Some of my brightest memories are from the acting I’ve done, at school, at university. It all felt so natural – I never had stage fright, the lines always came, my confidence on stage always several levels of tonnage higher than in my normal life.
But though I was good I would have faced a struggle if I wanted to be great, to be a professional. Because every character I played was me. My approach was simply to soak up the character and imagine what sort of me their situation, their backstory, would have created. I reacted, I spoke, I moved as a slightly different sort of me.
In acting it’s not such a problem, unless you want to really become a true actor – someone who doesn’t just put on different clothes, but different people. In writing, though, my impulse to put myself before everything else has strangled me, and continues to do so.
I wouldn’t want to escape my natural talent for taking things I experience, moments I live and relive, and being able to turn these out on the page. But now deep into my first real writing project my weakness in character, in understanding other people, comes out.
There’s parts of me, or potential parts of me, in my characters. But there must be more than that, unless I want a book staffed by facsimilies. Without differences there’s no tension, there’s no direction.
The other night I sat down with a new book my wife has bought me, a text book basically, and gave an exercise a go which asked you to examine your philosophy of life. Use a few lines of dialogue, it suggested, use images.
I’ve written about using books like this before in my journal – this whole exercise is from the first book she bought me. I always feel a bit dirtied, almost, by using something so workmanlike (in my perception) in the pursuit of connecting with my passion.
Sometimes I think it’s because sections are so obvious, or Fisher Price level to me that I question why I’m even reading the book – I know all this stuff, don’t I? It feels like a dumbing down of me, of the process of writing. It takes the magic away, and makes it all into something that anyone could do. It devalues my image of writing.
But only because I see what I want to see, or see what I don’t want to see. When I’d finished the exercise what I had to share with my wife wasn’t anything to do with my life’s philosophy – it was a sugar-shell bit of fun with words and images. It was easy.
I didn’t engage with the point of the exercise, I just saw in it what I could do without thinking about it too much and fired something out. My technique is practiced, I’ve had years and years of writing to hone the ability to develop something surface-level in a matter of moments. Well done me. But one tap and it all shatters into worthless pieces.
The fact my wife wouldn’t allow me to get away with what she called a missed opportunity really cut me. I wanted reaffirmation that my cleverness with words, my unformed quick-and-easy natural idea was something to be proud of, to celebrate.
I always react badly to these books, and it was clear from our conversation that it’s because I want to be able to do what comes naturally, easily, and get somewhere without having to do anything more. Which isn’t possible. I can be good, if I like. But wouldn’t I want to be really great?
So the challenge suggested by all these books is that I’m not working hard enough, that I’m lazily drifting through something I want to succeed at, and succeed in big, big terms. But if I’m serious about getting better, I’ve got to do more than just do what I’m good at.
The evenings are getting lighter and I’m getting increasingly excited about this year’s cricket season with my village club. Any suitable moment I have between now and April’s first match I’ll be practicing, pushing myself, working on ironing out the flaws in my bowling and getting consistent. Consistency is my only ambition. It’s doable.
Why I can’t look past my natural writing talents and start cracking on with practicing and improving my natural writing weaknesses is beyond me. Well, it’s not beyond me. It’s down to me. It’s up to me. It’s my fault I didn’t push myself in the exercise, and I deserve all the stick I get, much as I’ll deserve any praise if I target my weaknesses.
But I’ve not been writing this for a long time. I’ve been reaching for journalism on a low level, personal questions. I’ve been expressing a lot, my writing’s been about taking action or actively expressing something that I’d arrived at or come up against. But I haven’t been journaling, I haven’t been questioning, I haven’t been getting myself out of the way.
I’m sure my wife, reading this, will see that I’m casting about wildly for a direction, and that probably I’ve arrived at the direction right now, and will be frustrated that I’m about to stop writing just as I arrive at the direction. I feel blind, I feel lost. I feel like I’m blathering on about old, old stuff. Tired stuff.
I need to be asking myself new questions, not repeating old journal entries in different ways. One of the greatest things about our relationship is that we talk openly and intricately about everything. I’m a natural confesser, I can’t move through something unless I express it, and I don’t want to express something without expressing it to her first.
That’s why I’ve talked with my wife about visiting a strip club. About looking at other women, girls. About my feelings of uselessness, or my fears of getting things wrong, my emotional weariness. My sense of how pathetic all this sounds.
I drag these feelings I have around and around trying to make sense of them. I question myself, and if I don’t reveal these questions to my wife – the one person with whom I share my entire life – then I can’t fully answer them, and I wouldn’t be able to express or discover the answers with her if I didn’t reveal the questions to her.
At the same time I don’t want to be a stuck record, always having the same tensions, the same questions, the same confusions, and so often I’ll just brush away recurring conflicts in an attempt to save her from the same conversations. Like an idiot. Because largely the conflicts only recur because I don’t share them with her.
There’s no direction here, only a need to write something honest and open and exploring at work, because I’m getting sucked under the tide of my job, and my job is not who I am. I want to give it what I can, but it can’t have the whole of me. And yet, I have to stay whole somehow, I have to prevent myself splintering into work-me and real-me.
I’ve been running a weekly blog thing called Open Minday, writing some theory blogs, some economic thoughtblogs, basically just examining and exploring my feelings about topics and issues. But I think I need to put those away for now. I need to concentrate on the book, on myself, on character and other people, other humans.
