En garde!

Some more pictures from Challenge Wratislavia (epee only - although I'm a foilist, I took only epeeists). Rest here, click on those below for bigger versions.

Unlike foil, epee allows double hits - which makes it a lot easier. 

Elation!

Not great fencing in this shot, but I liked the angle

Great shot from Josh Wrigley

Appalling - but Ned Tidmarsh still makes the hit.

We had way too many England-England fights - very tense.

I like this one for the symmetrical blade bends

Harrison Nichols came 2nd overall: his mum enjoys a good shot in the semi-final.

Back. With a vengeance

Hello all. I know you've missed me, but you'll have to bear with me. In the next two days I have to teach two new texts, prepare seminars for other people to deliver, and mark a load of essays, as well as catch up with everything while I've been away and deliver lectures as normal. All while coping with severe exhaustion.

I've also been uploading several hundred of all-action England junior fencer photographs: I was the team manager for Challenge Wratislavia in beautiful Wroclaw, Poland. I've been before, but not as team manager, and it's a very different experience - even though the kids were lovely, there's no chance to relax, whether you're consoling somebody after losing a fight, trying to help winners keep their motivation, fixing kit, patrolling hotel corridors, wondering where the bus is, counting people who won't stand still, checking passports, explaining to the hotel why we need 30+ meals right now, using a Polish phrase book to explain to the organisers that a referee should be pushed down some stairs for being useless and on and on.

However, I did have time to take several hundred pictures, mostly of fencing action. So if you like fast-moving shots of children hitting each other, you'll love this set. Here are a few samples.

Green about the gills

Ireland and England are playing each other in the 50-over World Cup match, right now. England should slaughter Ireland, but they're making slightly heavy weather of it: only two wickets down, but the scoring's not particularly fast. I'm praying for a sneaky Ireland win, though it's going to come down to the quality of the bowlers.

Unfortunately, due to a finger injury, Ireland won't have the pleasure of smashing the stumps behind Eoin Morgan: ex-Ireland turncoat and underwhelming current England player.

Follow it live here.

Books again

A few more in the post: teen fiction for next year's Literature and Identity course, if I still have a job then. Nancy Garden's Annie On My Mind, Hautzig's Hey, Dollface, and the first Judy Blume I've ever held, Forever, which is apparently still controversial and frequently banned (haven't they ever read this or this: they make Blume look like a medieval nun?).

Cue female readers telling me their Judy Blume stories. Please! Being male, they're rather out of my comfort zone. I'm sure at least one of my 4 sisters must have read them, but I'm certain that they'd have been on the banned list in the family home, being about it.

Also on the subject of identity, P J Harvey's new album, Let England Shake, has arrived: an exploration of competing versions of Englishness. As far as I can tell, Harvey objects to the way Englishness seems to be defined by aristocrats cheerfully sending peasants off to die for imaginary reasons. I do love her music - very few artists are as consistently unsettling and challenging. Not sure why she focuses on England rather than Britain - only she could answer that, I guess. Britain's Patti Smith?

Howzat?

Distracting me from work today will be England v. Pakistan cricket, live here. There's an extra edge to it, thanks to Tory Scum David Cameron's decision to stand up in hated neighbouring India and shout 'Pakistanis are all terrorists ner ner ner' (I paraphrase, but that's roughly the gist of it).

Peace reigns once more

I watched England in the World Cup for the first time this competition. Obviously many better qualified people than I am will explain how exactly these players managed to lose 4-1 to Germany, but I was surprised. During the Premiership season, we're constantly being told that they're world-class, and sometimes they demonstrate it - but on yesterday's evidence, they're nowhere near Germany, Brazil, Argentina (poor Mexico), The Netherlands and several other teams.

Update: if you want a depressing explanation of why good people are turned off English football, read this excellent and worrying piece by Benjamin.

Here's an explanation for England's 'phantom' goal, sent to me by a German friend who isn't gloating. No sir. Not one bit. No way.

Relive the glory

By watching England v USA in glorious technicolour Lego!
From these guys (I'm guessing), who are gradually recreating every match meticulously.

A draw's a win, right?

Here's one US tabloid's take on their team's battling draw with England, via Paul Flynn MP's blog. It's a Murdoch paper, by the way.

