Colemanballs

For no other reason than I think they’re funny (and I have a fondness for the perpetrators)
The magazine Private Eye coined the phrase Colemanballs to mean the funny verbal phrases and sentences that come out of the mouths of sports commentators. It was originally applied to David Coleman whose enthusiasm and involvement in his job meant he made many endearing gaffes during his 46 years as a highly respected sports commentator. 

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales - a medieval text full of language fun

Honourable History
Ballsing up the English Language has a long history with deliberate language jokes as far back as Chaucer’s medieval Canterbury Tales and embodied in the misspeaking of Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals. Apparently as early as the 1949 Oxbridge Boat Race, the BBC commentator John Snagge announced “I can’t see who’s in the lead, but it’s either Oxford or Cambridge” which falls into the category of Stating The Bleeding Obvious. Some of David Coleman’s utterances fall into this category.

Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop - the "very pineapple of politeness"

Verified Colemanballs

• If that had gone in, it would have been a goal.
• This evening is a very different evening from the morning we had this morning.
• He is accelerating all the time. The last lap was run in 64 seconds and the one before that in 62.
• He’s 31 this year – last year he was 30.
• Forest have now lost six matches without winning.

A few of my favourite Colemanballs not by Coleman

• They didn't change positions; they just moved the players around.
• I don’t want Rooney to leave these shores but if he does, I think he’ll go abroad.
• He’s one of the greatest players in the world, if not one of the greatest anywhere.
• I never make predictions and I never will.
• This is really a lovely horse and I speak from personal experience since I once mounted her mother.
• Sure there have been injuries, and even some deaths in boxing, but none of them really that serious.
• If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again.
• He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn't like it – in fact you can see it all over their faces.
• Here they come, every colour of the rainbow: black, white, brown.
• And he missed the goal by literally a million miles.
• He's pulling him off! The Spanish manager is pulling his captain off!
• The game is not over until it is.

RIP David Coleman

Here at the palace I will rest awhile

Afternoon tea and a shock for George III
En route to Salisbury Cathedral (see previous blog) and before the ecstasy of Stonehenge (following blog) we rested for afternoon tea at Blenheim Palace. As you do. Apart from the glory of the treat, we had a guided tour round the State Rooms, a virtual tour round a weird “Untold Story” with ghostly projections giving a flavour of Blenheim’s history (and in fact on the return journey we stopped again to peer into the Duke’s rooms.) At times like these, I usually feel like Heathcliff must have felt staring into the windows of Thrushcross Grange, expecting at any moment to be thrashed and sent back to Wuthering Heights. At Blenheim the guides were in fact very welcoming, impressively knowledgeable and were able to motormouth through the chequered history of battles, wars, loveless marriages, tragic events, bitter legal disputes and architect tiffs that went into the creating of the only building in England called a Palace that’s neither royal nor connected to the church. Although the construction began during Queen Anne’s time, it was George III who cemented Blenheim’s reputation as being too big for its non-royal boots by gasping “We have nothing to equal this!”

"Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail"
In John Donne’s poem of witty poetical advice To Sir Henry Wotton he remarks that “Life is a voyage,” “Cities are sepulchres,” “Courts are theatres” and “The country is a desert” unless you can look within and “Be then thine own home.” No amount of luxury or power will satisfy your soul if you fail “to thine own self be true” as Shakespeare had Polonius say in Hamlet. Donne admires the snail who carries “his own house still, still is at home” and the fish who glide by “leaving no print where they pass.” Seeking fame or fortune means nothing without loved ones. I’m sometimes puzzled by my own politics of liking big houses and estates (and supporting the Monarchy as an institution 100%) – when I’m instinctively liberal and hate entitlement and the unfair distribution/hoarding of wealth by the few. Could it be that my “view within” (as E M Forster put it in A Room With A View) recognises that the “gorgeous palaces” can be seen as prisons, trapping those inside whose souls can never truly be free?

