Saturday, January 24, 2004
Anyone for tennis?
A couple of years ago Gig Buddy and I were desperately fighting back from the threat of a sound thrashing in a tennis match; I got outsmarted and wrongfooted at speed, and next thing I know I'm waking up with a first aider in my face and excruciating pain in my right knee. As aforementioned right knee is heavily strapped as the minor by-product of two lots of surgery and a ruined international sporting career (okay, so that bit's made up, but the first bit isn't...) I immediately envisage metal rods in knee brace pressing into tender swollen flesh, cut-off circulation, and then it's a short hop and a limp from there to amputation in my mind. And I'm not good with pain. So even though I'm clamping my teeth down hard on my arm in the absence of anything more useful from the first aider, I'm also screaming "get that effing thing off my leg NOW" at my gentle unassuming doubles partner. I watch him turn a pale shade of lime green as he gingerly tries to slide the hot sweating rubber contraption off, but in the end there is nothing for him to do but yank it and suffer my excoriating torrent of abuse.
"I'll take you to casualty," he says when the screaming has subsided.
"Just carry me into the bar", I says. "I bloody need a pint after that."
So we end the match in the bar, and I end up catching a taxi to casualty at 5 in the morning when I have actually chewed my own arm off with the pain.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and a few boxes of horse tranquilisers later, and I'm in with the physio. It's a long-standing injury - torn anterior cruciate ligaments - and it's the 'what now' options conversation. After discussing the advantages and disadvantages of reconstruction surgery, he turns to me and he says, "well, you know, you really have screwed up your knees - have you ever considered competitive chess?" And although in the nine long months of our acquaintance that followed, I came to appreciate the warped sense of humour lurking beneath his solemn professional exterior, I think he did actually mean it...
Call me a reckless fool, a hopeless optimist or a dangerous psychopathic nutter if you will, but I opted - third time lucky? - for refusing to give up sport and to put myself through another nine months of physiotherapy hell. But all the time I was balancing on one leg with my eyes shut, a little part of my brain niggled away at the idea of competitive chess.
The glittering prize (pound shop trophy and a BSE burger) of the Park College Staff Mixed Doubles Tournament out of my reach for yet another year, maybe this was the path to glory I had been seeking all my life, my injury a message from the Gods. All I had to do was to heed their call!
One minor technical detail, of course - I ain't no chess player... I like the game, as I like all strategy games, but I just hadn't played it since my dad used to thrash me at it aged 9, all part of his "life's tough, bloody well get used to it" philosophy of parenting. And then there's all that business with Grand Masters and other Masonically intimidating things in the world of Competitive Chess.
But, I figured perfectly reasonably, I'd be in with a chance of the big time with Competitive Scrabble! I was already playing at rated level against Mr Cheating Bastard (aka my computer...) and winning (well, sometimes, but he really does cheat, laying words with no vowels in and far too many qs and zs). I had already reached the point where no friends would agree to suffer the indignity of losing against me again (viciously competitive streak obviously a genetic throwback to my father, but I have never yet taken it out on a poor innocent adoring nine year old...). And there on the Scrabble website were details of the East Sussex Open Tournament, just a few miles up the road. It was quite obviously my destiny!
But oh how the mighty fall! You have absolutely no idea what "competitive streak" means until you are in a church hall with a hundred old ladies, average age 93, and the clock is ticking on a match! They hunch over their letters. The second you make an astonishingly good word out of 4 Es and an L, they pounce mercilessly with a 7 letter 50 point bonus word and not a flicker of emotion. A tennis player, you smile "jolly good shot" across the board, and they slash you dead as they flick some more killer letters out of the bag. You tremble, your mind turns to leftover trifle, and before you know it you have inadvertently set them up for "quaking" on a triple word score. They have started their demonic chuckling well before you have finished laying your second letter...
But it's not the old ladies who chew volumes of the OED in a way that makes you wonder where their husbands went who disturb me most. Oh no, that special privelege is reserved for the Damien offspring of the Scrabble-Meisters. They are probably in their late 30s or early 40s, but it's difficult to tell because they dress out of the Cat Protection League charity shop and have never had a haircut. They have skin from the BBC special effects department and the kind of smile that makes you catch a taxi and starve for a week rather than stand another five minutes at a bus-stop with them. Oh yeah, they are the scary ones...
Because the old ladies win fair and square, and I am looking forward to the kind of retirement that involves this kind of Olympian training, and a strict diet of brain-enhancing food. But the Damien offspring cheat, pure and simple. Okay, so cheating is allowed - the rule book says it's up to me to challenge if I think they are making words up. And we all make mistakes, thinking a word exists when it doesn't. But this one woman I played against, resplendent in an olive polyester cardigan and appalling bodily hygiene, stared me in the eye like a 14 year old wigga on a BMX (I swear she grabbed her crotch too - MTV does terrible things to adults who don't get out much...) as she laid a 7 letter 50 bonus point word I absolutely knew was a big fat fibbing cheat. As I looked at her incredulously, thinking "that just is not cricket at all", her eyes glinted and her nostrils flared at the sweet smell of imminent victory.
