Mrs Hammond, E M Forster and me.

When I was 17 I used to have double English with Mrs Hammond once a week.  That was 80 solid minutes of studying literature.  There were about 6 of us in the class.  I used to talk more than most, a fact which I was probably hated for by the others. 

One week we were doing A Passage to India, and I made myself very unpopular 1 minute into the lesson by saying 'You know, Mrs Hammond, I just don't get this book, what's it all about?'.

For 79 minutes she spoke, without anyone else uttering a word.  She hardly paused for breath.  It was one of the longest monologues in history, it made Hamlet's soliloquy look like a limerick.

I can't recall anything she said, but the one thing I can remember from A Passage to India is 'Only Connect', which I take to mean that we don't really know the meaning of life, so we just need to connect with others, and there's meaning in that.

I had to wait for social networking to be invented for this to happen fully but now I'm more connected than ever. 

I've found Paul and Stephen in Spain, Fraser in Australia, Charlie and my cousins in New Zealand, my other cousins in Sheffield, my friends the indestructible Holdsworths from up the road, Ute in America who used to be a German, I've found Pamela and Vanessa from Germany 83 and Sylke and Carola from Germany 85.  I've found Mandy and Andy from 1990 at the CSC, and Phil and Alan and Dean and Kat and Elsa from just last year on the yacf forum.

I don't know what the mearning of it all is, but I'm more connected than ever.  To the present and to the past.  And a small part of everyone is in me.  And a small part of me is in everyone else.  And now I think I understand what Mrs Hammond was going on about. 

As a postscript to this, I tried to find a reference to 'Only Connect' in Passage to India, but I could only fnd it in Howards End, another Forster book I read while I was attending Mrs Hammond's English classes.  It was a bit like an early book group in that we all had to pick a separate book to read and report back on and I chose Howards End because I thought it sounded amusing to shout out 'I'll take Howards End', whereas I think Mrs Hammond had seen it all before and just thought I was being idiotic.

So, this has forced me to question my memory of the event, and it could be that during the 79 minute speech Howards End came up as well, I'm not sure.  It doesn't really matter though, because ever since then I have had the little mantra of 'Only Connect' playing in the back of my head, and it also fits in with one of my other favourite quotes from Kurt Vonnegut which is 'We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is'.

I lack the certainty of conviction to be a sincere follower of one of the big religions, but I do sincerely want to connect, because when I look back at my life, all the times I was happiest was when I was connected to others, doing things, having fun, running around the English Garden or the rugby field, or going on bike rides or sitting around in pubs talking crap.  There is a time for solitude and I need some of that too, especially to watch televised sport, but all the worthwhile events I can remember, I can remember being there with someone else, and that was what gave it the meaning.

And it hasn't always been the same someone elses.  People have come and people have gone.  Some have been lost and found again, and some have just been lost.  But the feelings of joy and togetherness are often the same, no matter who it was or what the situation.  When I look back at pictures of my 15 year old self laughing in Germany I look the same as the 41 year old me laughing in Scotland.  I looked thinner when I was 15 and I had less difficulty bending down to pick things up off the ground then, but it's me all the same.  And when I think back to the joyous feeling of winning a rugby match in the last minute against Giggleswick, I feel pretty much the same as I do about arriving in Saltburn after guiding a group of people on a coast to coast bike ride. 

People sometimes say I'm a miserable sod, and a misanthrope, but underneath I'm not.  It's just that I often get scared of the unpredictability of people, and I don't always know what to do with the fallout from behaviour I don't understand or can't cope with, but I like people really.  And the last few weeks has brought that home to me.

Thank you Mrs Hammond, I'm all connected up now.

Impersonating Rambo and running round Venice with water pistols

The first time I went to Italy was in February 1986, and I didn't need to hire a mobile home for that one.  There was a coach laid on for us.  It was the school rugby tour of 1986.  We even got matching rugby shirts and jumpers made, something I didn't have the benefit of again until 2010 and our Walney to Saltburn coast to coast ride.  

We were based in Padua and we were supposed to play 3 games in a week.  The middle one was cancelled because of bad weather so we just played the first and the third ones.  When we turned up to play the first one, I thought that should have been cancelled aswell, half of the pitch was frozen solid.  I moaned about this for a while, but Jim Collard just said to me 'If you don't want to play, we'll find someone who will'.  So I shut up.