Women who Dared

Badby bound
Regular readers will know I consider an “egg-shell” in Northamptonshire a second home – and so we were there recently, snuggled in village living, bathed in hospitality, chitty-chattering away and rummaging through nature prior to the explosion of Badby Wood bluebells which are on the brink of blooming. When we are fully assembled, there are six women to three men – the elder stateswoman was gallivanting on another trip on this occasion – so, with double the oestrogen, it was an apt time to visit the Bodleian library exhibition about the women’s movement. 100 years since The Representation of the People Act allowed votes for (some) women!

Badby Woods

Sappho to Suffrage: women who dared
Bodleian staff members regularly delve into their archives for artefacts to display. If you haven’t visited, I’d recommend checking out their website’s What’s On. Until February 3rd 2019 they have an imaginatively-presented collection showcasing the achievements of women who dared to do the unexpected. You can see fragmentary scraps of poetry by the remarkable poet, Sappho, engravings of pirates like Anne Bonny, accounts of cross-dressing female soldiers getting military pensions; records of explorers, scientists, mathematicians, writers (a manuscript of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for goodness sake!); photographs, banners, musical scores, medieval book-bindings and even a Suffragette board game!

Oxford, Badby, Women who Dared....

How’s your Dad these days, Lizzy?
The object that startled me most was Elizabeth I’s prayer-book embroidered (when she was a child) with her step-mother’s initials, KP – Katherine Parr. Astonishing! Poignant! If you could only visit Elizabeth when she was stitching those initials and ask her about her dad, her mum, England at the time, her hopes for the future…. 

The First World War
Until you see material assembled like this it is easy to forget that the achievements of women have often been left out of the history books and the national memory. A significant contribution to victory in Britain during the 1914-1918 war was the willingness of women to enter the laboratories, factories, hospitals and services that were essential to keeping the Home Front going and feed the engine of war abroad. The authorities had no choice, after the war-time contributions of women, other than to allow property-owning women over the age of 30 to vote in 1918, a step towards equal voting rights in the UK.

Suffragists and Suffragettes
The courage and determination of the women of a century ago should never be forgotten. The recently-erected statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square has been a welcome addition to the cavalcade of bronze throughout London. Fawcett was a suffragist (one of those who advocated peaceful protesting and constitutional campaigning) but more controversial were the suffragettes who escalated from banners to marching to being chained to railings to smashing windows, to setting fire to letter boxes to attacking government ministers. Without their courageous violence, would change ever have occurred? (History suggests not….) The exhibition makes clear that the boundary between suffragists and suffragettes was blurred with many women belonging to groups taking dual approaches.

Force-feeding in prison
Lady Constance Lytton gave a sobering account of her own experience of force-feeding in prison:

Two of the wardresses took hold of my arms, one held my head and one my feet. One wardress helped pour the food. The doctor leant on my knees…. he explained the steel gag would hurt and the wooden gag would not….he broke into a temper as he plied my teeth with the steel instrument….the pain of it was intense and at last I must have given way for he got the steel gag between my teeth. Then he proceeded to turn it more than necessary until my jaws were fastened wide apart, far more than they would naturally go. Then he put a tube down my throat which seemed much too wide and about four feet in length…. the horror of it was more than I can describe….

Feminist men
I’ve written about this idea before but don’t apologise for writing it again: anyone of any age, any gender, any ethnicity, any class or any creed who doesn’t self-identify as a feminist doesn’t share the same definition as me. I’ve heard Juno Dawson explain succinctly that if your answer to the following two questions is “yes” then you are a feminist. Should a woman have the same equality of opportunity as a man? Should a woman and a man be paid the same salary for the same job? If you can’t answer “yes” to those two questions, then you have different values to me.

Mother, brothers, sister.... impossible not to be a feminist if you've half a brain....

Mothers, sisters, aunts, nieces, daughters, girlfriends, wives, colleagues
Everyone has had a mother. Not everyone experiences the other range of relationships you can have with women. But as a tutor in a secondary school I tried to transmit to teenage boys that they shouldn’t treat girls or women any differently than you would want your mother or sister or daughter to be treated. (The same applies, of course, to fathers and brothers and sons.) As humans it’s nigh on impossible to avoid interaction with both genders and mutual respect has to be the future for the next stage of evolution. Thank you, Suffragists and Suffragettes from history and all who continue to fight for a better civilisation.