by Yesterday I sat on the bank of the Basin and watched some provincial cricket, along with, er, forty-odd other people. It got me thinking. Sportsmen are really tactile, aren’t they? During Otago’s run chase against Wellington there were fist bumps, high-fives, low-fives, shoulder slaps and all manner of other gestures that I can hardly describe. I hadn’t taken much notice of this before, in the same way that until a couple of months ago, I wouldn’t have taken much notice if two people were conversing in Romanian. And that’s precisely it: this vast array of modern gestures is a foreign language to me. When I drop my colleague off after work, he’ll sometimes want to shake hands with me. That’s a gesture I’m entirely comfortable with; to me a handshake implies acknowledgement of the other person, and it’s good to acknowledge the other person. But other times he’ll want a fist bump or even a high-five, and on those occasions I feel distinctly uncomfortable. I’ve even seen him fist-bump our boss, who unlike me, seems au fait with the concept. I’m guessing fist bumps are meant to imply mateship, something more than just acknowledgement.
As it happened, Wellington’s early declaration paid off, and they skittled Otago’s last six batsmen cheaply when all three results had been perfectly possible. As I walked home (all of three minutes) I passed what must have been the Wellington changing room and I could hear them singing something in celebration of their victory. That’s some kind of mateship going on there again, isn’t it? Even low-grade rugby and football teams have those rituals, don’t they? I’ve never been part of anything like that myself. I play my interclub tennis, and I win and go home, or I lose and go home, or I stick around a bit to watch other people win or lose, and then go home. I have certainly played in teams where we’ve been to the pub afterwards and had a good chat, but singing has never been on the menu.
Temperatures soared into the mid-thirties today. Not here in Wellington – that would just be silly – but on the East Coast of the South Island. Christchurch and Dunedin both broke their all-time records for December; Timaru equalled theirs. (Note that this is New Zealand where “all-time” isn’t that much time. In the UK I’d sometimes hear that it had been “the wettest October since 1806” and those two centuries of weather records would remind me of how pioneering the UK was.) My planned adventure will give me both extremes of temperature to look forward to.
The Spanish general election was interesting, and it will now take a long time to form a government. Sometimes a messy outcome can be a good one, and I think this is one of those times. The two-party system has been well and truly obliterated by two newcomers to the game whose leaders are barely my age. Interestingly, as far as I can see, Spain doesn’t have a significant far-right anti-immigration party. This result is a version of what might have happened in the UK in May if (a) the polls had been accurate and (b) they had a better electoral system, not that the Spanish system is perfect (it gives extra weight to rural voters). Gosh, when the UK exit poll came out on that Friday morning (my time) I almost fell off my chair. I had to go out for lunch and had a hard time keeping the food down.
My parents arrive here tomorrow night. They’ll be staying with me until next Tuesday; we’ll have a very low-key Christmas. I’ve blown up some balloons and hung a bit of tinsel around the place, but really I haven’t been arsed. It will be great to have them here though.
