| Rowing, growing and dying. |
[Apr. 6th, 2003|04:12 pm] |
Boat Race day today and as ever I'm baffled why such a niche event, a rowing race between two universities that most people couldn't even aspire to study at, will attract so much attention. Six million people will watch it on television and thousands will line the river banks. Astonishing.
For me, it brings back memories of what I was doing in different years as it was on TV. Being up in Norwich in the year Cambridge finally won after a long streak of Oxford victories, watching it with a friend who spent two years studying medicine at Oxford and went through agonies watching them lose. The 2000 race, which I watched at a police station with several other witnesses while we waited for an indentity parade to pick out some of the gang that had attacked me on a train some months before. And the 2001 race, where I was working at the Independent and wrote a report on it that I'm more proud of than a lot of my other writing. It's a little clunky in places, but that's because I was writing it while the race was going on and I was watching it on TV, assessing what was happening, and typing at the same time. Within two minutes of the race finishing it was posted on the Indy's website. How's that for rolling news? :o)
This weekend we've been out to the allotment both mornings, digging a bed for the onions to go in, planting more potatos and generally tidying to make the place look more like somewhere vegetables might grow and less like an archaeological dig. It's amazingly good for the soul and I still can't get over my astonishment at my enjoyment of it. I really did think I'd hate every moment I was dragged over there - instead, I even went over on my own yesterday afternoon while Lisa was at work and got stuck in.
Now I really feel I ought to be getting angry about the war again, but I just can't find the energy. I've done it too often, I guess. There's been another friendly fire incident involving a British journalist, this time in northern Iraq when a US warplane hit a convoy of Kurds and American special forces, killing several of each. They also injured a senior Kurdish politician. The bomb landed about ten feet from John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, killing his translator. He himself was lightly wounded by the shrapnel, so lightly wounded that he seems not have noticed until a US special forces medic pointed out the blood while he was broadcasting live on the BBC immediately after the incident.
Simpson is the reporter whose tongue-in-cheek claim that 'the BBC had liberated Kabul' as he drove into the city ahead of the Northern Alliance attracted such derision. Now he's come up with another line to treasure: "I am sorry to be so excitable - I am bleeding through the ear." It's difficult to overstate what the fall-out would have been if he'd been killed but he evidently drew a lucky card today and, ever the professional, is reporting on the important stuff - the incident itself and the deaths - instead of composing breathless prose about his brush with death.
I don't suppose he's given much thought to the Boat Race though. |
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