More Autumn (And Football)

More Autumn

Last week I got the urge to garden, an urge I find difficult to resist. The urge happened to coincide with some quite large blue pots on offer in the local supermarket, so I bought one to go on the wall side of my balcony. Something to climb up the wall, I thought: a clematis, another jasmin; a rose? Why not all three? That was being too ambitious for the size of pot so there was only one solution: another pot. The jasmin and clematis are now installed in one pot; the other pot awaits a suitable rose.

I then decided that there was no way I could make the roadside opposite my kitchen window suitable for growing anything much but noticed that there was room for a large pot beside one of the trees without causing inconvenience to anyone. So I bought a plastic pot large enough to hold a climbing rose which I shall place there.

I also cleared up most of the back garden and bought 50 narcissi bulbs. I'm still rethinking the back, how to get more colour in August and September. Geraniums and bizzie lizzies seem to be the popular options but I'm not keen on either of them. I've planted some lavender but will have to keep thinking. I want all the planting done this autumn so that the plants can become established over the winter and are ready to take off next spring.

The weather continues to be surprisingly mild in the evenings. Early mornings are becoming noticeably dark and misty but the days are still warm and sunny and the warmth continues late into the evenings. Usually, at this time of the year, you need a sweater on after about 7 o'clock but now it's still shirt-sleeves temperature until 9-10 o'clock at night. I love the warm evenings so that is a real bonus.

For the last two Monday evenings we have been eating indoors at the Bar du Pont, although light rather than temperature has dictated that. Roberto has decided on “tartiflette”, a kind of potato, cheese and bacon hotpot, as a regular alternative to pizzas for the winter and that suits me fine as I like it and can never get through a whole pizza.

So, for me, the autumn has started well (and for Chelsea too); the optimists among the local soothsayers are predicting that the weather will hold well into December. I hope they are right.

Racism?

Friend Steve copied me an article by Rod Liddle, a good football journalist, which was a rant on the Football Association finding Chelsea captain John Terry guilty of racism when a criminal law court had found him not guilty of the same charge. I found I agreed with most of the article, even leaving aside the self-evident and long-established ineptness of the FA (not for nothing commonly known among football fans as the sweet FA).

What caught my interest was neither the FA's role nor the question of whether John Terry did utter the attributed remark or not. There were two points that came together in my mind. Firstly, after what was a very fractious match in which the incident occurred, all the players apparently shook hands and agreed to let bygones be bygones; that happens in a lot of matches in most sports. Secondly, Terry grew up in a multi-cultural neighbourhood playing with kids of many colours and currently plays at a club with a similarly mixed ethnicity, counting several black players as his avowed best friends. So it is unlikely that he is racist in any generally accepted sense.

That does not mean to say that he may not have made a racist curse in the heat of the moment and thus offended the thought police. Curses of sublime vileness are frequently made in football and no doubt other sports' matches. On the record are players at one time or another having uttered such sweet nothings as son of a whore, I fucked your sister and your mother's a whore. Zinedine Zidane was famously sent off in the penultimate World Cup final for reacting to one such comment (his opponent officially deemed blameless). So what's the official line on these sweet nothings? Nothing.

One point of view is that much that is regrettable is said and done in most high-adrenaline contact sports that is best settled after the match when tempers have cooled in peer-group reconciliation. And it's not just football; no footballer has yet been accused of biting a lump out of an opposing player's ear. Nor is it just men's games; I have a cherished video of a women's match that out-machoed any men's game I've seen and could easily have been the basis of GBH proceedings.

Another point of view is that racist comments are different; you can say an opponent is a son/daughter of a whore or his/her mother is a whore but not that he/she is the (black) son/daughter of a black whore (or, presumably, a white, yellow or even green whore).

It is into this absurd, legally ambiguous and politically correct minefield that the FA gaily ventured, with the inevitable result that it simply reinforced its reputation for ineptness.