A few facts about football (soccer)

One fact about soccer is that every man understands the offside rule, but no woman does!

A gross oversimplification, of course, and horribly sexist!  The rule is that a player is offside if there are fewer than two players between him and the opposition goal line at the moment that the ball is passed forward to him from a member of his own team. This leads to all sorts of debates, because the decision is usually made by a linesman (assistant referee) who has to make a split-second judgment based on his view of two things, namely the position of the offending player and the moment of the pass being made. If he is parallel with the play at the time, he has a reasonable chance of doing this, but if not …

The FA Cup is the world’s greatest club competition. That is surely true, because it is watched by people all over the world, and has a history of bringing together the giants and the minnows on the same pitch. And sometimes the minnows win!

A word of explanation for the uninitiated.  Every club in the country (that is, England and Wales - Scotland has its own competition) that is registered with the Football Association is entitled to enter the competition. This includes a whole host of amateur clubs that play in local leagues as well as the professionals. After several preliminary rounds there will be a number of these clubs who reach the “first round proper”, which is when the lower tier professional clubs join in. All the rounds are drawn from scratch, so a small amateur non-league club can find itself playing a professional league club. 

When the third round is reached, the top clubs (i.e. from the Premiership and the Championship) enter the draw. If any of the minnows have survived to this stage, they stand a chance of drawing a club that is oozing with international players who earn millions and own private jets. 

The draws for the later rounds are televised and watched eagerly as the small clubs hope to draw a much larger club. Although the chances of winning such a match are not as great as when a club of equal or lower status is drawn, there is a huge financial incentive for the smaller club, because it stands to fill its own ground if the draw is a home fixture, or, if drawn away, share in the gate receipts of the larger club, which may well be able to accommodate tens of thousands of fans at its ground.

The best result – from the smaller club’s point of view – is neither to win nor lose the game when drawn against a larger club but to earn a replay, because the second match is always played at the ground not used for the original match. It is even better if one or both matches is televised, because the fees earned from TV companies are well worth having.

The history of the competition includes many examples of ‘giant killing’, when a minnow has defeated a major club from the top flight of English football. A moment of brilliance or luck can turn a match upside down and produce an unexpected result that will bring a minnow club, and its players, very welcome fame and publicity, if only for a few weeks. It is the possibility of an upset that excites the public imagination and makes the FA Cup such a fascinating competition.

Any more facts about soccer? It’s a game of two halves, the winners are over the moon, the losers sick as parrots, and referees have to leave their guide dogs in the changing room. That should be enough to be getting on with.

© John Welford

How to pronounce 'ough'

How do I pronounce thee? Let me count the ways!

Once upon a time a Frenchman was travelling via the Channel Tunnel from Paris to London (OK, so the time wasn’t all that long ago). As his English was not all that good, he spent the time reading a book of tips on the language, and as the train approached St Pancras he found the page that read:

“tough” proounced tuff

“though” pronounced tho

“through” pronounced throo

“thorough” pronounced thurru

“cough” pronounced coff

“bough” pronounced bow

“lough” pronounced loch

As he got off the train and walked into the London streets he looked up at a theatre billboard and saw “The Sound of Music – Pronounced Success”, and that was when he shot himself!

So that makes seven. For the uninitiated, a lough is to an Irish person what a loch is to a Scot (i.e. a lake or a sea inlet), and is pronounced the same way, that is to say with a slightly guttural sound that is a cross between “lock” and “shhh”.

I have to sympathise with the unfortunate (and mythical) Frenchman, because there are no rules that can help the learner of English to know which pronunciation applies when. You just have to learn these things as you go along.

It is place names that are most likely to trap the unwary. For example, Slough (pictured above) is a town to the west of London that is known to most Brits for only two things. It is the setting for Ricky Gervais’s modern classic “The Office”, and it was once famously pilloried by the poet John Betjeman in the lines:

“Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

It isn’t fit for humans now.

There’s isn’t grass to graze a cow.

Swarm over, Death!”

Unkind maybe, but at least it taught a generation that the place wasn’t called Sluff.

During a visit to Baltimore I once met a young American lady who said that she was about to visit my country for a conference at a town called Lowborow.  It took a while before I realised she was actually going to a place that is only few miles from where I live, called Loughborough. I had never appreciated before that this name would cause anyone a problem, but it actually has two “ough” syllables which are pronounced differently, namely numbers one and four on my list above.

I therefore had a pleasant half hour teaching this delightful person to say “Luffburru”.

As to why English presents such eccentric difficulties, that would take a long and boring time to explain. Suffice it to say that ours is a language that has evolved over many centuries, based on many complex roots, with the sole purpose, it would seem, of baffling those poor benighted ones who have had the misfortune to be born elsewhere.

© John Welford

Grave of an unknown sailor

There is something infinitely sad and poignant about gravestones like this. Many thousands of lives were lost during World War II, and most of those victims have graves which family members can visit to pay their respects, but sometimes this cannot be done.

When a dead body cannot be identified, for whatever reason, the authorities still need to pay proper respect to whoever it was, and so gravestones like this are necessary.

There are all sorts of stories that might lie behind the placing of this stone, and none of them are particularly pleasant. High explosives do very nasty things to human flesh, as does the sea when a body spends a long time in it before being washed ashore, and the body that was buried here might simply have been unrecognisable when discovered. The sailor’s identity tag could easily have been lost or rendered unreadable.

There is also the sad story that belongs to the victim’s family. Not only did a son or husband never come home, but the family never knew what had happened to him or where his remains were to be found. It may be that the sailor was from overseas and the family simply did not have the means to investigate the circumstances.

