Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "england"

Thatcher and Andreotti, eh? If only there were a hell for them to rot in. Still, tradition asks us not to speak ill of the dead, so let’s see what we can say about those two that is positive.

Thatcher deserves a statue in Buenos Aires. It was arguably her insistence on fighting a war over a few rocks in the Atlantic, no matter how heavy the cost in lives and ever since then in money, that led to the collapse of the fascist regime in Argentina and the advent of democratic freedoms there.

Andreotti, for his part, was the first major Italian politician to advocate “debt forgiveness” for poor countries instead of insisting that they sacrifice their children to placate the anxiety of Western bankers. He was regarded as going ga-ga. Now, of course, Italians, and other Westerners, would love “debt forgiveness” to be applied to themselves.

One of the things that inspires my work is corruption in soccer. This is because I used to see sport, and soccer in particular as a great equalizer, a level playing field on which merit could at last reap a due reward.
I don't really believe that now, and one of the sources of knowledge which have changed my view is Jerry Bullivant's blog, uncompromisingly entitled entitled Football Is Fixed.
Here is an extract from his latest entry:
"Roy Hodgson, with one Danish League Title in 24 years and with his close links to Stellar, Base, Key Sports and Wasserman agents (who collectively represented over 60% of England's Euro 2012 squad), is not fit for purpose to be manager of the England team."
The blog itself is currently here:
http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/
Of course, it goes way beyond sport.
Needless to say, I recommend it.

My latest short e-book is an antidote to fundamentalism, as well as a story about soccer, society and growing up. http://amzn.to/1vaWwap For young adults and others interested in the future.

You know how everything is supposed to get worse, at least worse than it was back when we were in our prime? Well, very often it doesn't. Take racism in the UK. When I was a lad in the 1960s, people here were expected to be mildly racist. The football club I blindly followed (and still do) was one of the first in England to hire a black player, Gerry Francis, a man from South Africa. He was a very skillful player who soon earned enough respect and affection from the fans for them to refer to him by his name rather than as “the darkie”. Fast forward a few decades and the whole town is in the streets to welcome home a black sportswoman, Kelly Holmes, and her two Olympic gold medals. There is still far too much racism in the country, and it is still exploited by unscrupulous politicians, but its focus has shifted. The grandchildren of immigrants with “black” skin are now generally accepted as bone fide Brits, and something similar is happening with the children of immigrants from South Asia, if they opt for integration. The Other now comes dressed in “white” skin and hails from Eastern Europe. For the pleasure of being nasty to them, we have just given our European partners the V-sign and are preparing to chop those two fingers off. Silly really. Which brings me to Paul Beatty's comic masterpiece of anti-racism and anti-idiocy, “The Sellout”
[to be continued]

When you come “home” after years spent far away, you have to steel yourself for some reverse culture shock. Last time, there was less than I expected (though the rampant ageism in England was a surprise) but this time I got zapped in a place I didn't expect: language. Blimey, they don't half talk funny in England these days! Particularly the young, though more so on television than in the streets of Kent. Well, it's only natural that language should evolve, but the area of greatest innovation seems to have switched from vocabulary to sound. One phenomenon I've noticed is a restriction of the vocal chords, especially at the end of an utterance. It's something I've tried and failed to imitate, but thanks to Ian McEwan, I now understand what it's about. In his new, intriguing short novel, “Nutshell”, he mentions it and gives it a name: “vocal fry”, which means you can Google it. It turns out to have originated in the USA and to be prevalent among young women. Unlike young people's slang, which is intended to keep us oldies out, “vocal fry” aims to impress other youngsters, apparently by giving the speaker an air of sophistication. It is also a technique used by singers. One thing I've noticed in various languages is that people often constrict their vocal chords when they want to sound posh. This all begs the question of whether people fry their vocals deliberately or unconsciously. It also turns out that a lot of people dislike the sound. However, the reaction of my better half, a native speaker of Chinese, to one disdainful You Tube video, was that she preferred the sound of vocal fry to to the high-pitched whine of the young lady denouncing it. Personally, I'm just happy to have got a handle on it, and to know that it's not just my hearing aid playing up.

Dead Simple
In Franc Roddam's 1979 film “Quadrophenia”, the gang of Mods coming down to Brighton for a weekend of violence stop their scooters on the South Downs when the coast and a shimmering town come into view and say, reverentially, “That's Brighton!”.
In reality, it was not louche, dirty, pulsating Brighton but the sedate retirement town of Eastbourne. Nevertheless, watching the film in Portugal, the scene was enough set off pangs of nostalgia and longing. Forty years later, back in Portugal, I'm still drawn to anything set in Brighton, which is what led me to Peter James's novel "Dead Simple". It is replete with evocative place-names, though it is a fantasy Brighton, in which a hard rain falls as it might in a post-apocalyptic Seattle, and all the police are jolly good lads and lasses, whereas we used to say that the city had “the best police force money could buy”, and woo works. This last is used by the author to set the story straight. Convenient car crashes also play a role. The characters are static and lacking in subtlety, unlike the real city's denizens, who give the place its true flavour.