by Last year it was the two Michaels, this year the two Lukes. They didn’t disappoint. Humphries took the first set and was all set to make it two sets, but Littler smashed and grabbed. One apiece. From there the youngster was in the ascendancy, and Humphries looked a beaten man. Despite maintaining a three-figure average, there was a distinct weariness about him. Every big treble (all those treble 19s!) or big finish by Littler was a gut-punch. In the deciding leg of the seventh set, leading 4-2, Littler needed 112. He can recite his out-shots in his sleep. Treble 18, single 18, double top. His first dart found the intended target, but then his second clattered into it, joining it in the treble. He could still finish – on double two – but he was knocked off his stride. He missed the double two by a whisker, Humphries mopped up to go just one set behind, and from there the “older” Luke (born 11/2/95) never looked back. He won 7-4 to lift the title, pocketing half a million pounds for doing so, while Littler won £200,000. The remainder of the match was hardly plain sailing for Humphries though – there were deciding legs and crisis points with great regularity. Humphries averaged 104, Littler 101. They both hit a maximum 170 finish. The legs and sets zoomed by, such was the standard. The whole thing was done and dusted in under two hours, including seven annoying ad breaks.
It might be for the best that Littler didn’t win. Call it the Emma Răducanu effect – win an enormous prize when you’re oh so young, then the pressure of expectation is heaped on you and it’s all too much. Littler was extremely popular with the crowd, and got people tuning in from around the world. Even Romania. ln large part it was his extraordinary talent for someone so young, but also it was the way he looked so comfortable on the big stage and how he already had the doner-kebab-eating darts player look down pat. It’s scary that he could still be challenging for big titles in 2060, when I’ll either be pushing up daisies or won’t know a bull’s eye from a cat’s eye. As for Humphries, he was pedestrian in his first match, then stared down the barrel in both his next two, at one point surviving two match darts. From there he put together three sublime victories and was a worthy overall winner. In his speech he cited his battles with mental health problems. Good on him for opening up. It was also referee Russ Bray’s last match in charge. His incredible 180 call will be missed. The whole tournament was a huge success. The international players added a lot of intrigue to the early rounds, and were often victorious. Germany is now a powerhouse in the game. Let’s hope darts, which still reminds me of beer and fags on telly when I was about seven, continues to grow.
The adverts between sets were at times horrifying. The Barclays one gave me conniptions. It gave a litany of financial stresses that modern, economically active people face: school uniforms, gym memberships, phone bills, yoga classes, getting a wonky shed door fixed, swimming lessons, more school uniforms, I can’t remember how it went exactly. Apart from the idea that Barclays could help you with any of that being laughable, it made me consider how far I’ve drifted from normal, mainstream life. And just as well – I wouldn’t bloody cope with all of that. Not even close.
I recently picked up a newspaper called Dilema Veche. That second word means “old”; their house style is to use the pre-1993 spellings – î instead of â, except in the name România and its derivatives. The headline – Bohemianism in Romania – caught my eye. There are several articles in the paper on bohemia and its origins, some of which I’ve yet to read. A bohemian lifestyle, which I partly have now, has always been attractive to me, as long as it is accompanied by a good deal of actual work. That’s really what I wanted 20 years ago or more, but I ended up doing the corporate thing because there was no alternative that I could see. The paper bemoans the loss of bohemia in society, and blames this at one point on conformity caused somehow by woke culture. I’d say the real culprit is hyper-capitalism. A consumer-based society runs counter to bohemian values. So do skyrocketing property values. Devonport in Auckland was a hotbed of alternative lifestyles in ther eighties and early nineties, but seven-figure house prices had put the kibosh on all of that by the time I arrived there. The cost of university education isn’t helping either.
What a start to 2024 in Japan. First a huge earthquake off the Sea of Japan and resulting tsunamis killed dozens. Then on a runway in Tokyo, an Airbus with 379 people on board struck a small coastguard plane which was headed to the west coast of Japan to help victims of the earthquake. Five of the six on the small aircraft died, but miraculously everybody escaped from the burning passenger jet. I still remember as a small boy the grainy TV images from Japan after a domestic 747 crashed into a mountain, killing 520 people. That number felt unthinkable to me then. This was 1985, the deadliest year in aviation to date.
Edit: Talking of 1985, Driver 8 by R.E.M. just came up on my YouTube. It came out in that year. A fantastic train-country-folk-rock song. Did train drivers not have names back then?