I need to get back into journaling, digging around in my head, giving the papers of my mind a shuffle, file away bits and pieces, take out things and consider them. I need to get back into journaling so I can get back into writing, and back into the book. That’s what’s really important. That’s the writing that really matters.
#OpenMinday – Sport, commentary and banter @BarnayRonay @EvaWiseman @martinkelner
What is Open Minday?
The oily slipperiness of banterese makes attempting to pin down why it’s become the touchstone of maleness (or, at least, self-proclaimed ‘ladness’) a Sisyphean task. The banterers aren’t listening.
Anyway, @BarnayRonay has already expertly speared the way banter has weedled its way into mainstream sport (or football, as it’s known outside of the tabloid back pages) all shit-eating grin and shrugged shoulders, hands raised in defence, “It’s only bants!”
And @EvaWiseman took a scalpel to the seams holding together the “Just bants, gramps!” excuses, in the awkward silence as UniLad shuffled its feet and squeaked out an apology for celebrating the low convinction rate of rapists.
Banter is now, essentially, an excuse to be inexcusable. It’s driven by fear – of silence, of being outflanked, of failing to be the dog that’s doing the eating. It’s tribal, it’s aggressive. It’s not sparring with words, it’s half-formed nonthoughts scrapping like boys in a playground, all headlocks and hamfisted thumps.
The “it’s just a joke!” defence means one thing – “I didn’t mean it!”. Banter is a loud and unpleasant fart, semi-self aware, guiltily enjoyed for the effect it has on bystanders but ultimately and unavoidably a waste product that could have been avoided. Or at the very least genuinely apologised for.
In 2012 banter isn’t Oscar Wilde or even Newman and Baddiel. Like Barnay Ronay says, banter is “anti-chemistry”. It’s shutting other people down, drowning other voices out, filling the verbal space with guff spuffed directly from the sludge of the unconscious, the hindbrain, bypassing thought.
I stopped watching football after binging on the World Cup in 2010. I’ve since lost all interest in the sport. One summer of listening to men paid to share their knowledge and experience of the game blurt out inane, uninformed lazy commentary was enough to kill football for me forever. My own knees, meanwhile, were enough to stop me playing.
“This player has the ball, oh and now that player has the ball, he’s taken the ball past another player and hit the ball with his foot and, oh, the striker nearly put the ball into the net to score a goal which as we all know would have made the game a different game to the game which we are watching now which is actually still the same game because what I said could have happened didn’t.”
I’ve thrown myself into cricket instead, a sport that can still boast a full-voiced beer-fuelled population while managing to talk about itself without smirking, joking, winking or nudging. Cricket commentary in every form covers the game, the tactics, life and everything inbetween. Football commentary seems trapped in inane nothingness. In banter.
Almost a year ago @MartinKelner wrote a fantastic article comparing the sparse, sure-footed commentary of Brian Moore in the 1981 FA Cup Final with the nonstop nothing-speak of latter-day TV sofa-saints like Clive Tyldesley: “It is almost like a form of Tourette’s”. Or banter.
There are some great analysts in football – I loved Gordon Strachan’s short stint on Match of the Day, and occasionally one of the old cloggers will shed light on an aspect of the game usually given nothing even approaching lipservice by the Andy Grays and Richard Keys of the world. But you simply can’t fill every second of a match with considered thought.
But banter can fill a thousand stadia, a hundred thousand silences. So commentators banter with each other, cast judgement on a player’s off-field life or make idiot abstract observations. And the language of football, the teased statistics, gives these babblers all the mouth-amunition they need to fill every second of a match with unconsidered nonthought.
In Saturday night pubs automaton voices parrot the same witless verbage, proving their commitment to the sport through their dedication to memorising the accepted phraseology. And on the Sunday morning sports fields the adult voices bellow remembered lines of commentary at confused kids attempting to learn an incredibly technical game. Attempting toenjoy learning an intricate and hugely tactical game.
What other sport promotes the voice of the fat-ankled radio presenter, the bellowing fan, to such a towering level they can spit out judgements of a player’s commitment or effort while picking donut out of their teeth? How can you take seriously a sport which insists on elevatating the recognisable voices, the cloned outrages, the echoed opinions?
The phone-ins complain about the skills of English players, players who have only ever been told to hoof it out of danger into the channels or the mixer, who never heard an extended and exploded discussion of the thought behind the action during their grassroots years, who grew up listening to commentators filling dead air with dead thoughts.
I honestly believe that commentary is a huge and compelling factor behind the English football team’s inability to win a major tournament. It’s a cycle of non-ambition that begins with watching the game on TV, through to the yelling of fans in the stalls, and the limp questioning of TV interviewers in post-match broadcasts.
And it’s this need to banter, to talk, to spout noise endlessly at all levels of a game that has the same base strength as cricket or rugby (another sport that manages to retain thought without being sapped of excitement) that makes football the obvious contender for mainstream tribalism, easy access sports tourism.
It’s precisely because of this ubiquitousness of football that the massive influence of TV and radio mouthpieces spouting sport talk about anything but sport can’t be underestimated. Football can’t go anywhere but down if it continues to elect its champions from the ranks of the banterers, the unreconstructed lads, the echo chambers in human form.