‘Joy and woe are woven fine’
To expand on this well known phrase from William Blake – it comes from that poem which we all had to read in school: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower...’, called ‘Auguries of Innocence’.
‘Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.’
The reason for quoting this is really an apologia because I was originally going to write about something humorous: the recent LAFTA awards, in contrast to the BAFTA awards. More of them later.
If one searches for a story which to my North American readers catches the pulse of everyday life in the UK; until the tragic news about Marie Colvin et al in Homs; a story which excited nationwide sorrow and sympathy appeared in the news this week and concerned a fatal crash which happened to children and teachers on their way back from a half term school ski trip. Now you may say that this is a very middle class preoccupation. Skiing, at least for Brits, is an elitist sport. Very poor children, and those from schools where many of the kids are from broken homes or of single mothers, are unlikely to be off skiing for half term. But it seems that this was a very ordinary school in Alvechurch in the Midlands, many of whose parents must have really dug deep to send them on holiday, and the chosen method, as with so many of these trips is a rather ghastly long journey by coach, cross channel and down to the Alps, staying either in very basic hotels or dorms, and then travelling back again by coach overnight. Both of my daughters have chosen to do this sort of trip before – with their University ski groups, and while the journey is unpleasant, they survived and even had fun. In this case it seems likely that the coach driver fell asleep at three o’ clock in the morning as they drove back up the autoroute, the coach careered off the carriageway, and one teacher, a Mr Peter Rippington, died instantly, one girl was very seriously injured, and there were a number of other injuries. Mr Rippington, who was much loved by the children, was 59, and was just about to retire. A sad little photo of a memorial left by children at the school said ‘Rip, R.I.P.’ In parallel with this story there appears in the news today a little item which suggests that reports from BALPA, the British Airline Pilots Association, indicate that a substantial percentage of pilots admit to falling asleep in flight. This accompanies a piece that states there are proposals to allow an increase in the maximum time in a 24 hour period that pilots can spend in the cockpit. Currently this stands at what seems to me to be a surprisingly long period: 16 hours and 15 minutes.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) makes annual awards which can be viewed as Britain’s answer to the Oscars. Looked at dispassionately, these awards are a self-congratulatory exercise which generates publicity for all the Luvvies involved in TV and Film. Belatedly, a number of organisations, e.g. hospitals, banks, hotels, in fact virtually anybody, has tumbled to this idea. In contrast, the LAFTAS (source of acronym unclear) are comedy awards sponsored by Loaded Magazine. The appellation requires one to think of comedy with a Northern accent, hence LAFTA not LARFTER. This is a long winded way of getting round to the awards for best one-liners. This year’s winner is Tim Vine: ‘Conjunctivitis.com; now that’s a site for sore eyes’. There were some reasonable also-rans: Jimmy Carr with ‘I know a couple who get on like a house on fire. They both feel trapped and are slowly suffocating to death.’ Paul Daniels: ‘I said to a fella, “Is there a B&Q in Henley?”. He said “No, there’s an H, an E, an N, an L, and a Y”. Perhaps to appreciate that you need to know that B&Q is one of our largest D-I-Y outlets.
Or another in joke – though British Football (or soccer if you insist) is so world wide that the machinations of our larger clubs are more or less universal property. There is a nice tongue in cheek article by Matthew Norman on the back of the Telegraph Sports section today, in which he pokes fun at the situation currently endured by Andre Villas-Boas, the young Chelsea manager. Chelsea were trounced in the Champions’ League this week by Napoli, 3-1. Chelsea of course is owned by a rather dubious but indubitably rich Russian called Roman Abramovich, a man who goes through managers and players rather faster than he goes through yachts, wives, or Armani shoes. In addition, Abramovich seems to love his football, and therein lies the problem. He is not exactly a ‘hands off’ owner. Graeme Souness once said of the Southampton chairman, Rupert Lowe, ‘How can anyone who is called Rupert know anything about football?’ Equally it seems one could ask the same of Roman. The gist of the Norman article is that Villas-Boas is imagined to be an innocent abroad: ‘Signing up for a boss as legendarily patient and ferociously committed to painstaking, long-term planning as the Siberian oligarch, the assumption must have been that the first three years would be nothing more than the prologue, dedicated almost solely to the laying of sturdy foundations.’ I think you appreciate the irony already. Further on Norman says: ’Not only is the Chelsea dressing room among the cuddliest ever assembled, boasting such ego-free loyalists as John Terry, Ashley Cole and Frank Lampard. With Didier Drogba and Florent Malouda boosting the average age to 57, the Stamford Bridge crèche offered a beguiling vista of a golden tomorrow laden with silverware.’ It seems that the pay off for AVB will be in the £10-15 million pound range. As Norman says, ‘Regrets? Perhaps he’ll have a few. But then again, too few to mention.’
