An Olympic Summer

 If that's 23 degrees outside, I'm only glad it's not the 34 that was thought possible. Summer becomes a grind even when we are given some heat off for good behaviour. Later July and then August take away my usual round of concerts, brings out kids and noisy neighbours and is the time most associated with city centre riots. It is a long time since summer was the undisputed highlight of the year, celebrated in such songs as Sumer is ycumen in.

Being a curmudgeon, like being a pessimist, is a defence mechanism used by people who can be perfectly happy in other circumstances but not entirely so as things stand but it's only three or four weeks until such circumstances might yet prevail again.

Sport is supposed to be that thing that diverts us from real issues into makeshift glory. Good luck to The Hundred, the version of cricket invented by Professor Branestawm, its latest forlorn effort to sell itself to a mass audience except it's not quite cricket. This summer it has been a footnote to the incursions of football via the Euros and the festival of windsurfing, break dancing and wall climbing that is now the Olympic Games.

And, why not. Although the Olympics are really the running races, how do we know it shouldn't be knitting, bricklaying, flower arranging or competitive eating.

One way of seeing what television amounts to is to experience it with one dimension removed. While Top of the Pops could often be silly it could also be brilliant but watch it without the sound and it becomes clear it's a lot of posturing. Listen to a sitcom from another room and it amounts to regular bursts of canned laughter whether it's Dad's Army or The Green Green Grass. And sport, whether it's exciting or not, is a commentator employed for their capacity to transmit the routine sensation that somebody has won.

Somebody was bound to but I'm happiest when my horse has got over the last well clear and I've got it right again, bar the shouting.

There were some great running races in the Olympics. The fact that the Men's 100 metres was so close suggests it might have been drug-free. Flo Jo simply could not have been that much faster than the rest of her gender and species but gender is now a sinister issue where once Jarmila Kratochvilova had always been female and so was Caster Semenya as far as I understood it. We are not all made the same. All except two of us will not be Olympic Champion at any given games but now there are 72 genders and what I want to know is why I, alongside so many others, am a victim of the prejudice against my exact specification that denies us the glory of being Olympic Champion of Everything.

Like literature, sport depends on the 'suspension of disbelief' and allowing ourselves to be involved with it even though we know there's something not quite right about it, like the fact that Everton and Nottingham Forest survived relegation last season despite points deductions whereas Man City keep kicking 110 financial irregularity charges down the road almost as often as they equally effectively kick a ball.

Absurdities come into focus when one things about things too much, one could think, but it's too hot too often; sport is expecting us to pay up and be thrilled by a meaningless circus and we are forever shortchanged while expected to be grateful. But somewhere deep down in the curmudgeon or pessimist there remains the idealist who still nurtures the hope that everything is gonna be alright.

Kamala hasn't taken long to be running all over Trump in the polls; we eventually now have a competent Prime Minister with a good majority for a few years in the UK and, rather than have Beethoven's Archduke Trio set on replay on the record player, it's only a few weeks until Chichester and Portsmouth Cathedrals, the Menuhin Room and other local venues will be providing such things in the flesh again.

It ain't over til it's over. Keep Hope Alive.