MrGareth’s Missives

I’m ever so upset about the death of Bill McLaren and just needed to post my tribute – so excuse me if you’re completely not interested.

I can’t remember being so upset by a celebrity death. I grew up listening to Bill McLaren calling Wales win Grand Slam after Grand Slam in the 70s, and I have always associated that voice with that golden era of Welsh Rugby and father-son quality time. His voice was the sound of the greatest game in the world. As someone eulogised about him, “he was the voice of fairness” in such a passionately partisan competition (the six nations) and despite his obvious Scottishness, you always felt he genuinely wanted Rugby to be the winner. As someone else said, his commentary: “…sent a shiver down my spine!” It could also bring tears to the eyes.

He did of course famously give birth to “…and they’ll be cheering in the streets of {insert star player/try-scorer’s home town} tonight”. (This phrase was of course amusingly bastardised to comment on Manchester United’s convenient adoption by fair-weather fans as “…and they’ll be cheering in the streets of Bournemouth tonight.”)

I really am not sure if Rugby has ever sounded the same since he retired. Every Six Nations game since is commentated by a series of people who aren’t Bill McLaren. (I had an Uncle who worked on BBC’s Rugby Special and Nigel Stamer-Smith gave the eulogy at his funeral. Even then I remember thinking “he’s not Bill McLaren”.) He was to Rugby Union what Motty is to Football. His chuckle, knowledge and Scottish stac…ca…to crescendos to the great tries of our time will be so sorely missed.

They say Rugby Union is the game they play in Heaven…well The HBC has just got a new star commentator!

So Ban Ki Moon arrived in Haiti and declared that it is was the "worst humanitarian disaster in decades". That struck me as an extremely profound statement. Lets say that "decades” means 30 years, for the sake of argument; that got me thinking…that’s pretty bad. There’s been some spectacularly awful disasters in the last 30 years.

In reality, when it comes to enormous humanitarian disasters, we don’t have to look much further than the last couple of years. Katrina, the Boxing Day Tsunami, The Chinese Earthquake - three of the worst disasters I can think of just off the top of my head (2008 alone saw both the Sichuan earthquake and the Indonesian – both larger than the 7.0 magnitude Haitian quake). These three alone were catastrophic, heart wrenching and harrowing to witness even from the comfort of your living room – but not as bad as Haiti is right now.
Then there are several other uber-earthquakes in immediate recent memory in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - but not as bad as Haiti is right now. The Honduran Hurricane in 1998 or the recent Samoan Tsunami also spring to mind – all awful at the time and now “superseded” in awfulness. Then there’s various man-made disasters such as Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and the countless African Civil Wars and Famines all of which were humanitarian disasters beyond comprehension when you’ve no experience of these things. Then, think about those random catastrophes such as the Bhopal Chemical disaster of 1982 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster and of course Chernobyl. But not as bad as Haiti is right now

Naturally the web has no end of useful – albeit macabre – resources on this vain, including an exhaustive list of the deadliest earthquakes. But its worth visiting Wikipedia’s list of the ten worst natural disasters of all time  to see that according to it, none of them have occurred since 1975 – just outside my own personal understanding of “in decades”.

Just what constitutes a humanitarian disaster is no doubt defined somewhere, and what criteria is used to judge which ones are worse than others is probably also a scientific classification performed by an extensive team at the UN. They say that the reason Haiti is in such an appalling state is that the infrastructure wasn’t in great shape as it was, and now what did exist has been destroyed. Also that the buildings were so poorly constructed and that law & order is tenuous at the best of times.

In a world where something terrible on this scale seems to happen at least every 12 months, its kind of helpful to be jump-started out of your TV de-sensitised complacency into a suitable level of shock and sympathy.

Everything is – as they say – relative. Bottom line = whatever you can remember, its not as bad as Haiti is right now.

You have to Love Sydney this time of year! Entertainers are flying in left, right and centre. I've already seen Grizzly Bear and have tickets to see The Pixies, Echo & The Bunnymen, Jane's Addiction, Them Crooked Vultures, AC/DC and Wolfmother in nthe next 6 weeks or so...

