LITMIR.BIZ

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steel and aorta.

      For all the literal and psychic scar tissue the incident left behind, hand on nearly-pierced heart, I’d rather relive that lively dawn encounter than listen again to that drone of basso profundo killer bees trapped in a drum. If what my wife, whose finishing school was bombed in the war, refers to as the ‘vulva labia’ is indeed a central panel in the tapestry of South African national life, so too are Aids and carjacking, and you don’t hear anyone slapping metaphorical preservation orders on them.

      78

      The Charlton Brothers

      Are Jackie and Bobby Charlton Jewish? I wouldn’t normally ask, because the fact that they were respectively decent and exceptional at football would seem to offer a definitive answer to that question. And even if it doesn’t, the existence of coalminers among their north-east forebears surely settles the point.

      However, there is something so immutably Jewish about their decades-long feud that you have to wonder. From Cain and Abel to Mike and Bernie Winters, and possibly (at the time of writing it remains too soon to be sure) David and Ed Miliband, the fraternal fallout has been a defining sub-strand in my people’s troubled history.

      Whatever their genetic roots, the Charltons have been pests for almost as long as they have been broigus, to use that Yiddish term for non-speakers. One intriguing thing about them … but no, that’s too fanciful a thought even for this book. One mildly interesting thing they represent is an apparent paradox that is in fact no such thing. It is often commented, in mystification, that the greatest players tend to make the lousiest managers, and vice versa. The truth is that gifted individuals fixate on themselves, which is not a recipe for successful leadership, while the more mediocre need to think more about the team and their role within it to survive, which clearly is.

      So it has been with the Charltons. Bobby, a magnificent midfielder for Manchester United and England, had one foray into management, wasting no time in easing Preston North End to relegation. Jackie, an effective clumper of a centre half for Leeds United and England, took both Middlesbrough and Sheffield Wednesday in the other direction before leading the Republic of Ireland to an unlikely World Cup quarter-final in 1990.

      Forced to choose the Charlton with whom to be trapped in a lift, it would probably come down to the toss of a coin. Jackie has a slightly cruel, laconic wit, putting you in mind of the Duke of Edinburgh he facially resembles, but might drive you mad with the didacticism and unpalatability of his opinions about the state of the world and who is to blame for it (see Prince Philip, above). His inability in press conferences to remember the names of players he selected for Ireland minutes earlier further suggests a man who might, in that faulty elevator, thrice entertain you with the same anecdote within the same quarter-hour.

      Bobby, on the other hand, would bore you close to a coma far quicker than the lack of oxygen. A drearier old fart English sport has never known. His monotone could be used by riot police who left their CS gas back at the station, while added to the stubbornness that saw him retain the combover for thirty years is a sullen taciturnity to chill the blood.

      There is an excuse for Bobby’s failure to scintillate off the pitch as he once did on it, of course, and it pays credit to his elder brother’s fraternal sensibilities that despite acknowledging how the Munich air crash of 1958 affected the younger’s personality, Jackie disdains the making of any allowances.

      The precise cause of the feud has fascinated scholars for decades, yet despite tireless research and the publication of both men’s autobiographies, it remains a source of mystery. All that is known beyond doubt is that it centred around their mother Cissie, an apparently domineering matriarchal figure whom Bobby resented for disrespecting his wife, Jackie in turn resenting Bobby for ignoring Cissie as a result. Jackie also resented Cissie, in his case for favouring the more talented Bobby when they were children, but expressed that by showering money and time upon her. Oddly for an older brother of such seemingly limitless self-confidence, he seems much the more sensitive of the two.

      The most admirable thing about both, meanwhile, and the one and only thing that binds them, is their adamant refusal to acknowledge the other. Here they show unwonted good taste, and set an example the rest of us will, in the absence of a broken lift, be happy to follow.

      77

      The Charity Fun Runner

      Were the pen truly mightier than the sword, the penchant for marathon runners wearing fancy dress in the alleged interests of charity would not have survived that glorious scene in The Office in which, on Comic Relief day, David Brent is sacked while dressed as a comedy ostrich. Scything though it was, Ricky Gervais’s satire of the exhibitionist dullard claiming to be motivated by the plight of starving Africans when driven solely by the craving for attention had no effect. Every year several thousand people continue to run the London Marathon dressed as superheroes, cuddly animals, ballerinas, vampires, and in one memorable instance a Rubik’s Cube.

      This is by no means an event screaming out for additional reasons to ignore it. As one of Gervais’s own comedy heroes, Jerry Seinfeld, put it in his eponymous sitcom about nothing, when invited to a friend’s friend’s apartment to watch the New York version, ‘What’s to see? A woman from Norway, a guy from Kenya, and 20,000 losers.’

      The particularly pernicious thing about fun runners, more even than how they plunder the event of its inherent nobility, is the hint their costumes offer about the callousness of their sponsors – the implicit suggestion that had they asked for donations to run in shorts and a vest, they would have been brusquely dismissed. Can it really be that, as the determinedly zany do the rounds of their locals, they often hear the words ‘I’ll give you 50p per mile, and gladly so, but only if you dress as Virgil Tracy. If you won’t do it dressed as the pilot of Thunderbird 2, the local hospice can go hang’?

      76

      Rhona Martin

      The Mrs Mop of the Winter Olympics (it’s being so cheerful as keeps her going) is honoured with an entry very little for herself, and even less as a representative of a peculiarly nonsensical ‘sport’. Primarily Rhona is honoured here as the catalyst for despair and self-disgust induced by her finest hour.

      She seems a dour sort, to be truthful, does the captain of the Great Britain squad that won gold in Utah in 2002, and the doleful sheepdog haircut has its part to play there. But wouldn’t you be miserable if you devoted your waking life to such a vocation? Many Olympic minority events are lent charm by their nihilistic pointlessness, and those of us afflicted with the obsessive interest in numbers and rankings that almost defines the Aspergers end of the spautistic spectrum can pass untold hours fascinated by the scoring systems of diving, archery, showjumping and even weightlifting.

      Curling, on the other hand, is what that late and deeply lamented comic giantess Linda Smith wisely identified as ‘housework on ice’. What it says about this country that millions of us were driven to emotional involvement in Martin’s triumph is too obvious to say at all. But we’ll say it anyway. What a preposterous sporting land this must be when the endeavours of four slow-skating charladies buffing up a sheet of ice for no apparent purpose is the cause of feverish national excitement.

      This outbreak of proxy Henmania – the succumbing of otherwise normal people to patriotic impulses that overwhelm all rationale to cause more revulsion than pleasure – was as fierce as any in modern history. To care desperately, even for a few hours, about which stone has been ice-buffed to which part of ‘the house’ (the scoring section) was a shaming experience, and hers as depressing a gold medal as was ever placed around the neck of a Scottish housekeeper misrouted from overseeing the polishing of baronial floors to standing on a podium, moist-eyed, making a choral request to the Lord for the survival of our Queen. Shame on you, Rhona Martin, and infinitely more shame on us for watching you.

      75

      Arjen Robben

      It pays rich testament to this gifted Dutchman that the fans of Chelsea FC, seldom saluted as the least partisan of supporters, cannot stand the man who contributed so much to the winning of their first Premier League title in 2005–06.

      It

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