In the event it wasn't too bad because the pitch thawed out quite a bit during the game, and having thirty warm bodies piled up on bits of it helped with the thaw.

We lost the first game, and to be honest we were crap.  We didn't lose by much, but we didn't play well.  After the game, we got told by Mike Lamb and Jim that we were crap.  And I should have just listened.  But opening my mouth when I shouldn't has been a perennial problem for me.  Richard Kilgarrif told me afterwards it was like watching the end of Rambo 1 (First Blood).  It's okay, I didn't blow up an entire small town, but what I did do was give an emotional and incoherent speech about how we'd done our best blah blah blah.  For the rest of the trip Richard used to do Sylvester Stallone impressions at me, 'I did it for my country' and all that in a slurred voice.

It didn't help to shake off the Stallone comparison that we went en masse to see Rocky IV in the cinema while we were over there.  It had been dubbed into Italian and for some reason they'd chosen a Joe Pasquale soundalike for the part of Rocky.  You didn't really need a translation to follow the story though.  Basically Rocky lost at the beginning and then he went and did some training and lost a bit of weight, and then he won at the end.  Simples!

It was a pretty cool trip, because on our days off when we weren't playing rugby, we got to go on trips.  We went to Venice on a double decker train and we all bought water pistols and drank hot wine (vino callo) to keep warm in St Mark's Square, and bought takeaway pizza.  Venice is the best city I've been to for fighting with water pistols, because there's water everywhere so you can always get a refill.  Also, it's the quietest city I've ever been to, because there aren't any cars.  I'm glad we were there in the winter though, because it can pong a bit in the summer apparently.  We also went to Verona, and all I can remember about that is eating more pizza, and finding a scarf on the floor which I decided to keep.

Padua is the only place I've been to where it was cheaper to order a pint of wine, than a pint of beer.  They had some fizzy red stuff at one of the bars.  I had about 4 pints of that one night.  It gave me a hell of a hangover.  There was an ice cream parlour opposite our hotel and they had 30 flavours of ice cream.  I'd only ever seen Neopolitan so this was amazing.  I had about 40 tubs of the stuff while I was there.

As well as blowing my spending money on ice cream I spent a fortune playing an arcade game called King of Boxer.  You had to beat about 10 boxers in a row and if you did, you had to face Violence Joe in the final, and get your head smashed in.  But I hardly ever got through to fight Violence Joe.  All the other fighters were easy, but there was one called Brown Pants and I just couldn't get past him.  I must have spent about £30 trying.  

We played the third and final game just before coming home, and this time we won 7-4.  It was a low scoring affair, and Fraser Maclennan-Pike kicked the winning penalty.  I expect the rest of the team were very relieved to have won, because it meant I didn't need to do any more incoherent babbling in the style of Rambo.  

It's not every week you get to play rugby on an ice rink, impersonate Rambo, eat 30 flavours of ice cream, get beaten up by a guy called Brown Pants, run round Venice with water pistols and watch Rocky IV with subtitles.  We won't see the like of those days again. 

Unlikely things to have happened on a rugby pitch

I used to play rugby at school.  They didn't give me the ball much, because I didn't have any ball handling skills.  I mostly just used to knock people over and dive around on the floor getting the ball back, and when I did I'd give it to someone else to do something with it.

I probably played about 100 games of rugby when I was at school.  I can't remember them all now, but there are things I do remember.  Some of the games were 30 years ago, so it's not surprising the memories are a bit vague.  But there are 3 main factors at work in the games I do remember.

I remember the games we won against teams we usually lost to, I remember the games which we won in the last minute and I remember the amazing goal kicking of Graham Tyler.

For example, we used to regularly lose to Ampleforth College and Welbeck College.  In the six years we played them we only beat them once each.  When I was in the lower sixth I used to play for the school's 2nd XV.  We weren't good enough to be in the first team, and because we weren't as important as them we didn't have to take it as seriously.  

All the different age school teams used to play the same school on the same day, about half of them at home and half away, so you never got to watch the teams play that you weren't in.

I can't remember why they were there, but for some reason when we played Ampleforth that year, the first team weren't playing and they came to watch us.  So we had basically about 20 people cheering us on.  It's amazing how much noise 20 people can make, it's the closest I've ever been to playing in front of a crowd.  It must be incredible to play in front of a whole stadium, although if you're England these days, that doesn't seem to help.