"Challenge it, challenge it," the sane voice of reason begged inside my head. But she had me on the ropes. I shrugged and laid my next word.
Did I choke? Or did I uphold the fine virtue of good sportsmanship, refusing to dignify her behaviour with so much as a challenge? Who knows, but that match put me right off Competitive Board Games. And even now, though the story ends with me acquiring a new state of the art pro-crippled-athlete knee brace and returning happily to the genteel world of indoor tennis, if I find myself slacking in the gym on the necessary knee-maintenance exercises, I think of Olive Cardigan Woman and I run!!
A couple of years ago Gig Buddy and I were desperately fighting back from the threat of a sound thrashing in a tennis match; I got outsmarted and wrongfooted at speed, and next thing I know I'm waking up with a first aider in my face and excruciating pain in my right knee. As aforementioned right knee is heavily strapped as the minor by-product of two lots of surgery and a ruined international sporting career (okay, so that bit's made up, but the first bit isn't...) I immediately envisage metal rods in knee brace pressing into tender swollen flesh, cut-off circulation, and then it's a short hop and a limp from there to amputation in my mind. And I'm not good with pain. So even though I'm clamping my teeth down hard on my arm in the absence of anything more useful from the first aider, I'm also screaming "get that effing thing off my leg NOW" at my gentle unassuming doubles partner. I watch him turn a pale shade of lime green as he gingerly tries to slide the hot sweating rubber contraption off, but in the end there is nothing for him to do but yank it and suffer my excoriating torrent of abuse.
"I'll take you to casualty," he says when the screaming has subsided.
"Just carry me into the bar", I says. "I bloody need a pint after that."
So we end the match in the bar, and I end up catching a taxi to casualty at 5 in the morning when I have actually chewed my own arm off with the pain.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and a few boxes of horse tranquilisers later, and I'm in with the physio. It's a long-standing injury - torn anterior cruciate ligaments - and it's the 'what now' options conversation. After discussing the advantages and disadvantages of reconstruction surgery, he turns to me and he says, "well, you know, you really have screwed up your knees - have you ever considered competitive chess?" And although in the nine long months of our acquaintance that followed, I came to appreciate the warped sense of humour lurking beneath his solemn professional exterior, I think he did actually mean it...
Call me a reckless fool, a hopeless optimist or a dangerous psychopathic nutter if you will, but I opted - third time lucky? - for refusing to give up sport and to put myself through another nine months of physiotherapy hell. But all the time I was balancing on one leg with my eyes shut, a little part of my brain niggled away at the idea of competitive chess.
The glittering prize (pound shop trophy and a BSE burger) of the Park College Staff Mixed Doubles Tournament out of my reach for yet another year, maybe this was the path to glory I had been seeking all my life, my injury a message from the Gods. All I had to do was to heed their call!
One minor technical detail, of course - I ain't no chess player... I like the game, as I like all strategy games, but I just hadn't played it since my dad used to thrash me at it aged 9, all part of his "life's tough, bloody well get used to it" philosophy of parenting. And then there's all that business with Grand Masters and other Masonically intimidating things in the world of Competitive Chess.
But, I figured perfectly reasonably, I'd be in with a chance of the big time with Competitive Scrabble! I was already playing at rated level against Mr Cheating Bastard (aka my computer...) and winning (well, sometimes, but he really does cheat, laying words with no vowels in and far too many qs and zs). I had already reached the point where no friends would agree to suffer the indignity of losing against me again (viciously competitive streak obviously a genetic throwback to my father, but I have never yet taken it out on a poor innocent adoring nine year old...). And there on the Scrabble website were details of the East Sussex Open Tournament, just a few miles up the road. It was quite obviously my destiny!
But oh how the mighty fall! You have absolutely no idea what "competitive streak" means until you are in a church hall with a hundred old ladies, average age 93, and the clock is ticking on a match! They hunch over their letters. The second you make an astonishingly good word out of 4 Es and an L, they pounce mercilessly with a 7 letter 50 point bonus word and not a flicker of emotion. A tennis player, you smile "jolly good shot" across the board, and they slash you dead as they flick some more killer letters out of the bag. You tremble, your mind turns to leftover trifle, and before you know it you have inadvertently set them up for "quaking" on a triple word score. They have started their demonic chuckling well before you have finished laying your second letter...
