The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  My father gave up on me. Mr Knocker put me down for a hairdresser and a Protestant. But there was always my uncle Peter, a die-hard Celtic supporter – not like my brothers, but a real Celtic supporter, the sort who thought Rangers fans should be sent to Australia on coffin ships, or made to work the North Sea oil rigs for no pay – and Uncle Peter for a while appointed himself the very man who would, as he delicately put it, ‘get all that poofy shite oot his heid before it really does him some damage’.

  Game on. But not for long. Uncle Peter arranged to take me to see Celtic and Rangers play at Hampden Park. He was not unkind and had put some planning into the day out, but not as much planning as I had: for a whole week it had been my business to make sure that the only clothes available for me to wear to the treat were blue. For the uninitiated, I should say that Celtic fans tend not to wear blue, especially not to the football, and never, in all the rules of heaven and earth, to a Rangers game.

  My uncle was distressed. He called me a Blue Nose to my face (strong words for a bishop) and when we arrived at the ground he made me walk behind him. He said that if Rangers scored and I made a noise he would throw me to the Animals (the stand in Celtic Park where men peed and drank Bovril was affectionately known as the Jungle). When Celtic lost the game 1–0 he called me a Jonah and said everything was lost with me and I should stick at school because I was bound to end up at university or worse.

  Easier said than done. Academic distinction at our secondary school was mostly a matter for the birds, so the best a boy could do was to set his mind on surviving four years of PE without ending up in the Funny Farm (Mrs Jess’s remedial class, only marginally more humiliating than being excluded from the school team). It was a wonderful education in the intricacies of human nature. I had pals, good pals, and as a resident smoker at the corner and a fearless talker-back to the nuns, I was in a position to feel confident about their loyalty when we came before Mr Scullion, the chief lion at the gym hall.

  Not a bit of it. No sooner had Scullion given some Kenny Dalglish-in-the-making the chance of picking a football team than all affection and loyalty would fall away like snow off a dyke. First lesson: let nothing stand in the way of winning. My good-at-football erstwhile mate would choose one loon after another – a bandy-legged chaser here, a cross-eyed soap-dodger there – until the teams were nearly complete, except for me and Mark McDonald and some poor dwarf called Scobie left glistening with shame on the touchline. A new deputy headmaster came to the school; you could tell by looking at his hair that he was all brown rice and liberal experiment, so I wrote him a well-spelled note about reversing the method used for the picking of teams. I remember the day and the very hour.

  ‘O’Hagan,’ the PE assistant said, ‘pick your team.’

  I walked the few yards onto the field like General Patton contemplating the sweep of his 3rd Army over France. ‘Scobie,’ I said, ‘McDonald.’ And so it went on until every lousy player in the group had smilingly succumbed to an early invitation from the worst football picker in the history of St Michael’s Academy. My hand-picked Rovers and I got beat 12–0.

  When I was twelve, I had nearly run out of juice on the football-hating front; it was an exhausting business not playing the game. But then I had an idea of quite intense perversity. Even my friend Mark had to shake his head sadly and note that in the arsenal of anti-football weaponry my new device was just too much: for a moment he pitied my trophy-winning brothers, he truly felt for my Scotland-deluded dad. I had gone nuclear: Jacqueline Thompson’s School of Ballet.

  Ah, the pleasures of disownment. Before setting off to Dancewear in Glasgow to buy my first set of pumps, however, I was dragooned by the seething Scullion to take part in a hateful five-a-side against Kilwinning Academy. What happened? With only two minutes to go I ran into the ball with the ferocity of a POW making a dash for the barbed wire. Reader, I broke my leg. As I fell to the ground in agony I was sure the sylphides were coming to fetch me en point, but – after even more delusion – I woke up in Kilmarnock Infirmary wearing a plaster cast the size of Siberia, and my father drove me home in perfect silence. The years have passed now, but I can still see him smiling in the audience many months later, the night of Jacqueline Thompson’s Christmas Dance Display at the Civic Centre in Ayr, as his youngest son came onto the stage, football boots and socks pristine, whistle in mouth, to make his first appearance onstage in a dance number called – I swear to God – ‘Match of the Day’.

