Distant concerns

Sailing, snorkelling and looking forward to SCUBA diving, it is hard to appreciate what’s happening to my team on the other side of the world. In the space of a few weeks we have lost our honorary life president (Elton), our manager (no longer will the nickname “Betty” grace this blog), our chairman Graham Simpson and now our chief executive Mark Ashton. Paraphrasing: to lose one board member is silly, to lose two is downright careless. There are fears expressed on internet boards that we are in freefall, other opinions suggest that we may have turned the corner with the departure of loss leaders. I fall squarely into the latter camp.
How Watford FC Plc managed to turn a season in the Premier League and the £40 million income it brought (along with nearly £10 million for Ashley Young - who has since justified every penny - £4 million each for Hameur Bouazzer and Marlon King, £2 million each for Darius Henderson and Danny Shittu) into a financial crisis is endlessly bewildering. Would we be in Leeds’ or Luton’s position if we had lost that play-off final three and a half years ago? We didn’t spend silly money on new players and stated clearly that we were earmarking cash for stadium redevelopment. What happened?
The question is rhetorical. There had been some fallings out with “the Russos”, a family whose name unfortunately brings to mind the Sopranos rather than Abramovich, but they are right back on the scene after the AGM that triggered the chairman’s demise. There have been subsequent reports that the new manager, Brendan Rodgers, was poised to leave within a week of arriving.
I realise now that I haven’t blogged about the arrival of the ex-Chelsea reserve team boss but can’t say much more than “I was right” about the fact I wouldn’t have heard of the next Watford coach. On his watch we have drawn against the bottom club, lost at home to Spurs (which our host in Queensland, Allen, enjoyed) but we finally won two games, both 2-1, at home against Norwich and Coventry this week. Some less fair-weather fans than I are dreaming of Championship football again next year. I am dreaming of the Great Barrier Reef this week.

Natural roles

I have seen, read and talked more about animals in the last seventeen days than in any such period in my life. As well as seeing various marsupials and birds on national park walks, our Whitsunday sailing trip, which included snorkelling, enabled close inspection of turtles, rays and a large variety of fish. Then there have been toads, reptiles and insects I’d never seen before. Brisbane New Farm Library’s “The Qi Book of Animal Ignorance” has been supplemented well by a copy of Bill Bryson’s “Down Under” which I’ve had for years and can (after carrying it for seven weeks and reading it cover to cover) justify off-loading. Bryson has a fascination with all that can kill in Australia though never gets close to a wild animal, his most significant animal story involving guard dogs.

I enjoyed the quote in the introduction to the Qi book, that there is “only one unambiguous truth: that the word ‘natural’ is meaningless. Animal strategies for feeding, reproducing or just getting about are so madly various, so utterly, gloriously perverse that you end up believing that anything is possible”. The lack of human imagination concerning what is normal, then, remains a disappointment. I am guilty of that lacking.

As a male of the species, latterly I have behaved as though cooking were the preserve of the female. I know I am not alone in expecting a role to be played by the woman in my life I call “mine” but it is the recent observation of what has become natural or normal elsewhere that has heightened or reawakened my awareness of my own ongoing complicity in this lack of imagination concerning sexual roles. I have settled and others have settled too. Some, perhaps, (after all, who am I to judge) have lost much more than me in the settling. That those I am thinking about are female would not surprise anyone with any feminist instincts.

Parallels Down Under

The Horns recorded their first win in seven league games and their first win at home since I left by beating the second richest club in the world (QPR) 3-0 with first-half goals from Tommy Smith, Darren Ward and Lee Williamson. In doing so we moved up to fourth from bottom as Charlton were thrashed at home, consequently parting company with manager Alan Curbishley.

In Brisbane, I had to go to bed ten minutes before the Vicarage Road final whistle but woke up with an A-League game to go to with my congenial hosts Sue and Allen (who lent me an away shirt). So it was that Watford’s red and gold merged to become the orange of Queensland Roar (rubbish name), who had a worse home record than the Golden Boys, not having won at the impressive but largely empty Suncorp Stadium (which, in common with WFC, they share with a rugby club) all season.