For a sport which is generally more visceral and less cerebral than rugby, football can generate quite a lot of humour, though this rarely comes from the players themselves. A report from another hotel in Oman where we were staying last week confirmed that the Wigan Athletic players, there for a friendly match (their goalkeeper – OK – goaltender if you will – Ali Al Habsi is an Omani), were not all immersed in Kindles catching up on Jane Austen but using their iphones, or their ipods with the noise cancelling headphones. Given the sort of stuff they probably listen to I would have thought that noise cancelling headphones were a good idea. An article about rugby by Alasdair Reid reports an incident in a match between Newcastle and London Irish. He starts by saying: ‘John Lambie, the legendary manager of Partick Thistle FC, was once told that his main striker had suffered a knock to the head and didn’t know who he was. “That’s brilliant,” Lambie growled. “Tell him he’s Pele and get him back on.” It seems that something similar happed to Newcastle winger Ryan Shortland, who took a ‘heavy blow’ and ‘wasn’t 100 percent sure where he was’. Shortly after this however, Shortland produced the game’s pivotal moment and scored a brilliant try (touchdown for you gridiron fanatics).
Sport seems to have preoccupied me far too much when I meant to tell you about our 4 day trip to Oman last week, with its lovely climate at this time of the year, lovely people, and spectacular scenery and experiences. In fact that is why I originally titled the blog ‘One hundred camels for your daughter.’
‘One hundred camels for your daughter’. I thought at first it was a joke, but now I wasn’t so sure. Our hunky Omani guide, Mohammed (how many Mohammeds are there in the Middle East?) had recently unburdened himself to us concerning his failure to win the hand of his girlfriend, a girl he had really liked very much. Her father, who was described in dismissive tones by Mohammed as really ‘an African, not an Omani’ had thought to make substantial capital of his daughter. Mohammed had been anticipating a dowry of perhaps a thousand rials (about £1750), and had possibly been of the opinion that the asking price might perhaps be up to three thousand rials. When the prospective father in law, who by dint of eloquent gesture Mohammed implied was the Ebenezer Scrooge of Muscat had asked for six thousand rials, he could see that his marriage plans were going up in frankincense scented smoke. Once the awful price was named however, his girlfriend, once so amenable, so well disposed towards him, became a tartar. ‘Surely I am worth six thousand rials?’ she taunted him. Poor Mohammed, who had thought to make the catch for about a thousand, with a couple of thousand to invest in setting up home together, was discomfited and the relationship was over. Without having seen the lady it was hard to judge whether either party was in the right. Lindsay was of the opinion that our Mohammed was a bit of a bad boy, and the father had been justified in naming an impractical price for his daughter, but I didn’t think we could be sure. To cheer him up I told him a very old joke which I must have heard thirty years ago about the situation in rural Ireland, where just as in Oman it was the custom for the male suitor to recompense the prospective bride’s father. The story goes that an unmarried farmer, of not very prepossessing appearance, had heard about a farmer in a nearby valley who had three marriageable daughters, who surprisingly had not been taken. Approaching the father, and eyeing approvingly the three girls, he enquired first about the least attractive of the three, who was called Maggie. ‘Ah, well now’, said the father. ‘I would accept 50 pounds for her hand’. ‘Fifty pounds’, said the farmer, ‘to be sure that isn’t very much. Is there anything wrong with the girl.’ ‘Well’, said his prospective father in law, ‘She is just after being the tiniest little bitty bit deaf.’ ‘So’, said the other, ‘what about Molly? Now she’s a prettier thing altogether.’ ‘Ay, she is that,’ agreed her father, ‘and she is thirty pounds’. ‘Thirty pounds’, said the suitor, ‘Now that is very reasonable.’ ‘Ah but’, said her father, ‘but you see she is just the tiniest little bitty bit lame in her legs, you see.’ ‘Well now’, said the visitor. ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to marry Mary, for she is the prettiest of the three.’ ‘Well, to be honest wid yer’, said the other, ‘I am just looking for ten pounds to take her off my hands.’ ‘Bless my soul’, said the farmer. ‘She must have a terrible temper on her, or sometin’ like dat’. ‘No said her father. She is the loveliest girl that you would ever wish to meet’. ‘Well I would definitely like her for my wife’, said the farmer. Is there nothing that is the matter, at all?’ ‘Well’, said Mary’s father, a little sheepishly, ‘She is just the tiniest little bitty bit pregnant’.