  For long enough – 1982, 1986, 1990, 1994, 1998 …, oh how they trip off the tongue – I have comforted myself with the notion that my sense of defeat about football is entirely in keeping with my nation’s performance on the field. But I am getting older now, and Scotland are not getting any better; being a Scottish person means growing into your sense of defeat, and like every other square-shoed man trying to get a bit closer to the bar, I find myself now occasionally looking towards football to offer a sense of nation-sized glory at least once before I pack up my pistols and grow a moustache. Imagine the horror. No sooner had Scotland failed to qualify than I was moved to treat my friends to John Steinbeck’s comment to Jacqueline Kennedy: ‘You talked of Scotland as a lost cause,’ he said, ‘and that is not true. Scotland is an unwon cause.’

  Bloody hell. Better make mine a double. Five minutes later I was thinking about Ireland and five minutes after that, God bless us and save us, England. This is the hallmark of the truly hardcore football hater: he is a turncoat, naturally, and he will sometimes give in to sentiment, but at heart he is without grief or care about the prospect of victory or defeat, and all he really wants is for his birthday party to take place in a nice big room with tables and chairs.

  Into the bargain come the jokes: like all would-be playground subversives, I was, more than anything else, a sniggering wreck, an absolute pest who would do anything for a laugh. For instance, I’ve never heard a joke about Scotland’s crapness at football that I didn’t find funny, and, by the same token, just the other week, when I saw the Tennent’s lager advertising campaign for the World Cup – ‘Och Aye Kanu,’ it says over a Nigerian flag, ‘C’mon the Tartan Argie’ over an Argentine one, and ‘Support Sven’s Team’ over Sweden’s – I took the train back to London in a swoon of certainty about the wisdom of Scotland’s dislike of England. Once you get into the swing of it, there’s nothing so addictive as inconstancy; the only trouble comes when football-hating becomes a sort of love, when you find yourself not saving hours but dispelling days in your pursuit of understanding the whys and wherefores of the unbeautiful game.

  I would, by the way, encourage anyone inclined to pursuits of that kind to keep their distance from the World Wide Web. The internet – a thing which at times seems designed for and by nut jobs of all stripes – is never madder than when hosting any sort of discussion about football by any sort of fan. Take the following which picks up the England–Scotland resentment theme just alluded to. Topic headline: ‘I Wish You Would Stop Sponging Off Us’:

  Browser A: You are a twat. We want to be free of you inbreed half-breed Anglo-Saxon scum and one day we’ll get rid of you and your German Queen.

  Browser B: I am making it my mission in life to inform my fellow countrymen (English) what a bunch of pathetic cunts you Jocks are. Get ready to reap the whirlwind. Tourism will die.

  Browser C: Yeh. England is your master, bow down, you subservient nation. And bugger the Argies as well.

  I hate to cut out of the debate at such a crucial juncture, but you get the idea, and it does go on for thousands of hours. I have to say, though, perhaps surprisingly to some, that this kind of sophistication has yet to cause the generally football-appalled like myself to see the light.

  I have this bunch of pals in London who are mainly Scottish but who play in a team called the Battersea Juniors. They are more persuasive in this regard. The team is a bit up and down, a bit part time, even for a Saturday league, but I went to see them recently with a view to turning them on to the virtues of figure-sk
ating. It didn’t entirely work out: a feature of the genuine egomaniac is that we can’t ever truly understand other people’s obsessions, but these boys were absolutely for real – I recognised their determination from my youthful days with Mr Scullion. ‘You’re a fucking pure tosser,’ said Alan to the referee, a Christian who gives up his Saturday mornings for £10.

  ‘You keep it shush!’ said the referee.

