ON FORM

On Saturday I watched the Grand National on TV and it was won by the unfancied nag Rule the World at 33-1, pipping my lovely wife’s selection The Last Samurai. Rule the World was, as we racing aficionados say, “on the bit”, and he strode out beautifully, not bothered by his inexperienced but thrilled jockey 19-year-old David Mullins and making ecstatic his well-known Irish trainer, who sadly recently lost a son, Mouse Morris. He was magnificently “On Form” – my own selection, highly respected Holywell, fell ignominiously at the second of thirty fences. Naturally my mind turned to the joy of being On Form and its sad reverse.

Rule the World romps home

As this is also the Augusta Masters weekend, we remember other demonstrations and lapses in form. For years Tiger Woods was a worthy Master (4 times winner) almost unbeatable on the luscious manicured fairways of Augusta. Then suddenly his demons congregated and he lost it, now a shadow of the thrilling golfer he once was. We also remember Rory McIlroy in 2011 leading by 3 strokes on the last day and then blowing it with a horrendous final round of 80 - off form with a vengeance. Thankfully he redeemed himself the next year and he remains a great golfer, but this year record-breaking Jordan Spieth blew it on with a 7 at the short 12^th and Danny Willett (of England no less!) deservedly seized the green jacket.

We all know individually when we are on form, the easy fluency and charm, the persuasive arsenal of phrases and gestures finding their target, the warm approbation of friends and colleagues. We go home happy that we have done justice to ourselves; we have performed. Such moments are highly satisfying but they cannot be depended upon. Somewhere in our physical mechanism there is a vulnerable spot, inviting the insertion of the proverbial spanner into our works. Instead of shining, we stutter and haver, our tact deserts us, our phrases sound hollow and empty, our audience look at their feet rather than in our eyes: we know we have failed and we keep awake at night cringing at our embarrassing ineptitude. We should not overdo the agonising – like any other mammal we blow hot and cold, our temperaments have their ups and downs and steering a happy medium through life is frankly boring.

I have some sympathy with David Cameron, who certainly has had a difficult week, what with a row over £9m on an anti-Brexit pamphlet (a Government must be entitled to a point of view) and the furore over his Dad Ian’s past involvement with Panamanian entities. Much of the sound and fury is synthetic or misplaced. Ian Cameron was a stockbroker and of course he marketed shares to a well-heeled clientele: tax planning (the polite term for “tax avoidance”) is part of the warp and weave of commerce. If investment business can lawfully be channelled through tax havens in Panama, Cayman Islands or the BVIs, so be it – it is up to the HMRC to introduce restrictive legislation if they so wish. Until then, keep mum. Pretending that Cameron had some higher duty to eschew the whole area seems hypocritical to me. He is a citizen like any other and if Jeremy Corbyn and his gang want to use this as a club with which to beat the Prime Minister, their driving force seems little more than the politics of envy based on the fact that they cannot abide anyone more successful and richer than they are. Cameron admits he could have handled the matter better – he was simply off-form.

Pantomime not Art with A Midsummer Night's Dream

He is in good company being off-form. William Shakespeare could be brilliant, inspirational and almost life-changing. His tragedies in particular reach the heights of genius. But he has his duds too – I submit The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream respectively too unfunny, too tedious, too gruesome and too fanciful to deserve serious study. Yes, the Bard had his off-days; even in otherwise gripping Macbeth the action is paralysed by the leaden comedy of The Porter’s scene. Did old Will sometimes have a tin ear? Even allowing for the peculiarities of Jacobean “humour”, I think, to borrow Salinger’s expression from Holden Caulfield, Will was “as sensitive as a toilet-seat” when he wrote this scene. Similarly, William Wordsworth cannot fail to move with his matchless poetic diction in The Prelude but he was also guilty on an off-day of composing his ineffably feeble The Thorn.

It is a Monday as I write and we all tend to be slow to warm up on this gloomy day. But I implore you to down that bracing tonic, calibrate your well-tuned physique, think positively, skip outside and scintillate!

SMD

11.04.16              

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016