A truly 'world' cup

A truly ‘World’ Cup

In a few weeks the FIFA World Cup will take place in Brazil, and the eyes of the world will turn to South America to follow the fortunes of thirty-two qualifiers. It is the twentieth time that teams have officially gathered for a World Championship, and there will be a huge global television audience, boosted by internet access and media saturation. It is big, big business. An indication of how big is that last time FIFA, the world governing body, produced a seventy-three page document called ‘Television Audience Report’ to analyse in minute detail just how many people watched the finals in South Africa. The main concern of the report is how many people are ‘reached’ by coverage, and consequently how much influence the games have had in furthering the fortunes of the senior partners of FIFA; which include Adidas, Coca-Cola, Sony and Visa.

FIFA find it difficult, and financially compromising, when things do not go to plan. They are still baffled as to how the Beautiful Game has failed to make in-roads into India, and has only had limited success in the USA. There is uncomfortable shuffling of paper when politically sensitive issues rear up, such as their refusal to sanction any of their member nations playing against Tibet. Things that do not fit into the big money-making plan are gently and subtly manipulated so that, in time, the problem goes away.

A problem for FIFA is that professional sport is still unpredictable and no matter how careful the organisers try to be to keep everyone happy, mistakes happen. I use the term ‘mistake’ here in the FIFA sense of an event that does not maximise revenue for everyone at the top table. A clear example this time was the European qualification of teams. In the play-off to decide the remaining finalists after the group winners had been decided, Sweden were drawn to play Portugal. It might not seem like an important mistake until you look down the team-sheets of the two countries. Cristiano Ronaldo is Portuguese. Zlatan Ibrahimovic is Swedish. Over two games, the World Cup was bound to lose one of its star players, eliminated before even a ball has been kicked in the final stages. Both players are world stars, and both earn millions through lucrative sponsorship deals. Both raise the status of their national teams and both would grace the finals in Brazil.

Thankfully for everyone concerned, the bigger world star prevailed and the immaculate pectorals of Cristiano Ronaldo will grace the final stages, while poor Zlatan lies on a different beach somewhere, thinking about his next sponsorship deal.

It is not the first time, though, that things did not go quite according to plan. In 1974, when there were only sixteen teams taking part; England, France, Spain, Hungary, Mexico and the USSR did not qualify for the finals in West Germany. England, Spain and France all had large television audiences to satisfy. Mexico were the previous hosts. Hungary were a fading former football powerhouse. The USSR were disqualified after a shameful play-off against Chile. They failed to turn up in Santiago after a coup d’état.

Although the 1974 World Cup was meticulously organised by West Germany, and won by the home team, it must have seemed rather flat, especially for PaniniStickers. They had produced a glossy sticker album for the children of Europe, and had to shoe-horn in a special section at the back featuring four stickers from each of the ‘big’ countries who had not qualified.

In subsequent series, FIFA have gradually manipulated the qualification procedures in line with their ‘vision’ for the spread of football across the world. It is unlikely that a major European team will have problems qualifying in future, as thirteen of the thirty-two places on offer go to Europeans. Africa, so often viewed by FIFA as an important market-place, received the finals tournament in 2010 and have five guaranteed qualifiers in 2014. Asia have four or five places; but Oceania with limited population, televisual punch or corporate value to big sponsors, have ‘half’ a place for each World Cup. What that means is that the single qualifier still has to beat an Asian team in an eliminator.

So, in terms of making sure that the best players in the world are seen every four years, FIFA have it about right. It is controlled, and as much as possible predictable. Footballing backwaters are ignored.

The Australian FA became so disillusioned with the system that it withdrew from Oceania qualification and ‘joined’ Asia, to give themselves a better shot at qualification.

The FIFA website makes promising pronouncements about the prospects of teams in the bottom half of its rankings. There are 209 FIFA member associations. Realistically, any from the bottom one hundred could play on forever and never make it to the finals. We will never see San Marino (208^th) against the Turks and Caicos Islands (209^th) in any World Cup.

