Danger! Peril! Oh for goodness sake what NOW?!

We, if we are to believe what we are told, must live in the most perilous society on Earth. It is a wonder any of us are able to summon up the courage to leave our homes, as there are at any one time seemingly hundreds of studies going on to tell what new and interesting dangers are lurking around every corner.

In one newspaper we are warned that "a cluster of 31 cancers existed in one street" and that "this woman is one of more than 30 people in her neighbourhood to have developed cancer" underneath a picture of a vulnerable but resolute-looking elderly lady. The reason, we are told, is that the neighbourhood in question is in close proximity to two mobile phone masts. This is undoubtedly scary stuff- and is worth taking note of. These studies could have serious repercussions on the heath (and the communications networks upon which we so heavily rely) of the country. That story appears on the front page, and then continues inside.

Yet in the same newspaper an article appears headlined "Women in cities face higher risk of breast cancer". The reason for this is, according to the health expert consulted, "believed to be due to increased exposure to oestrogen, possibly due to the chemicals in pollution."
No mention here of mobile phone masts, of course. It might make sense to link the two stories- cities have the highest mobile network coverage of any areas of the country. There is another article discussing the risks of women who choose hormone replacement therapy. Oh, and a small note mentioning the high (and rising) percentage of woman graduates who are childless because they leave it too late to conceive.

My point is not to question the validity of these facts. But if the women of the nation chose to plot their lives according to these stories- just three articles in one newspaper on one day- they would not attend University, would live in the countryside (and even then, at least a mile from a phone mast? and would have children as early they can. The newspaper, effectivelty, is advocating a mass migration of women away from the cities, away from education, and into young motherhood. Like hundreds of years ago.

It would be a safe life; and let's not forget the myriad of other scaremongering stories that one could read during the course of a week. There'd be less cancer. Healthier chances of conception. Far less rogue door-to-door salesmen. Less danger from traffic. Greatly reduced peril of falling masonry, terrorist attack, and sexual harrassment from grubby men on public transport. And if they became self-sufficient, then their food would be entirely organic, again reducing their apparent cancer risk.

But this scenario of Britain's womenfolk retreating to the hills to form a community of country-dwelling, frantically procreating adolescents isn't especially likely to occur. It would involve undoing all the hallmarks of progress we are so proud of. All these stories serve to do is sew seeds of doubt in the mind of the women whose choices of career, education, and place of dwelling puts them squarely in this bracket of risk. There is such a constant stream of research occuring to feed these lazy column inches that one wonders if some of them weren't commissioned to study these perils (that people can't easily avoid while trying to fulfil their own potential in career or lifestyle) we mightn't have got a step or two closer to actually curing the ailments we're told pollution, mobile phone masts, and HRT can cause. If mobile phone masts' power is turned down, and they cease to be built near to schools and residential areas, then an important step will have been made. But people will still get cancer; and people will still look for something to blame- and too many easy column inches will be gained from it, without getting near a proper solution.

The Most Skilful Sport in the World?

In the recent weeks, a recurring conversation with a number of Australians has kept alive an argument that they will not let go; which sport is the most skilful in the world?
Naturally, the Australians feel they have the winner, or else they wouldn’t be so keen to continue the argument. Their beloved AFL (“Aussie Rules”) is, according to them, the perfect blend of speed, accuracy of passing and kicking, strength and toughness. It is certainly tougher than the similar sport we sometimes see played, the Irish Gaelic football. But can it really be the most skilful sport in the world?

I always point to the football we see from week to week in our Premiership (and, of course the leagues below),which must be up there in terms of skill. With the likes of Michael Carrick and Steven Gerrard fizzing passes around, and players with Wayne Rooney or Thierry Henry’s control receiving them, soccer must eclipse anything that Antipodean version of “footy” has got. Aussie Rules is a game that is very impressive because of its scale- they play on a cricket pitch, so it’s enormous, and they play with eighteen players a side. In a nation so enormous, perhaps they find all other sports rather meagre in comparison, and the AFL is the only one that suit’s the grand scale of size they’re used to. My response has always been to boast soccer as an infinitely more skilful sport- there is nothing so cultured as the raw skill of Cristiano Ronaldo or Cesc Fabregas in the ungainly efforts down under.

Now I have thought about it, however, I would probably look elsewhere than soccer. Each player does a fairly well-defined separate job, not all players master all the skills involved (apart from in League Two, where the mighty Hartlepool have recently shown themselves masters of the trade on all fronts en route to promotion). And something as simple as size can make a difference, whether particularly skilful or not- Duncan Ferguson made a career out of being tall and ludicrously short-tempered.

