Hands off?

Parkinson’s is a funny old thing. One of the difficulties of living with it, as with other chronic conditions, is summed up by that hoary old piece of advice: don’t let it define you. The irony is that the more you try to take it on, to resist that definition, the seemingly inevitable slide that follows on from that moment when, on diagnosis, you move from suffering to suffferer: that is, you become no longer a person with this wrong or that wrong with you, but a neatly pigeonholeable nameable condition. Continue reading

Enough already …

I wrote recently about my disillusionment with the modern way of giving, noting en passant that sponsorable feats are ‘subject to worthiness inflation, that is, to justify sponsorship you must come up with ever more wacky or onerous tasks. It won’t be long before there’s a charitable foundation for the children of people who’ve died on fund-raising trips’. Well, this may have been a joke of sorts even though it was based on observation of people doing frankly stupid things for charity, but today I discover that one American, Richard Swanson, died after being hit by a truck while attempting to dribble a football to Brazil for the opening of the World Cup, to benefit a football charity. Continue reading

One for the scorebook

The scorebook is something of a sacred object in cricket, a fetish, even. It records without prejudice the bare facts of an innings, its degree of accuracy dependant entirely on the skill and attention to detail of the scorer who wields the pencil. Many club scorers are women, imitating early modern publishers’ wives such as Sarah Griffin who kept the order books spic and span while their less literate husbands got on with the messy grunt of moveable type. Continue reading