Category Archives: Uncategorized

Sports Photography

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I have very little interest in sport and not much more in photography, but my eye was caught by this photograph in the Guardian Weekly.

The surfer is Macy Callaghan, who first hopped on a board when she was 3.  She is shown winning the World Surf League Qualifying Series at Boomerang Beach. The picture was taken by Jonny Weeks.

I’m sharing this because I think it’s the ultimate sports photo. The composition, the sense of movement, the juxtaposition of colours… there’s nothing one would want to change.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, they’d have to be very well-chosen words to replace this one.

Sorry for the muted colours: it’s a scan from a newspaper.
Click on Macy’s name above to see sharper, brighter pictures.

Hunter Gatherers at Heart

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We have a tiny lemon tree in our garden – so tiny that it fits in a pot. Twelve lemons have been slowly growing on it for a very long time, turning a slightly yellower shade of green each day, and today I harvested the first one. On my way back to the house I found myself singing an old song under my breath:

To reap and sow
And plough and mow
To be a farmer’s bo-o-o-oy,
To be a farmer’s boy!

My family left the land five generations ago, but deep down I’m still a peasant. I think we all are. In Australia the atavistic memory has more to do with cattle-droving or sheep-shearing, among the white population anyway, but the difference is superficial.

Even deeper down we are hunter-gatherers still. Why else do we experience a thrill when we enter a supermarket? Why else do we stalk special offers through the undergrowth of overpriced junk food and boring staples? Why else do we mutter thanks to forgotten gods as we take the last “reduced” packet from the shelf? Why else do our eyes dart to the bottom of the receipt to see how much we’ve “saved”?

For two million years we’ve been honing skills that have served us so well that… well, we have survived. From ocean to savannah to jungle to supermarket aisle. Go, Humanity!

Invisible Dirt

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If you’ve read my book ‘Household Management for Men ‘ (aka HM4MEN) you’ll be familiar with the concept of invisible dirt. This is dirt can be detected only by people with a certain medical condition, who are known to doctors as ‘women’.

Having spent a month in a Tbilisi apartment where the only cleaning equipment was a broom, a dustpan-and-brush and a duster, when it came time to do a bit of a clean-up – so the landlord and lady wouldn’t think I’m a slob, and by extension that all Australians are slobs – I wielded the broom. Applying it to an apparently clean floor I witnessed an astounding phenomenon. As the broom progressed along the surface of the floor, dirt appeared in front of it!

sweeping

After some experimentation and coffee-assisted contemplation I concluded that the dirt became visible when it attained a certain critical mass. So by moving the broom along the floor the invisible dirt was aggregated, consolidated, concentrated to the point where visibility occurred.

And I wondered… if this can happen to invisible dirt, might it not also happen to dark matter? If we could devise something analogous to a cosmic broom, and sweep the dark matter before it, a critical mass might be reached that would force this shy substance to reveal itself.

So I’ve done the hard work – the insight bit. If some clever scientist-person will now take the next step and come up with the means to carry out my clever plan… well, I’ll be happy to share the Nobel Prize 50/50.

Hotel Showers

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I judge a hotel on its fulfilment of a few basic conditions:

  • Helpful staff.
  • Free wi-fi.
  • A fridge uncluttered with overpriced mini-bar stuff.
  • Separate waste bins in the bedroom and the bathroom.
  • Separate, decent-sized bars of soap for the basin and the shower.
  • A shower that I can stand under without using one of my hands to hold it up.

I recently stayed at a hotel that failed dismally on the last of these. Luckily I always travel with a coat-hanger made of very thin wire. This is how I had to shape it to hook the shower head on the top rail of the shower screen:

benthanger

Do you have items that you carry around to rectify hotels’ deficiencies?

Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize for Literature

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Well, the dust has settled and there are other stories to occupy the minds of the newsmongers. Am I bitter? A little, I suppose. But I have to concede that Bob Dylan is a significant poet and, if it’s lifetime achievements we’re talking about, his lifetime as a writer trumps mine. So I’m happy to say, “Well done, Bob!” and wait my turn. I just hope the Nobel Committee appreciates that my lifetime is finite so they’d better get a move on.

Burkinis

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OK, I know what you’re thinking: When is StroppyGit going to pronounce on the row in France over burkinis? Never let it be said that I am insensitive to popular demand, so here goes.

First, I completely agree with those who see the burka as an instrument and a symbol of patriarchal oppression of women. The great majority of women who choose to wear it do so because of the cultural/religious environment into which they had the misfortune to be born. Muslim women who live in Western societies and wear the burka in public must expect to have difficulty making friends and getting a job. They should also realise that they are reinforcing prejudice and hostility against their religion, whose values with respect to gender relations are utterly opposed to modern secular values. In any situation where security is an issue, faces must be revealed and body searches must be submitted to.

Having said all that, it does not follow that a bathing costume that covers everything except the face, hands and feet should be banned. Yes, it may be provocative inasmuch as it is associated with Islam, and most non-Muslims find aspects of Islam objectionable. But is it a religious symbol, in the way that a cross or a crescent or the star of David are religious symbols? I don’t think so. I see it rather as a cultural by-product that will fade away as the culture that spawned it matures.

I like this photo, by the way, which I took from a website – but I forget which one. If it was yours, or if you took the photo, please tell me and I will add an acknowledgement. It’s brilliant because of the almost-exact equivalence of the two women’s figures and movements; the matched horizontal stripes on both costumes; and most of all the happy smile on the face of the burkini-wearing woman. Well done, whoever took it.

Burkini

Being practical, the case is very clear. Banning the burkina is even more provocative than wearing it. Making Muslim women display an amount of flesh that is for them unthinkable will simply amount to a ban on their being part of the beachloving community and enjoying the healthy pastime of swimming in the sea. It will further isolate those women from mainstream secular society and retard their advance towards enlightenment and freedom. And it is a propaganda gift to the Islamists who want to portray Western society as hostile, corrupt and ungodly.

StroppyGit has spoken.

Georgian Theatre Royal

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I used to think that the real Richmond was in Surrey, on the Thames, with a park full of wandering deer. But as we wandered northward, from Beccles towards Scotland, Mrs SG and I found ourselves near a little town called Richmond, not far from Scotch Corner. According to our guide book it has a Norman castle – not unusual in the UK – and the world’s only surviving working Georgian theatre. We were intrigued and aimed our little rental car in that direction.

A charming volunteer guide took us around the theatre, explaining things and giving us rich historical context. Apparently the people in the cheapest seats, in the gallery, really were uncouth and rowdy. They even peed on the floor so that the people in the choicest boxes below were rained upon. If the audience showed sufficient dislike of a performance the actors often called it off, changed their costumes and performed a different play – more of a crowd-pleaser.

And did you know that the process of reserving seats is quite new, and originally applied only to the boxes… hence the term ‘box office’?

The exterior of the Theatre Royal is pretty dull (see below) but the interior is a delight. It lacks the curlicues and gilt cherubs of the West End theatres and it seats only 261 patrons (and therefore was never obliged to have a fire curtain), but like the bluff North Yorkshire farmers who were its patrons when Samuel Butler opened in 1788 it is eminently fit-for-purpose.

GeorgianTheatreRoyal

GeorgianTheatreRoyal_Interior

The next time you’re in that part of the country, take the time to drop in and have a look. Better still, check online and time your visit when there’s a performance. We didn’t but we will next time. We may not be able to reserve the royal box (as patrons Charles and Camilla did) but the annual pantomime is not to be missed, we’re told.