I think that is a shame.

It is at this point, every four years, that I dust off my plan for a truly ‘world’ cup. It is so different to the current system that I can guarantee that if any FIFA official ever read it, he (for it is always a man) would wince, and have to lie down in a dark room.

My idea, quite simply, is to play the qualification like the FA Cup. You put all the names into a hat, and draw all the teams against each other, irrespective of global status, FIFA Ranking or geographical location.

It would work like this: in the first round, 162 teams are drawn against each other. 81 would be knocked out, leaving another 81 to advance in the competition and meet the other 47 who had been lucky enough to be given a ‘bye’ in the first round. You then have 128 teams, who are drawn again, just like in the FA Cup. You continue until you have whittled it down to 32 or 16 teams, or however many you want to take part in a ‘finals’ tournament in whichever country has bribed FIFA the most heavily to stage it.

The possibility for upset is vast. Brazil and Argentina might be paired against each other in the first round, as might England and Scotland.

Equally, the possibility for excitement is unconfined. Imagine what might happen if Brazil, for example, had to play a one-game eliminator in North Korea. Or if Spain were drawn against Andorra. In a twelve-game group style qualification, as happens now, the wise money would be on Brazil and Spain. But how about in a single game?

There are many very sensible objections to such an unpredictable World Cup. The main problem is travel. How would the stars of Italy find the time to travel to Indonesia? Could it be afforded? To this objection I would simply state that FIFA, in their wisdom, have decided that Qatar will host the 2022 World Cup in desert conditions. Suddenly my idea does not seem quite as silly. Countries from all over the world will be flown into the desert state, which at ridiculous cost will have to build indoor stadia from scratch. Money talks.

The other main objection is one of spectacle. If the major footballing nations were eliminated in football backwaters, would the finals be worth watching? To this I counter that to truly be world champions, a country needs to be able to confidently approach any opposition and prevail. If Spain, the current World Champions, cannot beat Tonga or Andorra or Sierra Leone, can they truly claim to be the best team in the world?

Lots of questions about non-conformists

“Following a riot in the city in 1274, Norwich has the distinction of being the only English city to be excommunicated by the Pope.”

This quote is lifted directly from Wikipedia about the history of Norwich, the fine old city that was once the second city in England behind London. My wife’s family have roots in Norwich and Norfolk and are rightly proud of coming from the city. As you enter the city there are signs that say ‘Welcome to Norwich – A Fine City’, and I believe them. It’s not a bad piece of PR from some councillor with an over-inflated sense of his (or her) own importance.

I had the good fortune to be educated (in every sense) in Norwich in the early 1990s and even though I did not take all of the opportunities that were offered to me in that time, I still look back with great fondness on my time there. Part of that might be to do with my years coinciding with the greatest in thehistory of Norwich City FC, but there are many other reasons.

One of the main things that is special about the city is that it has been a centre for non-conformism for more than five hundred years. It has been populated by people who think and believe in different things.

The original meaning of non-conformist in England was a person who refused to follow the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. In 1662 the Act ofUniformity ejected about two thousand preachers who refused to conform to the provisions of the Act. Long before the Act, and after it, Norwich was home to men like Robert Browne and William Bridge, who in their own ways demonstrated their wish to behave, worship and live according to their own rules.

By the time I lived in Norwich in the 1990s many of the non-conformist chapels were little used, and the choice of living differently was most visibly expressed by men with dogs on ropes drinking White Lightning outside the Tesco on the market square.

Throughout my adult life I have had an interest in the alternative thinkers, who are often also the ones on the edge of society.

I went from Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder to Wendell Berry. I realised quickly that none of them came from around here. Why not?

