COME ON . YOU CAN DO IT!

I have to confess I have an irrational loathing of marathons. It’s a mixture of things. The ghastly costumes. The sweat. The tortured ligaments. The sheer jollity of it all. In fact in my family I was brought up to believe that the words “it was all very jolly” were code for “it’s horrible, tasteless and boring”.

Over the past two weeks jolly has been on few lips.  There’s been a tragic death of a young runner in the Brighton Marathon and the terrorist bombings in the Boston Marathon.  The fact the Chechnyan terrorists chose the marathon to express their angst seems bizarrely cruel especially as the destruction of human tissue happened to what the Boston surgeon grimly described as “lower extremities”.

But it would be a mistake to feel what’s happening now is exceptional.

It seems worse but it’s normal now for protestors with hate welling up inside to make protests where’ll they’ll get most coverage.

And talking of normal I loved a piece recently by Rod Liddle describing as normal the crowd violence at the Wigan v Millwall Cup Semi Final, which evoked such outrage. He depicted it as Man A asking Man B to sit down in, albeit, slightly colloquial language. Man A took exception and uttered words to the effect “Right, I’m going to fuck you.” Liddle patiently explained that this was not a brusque and compelling expression of sexual intent, merely a signal for a bit of fisticuffs.

With that wry observation the sun came out for me and the daffodils waved in applause. I realised all my grumpiness about people running for 26 miles or so in company with thousands of other maniacs was their choice and, anyway, they seemed to smile a lot. Let them, I thought, as I poured another glass of claret, let them, I allowed as I lit a cigar, yes, let them I conceded, have their fun.

So Rod Liddle made part of my week, George Bellows the other part. He’s the relatively unknown American Artist whose work is now being shown at the Royal Academy Sackler Gallery.

Here’s what Bellows (an example of whose work appears above) proclaimed as his philosophy of life:

“Try everything that can be done.
Be deliberate. Be spontaneous.
Be thoughtful and painstaking; 
Be abandoned and impulsive.
Learn your own possibilities.”

I was inspired by the sheer roundedness of this.

And then I briefly wondered if maybe I shouldn’t be impulsive too and think of running the Marathon after all.

Or whether, perhaps, the Millwall football fan slogan didn’t capture my ironic, Rod Siddle mood better:

“Nobody likes us but we don’t care.”

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