This Old Sporting Life...

This old sporting life...

Those who read these columns regularly will know I spend a great deal of time riding around on bicycles. It will also not have gone unnoticed that not so long ago I had an hip operation.

It's spring and the cycling season has really started. For several weeks now I have been out in the forests or on the roads. Most weekends I have joined a group of cycling friends on their Sunday rides. Despite having to drop off the rear of the bunch a few times my teammates have been very complimentary about my progress and performance. Even my physiotherapist, who also happens to be one of the group, is impressed at the speed of my recovery.

My own feelings, however, are somewhat mixed!

I am pleased, and a little proud, that I was back on a bike just five weeks after the hip operation, a week ahead of schedule. A week later, six weeks earlier than most predictions, I'd already made a few trips on my mountain and road racing bikes. However, although it slipped by almost unnoticed, I can't avoid the fact that between the operation and my cycling come-back I had a birthday. It was my 70^th birthday. Seventy! How did that happen? It seems such a short time ago that I was pretending to be 18 so that I get into bars! Anyway, the point is, I have no idea what level of cycling performance I can reasonably expect at this age. Is there still room for improvement or is this as good as it gets? And what about all those sports related aches and pains? Which ones will eventually just go away, which ones can be treated and which ones are here to stay?

Yes I know, some of you will be thinking that at my age I should be sitting in an armchair watching sport on TV. That I should be down the pub sipping beer and grumbling about how things used to be better and that I should not be cycling around the countryside dressed in tight fitting cycling clothes. You may be right but my confusion is not restricted to my cycling activities.

Many of my friends are working less, will soon stop working or have already retired. That I have stopped  working as a  bike courier was inevitable, it was time, I don't miss it. Unfortunately, though, most of the clients and contacts for whom I provide cartoons and illustrations are also slowing down, stopping, moving on or changing direction. That leaves me both happily retired and desperately looking for work at the same time! My search for work is partly motivated by financial reasons (artists don't have pensions) but it has even more to do with fulfilment. Rest and relaxation is not for me. I need and want some stress, some challenges and some serious deadlines to stimulate my creativity. And I need an audience to create for. As for recreation, well, a whole lot of activities are no way near so much fun when you have all the time in the world to do them.

I am lucky enough to have many young real and virtual friends. A large proportion of these live in or come from Kyrgyzstan. I am pleased to say they they don't treat me with all the respect that they have been brought up to show their elders and in the same way I have always treated them as fully grown adults which means that we converse or communicate on fairly equal terms. Because I am older and therefore theoretically wiser, they do however at times ask my advice. Well I suppose I am wiser,  wise enough to know I shouldn't be giving advice to anyone.  However I am quite prepared to relate my experiences and share my opinions so that they can make their own mistakes! On the other hand, to be honest, I learn a lot from them, not just about their background and culture but as they progress up the educational ladder some of them are simply getting to be a whole lot smarter than me!

However it will be a long time before they are qualified or experienced enough to help me with my current dilemma: 
the birthday I mentioned was four months ago and I still don't know how to be seventy!

"That's Logical..."

“That's Logical.....”

On the face of it the amount of media coverage that one person dying from lung cancer has recently received is out of all proportion. Especially at a time when hundreds of innocent people are being killed by terrorists activities and state sanctioned air raids or are drowning while attempting to escape oppression and violence. However, this particular Dutch former chain-smoker, it must be said, was genuinely a legend in his own lifetime. In the furthest corners of the earth, even in places where they think Copenhagen is the capital of The Netherlands, just about anywhere, in fact, where a ball has ever been kicked people will know who Johan Cruyff is.

If by chance you haven't heard of him and you've managed to miss all the newspaper, radio and television coverage this last week there in plenty of information for you online. Take a look and you will discover his enormous contribution to football as player, manager, commentator and critic. You will discover that he is right at the top of the 'greatest Dutch person ever' list, along with Erasmus, Anne Frank, Rembrandt, and van Gogh and you will learn why he is considered a half-god in Catalonia! 

Along with lengthy accounts of his achievements, and conflicts, as footballer and trainer, there will also be a list of quotations. During his playing and management career and, even more so later, as a TV football analyst, he became increasingly famous, or notorious, for his unorthodox statements and unique use of language. His comments hovering somewhere between 'brilliant insight' and 'blatantly obvious' were formulated using a curious mixture of Amsterdam dialect, incorrect grammar, muddled syntax and an advanced vocabulary. The public reacted to his statements with a mixture of amusement and wonder while even his friends and colleagues at times found them incomprehensible. Nonetheless he would frequently finish his statements and seal his arguments with his trademark phrase “That's logical” !

The funny thing is that I had little trouble understanding most of his grammar, his pronouncements or the thoughts behind them. Which, I fear, may well say a lot about my own use of Dutch and the way I think.

His most famous quote: “Every disadvantage has its advantage”, often misquoted as “Every advantage has its disadvantage”, is basically Newton's third law of physics i.e. 'Every action has an equal and opposite reaction' a law that, as far as I am concerned, can be applied to all interactions including human ones. Personally I rather like his “If you're not in the right place at the right moment you are either too late or too early” simply because it manages to be meaningful and totally unnecessary at the same time! 
However my favourite may not be a Cruyff original at all but I heard him say it several times: “Don't look at the result, look at the causes”. For example, in football terms, if the last defender misses his tackle allowing an opponent to score a goal, don't blame the missed tackle, consider why the defender was put in the position of having to make the tackle. The real mistake was probably made several moves earlier. Or, here's another example for those of you who get bored with talk about football and footballers: most people who wake up with a sore head and a sick stomach after a night partying will say “I should never have had that last drink”. The truth is, it wasn't that last drink that did the damage, it was all the drinks you had before it that caused your hangover!