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.