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Beauty and the beast
UNACCUSTOMED as I am to watching sport on television, I was completely dazzled by the triumph of the great Linford Christie at Stuttgart. As far as I am concerned he has given new meaning to the idea of spectator sport. He has also given new meaning to Virgil's Aeneid Book V, which I studied for A-level long ago and which is all about sport. It was lost on me then, but now at last I see what Virgil was getting at - the princely brooding of the great champion before the final trial, his manly beauty and his manly modesty, the elegance of extreme effort, the roar of the crowd, the simplicity with which the great athletes in the first three places embraced each other in victory and in defeat, and so on. It is all in the Aeneid, but both the classics and young men are rather thrown away on young girls, all too often.
I even felt something like a sob when Christie began to sing the national anthem. But my raptures were rudely interrupted by a gigantic rabbit. It may sound incredible, but so it was - a grotesque, human-sized, pot-bellied rabbit on its hind legs, posturing and fussing about the winners' podium as if it had some function in the proceedings. Indeed he was the official emblem of the World Championships, Runny the Rabbit. The presence of this ludicrously ungainly figure at such a moment seemed to me deeply insulting to the athletes and, incidentally, demeaning to all natural-born rabbits as well.
To add insult to injury, our national hero at this solemn moment of triumph suddenly had a huge toy bunny thrust into his arms, and then an outsize toy Mercedes, for all the world as if he were on that old children's programme Crackerjack. Are these occasions felt by our commercial masters to be incomplete without some monstrous emblem, logo or mascot? Certainly at the end of the Barcelona Olympics, according to the art critic Robert Hughes, an eight-foot, grinning, foam-plastic foetus suddenly appeared on the stage and was announced as 'Whatizit', the official emblem of 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
'Semiologists, if one wanted to get fancy about it, would call him a floating signifier,' wrote Robert Hughes. One does not actually want to get fancy about it, but what Whatizit and Runny the Rabbit do signify, yet again, is the infantilisation and the vulgarisation of popular culture, and the deep contempt in which we, the masses, are held by those who want our attention and our money.
PEOPLE tend, in the long run, to resent being bamboozled, especially when it comes to voting, so I have a helpful suggestion to make to the Prime Minister. I recommend striking out for ever, and consigning to oblivion, the words 'National Insurance'. The phrase has become a lie. I am not sure that I object to paying more taxes but I do object violently to paying higher contributions to NI, as recently proposed, when it is no such thing.
National Insurance does not insure us all adequately against hardship, old age, serious illness or long-term disability. That is what Mr Elphick discovered when, having paid his National Insurance contributions, not to mention huge amounts of tax on tobacco, he nonetheless found he was denied a test to determine what sort of life-saving operation he might need. Had he been privately insured he would have been tested at once, and very likely still be alive today.
I do not think his NHS doctors can be blamed. They have to make difficult decisions about the best use of inadequate resources, and people will always disagree about these hard choices. What we need is an honest admission that the state cannot provide good quality womb-to-tomb care for everyone, as envisaged after the war. And perhaps more people will realise from Mr Elphick's experience that it may actually be preferable not to hand one's destiny over to state-run industries, but to buy and to control one's own insurance policies.
IT is now well known that testosterone is responsible for almost everything that is wrong in the world: almost any schoolgirl will tell you so. It is testosterone that drives the politician, the speculator, the warmonger, the rapist, the over-demanding husband and the over-enthusiastic council tree surgeon. The good news is that men produce less of it as they get older. But will they ever learn? There is now testosterone replacement therapy for men who feel their libido flagging, provided in the form of buttock implants by a Dr Carruthers of Harley Street. Not for them the wisdom of Socrates, who was grateful for a falling away of lust.
I suspect they are only doing it to keep up with their wives, who are dosing themselves with testosterone as part of female HRT, which is said to have the effect of spinach on Popeye.
However, I am delighted to report, in the interests of a balance in nature, that the women of the Peruvian Andes grow a carroty potato-like thing called mashua, which tastes delicious and lowers male testosterone levels and lust -by up to 50 per cent in experimental rats. They use it regularly to control their men. This was reported at last week's International Congress of Genetics in Birmingham, which has been making sensational reading for days - all those teenagers who think that science is not exciting need their brains testing.
Mashua has the enormous culinary scope and charm of the potato; it is considered a natural method of birth control, and it is also an insect repellent; the possibilities seem endless. If this wonderful plant is not immediately promoted on Gardeners' Question Time, with full cultivation instructions, we shall have to face the fact that the beloved old team may genuinely be a bit behind the times.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, August 22, 1993