What makes them different? How much tolerance should there be in any city for those who want to behave in a way that sits uncomfortably outside the accepted rules? What value do such people have, and what happens when their ideas seep into the mainstream of our thinking and behaviour? Why do some areas of public life, such as art, sculpture and music, attract the unorthodox; whilst others such remain steadfastly cautious?

As I age and find myself sounding increasingly like my father, what place does ageing have on my views?

And most importantly, is society now being shaped in such a way that dissenting voices are snuffed out much sooner than in the past? Do we now live in a time when the real non-conformists and dissenters have no voice at all? And what implications does this have for the future of ideas? Where are the supposedly controversial ideas going to come from in the Twenty-First Century?

Everyone lies on a scale between active non-conformist and Martin from ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’. I think how non-conformist a person is in adulthood depends on a number of factors from childhood to first employment. Some of us are told not be quite so silly by our parents and from then on tread a path in their footsteps. Some arrive in Secondary School and have the stuffing knocked out of us by a particularly brutal regime. Some have a period of enlightenment from sixteen to twenty-one, whether away from home at a college or in first employment; and it fizzles out when we leave home, squashed by the commitment of a first home.

For most, it is a financial pressure that makes us conform. You need the job, so you cut your hair and put on a shirt and tie or a sensible skirt. Or both, if you are Eddie Izzard.

What I have found worrying in the last ten years or so is that I still look for the non-conformists all the time, and I see them snuffed out not by a particularly nasty school teacher or a mortgage, but just drowned under a flood of banality that is offered us by large companies from London, Paris, New York and Beijing. We cannot escape the ‘words from the sponsor’.

I go to work, I pay my taxes, I go to Church on a Sunday (itself quite a non-conformist act in 2014) and I am overwhelmed by the beige nature of what the major companies like us to believe is ‘culture’.

I am surprised how all-pervading the soma of modern life is. We are becoming defined by the products that we buy instead of the books that we read. We are placed into target categories by political scientists so that our votes can be better harvested according to the television stations we watch.

I can already hear the voices of several close friends who will be telling me to pull myself together, and that I still have choices, and that I don’t have to end my days watching re-runs of ‘Friends’ and eating crisps. My point really is how much choice do I really have?

So I have devised some simple questions to make an attempt to classify or clarify the choices that I have, and see how easily I could choose an intelligent alternative.

If it isn’t on the internet, how easy is it now to find the information?

If I want to buy food grown near where I live, how easy is it to buy in Sainsbury’s or Tesco?

If I feel strongly about something going on in my town, how easy is it to have my voice heard by someone in power?

If I want to hear music that is not endorsed and massaged by a multinational corporation, which radio stations offer it?

I am proud that I am from the same country as Thomas Becket, William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, Mary Shelley, David Attenborough, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, John Peel, Tony Benn and Joe Strummer. I may not agree with everything that these people did or said, but my pride comes from the fact that they were allowed to say it.

I am not proud that I live in a country in which popular protest at dysfunctional government is viewed in the same light as football hooliganism. And in which people pay money to watch John Terry play football.

Somewhere in the middle ground lies a place in which the odd-balls, freaks and eccentrics in our society are tolerated. As the Stranglers said, ‘Whatever happened to the heroes?’ I think they are still there but because Ant and Dec are presenting another Jungle Challenge we may not get the chance to hear from them. We are poorer for it.

10 rules for 10 year olds

10 rules for 10 year olds

1        The screen you love looking at is just a screen. The real world is out there, go and have a look.

2        Collect something that you can’t buy in shops.

3        Read, read, read.

4        There is a difference between heroes and superheroes. You may have a hero who makes a mistake. It is because he or she is a human being.

5        The old people that you see all around you were all ten years old, once. So they know what it is like being you. Listen to what they have to say.

6        As far as we know, time travel is impossible, so make the most of today.

7        Now is the time to learn to play Chess. It’s a skill you will not regret for the rest of your life, and is really good for your brain.