  Paul was trampled on by the home team and screamed like a pig and got a twisted ankle. Raymond was out of breath and shouted to me that he’s been on a pizza and fags diet for the last six months and had just crashed his TVR Griffith into a central reservation.

  ‘A low-slung car for a high-profile guy,’ said Russell.

  The linesman was smoking a gigantic joint and shouting down the phone to his girlfriend in the rain. A young English player called Kez was up and down the park: ‘He’s new to the team,’ said the injured Paul, ‘young, fast and talented – unlike us. Oh. My leg’s fucked.’ He stared into the mud and the driving rain. ‘I wonder if I should take a sicky.’

  Alan eventually got a red card. The referee said that repeatedly being called a ‘knob’ was like being accused of sexual deviance. Alan apologised. ‘OK,’ said the referee, ‘I’ll let it go this time, but any more of that and it’ll go through.’

  ‘Cheers, Ref,’ said Alan. And when the Christian departed the field of play Alan turned to his team-mates. ‘Knob,’ he said.

  Meanwhile, these last weeks, the World Cup has come to spread the values of commitment and fraternity at an international level. I remember my dad buying me and my four brothers Celtic strips one Christmas; my brothers doing keepy-up with the new balls and tearing off their pyjamas as quick as possible to don the green and white, and me, standing at the door, looking into all this carnage with eyes like My Little Pony. ‘I told you he would hate it,’ said my mother, who reached behind a green sofa, producing a Post Office set to gladden the heart of any housebound hooligan.

  I phoned my father the other day in a fit of questionable delight after England beat Argentina. ‘England are a shite team,’ he said philosophically. ‘They get one goal and they think they’re the champions of the universe.’ I tell him I’ve been buying dozens of packets of Panini football stickers for my girlfriend’s two boys. ‘You lay them all out and stick them in the book,’ I said, ‘and then you mark down the results and all the information about the players and you can cross-reference them and all that stuff.’

  ‘Typical enemy of the game,’ said my father. ‘Turns everything into office work.’

  Poetry as Self-Help

  NOVEMBER 2004

  People have been asking for books to help them since the invention of printing. Before printing, actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William Caxton got in on the act early enough with The Game and Play of Chess Moralised (1474), a book which aimed to make people better than they used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many readers accepted would do for the time being. In what my headmaster used to call the interim period, self-help books have taken over the world, which is fast becoming a place where no one is safe from the threat of their own improvement. Nineteenth-century must-haves – How to Be Happy though Married (1887) and How to Be Pretty though Plain (1899) – have recently been, well, improved on, with the publication of such instant classics as How to Become a Schizophrenic by John Modrow (1992) and How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer (1989).

  There are people who will only read westerns or crime and others who prefer not to read any book unless, like the works of Maya Angelou, it manages somehow to have a self-help tinge. (‘Self-Improvement’ is now, quite often, a section in your local library.) The self-help preference has the ear of Oprah Winfrey, who publishes one of the most successful magazines in America, and there is a separate best-seller chart for books whose titles love a colon, books that will settle for nothing less than improvement for their readers. Currently riding high are Why Your Life Sucks: And What You Can Do about It by Alan Cohen, When Children Grieve: For Adults to Help Children Deal with Death, Divorce, Pet Loss, Moving and Other Losses by John James and Russell Friedman, and Bodylove: Learning to Like Our Looks and Ourselves: A Practical Guide for Women by the punctuation-crazed Rita Freedman. Publishing houses in New York, busy, as usual, looking for the hot new writing talent, will expect to find it in the medical journals and at psychoanalytic conferences, such is the demand for quasi-medical books which tell you how to deal with life’s crapness. In the same way, editors are often to be found with their favourite children’s authors, trying, over a glass of herbal tea, to persuade them to write something simple but heart-warming that might prove to have ‘crossover appeal’ in the adult market.

