responsibility for their welfare.

The great capitalists were another group whom I loved to hate in my youth. Again I failed to realise at the time that the public library which I frequented so much as a boy had, like so many throughout the country, been financed by Andrew Carnegie. He emigrated from Scotland in the nineteenth century and rose from sweeping up in a bobbin factory to being the founder of the American steel industry. He literally gave away almost all of his colossal fortune to educational causes such as libraries and colleges. I never thought of him when I was tarring all capitalists with the same brush.

Neither did I spare a thought for the Cadbury family who built a chocolate making factory in the village of Bourneville near Birmingham in 1879. The family pioneered worker pensions, fair wages, treated the staff with respect and built rows and rows of modern housing with gardens and an adjacent park for their recreation. In 1888, the Lever family built a similar project at Port Sunlight across the River Mersey to house those employed in their soap making factory. I also paid scant regard to the likes of John Howard, the wealthy High Sheriff of Bedfordshire who dedicated his life to ensuring that prisoners in our gaols were treated as human beings. I totally forgot to remember Elizabeth Fry, born into the family which founded Barclays Bank. She worked tirelessly to help all sorts of under-privileged people in workhouses, asylums and slum areas. As someone who had studied the history of the nineteenth century, The Earl of Shaftesbury ought to have been fresh in my memory. A member of the landed gentry, he used his influence to improve life in the lunatic asylums, fought to eliminate the evils of ‘little boy chimney sweeps’ and helped to introduce the free Ragged Schools for the hopelessly poor city children whose lack of footwear prevented them from attending the voluntary schools which were springing up in the 1840s. Did I think of him when I wanted to exterminate aristocrats and bring the capitalist system to its knees? Not a chance.

I immediately joined a left wing trade union on qualifying as a teacher, picketed the offices of Lancashire County Council, occasionally went on strike and staunchly worked to rule when the Thatcher government was hell-bent on destroying any group which attempted to uphold the rights of the working class. It lasted a good six months and tested my loyalty to its very core. All out of school hours contact with pupils, including extra-curricular activities which offered the only hope for many of our poor children to shine, was banned and we even lost a whole season of schoolboy football. That was agony for me but like thousands of other teachers, it seemed like a cause worth fighting for. A compromise deal was eventually hammered out, but in truth it was the last hurrah for the militant unions. The miners had been crushed and the will to fight seemed to evaporate.

On looking back, I accept now that I was so entrenched in my left wing views that I never considered an opposite viewpoint. I was right, the rest were wrong; it was as simple as that. But I should have known better. In 1967, a folk singer called Judy Collins recorded a beautiful song entitled ’Both Sides Now’ which in terms of alliteration, rhyme and pure poetry, was arguably the most beautiful song of the decade. Look the words up on the internet but can you beat ‘Bows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air” as a description of cloud patterns. It was written by the legendary Canadian singer/song writer Joni Mitchell, was a massive hit for Collins and has been covered by stacks of artists as diverse as Bing Crosby, Paul Young, Herbie Hancock and Susan Boyle. I loved the song way back then, snuggling up on a settee with the girl of the moment and simply dreaming.

But how could I have missed the point of the lyrics; to look at things from both sides, to see the other person’s point of view. As I learned later, those from privileged backgrounds can actually be OK. How could I try to verbally blast a group of people that I did not understand? Did not understand because I had not taken the time to get to know them, to listen to their point of view. Of course, even looking at society patiently and in the most considered manner, I would still have voted Labour. I cannot accept the theory of Social Darwinism; the survival of the fittest, the law of the jungle. I do now understand that to have totally equal pay will not work; there has to be incentive, a kind of meritocracy, but I believe that those who have more than enough should support those who have not through a system of taxation which cannot be avoided simply because they have a clever accountant; are you listening Starbucks? There are lazy oiks in all walks of life but the majority of those who struggle do so because they have been less fortunate than others. Even now I struggle to come to terms with the likes of Cameron and Osborne with their aristocratic upbringings, including expensive public school and Oxford educational backgrounds. However, I would no longer think of them in terms of forces of evil, simply people who look at the country in a totally different and (in my opinion) a totally incorrect way.

But the Joni Mitchell song is not just about political difference, it is also about personal relationships. How often have we fallen out with someone because we only evaluate a situation from our own perspective? At one time in my life, I could regularly have fallen out with everyone; jumping to hurried conclusions, not trying to reason why they may have acted in a certain way. Many a friendship can be lost through a rash word; through an unconsidered opinion. Surely it has to be better to think carefully about a problem we may have, to try to understand the opposing point of view before ‘going off on one’. Then if all else fails, there is always the ‘get out of jail free’ card. I don’t like to contradict a diva like Diana Ross, but sorry often does make it right. Good friendships, strong relationships are the jewels in our crown and we can protect them if we listen to Joni. In other words, look at situations ‘from both sides now’.

M.J Hodkinson

 

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