8        Ask your teachers a question every day that is not to do with the curriculum that you are studying.

9        Play a sport that carries on when it starts to rain.

10      Listen to your mother. This is the most important of the ten rules.

The Beatles - Tune In

The Beatles – All These Years

Volume 1: Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

When I heard that Mark Lewisohn was writing a book about The Beatles, I was immediately keen to know the details. Since the band split there have been dozens of attempts to describe just what happened between 1962 and 1970, and all have been disappointing. Different authors, journalists and historians have encountered unwillingness on the part of the participants, lack of access to information, or have just been sloppy with the facts. There is a whole industry in Beatles Myths that people are happy to recycle, few of which are based in fact.

What Lewisohn has done is to return to as many original documents and eyewitnesses as possible, and he has not been scared to be as comprehensive as he can be. The resulting book is volume one of a proposed three-volume opus, and tells the story only as far as 31^st December 1962. It is eight hundred and forty pages long, not including footnotes and references.

It is a startling work of scholarship.

It is also timely, as fifty years and more have now passed since the events he is describing. For all of my childhood I thought of The Beatles as a band that had only recently split, and it is quite a shock to actually do the mental arithmetic and to realise that it is now a long time ago. Part of this deception is reinforced by the Just For Men still used by some ex-Beatles. The surviving Beatles and the widows of the others are now old people, and their story needs to be told. It seems unlikely that McCartney or Starr will now spend the time doing it themselves. McCartney, I think, is happy to have some episodes of his long career remain ambiguous. Ringo probably isn’t bothered. The time is right for Mark Lewisohn to step up and fill in the gaps. If he lives long enough to complete his magnum opus, I think that in future years it will become known as definitive.

The story of The Beatles does not begin in 1962 when Ringo joined the band. It does not even begin with the meeting of John and Paul at Woolton Village Fair, or the birth of the oldest Beatle (Ringo) on 7^th July 1940. Lewisohn begins his framing of the events in 1829, with the birth of James Lennon somewhere in Ireland, probably in County Down.

There is a whole chapter of careful explanation as to how the families of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starr and Best arrived in Liverpool.

This may seem like overkill, but there is a reason for taking the long view. It emerges that three of The Beatles (Ringo being the exception) have deep roots in Ireland, and proposes that their links to the spirit of their home city run very deeply indeed. As a port it is a well-spun theory that much of the wit and wisdom of Liverpool is the result of the great mix of immigrants, especially from Scotland and Ireland, and this is thoroughly un-picked by Lewisohn. He considers the old theories and searches for evidence to support them. He even makes reference to the cultural heritage of all the early Beatles, and assesses if common history had a role to play in uniting them (and excluding Pete Best) so conclusively. Where he finds no evidence to support the old ideas, he is not scared to say so.

The emergence of The Beatles as a world-changing cultural phenomenon is linked to two cities. Lewisohn is precise and careful in his description of the events of the five tours of duty to Hamburg. He has done his research well and understands what a place Hamburg must have been in 1961. He does not shrink from the seedier aspects of the time that the young men spent there. A theory central to the Hamburg story is that the massive amount of stage time accumulated was a major part in the subsequent success. Lewisohn is mathematical in his approach and the number-crunching seems to bear out his ideas.

As well as volume one being the story of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison; there is great emphasis on Pete Best, Stuart Sutcliffe and Brian Epstein. If there is a criticism of Lewisohn’s writing it is that the tragedy of Sutcliffe’s life is explored in a scientific way. There is space and a need to consider in more depth the emotional fall-out that his passing caused among his young friends. For the most part he tells the story of these three men with care and attention to all sides. By presenting all the facts, if somewhat dispassionately, he gives the reader the opportunity to decide who was really to blame in the turbulence from which John, Paul George and Ringo neatly emerged.