The parallels with my English club are not repeated when it comes to the league (Roar are third out of eight while their opponents Perth Glory, whose fans faced a six-hour flight home, are bottom). There is neither relegation nor promotion in the tiny division, which will grow by two (Gold Coast Galaxy and North Queensland Fury) next year. Still, the English Championship does have a Welsh team (Swansea City) while New Zealand’s Wellington Phoenix play in the Australian league.

Roar’s captain Craig Moore, who had an operation for testicular cancer just 12 days ago, started this Movember match (moustache growth is sponsored to benefit male charities every year in this month) and saw his team break their hoodoo and win by the same margin Watford did yesterday though this game saw five goals, the best of which was a second-half volley from Roar’s ex-Watford player Charlie Miller.

Bravery

I have been inspired by Koji, but to say that is not to hold him in any way responsible for the following, which I wrote for him on a card under the title above.

For a few, bravery occurs in the moment before the fact:
Imagining possible consequences and deciding – regardless – to act.
For even fewer, I can only imagine, bravery is a daily act of will
Summoning the necessary strength not to give up still.
Though any courage is unusual, what you are required to have is rare
And though it is an individual journey, you won’t be alone there.
Remember that the same sun and moon which watch your fight
Are seen by family and friends supporting you, every day, every night.

Today we talked about his future. He talked about “unknowns”. The relentless positive side peeled a little but not much. I am in awe.

Be Grateful

After catching an overnight train to Shanghai from Beijing when my mum and Brian had boarded their flight back to the UK, Jun and I spent the night of my birthday in a drink all you can club with her brother’s girlfriend playing a dice drinking game. Then we flew to Osaka, spent time with Orlando, Kahori and their girls and then went to Nara. A series of slow trains over about eleven hours got us to Tokyo late last night and we visited my friend Koji in hospital in Saitama Prefecture today.

Way before we’d come out here, Koji had said that he planned to take time off to take us places because last time (2002 for the World Cup) he’d been really tired what with working and his newly-arrived twins. Since that promise, Koji has had a motorcycle accident and is paralysed for life. He’ll never walk again but hopes to get back some feeling or use of arms or hands. I approached our meeting with a certain amount of dread.

Speculating on why that was is a little too self-indulgent given the nature of what has happened to Koji (putting aside the MRSA virus he caught after getting to the military hospital which is closest to where he had his accident), who put me at ease immediately we got there and is remarkably upbeat, taking strength from the words of those who have wished him well. We bought and fed him grapes and chatted about the mundane (my desire for a new camera lens, Watford’s trials (we lost at Swansea in the league on Sunday and won there the following Tuesday to reach the Carling Cup quarter-finals)) and the all-important: friends and friendship.

Many of his Essex University mates have rallied and those he saw once a year are now at his bedside of a weekend. In Jun Shimizu’s case, she is doing much more than that, even taking time off work to help Megumi (Koji’s wife) deal with those nasty financial issues that are overbearing in a state where health care is not free. Blame for the accident has been assigned by a witness to Koji and so his insurance company is refusing to pay. The government won’t help until he is certified as having a disability and that won’t happen till after months - as many as eighteen, possibly - of expensive rehabilitation.

Circumstances like these are supposed to make you grateful for what you have but I am reminded more of the most haunting words of the Band Aid single: “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” This is a negative sort of gratitude rather than a real appreciation. Maybe it shows a lack of imagination on my part: an inability to see myself in his position and therefore value more highly the abilities most of us take for granted. But tonight, before I sleep, I am pondering the idea of what we mean when we say “be grateful”.

Questions of Identity

The lyrics from that huge sweeping anthem are instantly recognisable: “It’s been a long time coming...but a change is gonna come”. But can you name the title of the track? Is it the first or second of those clauses? And who sang it? Was it Otis Redding?