Anyway, spurred on by the crowd, we actually beat Ampleforth.  I think the score was 15-9 but I could have misremembered that.  What I do remember is that we were winning 9-8 at half time.  I promised I'd buy Rhys Hughes a pint if he scored a try and he did right at the end of the first half, and that was when I really started to believe we might win.  The result was in the balance almost to the end of the match, and then we gave the ball to Mick the Miller.  That wasn't his real name.  He was really called Jon Hargreaves.  He was absolutely tiny, so I don't think he was any good at tackling, but he was called Mick the Miller after a greyhound.  I can still remember near the end of the match watching him from a long way away as he ran away from the Ampleforth defence and over the try line.  No-one could get near him.  Ampleforth teams were always massive and because it was a boarding school they used to cheat by being able to practise a lot more often than we could in a day school.  And we used to lose to them every year, until that one.  Years of frustration, and of not being good enough disappeared in that instant.  

For some reason, it's not fashionable these days to let children lose.  I don't know why.  Losing fosters determination and a will to win, and once in a while, when you win against the odds, it more than makes up for all the defeats.

Another game I remember was playing away at Giggleswick.  Not only was the pitch on the side of a massive hill, but there was a force 10 gale blowing down it.  It was pretty irrelevant who was the better team, because whoever was playing downhill was going to score all the points.  It was pretty clear that whoever had the advantage of the slope in the first half was going to need to build up a massive lead and then defend it in the second half against the wind.

At the break we were only winning 10-0 which we knew wasn't going to be enough.  And sure enough Giggleswick clawed back our advantage and with about a minute to go we were losing 12-10.  And then after spending the whole half under our own posts, we managed to defy the wind and the hill and the other team and get up to the other end of the pitch and Bill Barker managed to stand up for long enough to fall over their try line in the corner with the ball, and we were back in the lead.

And then Graham Tyler kicked the conversion from the touchline, using the wind to banana it over the posts and we'd won 16-12.  And there's no better feeling in sport.  

Well, I say it was Graham.  Memory can play tricks on you, that kick could have been taken by Andrew Axon, Graham was probably playing for the first team then.  I assumed it was Graham because it was the kind of thing he would have done.  I'll have to ask him.  But there's a good reason, why I would remember it was him, even if it wasn't.

I didn't always get selected for the school rugby team, mostly because I wasn't good enough.  Quite often I was a non-playing reserve.  In those days it wasn't the girly game it is today.  You could only put subs on if someone was injured, you couldn't take people off because they were tired.  That was kind of the point of being fit, that you could keep going at the end.

There was one game I didn't play in, against John Smeaton which we won 21-16.  There were 3 tries each and the difference between the teams was that Graham kicked all our kicks whereas they missed theirs.  One particular conversion was from right on the touchline, and it was from the wrong side for a right footed kicker (if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry, it's a rugby thing).  The thing I remember is not just that it went over, but the body language of the whole team, who cheered and jumped up in the air as it went over.  I wouldn't have seen it if I'd been on the pitch, but I could see them all from where I was stood.

Why do I remember that kick?  Well, to put it into perspective, this is schoolboy rugby I'm talking about.  These were not professionals.  We used to practice once a week during double games on a Tuesday afternoon and we had a quick runaround one lunchtime a week as well, which was necessarily short because we also had to fit in getting a school dinner in that hour.  And Graham was always practising.  He used to practice kicking, after we'd all packed in (maybe he took packed lunches, I'm not sure).  Sometimes I used to watch him practisiing his kicks out of the window, and the thing was, they nearly always went through the middle of the posts.  

But even knowing that about him, it was still amazing that the kick against John Smeaton went over.  The pitch was so clarted up with 80s mud, and the ball was so wet that it would have been like kicking a pumpkin.

And that's why I remember it, and that's why I remember Mick the Miller's try, and Bill Barker's against Giggleswick.  Because it wasn't likely to have happened.  All the games we won, when we were supposed to, against teams we were better than, and all the kicks that went over from in front of the posts, I've forgotten. 

But I remember the unlikely things, because they happened against the odds, and I saw them, and I can remember how it felt when I did.  And for me that's the meaning of sport.