And what's not to like when you are an international superstar who can fly the planet First Class and get paid for coming instead of the other way around. I really don;t understand why more don't pop into the Whitsundays on the way home, but there you are...

Anyway, I was reading this article in The Herald ("Don't bust a gut, Sydney adores you...") the other day about how Sydney generally is so thrilled anyone of any importance even turns up, that they really don't demand great performances and deliver standing ovations regardless of how good the show is. Like some fawning puppy dog, we'll be grateful for the smallest musical mercy apparently.

Now I wasn't at a lot of the gigs they mentioned. It did single out Leonard Cohen as one exception, and also Neil Young (although I heard he was a monster on his last performance here, growling at the crowd for not dancing enough.)

Anyway, I caught Velvet Underground's John Cale at the weekend at the Enmore in Newtown. A great show for the most part. His own material is just fairly professional, but formulaic rock n'roll I feel, enjoyable but forgettable at the same time (but thats just me). Obviously the VU stuff was sensational, and exciting to have that personal connection to some of the most important music ever produced.

So I was going to write this blog about how good his show was in contrast to this article I read...and then he never came out for an encore. Just went off - "see ya Sydney," and that was it. No Encore is like a two-fingered salute to me - total disrespect. What did the crowd do? Aside from a few boos, shuffled off home meekly.

So lets - as a collective audience - start demanding more from our stars, we deserve better Sydney!

The holocaust - like yesterday's Haiti earthquake - is one of those events of untold human suffering and horror that the human brain is entirely ill equipped to process. Just beyond comprehension. Sometimes you need a doorway in, a small clue that with its own small understanding hints at the wider meaning.

I've been to the Yad Vashem Museum/memorial in Jerusalem. I've watched Schindler's List, I've seen the powerful episode of Band of Brothers when they liberate a camp. All of this - and much, much more - has been very moving, harrowing and miserable. But you always know you're still not close to understanding.

I'm still not but this news of the death of the woman who protected - or tried to - Anne Frank from the Nazis in Holland was another one of those hints. It coincided - quite serendipitously - with a screening of a dramatisation of the girl's diary I saw recently. In fact the final scene - once you've been shown how many of Miep Gies' charges did not survive (most of them!) - is Miep Gies herself finding Anne's diary after the Nazis have taken them away.

What dawned on me quite powerfully, no doubt assisted by the multiplier effect of having those dramatised images in my mind from only days before, is that what we were missing were the words from a grateful Anne Frank eulogising Ms Gies' heroism. Because the little girl was gassed along with her older sister in a chamber in Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

What we missed was her growing up in the 50s, dating boys and listening to rock and roll. We missed her getting married in the 60s, having children and watching Woodstock and the Moon Landings on TV. We missed her marching with CND in the 70s, while her children were at school. We missed the publication, celebration and no doubt Hollywood dramatisation of her subsequent novels. Perhaps a Pullitzer or even a Nobel Prize for literature. We missed her all the things she would have achieved as a famous member of the European literati, like Oprah interviews, and all manner of political, cultural and artistic endeavour we can only imagine, must only imagine. Because she was murdered at the age of 15 for being a Jew.

You can try to multiply that gap many million times over to comprehend what happened, I'm trying, but I can't. But I feel I got a little closer...

I slung this up on Facebook and it seemed to ring a few bells...certainly did with me. What do we do? And why do we do it? Shame more of us can't be this honest about it, but so many will invoke our long-winded titles as some form of justification for our self-important demeanor when in reality we are just wage slaves that do just what we are told to - some with more flexibility than others!

This of course is another reason why I live in Sydney. Looking at the temperatures on my iPhone the other day the range for England was 1 to -4! I don't think I can cope with less than 10 degrees anymore after nearly 10 years in Australia. I can't even conceptualise *minus* anything! While snow is very pretty, I will prefer to limit it to that one long weekend in thredbo I manage once a year! If England could handle the snow that would make it OK, but sadly my memories are that the whole country's infrastructure collapses at the slightest suggestion of the stuff. The chunnel's recent excuse to mitigate the recent crisis there - "the wrong kind of snow" - may have seemed comical to many, but merely reminiscent to me. Once you've heard "the wrong kind of leaves" blamed for train delays, you really have heard everything!