I don’t doubt that there are aficionados who scoff at the ignorance, but last year I was not alone in being unsure. When I read a version of that line on the BBC News website as part of Barack Obama’s victory speech, it brought back the difficulty I had downloading a song I had in mind but didn’t really know. Many people using the same programme as me had misnamed and misassigned it.
Although the discussion concerning the new President has often been centred around race, the more relevant question of identity remains: who is Barack Obama? In Europe, at least, there has been massive support for an unknown quantity. Is he really an agent of significant change? On foreign policy – which is what most non-Americans care about most - John Pilger in a New Statesman article certainly doesn’t think so. Same old, same old is his verdict: kowtowing to the Israel lobby and maintaining a belief in American military might as right
Obama himself has denied a shift to the centre after winning the Democratic nomination but a change there certainly did come. Now we get to see who the man is. Is his rhetoric merely that? I was hugely inspired by his grown-up discourse on the subject of race. But those were just words. The man will be measured by his actions.

I See Dead People

Joss has kept me up date with our home games, texting me about our 3-2 home defeat to Wolves and I picked up on our 2-0 defeat at Preston after reading Aidy’s latest email. By the time we started our home game against Blackpool on Saturday 1^st November, I had trooped round the Forbidden City with Jun, Mum and Brian (nominally). That was closer to the end than the beginning of their trip: they have already been treated fantastically in Xian, with Jun’s family and friends showering my mum with gifts, taking us around in a hired van (to the Terracotta Army amongst other things) and buying us massive meals. Then we flew to Guilin and took a cruise down the River Li to Yangshuo before returning to Beijing and the “must-sees” there.

We woke up just after five for the Great Wall & Ming Tomb tour, and Joss’s text told me that we’d been defeated at home again. “Rasiak is back and scored” his succinct message related. I’d texted him earlier thanking him for keeping me up to date and asking who he was going with but without direct response. Anyway, the 4-3 defeat left the Hornets fourth from bottom. Surely Aidy was already a dead man walking?

The section of the wall we climbed was very different from that I had scaled thirteen years previously. Badaling is so full of tourists that Mum and Brian decided that the jostling was too much for them to continue. Fortunately almost everyone went one way so they were able to ascend a different way at their own pace.

Since then we have been to a Lama Temple and Mao’s mausoleum. I tried to sneak a video (using my phone) of the body but couldn’t look at the mobile for fear of being detected and didn’t realise it had auto-locked. Mao is as gold as the Watford strip. “Too much make-up” said Jun.

Joss’ most recent text informed me of the mutual decision by club and manager to terminate Aidy’s contract. I don’t think anyone will be wholly surprised: after last season’s disappointing end, he was going to have to improve and he has not done so. I’d like Alan Curbishley to take the job but it doesn’t feel possible. No doubt it’ll be someone I’ve never heard of; still, as long as there’s a beneficial bounce, I’ll take him.

Almost Famous

Monday we climbed the “incense burner” (557 metres above sea level) and at the top, first a solitary guy and later an excited group of students asked if they could have their photos taken with me. One of the males of the group commented that I looked like David Beckham (I don’t remember the glasses and earrings phase either).

Tuesday we headed in the same approximate direction to Yuanmingyuan to see the ruins of the Imperial Palace an Anglo-French force destroyed in 1860. Again I was invited to be in a couple of photos. Later, we met up with a friend from London, Maria, who planned this coincidental trip last year and we met her brother and a couple of her cousins, one of whom is David Lee, a Hong Kong movie and TV star. At the restaurant where we ate they got out the camera and took his picture and requested an autograph, then inexplicably asked me to sign too (later I wished I’d signed Tony Blair). At the bar of the five star hotel we went to later, people stopped talking and pointed (not for me anymore) and one awestruck girl came over just to say hello. Jun was pretty starstruck too.
A text from Joss indicated that Richard Lee is making a bit of a name for himself as a penalty saver, performing the feat again tonight as Watford squandered a 2-0 half-time lead to draw 2-2 at home to Cardiff. JJ and Hoskins scored but Priskin got himself sent off (again) and we were apparently under the cosh from then till the end.