Like most English people, Americans find it difficult to distinguish between Britain and England. Bunker Hill was the first engagement of the US War of Independence, in Boston. The British won, but lost half their troops. 

They think it's oil over…

So, did you all enjoy the big match between the United States and BP England? I thought there was some slick passing, though many of the tackles were pretty crude, and the defence leaked badly. 


Still, congratulations are due to England for achieving a creditable draw against a country where football ranks somewhere below competitive spitballing in the popularity stakes. Onwards and upwards, eh?


Actually, I didn't watch the match, other than ten minutes on a badly tuned TV in a takeaway. The streets were deserted - like the opening scenes of 28 Days Later. Instead, I watched Sense and Sensibility, the version with every Classically-Trained British Actor of the last 30 years. It was excellent, though obviously a novel of two halves, and poor Miss Dashwood (Emma Thompson) was left sick as a parrot until the lads Ferrers and Brandon turned it around in the dying minutes of extra time. 

I'm such a scenester

Because I've just bought The xx's album xx. To balance it, I'm keeping an eye on England v. Ireland in the One Day International. A not very good 203 for England, but Ireland's innings is delayed by rain.

Catch it!

No, not swine flu. The last day of the cricket's on and I'm not there - my sister just texted me to say there are seats but here I am at work and it looks like rain may be on the way. (If you don't know the area, Wolverhampton is twenty minutes away from Birmingham on the train and Edgbaston's a suburb of Brum). So I'm stuck with the OBO.

After three terrible, rain-ruined days, it's a real battle. I thought the Aussies would pull back into contention after chucking their first innings away for 203, but they're now on 171-4: better than before but still not much of a challenge for England. I wonder what's happened to the Australians. They used to be a) winners, b) hugely competitive and c) charming/amusing with it. Now they're none of these things and the world's slightly poorer for it.

(Oh yes, a note for our American readers).

Cricket's like baseball, only better. A match can last 5 days and still end in a draw. Breaks are taken for drinks, lunch and tea. The US and Canada had a regular test match well into the twentieth-century and I gather the tradition has been revived. The only cricket match in American literature is in Little Women, which makes sense as the game hung on in Pennsylvania longer than elsewhere - baseball took over during the Civil War because it was easier to carry all that stuff around. American cricket now centres on Indian computing experts in California and Caribbean immigrants in NY, rather than sad old English expats trying to show off…

Nightwatchman

I'm so bored with this educational theory essay, exacerbated by the knowledge that I've got to get it done by tomorrow - no chance for bunking off.

I've had the cricket on in the background (the Guardian's wonderful OBO coverage: one day they'll print one of my puns) and it's been a humdinger. England started brilliantly, then relied on their legends to arse things up - big collapse in the middle order, led by Pietersen throwing his wicket away, Bopara and Collingwood doing likewise, then Flintoff marking his final Test with a magnificent 4 runs. After bowling uselessly all day, Australia must be jubilant with 364-6 (Strauss 161no)

Au revoir

That's it for today - I'm enjoying England's abject collapse against South Africa, but I'm hungry and there's ironing to do. See you all tomorrow.

They think it's all over…

I didn't watch the football match last night because I was talking to interesting people and didn't want to watch a charmless bunch of thugs treat an amateur team like idiots.

Radio 4's sports commentator this morning posed the question 'what's the secret of England's success'? Could it possibly be that scoring 6 against a team with no professional players from a country comprising 'rugged mountains dissected by narrow valleys', only 2.13% of which is flat enough to grow crops, and a population of 83,000 - about that of Stratford-on-Avon or slightly more than the capacity of Old Trafford, isn't that great really?

Outplayed and outgunned

Last night was a tale of bravery, tactics, guile and determination. In every area, we were completely outclassed. We must bow down to the master and accept that we will always be amateurs.

To what do I refer? To Ireland's loss in the Twenty20 (we've still qualified for the last eight though)? To England's victory over mighty Andorra?

Of course not. Last night we welcomed the external examiners to our august institution. Every subject has an academic from another institution to check that we're teaching well, marking properly, offering good courses - usually they're amazed by the amount of work we do and the quality (they teach 2-3 modules a year: I taught 11 this year, two of them double). Last night in the Hogshead was like a Staff Ball - the only people there without PhDs were the bar staff.