So volume one is all about back-story, and it is quite a story. It may be too long for most readers – even some ardent fans of The Boys may wilt under the sheer size of this work – but it is necessary, fascinating and vital. John invited Paul, who invited George, who after a long time then invited Ringo. The eight hundred and forty pages that describe these simple links in a chain are quite an event in music and biography.

My mouth is watering for volume two. Lewisohn proposes that it will include the years 1963 until 1966 or 67. I cannot wait.

Silence and stillness

I work in education. Over the last fifteen years I have had the good fortune to work with some very interesting colleagues. I have also taught a lot of amazing children.
A dominating idea in education in the UK is that if there is a classroom full of children and if there is silence, then it follows that the behaviour must be good. Good children are quiet children. I have lost count of the number of times I have noticed a colleague pleading with a group of children to be quiet, and wondered why he or she was asking. Do we need silence in a corridor, or is it just an assumption that the rule must be upheld because our Victorian predecessors insisted on it?
I have been thinking about the lives of some of the children from the school in which I work. Some are ignored or shouted at in the family home, and coming to school is a welcome relief. When they do arrive, they spend a whole day being shouted at to make them silent. Is it any wonder they find the experience of school gruelling?
There is a time for silence in a school. In a religious setting it is important in order to show reverence. In an examination setting it is important so that communication between candidates is prevented. And how those in power love to examine our children. However, I see very little benefit to children in insisting on silence for vast chunks of their school days in every other situation.
The thing that I think many people with whom I work have missed is that stillness is more important than silence. Children live hyper-charged lives and are bombarded with stimulation from a bewildering range of sources. The stimulation usually takes the form of information in one form or another. They are also stimulated by ever-more refined foods that are doing amazing things to their young brains.
I think stillness is important because for some children moments of stillness in school may be their only experience of it. I fear for over-loaded brains, and think providing an opportunity for resting those brains is overlooked.
Our Secretary of State for Education, Mr Gove, is driving rapid change and doing a fabulous job in dragging British Schools into the Nineteenth Century. Such a revolutionary idea as allowing children to rest and have some stillness is absolutely against what he stands for, as it does not help in the process of producing good, compliant little robots to feed into the government's industrial machine.
Stillness in schools allows children to piece together and make sense of various madnesses to which they are exposed.
It also works for adults.
My resolution for the New Year is going to say 'Be quiet' less, and 'Be still' more.

What do I really know?

I had a very enjoyable evening with friends on Saturday night, which consisted of an anticipated film on a gigantic television the size of a small cinema screen, red wine, and with me dozing off halfway through. Sleeping in company is a faux pas, I know, but it was more to do with the week I had than the quality of the film. My wife assured me that all of it was good, even the parts that I missed.

My host is a very knowledgeable film and television enthusiast, and the conversation during the evening roamed over wide, open acres of what for me is unexplored celluloid. I am not embarrassed to admit that vast amounts of what most people regard as essential film are unknown to me. I have never seen a Woody Allen film. When talk turns to his films I nod sagely and hope that no specifics are mentioned. I have seen about ten minutes of one Hitchcock film and thought it was dreadful. I am ignorant.

Even my television knowledge has shrunk to pathetic little nuggets of information since the dawn of the new century. I watch ‘Pointless’, and some live sport… and that’s about it. I apologise. If you want to assemble at the coffee machine and talk about last night’s televisual excitements, I am certainly not your man.

What I found impressive on Saturday evening, though, was not the sheer number of hours that my friends and my wife have clocked up in front of flickering screens, but the knowledge that they have assimilated in the process. My learnèd friend has accumulated a sound knowledge of the geography of Vietnam from Kubrick, and how American hospitals work after decades of ER, and inter-war society from Downton Abbey.

I have been thinking about the nature of this knowledge, and how it has largely been acquired through entertainment media, and if that actually matters in our current situation. I used to be quite prickly about this and have a sort of league table of knowledge in my head. Facts gleaned from the tabloids were to be ignored. Facts from the telly were to be sniffed at. Facts from films might merit the raising of an eyebrow. Real facts, however, came from books.

