National anthems

Who in England feels genuinely represented by ‘God Save the Queen’? Not many of us, I dare say, considering how much moaning we do about how tedious it is and how it should be replaced by ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. As someone descended from the English, Scottish and Welsh and born in Scotland, I’ve never really felt it had to represent me, as I didn’t really know where I was from.

Being a mongrel nationality-wise meant I never knew which team to support in sporting events where the constituent parts of the UK represented themselves. My Auntie Sue gave me a Scottish rugby shirt when I was about eight or nine, which resolved that problem. What to do about football, though? By the time I got interested in it (about 1997) I came to realise that supporting Scotland was not going to be much fun. Or England, for that matter, with the glory long since departed. Wales? *tumbleweed* Anyway, how to decide which team would be mine in the 1998 World Cup?

In my early teens I decided to become a Chelsea fan for the flimsiest of reasons. The 1997 FA Cup Final was on the horizon, and the choice was Chelsea or Middlesbrough. What was my thinking?

1. London better than Middlesbrough (I would have said then)
2. Blue better than red (I maintain)
3. Premier League better than Division 1, to which Boro had just been relegated (now even better, what with Division 1 being downgraded every few years)
4. Zola better than Hignett (arguably)

But at this time music was the thing I knew most about, and it was as much on the basis of the FA Cup Final records the teams produced that Chelsea prevailed. Their song was celebratory and harmonically bold, it sounded like London, and it was by Suggs (what a man). Boro’s song was a cover version by Bob Mortimer of a Chris Rea song recorded (so far as I can tell) in a garden shed with a cheap Bontempi keyboard. Anyway, from the moment Di Matteo lashed in from 25 yards, I haven’t looked back. (Actually, I look back constantly, what with the obscene money Abramovich is throwing around. Only about £70m yesterday. It makes one long for the days of Eddie Newton and Andy Myers. Almost.)

So why not choose a national football team to support on the same basis? It would have been around this time that I borrowed from the library a CD of primarily European national anthems played by a military band. To my surprise, some of them turned out to be quite good, not the dreary dirges I was used to hearing before rugby matches. My favourite was Poland’s, the ‘Mazurek Dąbrowskiego’.

But Poland didn’t qualify for the 1998 World Cup (they had the misfortune of being drawn with England and Italy in qualifying), so I went for Norway. Not that their anthem is much more interesting than ours, but they had Tore Andre Flo and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer up front and I thought they might create a shock – rightly, as it happened. They beat Brazil in their final group match, but Italy knocked them out in the second round. Prior to the tournament I decided to compensate for their uninspiring anthem by writing an original verse of ‘Jerusalem’ referring explicitly to the Norwegian national team. It’s too embarrassing to replicate my version here, but suffice it to say that it was better than Blake’s.

I’ve been listening to national anthems again recently. Not masterpieces, most of them, but the extent to which they embody the character of the people they represent is interesting. Listen to the beautiful Israeli anthem and tell me it doesn’t sound like centuries of oppression (the text refers to this too). And don’t the French and German anthems sound exactly like the French and the Germans – or have our impressions of the people been coloured by the music? The US anthem sounds like the stereotype of the country – brash and ostentatious. Even Stravinsky’s arrangement has a touch of showbiz about it.

The thing is, I’ve come to realise that I like ‘God Save the Queen’. It’s not exciting, but it’s solid and built on firm foundations. The Winston Churchill of national anthems. ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘Rule, Britannia!’? Far too jingoistic.

And happily, perhaps the clincher, the most English thing of all, is that despite all of the moaning we haven’t actually done anything about replacing it. It’s what makes it the right choice. My country expects me to be apathetic, and I can’t be bothered to dissent.

Great unfinished novels of the twentieth century, part 94

THE FERGUSON AFFAIR

~ 1 ~

Alex Ferguson sipped his drink and a large globule of mucus dropped into his mug.

“Aaaaargh! Shit!” he exclaimed as his naked torso was splattered with coffee. He ran starkers through the house, drops of liquid flying out behind him until he reached the bathroom, where he grabbed a large towel from the airing cupboard and wrapped it around him, trying to ease the pain. Although it was only his chest that had been scalded, the pain was coursing through his body like a bolt of lightning. He drew his curtains, only too aware of the eyes watching him from across the road, and tiptoed to his bedroom. He sat on the bed and turned over to the female figure on his right. “My wife will be home soon,” he whispered, “Maybe you should be going.”