  Britain didn’t grow Elvis or Coca-Cola, but it grew Billy Fury and Irn Bru, and the great new self-help ethos has had little trouble finding local imitators. It may be an indirect part of Princess Diana’s legacy to the British nation, the success of The Little Book of Calm, but self-help has had its main British impact on television. Trinny and Susannah have just come back with a new series of What Not to Wear, a show which aims, like all self-help, to make people smile by first making them cry. Celebrity Fit Club is not a million miles away, together with DIY shows and cookery programmes that provoke people into thinking their life’s troubles can be vanished away with an apt deployment of cushions and fresh coriander. Nobody doubts it; everybody’s buying.

  This thinking has now been applied to the tired world of British poetry, which has long been in need of a specialist makeover, what with all those lisping ladies in tweed suits and National Health spectacles. The self-help treatment wouldn’t have worked in poetry, though, if it hadn’t been able to pass the Nigella test – you need somebody foxy and energetic to head up the whole operation, or it’s dead before it starts. Thankfully, there’s Daisy Goodwin, who has lovely dark hair and perfect teeth: just the person to encourage the use of poetry as a kind of mental flossing. The message is slick and pretty as an ad for Colgate: regular reading of poetry keeps you sparkling, even if it sometimes seems a bit of an effort. Keep it up and you will learn to enjoy the experience. It will help you in ways you never imagined. You will see the benefits into old age and beyond.

  This has less to do with poetry, of course, than it does with marketing, and indeed it was T. S. Eliot – that toothsome Tom, so ready to lighten your load and share your pain – who gave us fair warning about the price to be paid for messing with popularity. ‘We persist,’ he wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’,

  in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

  What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

  Well: so much for that. The ‘extinction of personality’, in the sense that Eliot meant it, has long since become extinct, and the rest – knowledge, self-sacrifice, the development of a consciousness – are less interesting, in the minds of most of the new-style poetry-tasters, than the idea that poetry has a duty to give people a leg-up from one part of the day to another. Poets are now often low-paid providers of half-memorable speech, moral hygienists, caption writers, or purveyors of beauty and truth to a community of readers seeking quickly to heighten their emotions or beef up their wedding speeches. People
reach out to poetry when they’re feeling drowsy or needy or depressed; it’s as if the Romantic dream of commonality has created a populist monster that can only tolerate the language of reassurance, as if Chatterton had indeed become the symbol of poetry: not of poets, as traditionally understood, but of poetry’s battalion of soft readers, dreaming of a sensitive exit and a pretty corpse. Those who want a gust of emotion will usually go to a Richard Curtis film, or read one of Goodwin’s suggested poems for people feeling out of sorts. And if they rent Four Weddings and a Funeral they can have both at once, without having to leave their own heads, however briefly. ‘Accessibility’ is the watchword; ‘making poetry available to people who would never ordinarily read a poem’. Naturally, one can see the point of this noble effort, and I hereby propose three cheers for the non-elitists.

  Goodwin’s Poems to Last a Lifetime has chapter headings like ‘Journey of Life’, ‘Missing You’, ‘Commitment Problems’, ‘Getting Older’ and ‘Memories’, each of which offers a group of soothing and instructive lines, accompanied by the editor’s friendly remarks, which not only show an interest in content over form, but, very largely, in emotional content over any other sort of content. In the section called ‘Infidelity’ there are six poems, starting with ‘Story of a Hotel Room’ by Rosemary Tonks. ‘This poem should be read,’ the editor writes underneath, ‘by anyone about to embark on an affair thinking that it’s just a fling. It is much harder than you know to separate sex from love.’ Very often, an interest in what the poem ‘says’ will be accompanied by biographical information about the author. Underneath Robert Graves’s ‘Symptoms of Love’, for instance, we learn this: ‘Scientists have recently classified love as a form of psychosis. Robert Graves knew all about this. The poet once threw himself out of a third-floor window after his mistress Laura Riding. Miraculously, they both survived.’