But it's not the old ladies who chew volumes of the OED in a way that makes you wonder where their husbands went who disturb me most. Oh no, that special privelege is reserved for the Damien offspring of the Scrabble-Meisters. They are probably in their late 30s or early 40s, but it's difficult to tell because they dress out of the Cat Protection League charity shop and have never had a haircut. They have skin from the BBC special effects department and the kind of smile that makes you catch a taxi and starve for a week rather than stand another five minutes at a bus-stop with them. Oh yeah, they are the scary ones...
Because the old ladies win fair and square, and I am looking forward to the kind of retirement that involves this kind of Olympian training, and a strict diet of brain-enhancing food. But the Damien offspring cheat, pure and simple. Okay, so cheating is allowed - the rule book says it's up to me to challenge if I think they are making words up. And we all make mistakes, thinking a word exists when it doesn't. But this one woman I played against, resplendent in an olive polyester cardigan and appalling bodily hygiene, stared me in the eye like a 14 year old wigga on a BMX (I swear she grabbed her crotch too - MTV does terrible things to adults who don't get out much...) as she laid a 7 letter 50 bonus point word I absolutely knew was a big fat fibbing cheat. As I looked at her incredulously, thinking "that just is not cricket at all", her eyes glinted and her nostrils flared at the sweet smell of imminent victory.
"Challenge it, challenge it," the sane voice of reason begged inside my head. But she had me on the ropes. I shrugged and laid my next word.
Did I choke? Or did I uphold the fine virtue of good sportsmanship, refusing to dignify her behaviour with so much as a challenge? Who knows, but that match put me right off Competitive Board Games. And even now, though the story ends with me acquiring a new state of the art pro-crippled-athlete knee brace and returning happily to the genteel world of indoor tennis, if I find myself slacking in the gym on the necessary knee-maintenance exercises, I think of Olive Cardigan Woman and I run!!
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Are you calling me "quirky" again?
It all started in class first thing yesterday morning. I'm there, fiddling around with wall heaters, electronic registers, and assorted bits of paper needed for a morning of intellectual enlightenment; my students are arriving and taking off their coats and generally catching up on the hies and how are yous of everyday. I miss the initial question, but the answer, from an entirely genuine and thoughtful young man is "Well.... as soon as I find someone else, I'm going to dump her".
Well, I couldn't let that go, now could I?!
"You what?!" I says. "If it's not working out, do the honourable thing - dump her, hang out with your mates for a while, and wait til you find someone you're really interested in."
Well, it does say in the syllabus that in addition to teaching the finer points of the linguistic offside rule, I am also responsible for the moral and spiritual education of the youths in my charge...
"Cor, no, you must be joking - who wants to be single?!!"
"What?" I screech, "but you're only 16!?!!!"
"So? Being single is rubbish."
Now, come on, you have to admit that that is provocation beyond endurance. They asked for the lecture they got on the gender politics of contemporary relationships, social change in the 21st century, and the history of romantic love! Didn't they?....
Well, they got it anyway. And one of the things I talked to them about is the "quirkyalone" thing I read in last week's Observer. I was blagging it, I have to confess, having only read that much, but talking about it made me realise that the idea had lodged squarely in my mind - out with all that appalling Bridget Jones single-and-desperate crap, and in with a new concept for living.
So that got me to thinking... About why I really didn't like Love Actually when the rest of the world was raving about it... About why I get so cross every January when certain Smug Marrieds give me the annual New Year Lecture on how I need to sort my life out. Translated, this is roughly "when are you going to grow up, accept something far less than your ideal, and live with someone you really don't even like that much but at least you're not single?" (subtext "like me").
Not that I have been helping my own perspective on this much. At work, when somebody is needed to come in on the weekend to do something, I often volunteer, saying "it's alright, you guys go, I'll do it cos I'm the sad git with no life". I do say it with a postmodern ironic inflection (sometimes!), but how rubbish is that full stop??!! I do have a life and actually I'm pretty happy with it.
All this also taps into a conversation the bloke I periodically throw my tennis racket at (aka "coach") and I were having about relationships. Well, okay, that was about fuck-buddies which isn't quite the same, and I'm not ruling that out as a possibility, but I was explaining to him that the women in relationships that I most admire are those I know who are over 50. They are so cool. In committed relationships with men they really like, and with whom they have good fun (and presumably sex, but as one of these women is my mother, I don't want to think about that - at all!!), but they are quite clear that they have no intention of living with them. They seem happy, relaxed and like they are enjoying life. They talk about their partners affectionately and they talk about what they have DONE both alone and together. When it comes to women of my own age who are in traditional relationships, what I more often hear is a heart-breaking mixture of loneliness, boredom and stifling claustrophobia. Hmmmm, which type of relationship would you choose?....