That rules out a lot of team sports, however, including rugby and cricket. While the jobs of, for instance, the scrum-half, the fly-half, and the blindside flanker are very skilful, they are also very specialised. Cricketers, too, stick to their own discipline of bowling or batting, with little scope for truly excelling in both as an all-rounder. The art of bowling spin in cricket must be more difficult than anything you see in Aussie Rules- they simply run around punching the ball to each other and bouncing it every few metres to avoid being penalised. But spin bowlers don’t tend to contribute all around the game like Aussie Rules players do.

There are so many sports which you feel could challenge the Aussie Rules fans’ arrogance- ice hockey is a sport that, having tried it, I have utmost respect for. Hockey skills are tricky enough without strapping a pair of blades to your feet and sliding around a treacherous surface. Similarly, Polo must be an awkward sport to master, having the unpredictability factor of having to aim your shots while astride a living, breathing, beast of burden. Even so, I would probably go for a multi-sports discipline as my final answer to the Australians- a decathlon (or heptathlon) is a fantastically sadistic way to bludgeon the body into submission, where often competitors perform at world class standard in all but one or two of the total amount of disciplines tackled. The range of skills on show there is phenomenal; but as for a team sport that beats the all-round skills of the AFL? Soccer’s probably closest. But, to my dismay, the Australians might just win this as well.

Any government making David Icke sound sane needs to look hard in the mirror...

Sometimes it takes a madman to make you see truth.
A case in point was last Christmas time, and was brought about by none other than David Icke, who, for the uninitiated, is a somewhat enigmatic character who was written numerous book espousing the view that all the major players in the world’s history have been descendants of- and there’s no easy way to put this- reptiles. A reptilian master race, apparently, spawned The Queen, George Bush, in fact any major player in world politics, past and present.

I need surely say no more to convince you that the man is mad. Should you remain, for whatever reason, unconvinced, however, peruse if you will the title of just one of his many books- Tales from the Time Loop: The Most Comprehensive Expos of the Global Conspiracy Ever Written and All You Need to Know to Be Truly Free. Oh, and he once told Terry Wogan, on air, that he believed himself to be the Son of God (what Jesus Christ might have to say about this- and whether Jesus was himself a reptilian- he didn’t say).

Yet Icke’s flagrant insanity isn’t what made Channel 5’s “David Icke: Was He Right?” a chilling piece of documentary television. It’s the fact that he, for a while at least, made sense. Not about the Reptiles, and not about the myriad other conspiracies he’s convinced of. Before he got onto this stuff- his bread and butter material- he was making convincing noises about the nature of modern government, and in particular whether ours may be considered a Police State. It was convincing not particularly because of what Icke was saying, but because of footage of Brian Haw, an anti-war demonstrator who has been camped in Parliament Square since 2001. Haw has been a thorn in the side of Parliament and the Police throughout his five-year vigil, falling foul of numerous laws and legal tussles along the way.

Police succeeded in denying Icke’s wife, filming him talkin to Haw, the right to film, despite there being no legal basis for doing so. It made uncomfortable viewing .This was right before the Lizard conspiracy was discussed at length, reminding the viewer of just who it was that we’re dealing with here. The question is, why did the Police bother? What harm was the filming of that one already well-publicised man going to do? Even if they didn’t like the idea of it, what happened to shrugging the shoulders and accepting people’s right to do things that don’t break any laws?

Icke’s job is made easier, when speaking to groups of hundreds of paying devotees at a time, because he can so easily dovetail conspiracy theories in with the post-9/11 climate of suspicion, human rights infringements, and press restrictions. Global politics is now easy pickings for someone like him, given the climate of mutual mistrust between governments and people. He can push the “Bush is a terrorist” argument. He can prey on people’s suspicions about Blair. He knows that we don’t really trust what we’re being told from day to day.

In a lot of ways it’s a lot like listening to George Galloway. The man is, to be frank, frightening. He has, over the last five years, been accused of being complicit with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, after his name was found in documents following the Allied invasion in 2003. He has been ejected from the sanctity of the Labour Party for bringing the party into disrepute after speaking out against the invasion (which hardly made him look innocent of the prior accusation of impropriety). He formed his own party, Respect, and managed to become MP for Bethnal Green. He was then accused of deserting those very constituents by ludicrously entering the Big Brother house, ostensibly to spread his political message to a new audience, but in reality ended up dressed as a cat, crawling around at the feel of Rula Lenska.

