The pound lost over 2% against the dollar today and has lost 4% so far this year. I dare say there are benefits from that as well as a downside and it probably doesn't affect me much but it is all apparently due to concerns over the UK remaining in the European Union and today's exponential decline is put down to the decision of one man. That is how important Boris Johnson is.
Caitlin Moran got it about right in The Times on Saturday in her outline of how she would organize the country, explaining that she would have Boris as a figurehead Head of State, with no power at all (and I can't see that mattering to him as long as he can be called Prime Minister), who could just be sent abroad to fall over, say 'Blimey' and make people laugh. Meanwhile a geek with no personality whatsoever that nobody sees and hardly ever hears about, who understands how to run the country, can spend all day on a computer, crunching numbers and deciding what to do.
Boris can hardly campaign with much conviction having been seen to spend so long trying to make his mind up where he stands but that could be presented as evidence of what a finely-constructed argument he has formulated, i.e. that a vote to leave provides a basis for negotiating a better deal to stay in. But his new friends- Nigel Farage and George Galloway- will not see it like that and neither will his old friends Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove. So it's a rare old, convoluted plan he has devised as the best way to get to become Prime Minister and we can only watch in dreadful trepidation as the long story unfolds.
I'm not going to continue any sort of campaign to Remain because most canvassing and electioneering looks to me counter-productive. You won't be persuaded to vote like me because I advised it, in fact it's more likely to put you off. Paddy was offering 2/7 that we Remain and 5/2 we Leave on Saturday but then I heard Ladbrokes on the radio saying they shortened the market up to 4/11 and 2/1 post the Boris declaration.
I still make it a 1/6 chance we stay in so you can have 4/1 Leave.
The positions of so-called right and left have shifted about alarmingly since the 1970's but now even the 'left', as in Jeremy Corbyn, and the Green Party are Pro-Europe. The biggest danger to the Remain vote is apathy and voter fatigue. But its greatest assets are those five figureheards listed above. If that disparate bunch of misfits are all voting one way then I'll vote the other.
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While waiting for more books to arrive (after sadly Hunter Davies' biography of Wordsworth was too badly damaged in the post and never arrived), I did read Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside on Sunday. You can see why Shakespeare was so eminent in his day and has been since. While I'm sure the play is a lively and entertaining romp on stage, on the page the footnotes take up almost as much space as the text, going to great lengths to explain all the puns and wordplay of the bawdiest kind. It makes Middleton seem like a Jacobean precursor of Jim Davidson.
I appreciate the fashion for cynicism, the commentary on emergent capitalism, the stock characters and how Ben Jonson was becoming the next big thing but I'm afraid we are spoilt by having had Shakespeare in the same way that Michael Bywater once explained that we were flattered by being of the same species as Bach. The arguments put forward by Rubinstein, representing anti-Stratfordians, that Shakespeare would have been too busy to write as many plays as he did as well as acting, are tempered by Middleton's output as well as reference in the book to another actor/playwright. They were insubstantial objections to Shakespeare anyway when the real problem for the anti-Stratfordian coalition seems to be with the idea of genius.
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One of the main benefits of having the Eurosport channels was always for me having the cycling on it. Now that cycling has become, in the twenty years since I packed up doing it, all but the British national sport and there is a Bike channel devoted entirely to pedal power, there is a danger that there might be too much of it and it could become the new football. But Eurosport has plenty of snooker, too, and I was glad of its coverage of the Welsh Open that finished last night because those with only terrestrial channels were denied the chance to see what was quite possibly the greatest snooker ever played if you discount some of the most outrageous nights of Alex Higgins' tormented career.
In the space of one week, Ronnie O'Sullivan won 4-0 in 38 minutes, turned down a 147 break and made 146 instead because ten grand wasn't enough of a prize for it (for him) and then came back from 5-2 down in the final, against the estimable Neil Robertson, to win 9-5. And that is snooker genius the like of which has not been seen before.
And it seems that, unlike other sporting greats that haven't been able to cope with their own singular gift, he's not even throwing it away on booze, drugs and a downward spiral. The most one can accuse him of is a kind of off-hand disregard. Barry Hearn said he showed disrespect for the audience who would have liked to have seen the 147. No, they saw something better than that- a 146 and the first time anybody's been cute enough to say no to the cash windfall and do something else instead.
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I'm looking forward to the forthcoming reading and music. Here already is Daisy Dunn's Catullus' Bedspread, then there will be the new Graham Swift, the not quite so new David Mitchell Slade House when it appears in paperback (ordered to circumvent Amazon's p&p rules), Sean O'Brien's selection of Andrew Marvell in the Poet-to-Poet series to see what one Hull-related poet says about the other for when I do my own revised summary of Marvell one day and, most long awaitedly, Gorecki's 4th Symphony, now out on CD.
So don't forget to tune in for all of them but, possibly before any of them, the Cheltenham 2016 Preview in which I will nominate the three big bets, and each way Gold Cup suggestion, that will retrieve the uncommonly unsatisfactory start I've had to the 2016 turf account.
It makes it seem a bit unlikely that dull old stories about My Life in Sport, with cycling, running, chess, darts, pool and possibly gaelic football, are going to be required to fill out these spaces for a while yet.