“Not until I get my money,” she replied. Alex hesitated.

“Thirty, did ye say?”

“Forty now.”

“Wha’? Ye hardly did anything,” he said, easily conceding, as he got out his wallet. “Wha’ did you say your name was?”

“Ainsley. Ainsley Jarvis.”

“Nice name – I’m sure I’ve heard it before. You’re sure you didn’t play for Aberdeen?” he enquired, for the second time that night. She nodded, wondering whether he realized she was female. She stepped onto the fleecy carpet that adorned Alex’s floor and put on her clothes. Alex gazed at her feminine, curvaceous body and wondered about how Manchester United were going to get out of their current spot of bother.

[circa 1998]

Any relation to any actual person, living or dead, is purely incidental

Memory triggers

While on holiday a month and a bit ago, I came across a mysterious reminder on my phone. It had been set for 15th November and read simply ‘Donovan’. Had I set this reminder myself? I must have done, though I had no memory of it. And what on earth did it mean?

I turned the matter over in my head. I could approach this problem from two different directions: the word, Donovan, and the date, 15th November.

What does Donovan mean to me? Jason Donovan, of course. I was quite a fan of his when I was about six years old. And his father Terence, also in the cast of Neighbours when I used to watch it in the mid-’90s. Also Donovan, the singer-songwriter from the 1960s, of whom I know nothing (and, pace hippies, in whom I have approximately no interest whatsoever) and whom I probably confuse with Lonnie Donegan as often as not. And I have known of people called Donovan in real life, though not known them personally.

What about 15th November? Well, it’s no less attractive a date than many others. It is the birthday of mercurial Uruguayan midfielder Gustavo Poyet, currently manager of Brighton and, among South American players, the Premier League’s all-time joint top goalscorer – until, that is, Carlos Tévez overtakes him, which will surely happen before the month is out, very possibly away at Blackpool on 17th October. Watch the video below to see him put a couple past Man Utd legend Massimo Taibi. But apart from this spectacularly useless knowledge, I can’t claim the date holds any special meaning for me.

Nothing in these paltry associations, then, suggested any connection between the two known facts. I had frankly abandoned hope of deciphering the meaning of the word, but decided as a hopeless last resort to ask friends and relations for suggestions via Facebook. As I began to type the request into the status update box, the answer magically presented itself to me. Donovan is the surname of my piano tuner, and I need to call him in mid-November so I can book a time to have the piano tuned before Christmas.

Needs tuning before the little red tree goes up this year

I can’t work out which is greater: the complacency of my assumption that I would automatically work out what ‘Donovan’ meant if I forgot, or the shame of forgetting my piano tuner’s name. Or the proof this whole story provides of my irredeemable middle-classness. It’s funny, though, regardless of all this baggage, to contemplate how, after seemingly endless and exhausting efforts to remember a piece of information, the slightest mental process brings it suddenly into focus.

This instantaneous unlocking of information has, like everything I write, been better expressed elsewhere. This passage from the start of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley is one of presumably many such expressions. The narrator, now middle-aged, has discovered a diary that is to awaken a trauma that has been suppressed since his boyhood:

I did not want to touch it and told myself that this was because it challenged my memory; I was proud of my memory and disliked having it prompted. So I sat staring at the diary, as at a blank space in a crossword puzzle. Still no light came, and suddenly I took the combination lock and began to finger it, for I remembered how, at school, I could always open it by the sense of touch when someone else had set the combination. It was one of my show-pieces and, when I first mastered it, drew some applause, for I declared that to do it I had to put myself into a trance; and this was not quite a lie, for I did deliberately empty my mind and let my fingers work without direction. To heighten the effect, however, I would close my eyes and sway gently to and fro, until the effort of keeping my consciousness at a low ebb almost exhausted me; and this I found myself instinctively doing now, as to an audience. After a timeless interval I heard the tiny click and felt the sides of the lock relax and draw apart; and at the same moment, as if by some sympathetic loosening in my mind, the secret of the diary flashed upon me.