2012: The Year of the Elephant in the Room

I started watching boxing after Lennox Lewis beat Evander Holyfield in the second fight of 1999. What this means is that in my viewing lifetime there has never been a heavyweight fighter of any charisma or talent. Our current undisputed heavyweight champion is the uninspiring Ruslan Chagaev, who gained the title by fighting the walking freakshow Valuev, a seven foot Russian slugger styled 'The Beast from the East'. Over in England we have had the occasionally talented but soulless Danny Williams, the former kickboxer Matt Skelton, and the supremely unlovable and arrogant Audley 'Fraudley' Harrison. Any of these dubious characters could easily knock out one of the talented and exciting fighters to be found in the light and middle weight classes at the same time, but they could never hope to acheive the same level of respect or popularity.

What this means is that the pleasure derived from sport is not dependent, as is sometimes claimed, on the sportsmen being the best in the world at their endevour, but rather on more intangible qualities like elegance and heart. There is no reason therefore why the Paralympics should not be taken as seriously as the Olympics. That being said, there is something deeply unsatisfying about the Paralympics. Mostly it is the rather worrying ethic which seems to pervade the games that it is not about the winning, but about the taking part. Nobody ever boos the opposing amputees, and if Britain's wheelchair rugby team fail in disgrace at the next games we can be sure that there won't be any angry tabloid articles berating them. The overwhelming feeling of the Paralympics is 'aren't they doing well'. I won't take the games seriously until contestants start taking performance enhancing drugs.

There's no news like a lack of news

A long car journey today gave me ample opportunity to savour Radio Four's dreaded hour and a half of news headlines (between 5 and 6.30 if you want to enjoy it yourself. It's almost a pleasure when the Archers comes on) and I was amazed by the amount of non-news on the Foot and Mouth incident. It strikes me that news outlets assign the number of minutes each story gets according to importance, rather than how much there is to say. I accept that another outbreak of Foot and Mouth would be a dreadful and significant event, but I don't see why I need to hear constant speculation and reminders that the situation has not changed in any significant way since yesterday. When there is news, tell me it, until then let's hear about something else. It's a bit like the compulsory ten minutes of time allocated every evening for over a week to telling us that areas of the UK affected by flooding have been damaged just as badly as everyone thought they would be, but no worse.

Dogtooth's recent mockery of Green envirobeefery bought to mind a new training regime which I have myself adopted. I get on a treadmill and rack it up to a goodly pace, and then fix my eyes on the calorie counter. A medium sized egg is 80 calories, so I run until I feel tired, and then see how many eggs worth of calories I have burned. I then go home and consume that many eggs. I sort of think that moving the calories through my system, rather than letting them hang around in my subcutaneous expanses, has the effect of flushing out unhealthiness, or something of that sort. At the very least it allows me to eat a lot more eggs than I otherwise would.

Meditation on Thais

Thaksin Shinawatra has bought Manchester City FC. This is just bizarre. Thaksin, lately the Prime Minister of Thailand, was deposed in his absence after a military coup in september of last year. Since then he has been living in London. In 2004 he laughably attempted to buy Liverpool FC. Presumably he tasted the delicious prospect of owning his own club then and has never looked back. Hmmm. Football and coups d'Etat? This is really the London Prodigal's territory. Although Dogtooth was in Bangkok when the tanks rolled in and was compelled to keep tabs on the whole affair. How strange that I should have witnessed the ousting of Thai statesman, yet I have never watched a Manchester City match.

Where's the beef?

There's no idiot like a pedantic idiot. Research done by Chris Goodall, Green candidate for Oxford West, endeavours - by way of a quite breathtaking departure from reason - to show that driving to the shops is four times greener than walking the same distance. Greater idiocy hath no rationalisation than the empirical evidence offered to support this claim: that a brisk walk to the shops will result in the sudden and uncontrollable urge to devour 100g of, say, beef, the production and delivery of which leaves a hefty carbon footprint in its wake. No doubt Hamilton's trusty abacus could provide us with some reliable stats and figures, but I imagine that a national aggregate of two to three main meals is eaten daily, discounting intervals of snacking. Appetites tend to be large or small, and rarely fluctuate. Clearly a 7km treadmill session would put the wind up the conscientious calorie-counter, but I have never known anyone to return from the 400 yard hike to the post office gasping for 100g of minced beef to quell their raging metabolism. That a significant number of Europeans expand quite markedly in their middle years is proof that we are overeating/underexercising anyway, and that the amount of food we need has little bearing on the amount we eat. Goodall's statistics may apply to a hyena abroad on the African plains, eating according to its requirements; but since the dawn of what might broadly be called civilisation, they have not been applicable to our lot.

This just in: Dogtooth popped out to the shops earlier to pick up some basic groceries. When I returned I drank a chaste glass of orange juice. I breakfasted modestly this morning; notwithstanding, the impulse to gorge 100g of beef is not overwhelming. I will hang on until supper-time.