MAROONED BY THE MARATHON

On Sunday it was the Brighton Marathon. This meant we were cut off from the outside world as the

Marathon looped round where we live. Some of us watched as the Half Marathon went by first - a depressing parade of people who were medically unfit to walk let alone run. It was torture watching. “Ah! Bless ‘em” said the person next to me.

But like bad art it shouldn’t have been happening. Then, thankfully, came the real thing. The marathon proper led by a dozen lithe, loping Kenyans whose grace like Ronaldo I could have watched all day.

The trouble with today’s world where anyone can join in is the content and performance is so often dreadful. All the media is full of exhausted prose. But over the last week or so there were three exceptions. Caitlin Moran whom I love deeply and who makes me laugh more than any writer since Alan Coren, had a rant about the referendum.

She was eloquent saying that apart from a few conservatives who’ve been obsessed about Europe (like a mum going on and on about a guy down the road whose porch extension she doesn’t like) most of the people in the UK really don’t get fussed about Europe…it just doesn’t interfere with their lives. Until now…
“Russia and the Islamic State must be high fiving that the energy of the most prosperous, but currently shaky, union in the world is being diverted by the UK having a drama-queen hissy fit over a quarter of a pint of f***-all”

And, she adds, “right at the start of the picnic season.”

Next up David Miliband.

Remember him waving a banana around and losing in the Labour leadership election to his dreadful little brother. Dave went off in a huff to New York to become CEO of the charity the International Rescue Committee (IRC). He is now a great success. Fortune Magazine has called him one of the World's Greatest Leaders in 2016.

And here’s what he says:

 "No nation in human peacetime history, never mind Britain, has voluntarily given up as much political power as we are being invited to throw away on 23 June. For what?  A cold, hard lesson in the demon of hubris, born of delusion that the world owes us a break….a tragic miscalculation which weakens ourselves, our friends and the international order on which we depend."

Bet you wish he was back. We need people like him whose command of language is so impressive and impassioned.

Which has had me wishing that our Prime Minister was like Justin Trudeau, Canadian PM. Insanely, Bobby-Kennedy-good-looking and charismatic he’s doubled the Canadian culture budget “because it matters.”  As impressively he astonished the audience at an event at the University of Waterloo, Ontario by his grasp of quantum computing. Witty, charming and graceful like those Kenyan runners who impressed me so much.

We need more smart and eloquent people like these around us and fewer intellectual fatties.