In praise of bodgers.

On Sunday our annual visit to Chertsey Agricultural Show was enriched by watching a bodger at work. The term is usually associated with work that will only just pass muster but in fact the bodger was a highly skilled craftsman who set up his pole-lathe deep in the woods and having selected and cut his timber would turn the chair legs for the Chiltern furniture trade. Bodging  has always seemed to me to be a wonderful craft. The pole-lathe itself is a masterpiece of simple but effective technology and the idea of working with green timber with just the wildlife of the forest for company has a ludicrously romantic appeal. It's good that a few dedicated folk are keeping alive a tradition that is a world away from all that accountancy and software design that we value so much these days.

Final Olympic thoughts.

So that's that. Forward to the Paralympics and good luck to all involved. The last couple of weeks have seen some outstanding performances and fantastic sporting entertainment. I remain very sceptical about the so called "legacy" and I need no lectures about bread and circuses, but at least the games gave  athletes and punters alike something to smile about. It's not difficult to think of things that the money would have been better spent on but I seem to remember that the same arguments were used against the Festival Of Britain. Sod it! Enjoy yourselves - it's later than you think.

Morrissey should get a life before it's too late.

You can't really expect someone who has forged a career out of writing and performing gut wrenching dirges about unrequited love and vegetarianism to be that big on sporting achievment but Morrissey's Olympic put-down will doubtless ring all the right bells amongst the skinny jeans and asemetrical haitcutt inhabitants of Planet Hoxton. I share the singers dislike of nationalism and have even gone as far as calling for a medal table based along class line rather than nationality. Not, mind you,  that this brainwave of mine has been met with anything but groans and a call to shut up and stop being so boring.
Look, lets be honest here. East London will probably end up with fewer sporting facilities than it started out with. The bill for all of this will be astronomical and in the months ahead we will have a seemingly never ending stream of revelations about financial wrongdoings.  And make no mistake, all of this is wrong - totaly wrong. But last night I had a wonderfull evening at the greco-roman wrestling. We ended up sitting in the block of seats that I think by rights are supposed to be for the "Olympic Family" and in our case this meant us sitting with members of the international wrestling fraternity. This was an added bonus and we were able to see at first hand the strong bonds of friendship between athletes from countries that have what you might call difficult histories; Poland and Russia for example. The wrestling was brilliant and so was the atmosphere. This is what people have been getting off on Morressey. Now fuck off and cook your lentils.

Jaimie Oliver to be new army catering czar?

Once the philosophy of the totality of the marketplace has penetrated every facet of life all kinds of weird and wonderful aberrations crop up. When G4S fucked up their Olympic security brief the army had to be called in. The MoD were saddled with the problem of where to billet the thousands of troops  now needed to police the games. Fortunately, just next door to Murdoch's Wapping HQ is a forgotten monument to a previous failed regeneration project, the long empty Tobacco Dock Shopping Centre.
Tobacco Dock is the property of Kuwaiti investment company Massila House and who knows what backroom deals were entered into to secure it as a base for the army.  Despite the cancelled leave, the visits from Boris Johnson and having to doss down where they can in the car park and abandoned shops of Tobacco Dock, the squaddies have remained cheerful. One thing that always helps is knowing that thanks to those army cooks, whatever time they return from the Olympic venues the troops can be sure of a hot meal waiting for them.  But now rumours are circulating that cuts to military spending will include the privatisation of military catering. Which one of Cameron's cronies will get the contract this time and which celebrity chef will be called in to give those army recipes a going over? Our lads and lasses could find that from now on it's going to be a case of out with the pie and chips and in with the lightly drizzled bullshit.

What a night!

See, I told you just to enjoy the moment. After last night's amazing hour of UK athletic glory we might just pause from the celebrations to reflect that Jess Ennis, Mo Farah and Greg Rutherford are all the products of committed state school teachers and the amateur club system. There will be time enough to consider what all this will mean for the next generation of British athletes but (and I say this through gritted teeth) Colin Moyniham has done well to point out the sheer unfairness of the advantage given to  public school athletes.  In the meantime. Enjoy!

Rory Stewart. Yesterday's man?

I thought that Rory Stewart's BBC2 documentary The Great Game was one of the best pieces of Afghanistan reporting that we have so far been offered. Informative, challenging and at times moving, it was surely going to make the media sit up and take notice of Stewart. But here we are three months later and the Tory MP for Penrith and The Border seems to be yesterdays man already. A toff adventurer/spook straight out of the pages of John Buchan, Stewart seemed ready made for fame; in the American market especially. Unfortunately times have changed and the Old Etonian got no further than one appearance on Question Time before the jackals started to dismiss him as just another gap year tosser  with a flair for self publicity. Stewart now spends his days listening to constituents moaning about the difficulty of finding a decent dry-stone waller these days and wondering what Richard Hanney would have done. Such is the ephemeral nature of celebrity in Cameron's Britain.

Strange days - Olympic dreams.

Thinks are starting to get very strange. This is my third post in a row about the Olympics and we are only into the first week. My involvement so far has included watching two cycle races and a time trial. Two of these events have featured the redoubtable Bradley Wiggins and none of them have been more than a ten minute walk away from home. So no real training benefit there. I expended quite a lot of energy laughing at Boris Johnson stuck half way down a zip wire. The stop button has been pressed on the booming public school tones of the mayor who's warnings on the tube about impending travel chaos have resulted in central London looking like there has been a plague alert. Just relax and enjoy it. Relax and enjoy. Relax and enj........ Oh sorry! Dropped of then.
My next Olympic involvement is a day out with my son that will feature a couple of pints in the notorious but wonderful Yucatan in Stoke Newington High Street, a haircut at a Turkish barber that includes having your fingers cracked and ears set on fire (all for a tenner I'm told), a dodgy kebab and an evening of Greco-Roman Wrestling. I'm not making any of this up. Well, perhaps the bit about Boris Johnson and the zip wire.