Postscript

Both Richmonds and much else besides formed part of the 250,000-acre land-holding (known as ‘the Honour of Richmond’) that William the Conqueror gave to his kinsman Alan Rufus of Brittany. Alan’s job was to keep North Yorkshire under control, which he seems to have done pretty well: the castle is dilapidated, but through neglect rather than bombardment. It played an interesting role in the First World War, which you may like to learn about here.

Factual Error!

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Factual errors don’t bother Donald Trump, but I just can’t rest easy knowing I’ve published something untrue.  It happened in the Two Statues post a couple of weeks ago, so I published a correction.  And it’s happened again with HM4MEN – not just an error in my post about HM4MEN but an error in the virtual pages of the very book itself!

But this time, instead of pulling the book off the virtual shelves and correcting it, I am going to give my blog readers a chance to find the error and win a prize.  The first person to find and correct the error in a comment posted to StroppyGit.com will get a free copy of my next novel ‘Bobby Shafter’ and a post extolling their cleverness!

I should add that this offer applies only to the specific error that I myself have spotted, not to any other real, imaginary, illusory, supposed or alleged error.  OK?

Breaking News

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Muhammad Ali died 9 days ago. The BBC World News TV channel classified this sad event as ‘breaking news’, cancelled normal programming, and broadcast hour upon hour of commentary and historical footage of Md Ali’s career until his funeral 3 days ago. Then we had live footage of a hearse driving slowly through Louisville.

MdAli_Hearse

Meanwhile momentous news from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and elsewhere took second place. Now that news takes second place to brawling football fans in France – but I’ll save that for another post.

I mention the BBC because that’s my preferred news channel at the moment. But CNN and Euronews (my other sources of English language TV news here in Armenia) were no better.

Don’t misunderstand me. I remember listening to the fight between Cassius Clay (as he was then) and Henry Cooper (Our ‘Enery) when I should have been studying for my A Levels. I recognise that as sportsman, activist and iconoclast Md Ali was a towering figure – a true celebrity before that term became debased.

There’s good reason to review a great person’s life, achievements and influence in a couple of documentaries, which those most interested can choose to watch. But the extent to which the airwaves were given over to this one event was, to my mind, excessive and showed poor judgement on the part of the programmers.

First Rock Concert

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Mrs SG and I have seen a lot and done a lot in our time, but until a few days ago we had never been to a rock concert. We like rock-and-roll music, we like being in an excited throng of people enjoying a common experience, we like (in Dame Edna Everage‘s immortal words) colour and movement. But we’d never been to a rock concert.

OkeanElzy_Concert2

So when a colleague alerted us to the imminent arrival of the Ukrainian band Okean Elzy (pictured below) for a 1-night stand in Yerevan (where we are at the moment) as part of their world tour, we saw an opportunity for a new experience. We also saw an opportunity to show solidarity with the Ukrainian people in their unequal struggle to defend themselves against their rogue neighbour.

OkeanElzy_GroupPhoto

We bought tickets online and went to the Karen Demirchyan Sports and Concerts Complex, arriving with 15 minutes in hand to find our seats – which were very comfortable by the way – and observe the rest of the crowd. To cut a long story short: the show started more than an hour late, the volume of sound was well above our pain threshold and at the back of the stage there was a battery of lights that flashed directly into the audience’s eyes. So we sat in our comfortable seats with our fingers in our ears and our eyes shut tight.

We left before the end of the first number, and as we went out into the blissful quiet of an Armenian summer evening we saw latecomers still arriving. Presumably they had been to rock concerts before and knew that they always start late.

In my professional roles as consultant and author, respect for my customers (clients and readers) is paramount. Why should rock musicians treat their customers with such disrespect? Why do their customers put up with it? Why do people pay large sums of money to be kept waiting and then to be deafened and blinded? It makes me stroppy, but more than that it puzzles me.

PS  I am not a music critic and I offer no opinion on the quality of Okean Elzy’s music. They’re very popular in Ukraine and elsewhere in the CIS, so they’re probably very good. I regret that their style of performance precluded my hearing them.