Real facts can be relied upon because they have come from the heads of long-dead writers like Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and DH Lawrence.

I have realised that I may need to revise my prejudices. The world changes so quickly that the life and experiences of even the most gifted and perceptive of writers from the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century are as remote to us as the Middle Ages were to them. How can any writer of one hundred and fifty years ago have written anything that is relevant today?

Enter, stage left, the howls of protest from lovers of The Great Novels. The Great Novels, they say, are full of observations about human relationships, and these never change.

That may be the case. If it is, then surely every kind of fiction that attempts to dissect the mysteries of life is just as important, and just as good at educating us. The knowledge we need to survive and become rounded individuals can come from Ally McBeal or Jane Austen. Del Boy or Dickens. Woody Allen or Turgenev. Does it matter where we learn our life lessons?

What that got me thinking about is how close to reality we currently are, how close we were in the past, and when the last time was that people were genuinely linked to the world around them by direct experience. I’d like to suggest that human beings living in Western Europe now can live and thrive without actually having to actually experience anything real, other than the supermarket. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I am saying that it is an amazing and interesting thing, and something we don’t think about too much. Do we actually need to go out and experience anything, given the vast accumulated wisdom of one hundred and twenty years of cinema (or eighty of you just count from the talkies) and sixty years of television?

When was the last time we were properly connected to the world around us, before the links became tenuous? Perhaps a hundred years ago. In the UK then, people washed their own clothes with their hands, and cooked their own food, and acquired knowledge of how things worked by talking to the people around them. If you wanted to know what the King sounded like, you had to go to the palace, wait outside, and hope he shouted at you. If you wanted a fried egg, you started at the hen coop and not the supermarket aisle.

The conclusion that I have come to is that I need to be less snooty about the things that I know. Unless I have come by an interesting thing by actual observation, and not through the wonder of Stephen Fry, I cannot be judgemental about where other people get their facts from. The world is a very, very complicated place. Much of the important stuff we really need to think about can be explored on E4 rather than Penguin Classics.

What do I really know?

'Human Traces' by Sebastian Faulks

I read 'Birdsong' by Sebastian Faulks when it was published, and it was a life-changing book. I had never read a modern novel before that was so meticulously researched that it seemed to have been contemporaneous with the era in which it was set, which was the First World War.
I was so in awe of Faulks' skill that I shied away from his later books as I did not want to break the magic. Just like we have favourite albums, a favourite novel can be a bit of an elephant in the room. I was scared to read anything new by Faulks in case it somehow tarnished the magic of 'Birdsong'.
This summer I decided that an acceptable length of time had passed (nearly twenty years, I note with alarm) that I could read some of his more ambitious recent books. I had read 'The Fatal Englishman' last summer. I first read 'A Week In December' It was OK - a bit to much of a gimmick, and the characters who were spot on for 2009 have already dated because the world moves on so quickly.
'Human Traces' has sat on my bookshelf in hardback since I bought it in 2005, tempting me to launch into it. It is 600 pages long, so I had the excuse that a short holiday was not long enough to read it completely.
I started it at the start of September and it took me a month to read. It will take a lot longer to sink into my bones.
What Sebastian Faulks has done, in a very long and rich book, is to examine the meaning of families. The plot, which centres on the life stories of two aspiring 'alien doctors' (psychiatrists), is incidental. I thought I was reading a great double-life story. The twist comes in the final quarter of the book when it becomes clear that what the author is actually doing is showing how strong the power of human love can be. The central relationship is one of mother to son, and the bitter, devastating grief of loss.
It is a book for parents to read. Had I read it in my twenties before I became a father, I doubt if it would have had such a profound effect on me.
For all the parents out there: can you remember how your world-view changed forever when you first held your child? In this book, right at the end, Faulks encapsulates that feeling.
It is devastating and brilliant.