To the Olympic Park. All those good things you’ve heard about the games? I’m afraid they’re all entirely true. My one disappointment was that the New Zealand women’s hockey team didn’t do the haka. But you can’t really blame that on London 2012.
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I suppose the only thing that I really regret about the whole thing is that rugby sevens won’t be introduced until the 2016 games in Rio. A final at Twickers would have marked a terrific return to Olympic competition for the oval ball game. It’s been a while: the last time rugby featured was in Paris in 1924, where it was the 15-a-side version.
One might think such a prolonged absence strange for a game whose professed ethos coheres so closely to those of Olympism. However, the century spent as ludus non grata (I made that up – I wonder if it’s correct) was probably deserved. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the 1924 final:
During the final between France and the United States at Colombes Stadium, French fans booed and hissed the American team for the remainder of the game after star player Adolphe Jauréguy was flattened by a hard tackle two minutes after the opening whistle, leaving him unconscious with blood pouring down his face and having to be carried off the field on a stretcher. In the second half, French fans threw bottles and rocks onto the field and at American players and officials, wild brawls broke out in the stands, U.S. reserve Gideon Nelson was knocked unconscious after being hit in the face by a walking stick, and French fans invaded the pitch at the final whistle, leaving the French team, aided by the police, to protect the Americans. At the medal ceremony, The Star Spangled Banner was drowned out by the booing and hissing of French fans, and the American team had to be escorted to their locker room under police protection.
And this a mere six years after a much bigger international punch-up had come to an end – you’d think the public appetite for violence might have tailed off somewhat. It seems compulsory at the moment to poke around the entrails of every sporting success or failure to see what it might tell us about the world today. One thing I’m pretty sure about: our enthusiastic approach to a free-for-all isn’t what it was.
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The great British ‘what do you call your meal?’ debate rolls on, a mere Olympic extravaganza being unable to distract us from something that touches so many of us so personally. Last weekend, it was The Guardian’s turn to give it a push. This comment by Jeannette Winterson on that English perversion, the dinner party, struck a chord:
The real issue is that I like food and I like to eat my food, not try to shove it in my mouth while talking to someone I hope never to meet again.
One thing that seems to have been missed by just about everyone (HF-W being an exception, but then he is an OE and so well versed in power relations) is that the use of ‘kitchen supper’ and ‘country supper’ go some way to justify the Marxist belief that social class always has an economic basis. Isn’t it implicit in the use of ‘kitchen’ that your house has a dedicated dining room? And doesn’t the use of ‘country’ clearly imply that you have at least two houses? So eat that.
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I recall coming across an old poem on this mealtime topic when I was a student. It ended with a couplet along these lines: ‘he who dines the latest / is in our town judged the greatest’. It made fun of the social competition involved in eating late, and the later the better (I presume late-dining demonstrated you didn’t have to get up for work).
I believe it dated from the eighteenth century (I also thought it was by Daniel Defoe but can find no reference to it online – can anyone help?), proving that the class war is one that can never enjoy an armistice.
Anyway, I propose taking this centuries-old social competition to its logical conclusion: I’m going to start calling my evening meal ‘brekkers’. Or possibly ‘lunch’ to really confuse people.
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The game can be played in America, though the rules are not quite the same. Paul Fussell devoted some space to meal time in this book Class, published about 30 years ago. I don’t remember whether he mentioned meal names.
As a Midwesterner by upbringing, I had to stop to think for a minute. These days, apparently, we call it dinner, for I used to spend a lot of time shouting :”Dinner!” up the steps to a dawdling son. But I think that we used dinner and supper pretty much interchangeably in the Ohio of the 1960s.
A woman I knew remembered for many years her daughter’s friend informing her that at the friend’s house they did not sup, they dined. She perceived this as a snub, though I don’t think it was intentionally. In this case, the household that dined was certainly not better off financially than the one that supped; they may, however, have perceived themselves as a cut above in other ways.
Thanks George. It’s clear though that this is another gold medal event for the Brits.