I don’t think this story did much to improve Mohammed’s feelings about his slight from the ‘African’ Omani, but it passed the time as we wound our way over the rough tracks of the Wadi Arbaeen. I found that, much as in England our suspicion of interlopers leads us to blame immigrants for every minor thing, in Oman it is either ‘they’re African’ or, when another driver was cut up by a car which pulled in unpredictably across our bows, ‘Indian’. The poor Indians have a tough time in the Gulf countries. Poverty stricken migrants, nobody is quite sure how many there are. A newspaper article in the Times of Oman by the government of Kerala estimated that there might be as many as two million Keralites working in the Middle East. On their way into the country, they are tempted to smuggle, and every poor Indian we saw at the airport was being taken apart by the customs officers. Not without reason perhaps. On the day after our arrival the Times of Oman reported the arrest of two large caches of heroin at the airport in immigrants’ belongings.
I am still fairly sure that Mohammed was joking about my daughter Katie, who has just turned 21. A high quality racing camel can fetch 100,000 rials; but on the other hand, I don’t know what the cheapest camel one can buy costs. Perhaps it’s like comparing a new Ferrari with a ten year old Nissan Micra... Mohammed was very keen when he left us to get both of the girls’ e mail addresses. His life of good behaviour in Oman (his mother is apparently very strict and is in the police force) is merely a temporary holding pattern until he can go clubbing in Dubai, or, his most fervent wish, to get to the Bora Bora beach party in Ibiza. In the meantime, he is a fluent and agreeable companion to our trip into the Wadis and to the desert camps of the Wahiba sands.
Perhaps it was all a bit rushed. I think the girls enjoyed it. They said so and I certainly hope so. We did hightail out of the desert at the crack of dawn (30 minutes drive across the sand), had to wake the garage proprietor in Bidiyyah to reinflate the tires of the Toyota Landcruiser, in order to arrive early in Nizwa, for the weekly cattle, goat, and sheep market. This was well worth the effort. A very medieval atmosphere pervades the little ring where the owners or their farmworkers walk or run round with their beasts, and crafty, sometimes almost imperceptible bidding and dealing goes on as they do so. There is no control over entry to the circuit, so the souk is a melee of men walking any which way to get to the action. It would be easy to get kicked or seriously injured. In another area, desert tribesmen appreciatively examine rifles for sale, with a lot of waving around of the weapons. I like to think of Nizwa as something like Dodge City in the 19th century – Wilfred Thesiger was here in 1947 or thereabouts, and gun law ruled. After our tour of the fort (straight out of Beau Geste), we head back to the luxurious beach of the Al Bustan palace in Muscat for a final day of relaxation.
I suggest looking at the Blake poem again. I am sure it will recall memories of your childhood. Blake wrote at times in a very direct, even naïf style, though critics agree that there is dense symbolism in virtually every couplet in this poem. It is meant to express the lot of man after the fall from grace and loss of innocence, with suggestions as to how to recover the prelapsarian state. As Joni Mitchell sang ‘we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’. I find that easier to understand.