Yet to hear him speak is a troubling affair. He is obviously convincing enough, even in his new Respect guise, to win a constituency election. He speaks uncompromisingly and skilfully on all manner of Middle Eastern issues, and sticks to his guns fiercely. The problem for the listener is, that both he and David Icke, men who few would choose to agree with if they had the choice, have got so much ammunition. Galloway will have a constant supply of material on which to rally because of the simple fact that, on many topics, he is right, and is certainly not shy about telling us so. Our government has failed to listen to its people with regard to the War in Iraq, and as such, men like Galloway become to the torch-bearers for the people. His Talk-Sport weekend phone-in is evidence enough of that, and all the more worrying for it.

Even the lunatic Icke. Ninety-nice per cent of his credulity-stretching tirades are nonsense. But it doesn’t matter if you are a mad ex-Coventry City goalkeeper turned conspiracy theorist and holocaust denier , as Icke is- the footage he presented spoke, worryingly, for itself. Not, perhaps, enough to make you start examining Blair’s face for reptilian features. But enough to make you think.

Cricket World Cup Sex Doll Shame

As a fan lucky enough to travel to the Cricket World Cup in the Carribbean, I can report that it has been an experience full of fun, and a credit to the islands hosting it. Or rather; everything outside the tournament itself has been.

To describe the competition itself, I'd like to highlight an episode of officialdom gone mad, involving a self important Security Guard and a sex doll, Misguidedly, the security official tried to confiscate the aforementioned doll from a bunch of rowdy New Zealand fans during their match with the West Indies. As he picked it up and carried it away- with no mention as to what crime the unsuspecting doll had committed to warrant her ejection- he realised that, carrying under his arm a fully-inflated polythene woman, he probably didn't look quite as clever as he usually felt when telling people to keep their feet off the seats and other such nonsense. He in fact looked like a fully-fledged kidnapper, as the wind was making the unfortunate doll's legs flap frantically in the breeze as though she was struggling to break free.
He then, safely back in his Security chair at the front of the stand, had to negotiate how to deflate the pneumatic woman. His search for the air valve was priceless; as was his face when he realised where the love-doll manufacturers, with the sense of humour you'd expect of them, had placed the valve.

This poor, unfortunate doll was an important symbol for this World Cup. Her unexplained ejection was symptomatic of the overbearing, American-run Security in force at the grounds- an attitude which stretched to the almost complete eradication of any Carribbean flavour from the matches themselves. Cricket in the Carribbean is usually a festival of music, dancing, barbecues, and overall, fun. The organisers of this World Cup thought it was enough to provide this with staged, tacky displays of "culture" in the lunch breaks. Of course what we all really wanted to see was an event which retained the real flavour of watching cricket in the West Indies; unfortunately that couldn't happen because of the American security, and the fact that the tickets were priced so highly that the local people we'd all hoped to share these events with were simply unable to afford entry to more than a match or two.

The Kiwi fans' doll's plight was more than just symptomatic; the doll was the embodiment of this World Cup- picked up, gripped too tightly, kicking and thrashing. In this case, the overly officious man doing the kidnapping was Malcolm Speed, the chief of the International Cricket Council. This tournament could have been an explosion of culture, colour, music, and sport all rolled into one. As it is, the grounds have been largely half-full at best, and the tournament has effectively been superimposed onto the Carribbean without allowing the islands themselves to interact with the tournament properly. The tournament had the air squeezed out of it by planning committees.

Occasionally, the matches were good enough to allow us to forget the stranglehold of the ICC. England's match against Sri Lanka was by far and away the best game of the tournament so far, the last-ball defeat coming as a bitter blow to all of us English fans shouting ourselves hoarse and waving the flag of St George manically. Unfortunately even the flag-waving was a bit of a flop; flags were allowed in the ground, but only when security personnel had removed the stick ( to be crude, "removing the stick" would have been a good idea for the security men themselves).

Amid all of this, the tragedy of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer's murder a week or so beforehand was brushed under the carpet- it barely made the local press, our only information on the murder investigation's laboured progress came from the copies of the British papers we managed to get hold of. There was talk of this tournament needing to be stopped after Woolmer's murder- the response was that it should go ahead, as a man who devoted himself to the game, he wouldn't want the tournament to stop. The final stages of this tournament will have some considerable work to do in order to make it a tournament befitting Woolmer's memory. Let's hope it happens.