It sometimes happened that there was no family left to mourn a disappeared serviceman. Whole families were sometimes killed by a single bomb during the London blitz, and if the son in the Navy also died a whole generation could just vanish.

And yet this life, whoever’s it was, was just as valuable as those of the other sailors in this cemetery whose descendants still pay visits to place flowers on their graves. They all gave their lives for a cause that was not of their choosing, and all such sacrifices deserve equal recognition.

Such a grave is also a reminder of the obscenity of war, in all ages, in that lives are snuffed out as if they had never existed. Real human beings, just like you and me with all our complexities and capacity for good and bad, can simply disappear without even a name to remember them by. And yet stupid humanity goes on doing it. As Pete Seeger sang, when will we ever learn?

© John Welford

Paying good money for rubbish

In 1987 Marie Jones, a playwright in Northern Ireland, wrote a play called “Somewhere Over the Balcony” that is set in Belfast at some time after the “Troubles” but when they were very fresh in people’s minds.

At one point in the play a character talks about the fact that the Troubles have made Belfast a popular tourist destination – people want to see where the riots and murders took place. She is particularly concerned with the actions of a German couple who are fascinated by everything to do with the events, including the fact that Republican women would bang the lids of their metal dustbins to alert their men when the security forces were approaching.

In the play, the Germans want to buy Kate Tidy’s dustbin lid as a souvenir. They offer her ten pounds for it, but then comes the good bit, as she tells the Germans:

“That was the first bin lid ever banged on Internment morning . . .  it was handed down from my granny. It is a collector’s item. It’s worth . . . two hundred pounds”

OK – so it’s a play, but I can just imagine something like that happening. It strikes me that nothing has changed in centuries – throughout history gullible people have been offered all sorts of trash for huge sums of money, in the belief that it has some particular significance. If all the supposed bits of the “true cross” of Christ’s crucifixion were put together you’d be able to build Noah’s Ark with them!

This was the trade that Chaucer’s Pardoner was in back in the 14^th century – ripping people off by conning them into believing that something of no intrinsic worth has miraculous properties.

Nothing has changed – people still pay absurd sums of money for items that once belonged to celebrities, or so they are told. The average human being seems to be just as gullible as ever!

© John Welford

Jet: a mineral that gives its name to black

Jet is an organic material that is closely related to coal and is often worked as though it were a mineral.

It is mainly found in strata from the Lower Jurassic era, originating from logs of ancient Araucaria trees (ancestors of the modern ‘monkey puzzle’) that fell and were washed out to sea, eventually being buried under other sediment that, over millions of years of heat and pressure, converted them into a relatively soft form of lignite or coal.

Pieces of jet are often found on beaches in such places as Whitby in North Yorkshire, where they have fallen from nearby cliffs as a result of local erosion.

The softness of jet allows it to be carved into many different shapes. It can also be polished to a brilliant sheen, which has long made it a popular material for use in jewellery.

Examples of jet jewellery have been found from Bronze Age and Roman times. It underwent a revival in popularity during the late Victorian era when people copied the fashion set by Queen Victoria for ‘mourning jewellery’ after the death of Prince Albert (she never wore anything that wasn’t black for the rest of her life).

© John Welford

Malala Yousafzai: Nobel Peace Prize winner

Malala Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, at the age of 17. Apart from being the youngest ever recipient of the prize, she is surely one of the most deserving.

Malala Yousafzai

The Nobel Committee awarded the 2014 Peace Prize jointly to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people". The latter name is probably not all that well known, but he is certainly a deserving recipient for his lifetime’s work in raising awareness of the problem of child labour, particularly in his native India.

However, the headlines for Malala are also well deserved. This is a young girl who, at the age of 12, was boarding a bus to go to school in her home province of Swat in Pakistan when a Taliban gunman fired three shots at her, one of which hit her in the head.

Malala survived and made a near-complete recovery, largely thanks to the sterling efforts of surgeons at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, England. The deliberate attack on her led to worldwide condemnation of her attackers, not least for their desire to murder a young girl simply because she was determined to go to school and was campaigning locally for the right to be educated to be extended to all girls.

The Taliban continued to threaten Malala and her family, who were subsequently given permanent residence in the United Kingdom.

Since her recovery, Malala has campaigned ceaselessly for the right of all children, everywhere, to be given a proper education. She has been given platforms to speak in countries all over the world, been feted by Presidents and Premiers, and on 12^th July 2013 addressed a session of the United Nations.

She is undoubtedly the world’s most famous teenager, having been included on lists of the “world’s most influential people”. She has received honours and plaudits from many countries, but she is probably most happy about the fact that the government of her native country has now introduced legislation in favour of girls’ education.

Few people would deny that she thoroughly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize – not for being a victim but for refusing to be bowed by her experience and indeed going much, much further in her unstinted campaign to achieve justice for young people. As a highly articulate young woman who speaks her mind and “tells it how it is” she is someone who is listened to and is making a real difference as well as setting a positive example that others are following.  

© John Welford

Teeth and the land bridge theory

Did you know that people of Native American descent are quite likely to have grooves on the back of their front teeth? This is something that has been noted by dentists for at least 100 years, but it is undoubtedly a feature that goes way back and did not suddenly manifest itself a century or so ago.

Another odd thing is that the same feature has been noted in people in Siberia, which adds strength to the generally held belief that America’s first inhabitants migrated from North Asia by crossing the land bridge that once existed where the Bering Straits are now. This would have been during the last Ice Age.

The big question, however, is why such a feature should have evolved in the first place? What possible advantage could there be in having grooves at the back of your front teeth? Maybe some Native American (or Siberian) out there can enlighten us!

© John Welford