So, last night I checked out this quirkyalone thing a bit more, and it was a revelation. I have found a home!! One of those things that you read and breathe this huge sigh of relief as someone articulates those thoughts that were lying around your head in the dusty corners you couldn't quite reach even with a coathanger.
I did the online quiz to check my quirkyalone quotient and I scored an impressive 107 - very quirkyalone. Though I would just like to point out that unlike other female quirkyalones I neither own a vibrator nor would ever want to count one as my best friend!! And I'm really happy with that score - at long last, after a lifetime of being the odd one, I am now unfeasibly cool, ranking myself alongside Angelina Jolie, Cleopatra, Morissey and Walt Whitman!! As Gary Glitter once said, "Wanna be in my gang?" Response, "Oh yeah!"
So, I start this New Year entirely happy, knowing that I am not even half looking for A Relationship - just keeping myself open to possibilities and enjoying the "magic click" wherever and whenever it occurs. And being too cool for words!...
(And my class are getting homework on it!....)
It all started in class first thing yesterday morning. I'm there, fiddling around with wall heaters, electronic registers, and assorted bits of paper needed for a morning of intellectual enlightenment; my students are arriving and taking off their coats and generally catching up on the hies and how are yous of everyday. I miss the initial question, but the answer, from an entirely genuine and thoughtful young man is "Well.... as soon as I find someone else, I'm going to dump her".
Well, I couldn't let that go, now could I?!
"You what?!" I says. "If it's not working out, do the honourable thing - dump her, hang out with your mates for a while, and wait til you find someone you're really interested in."
Well, it does say in the syllabus that in addition to teaching the finer points of the linguistic offside rule, I am also responsible for the moral and spiritual education of the youths in my charge...
"Cor, no, you must be joking - who wants to be single?!!"
"What?" I screech, "but you're only 16!?!!!"
"So? Being single is rubbish."
Now, come on, you have to admit that that is provocation beyond endurance. They asked for the lecture they got on the gender politics of contemporary relationships, social change in the 21st century, and the history of romantic love! Didn't they?....
Well, they got it anyway. And one of the things I talked to them about is the "quirkyalone" thing I read in last week's Observer. I was blagging it, I have to confess, having only read that much, but talking about it made me realise that the idea had lodged squarely in my mind - out with all that appalling Bridget Jones single-and-desperate crap, and in with a new concept for living.
So that got me to thinking... About why I really didn't like Love Actually when the rest of the world was raving about it... About why I get so cross every January when certain Smug Marrieds give me the annual New Year Lecture on how I need to sort my life out. Translated, this is roughly "when are you going to grow up, accept something far less than your ideal, and live with someone you really don't even like that much but at least you're not single?" (subtext "like me").
Not that I have been helping my own perspective on this much. At work, when somebody is needed to come in on the weekend to do something, I often volunteer, saying "it's alright, you guys go, I'll do it cos I'm the sad git with no life". I do say it with a postmodern ironic inflection (sometimes!), but how rubbish is that full stop??!! I do have a life and actually I'm pretty happy with it.
All this also taps into a conversation the bloke I periodically throw my tennis racket at (aka "coach") and I were having about relationships. Well, okay, that was about fuck-buddies which isn't quite the same, and I'm not ruling that out as a possibility, but I was explaining to him that the women in relationships that I most admire are those I know who are over 50. They are so cool. In committed relationships with men they really like, and with whom they have good fun (and presumably sex, but as one of these women is my mother, I don't want to think about that - at all!!), but they are quite clear that they have no intention of living with them. They seem happy, relaxed and like they are enjoying life. They talk about their partners affectionately and they talk about what they have DONE both alone and together. When it comes to women of my own age who are in traditional relationships, what I more often hear is a heart-breaking mixture of loneliness, boredom and stifling claustrophobia. Hmmmm, which type of relationship would you choose?....
So, last night I checked out this quirkyalone thing a bit more, and it was a revelation. I have found a home!! One of those things that you read and breathe this huge sigh of relief as someone articulates those thoughts that were lying around your head in the dusty corners you couldn't quite reach even with a coathanger.
I did the online quiz to check my quirkyalone quotient and I scored an impressive 107 - very quirkyalone. Though I would just like to point out that unlike other female quirkyalones I neither own a vibrator nor would ever want to count one as my best friend!! And I'm really happy with that score - at long last, after a lifetime of being the odd one, I am now unfeasibly cool, ranking myself alongside Angelina Jolie, Cleopatra, Morissey and Walt Whitman!! As Gary Glitter once said, "Wanna be in my gang?" Response, "Oh yeah!"
So, I start this New Year entirely happy, knowing that I am not even half looking for A Relationship - just keeping myself open to possibilities and enjoying the "magic click" wherever and whenever it occurs. And being too cool for words!...
(And my class are getting homework on it!....)
