IS IT REAL?

Authenticity is something of a buzzword right now along with transparency, honesty and sharing. The need for plain English and the “truth” are constantly on people’s lips.

I have felt uneasy about the Olympics and about cricket because of the doping scandals of the former and the betting corruption of the latter to the extent of not watching them.

What’s the point when so many competitors have cheated blatantly?  These sports are simply inauthentic being literally played on an uneven playing field.  Yet I found myself being drawn towards the Olympics despite my reservations. Applause like laughter is infectious. There’s something about sport when it’s played well that gets you. So when Adam Peaty  smashed the world record time in the 100 metres breaststroke I, who loathe swimming, was fascinated. Adam seems to have disrupted breast stroke technique by swimming in an exhaustingly aggressive way. A dull stroke made thrilling.

In the midst of Polish Weightlifters, Bulgarian Steeplechasers and Chinese swimmers being sent home this week for doping offences there’s a kind of naïve brilliance we see in the way some athletes excel.

Here’s a different story about authenticity.  There’s an old report of a conspiracy to cheat on insurance through bogus whiplash and other injuries which were allegedly suffered by 26 passengers on a bus that normally carried about eight people. When the bus ran into a car causing a slight bump legitimate, law abiding passengers watched in bemusement as the conspirators flung themselves to the floor of the bus clutching their necks and screaming in apparent agony.

CCTV footage showed some of them giggling as they performed these antics. It was not authentic nor intelligent but quite funny at every level. It’s the idea of mass incompetent corruption that has a Monty Python feel to it. There was one other piece of idiocy - they all made claims against just one insurance company.

Judge Patricia Lynch was the most authentic voice last week when she swore back at John Hennigan whom she was jailing for breaching an Asbo order:

Henningan: You’re a bit of a c..t
Judge: You’re a bit of a c..t yourself.
Hennigan: Go f..k yourself
Judge: You too.

Hennigan did not cut a particularly attractive figure in his behaviour or in his physical appearance - no Olympic athlete he - but I doubt if Patricia’s authenticity which won her widespread support on social media will go down quite so well with the judiciary.

Whilst writers try to find their authentic voice - the true them - this is not generally true of politicians who spend most of their lives trying to be what they think voters want. Boris Johnson, for example, plays whatever he judges will work best: buffoon, man of the people, intellectual, small boy or repentant. Our Foreign Secretary seems to have gone to earth doubtless working on his next performance. To misquote Bacon in his famous quote about Pilate:

“What is real?” said jesting Johnson but would not stay for an answer.