So what was this comprehensive defeat? It was the annual competition to persuade one of my colleagues (no names, to save his blushes) to buy us a drink. I have to admit that we failed utterly. At every stage we were outfoxed. He disappeared just as we entered the bar, and reappeared only when we were safely ensconced around a table, foamy pints overflowing. As we approached the critical stage of the next round, he disappeared for a second and reappeared with his own pint, despite our enthusiastic joshing about whose round it was (I eventually admitted defeat and made the trek to the bar).

By the crucial point of the third pint, we had pretty much accepted failure. Our tactics were reduced to leaving our now empty glasses on the table and staring at them silently. Once again, our foe managed to evade our clutches, spotting someone across the hostelry to whom he absolutely had to talk. He then left, victory assured for the seventh year running. Curses!

Needless to say, I'm not feeling entirely compos mentis this morning. Exhaustion and slight over-consumption of Ceres' bounty conspired against going swimming this morning. Despite this, I bonded with our externals over the twin joys of teaching and Stoke City.

What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?

Asked C L R James. Very little, if we're talking about Australia, humiliated! I hope England and Wales (usually known as England) go out next. Today: Holland v. Pakistan live here. Can Holland beat Pakistan? Well, they beat England convincingly. Ireland, of course, qualified for the Super 8s already, by beating Bangladesh. This is how they did it:

Tamim's run-out was a comic affair. Niall O'Brien dashed around the stumps to collect Mahmudullah's nudge, Tamim was sent back and dropped his bat, and O'Brien's throw to the bowler's end deflected on to the stumps off the ample stomach of William McCallan.

Nighty-night

That's enough for today. England have won another boring and pointless one-day match, and I've marked a lot of essays. See you all tomorrow for more of the same?

I'll leave you with a key moment from history:

Anyone else following the cricket?

If not, England are struggling but Bopara's doing well. I'm meant to be writing PGCE essays but the force is weak in this one. England 224-5, Bopara 97, Broad 16.

I've had a couple of gin slings

Ben rightly points out the essential silliness of today's protests because he's a democrat. I accept this, but would like to suggest that it's a start: I posted this in his comments but cross-post for your delectation.

Tie-die and slogans don't equal effective protest. But the argument is usually: wear a suit, get elected, then we'll take you seriously. But the syndicalists made the point that engagement with the system of established values blunts the legitimate objection to the system. Sometimes, violence is legitimate. Not the kind of pathetic protest we saw today, but the kind of serious, sustained resistance which the Tolpuddle martyrs, the Diggers, the Fifth Monarchists, the Peasants Revolt, the Monmouth Revolt, the '45, the Rebecca Riots, the Luddites, the Victorians who made early Peelers wear leather collars, the suffragists (just to cite British examples because it would be too easy to mention Irish and other ones) indulged in. One of the things I really respect about the English, Welsh, Scots etc. is that the people used to know how to resist. You cut Charles II's head off and ran plenty of other despots out of town, then forgot about it. Stop accepting that protest has to be 'legitimate': what does that mean? Who defines legitimacy? The American revolutionaries saw themselves as British patriots resisting illegitimate state control, and the police force nothing more than the armed wing of the upper classes for a couple of centuries ( and again during the miners' strike).

Slogans, witty placards and a few smashed windows won't bring about the revolution: it will delay it because it lets off steam. Serious, organised and sustained violence will, as it did in Kenya, Ireland, the 13 colonies, Poland, France, Italy, Cuba and many other countries. The problem with Britain is that the people were trained to legitimise the state because its power was trained on others (marginal groups, foreigners) to the extent that the British (or English, Welsh and Scots) forgot that power resides with them. Goverments rule by assumed consent - time to withdraw it. Today's protests were schoolyard histrionics - the lessons from history are that serious weaponry and strategic plans are required if you want to achieve serious change. Unless, of course, people just want a softer version of the status quo.

Sport sport sport sport…

England crash humiliatingly to India in the ODI - it couldn't happen to a better bunch of chinless wonders and imports who seem more determined to live the footballer lifestyle and reduce the game to bling-encrusted shallowness than to play well (and the ECB seems to think this is the future of the game. First the Stanford extravaganza and now this.