Oh, the weather outside is frightful…

At the time of writing, it is snowing outside (which should give some of you an idea as to the length of backlog I keep). All I see is some varying shade of white or grey, as the snow lies several inches deep in patches- and is still falling. Even the road is barely visible between its white dusting. All is calm, all is quiet, all sound deadened in that weird way snow does.

This has, understandably, somewhat altered my plans over the weekend. With all rugby-related activities off for the immediate future and a large repository of awesome awaiting in the hills near my home, I have spent around four hours over the last two days rolling around in, sliding over, throwing and falling into heaps of snow whilst wrapped in twice the layers of clothing I customarily wear; and loving every minute of it. Monday has come inconveniently early for me. I am a big child.

Of course, snow is not all great news. When the snow first fell I was stuck away from home and offered to give a friend a lift back to his; after I’d dropped him off I became caught in the worst traffic jam I have ever experienced, and took a total of three and a half hours to get to my house, eight miles from my point of departure. This is just one part of the minor infrastructure  meltdown that occurs whenever snow ends up where it’s unexpected; across Britain (where, incidentally, this decade has seen more serious snowfalls than the last half-century) roads have been clogged, schools have closed, airports have had to cancel flights and shops have shut. After a few days most people have basically got used to it and some aspects of life are starting to return to normal, but the smaller roads are still treacherous and flights continue to be cancelled across the country.

This of course inspires the usual parlance of “we are all a bunch of useless wusses, why is the country grinding to a halt, in Canada/Sweden/Switzerland/the mountain passes of Tibet they can deal with this pitiful dusting in their sleep”. This is generally an opinion put forward by a) raging pessimists who hate everything and b) people who are angry at having been stuck in traffic or similar for an extended period, and is somewhat stupid. In countries where snow is regular/predictable/all the year round, people have all the equipment (winter tyres, snow chains, snowploughs etc.) to make sure they can cope when the inevitable bad weather rolls in. In Britain however, snow is so irregular and unpredictable that to own all this expensive equipment is simply not financially viable to keep all year round, much less remember how to equip and use. If we just take the economic standpoint, despite the chaos it causes, we are better off in the long run having a few days every year or three of total mayhem than an expensive state of perpetual readiness that we really don’t need.

The fact that this sentiment exists, however, is indicative of the strange love/hate relationship we have with snow. On the one hand, we idolise it; we holiday across continents to spend weeks slithering around over a predictable supply of it, hail snowy landscapes as some of the most breathtakingly beautiful our planet has to offer, and every year as December rolls around we in the Northern hemisphere are greeted to endless images of snow in adverts, TV and everything else even remotely associated with Christmas. In this context, it is seen as a kind of wistful image; a wish for the snow’s beauty and the kind of landscape to make a crackling fire and time spent with the family seem even more attractive and like the perfect family Christmas that we all seem to aim for during the festive period. Snow is something to be lusted after, something we are willing to pay an awful lot for, and that has some kind of mystical quality to it.

But then we consider the inverse; what happens when it arrives. Across the country, news bulletins offer us stern warnings of icy roads, treacherous conditions, the occasional serious incident (this year four people were killed in a hiking incident during the worst part of the cold weather) and, of course, the thousands of parents facing childcare problems as little Timmy’s school has shut and he wants to go play in the snow. When it comes around, the number of people who say they hate snow grows rapidly; it traps us in traffic, riles our tempers, messes with our schedules. The snow itself, so pristine when it first falls on fresh, cold ground, rapidly becomes compressed down to slippery, dirty ice, before turning into a messy slush. For many, there is no option but to wrap up warm, stay indoors and curse the day God invented the ‘cold rain’ (as a mate recently described it).

To an extent, this is an age thing; when young, we yearn for the snow that is so often promised but never comes, and without the responsibilities of adulthood we are fully equipped to make the most of it when it comes round. To an adult, being unable to get to work is frustrating and inconvenient; but a closed school is a child’s paradise, and offers an excuse to spend the entire day messing around doing as you please. And not only that, but the weather has also provided the best playground imaginable; not only is snow soft and relatively harmless, but it can be easily compacted into a harder, more solid form, allowing it to form snowballs, snowmen and even makeshift igloos. Even better than that, snow is mighty slippery stuff, allowing us to go flying down hills far faster than we could hope to even sprint, whilst still being soft enough to break our fall and clean enough that we don’t have to worry about ruining clothes, adding sledding to the ‘snow play’ repertoire.

Perhaps children are simply those best equipped to enjoy the snow; they don’t have to worry about the roads or work, and have none of the adult responsibilities that so weigh our older selves down. Or maybe they just have the correct mindset to deal with it, because in all honesty, snow is really good fun; a form of entertainment that is great precisely because it comes around so rarely, and provides so many opportunities. Maybe I’m just a big kid, but to me snow is a chance to forget a few of my responsibilities for a while, and just have fun bouncing off the trees. To return to the mind of a child one again, but with the adult body that allows me to get the absolute most out of it.

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Losing

I have mentioned before that I am a massive rugby fan, and I have also mentioned that I’m not that brilliant at it and have much experience of losing. I also support England, which has left me no choice other than to spend the past ten years alternating between moments of joy and long periods of frustration over what could have been, whilst continually living in the shadow of ‘that drop goal’ (apologies for non-rugby fans, for whom this will make little sense, but bear with me) and trying to come to terms with our latest loss (although… any New Zealanders reading this? 🙂 ). The team I support have spent the last few seasons living through a similar shadow of former success, and many losses have subsequently ensued. As such, I am very well acquainted with the practice of losing, and in particular the different kinds of loss that can occur (and the emotions inspired thereof). The following list will not be exhaustive, but I’ll aim to cover as many as I can.

The most obvious variety of loss has also perhaps the most potential to be depressing; the thrashing. An entirely one sided affair, where all concerned tried their best but simply weren’t good enough to even come close to standing up to the opposition, a thrashing can serve as a message saying “People might tell you to try your best, but your best isn’t good enough“. This is a terribly depressing thought, suggesting that all of one’s hard work, effort and training matter for nought in comparison to one’s opponents; or, the thrashing can be taken in a positive vein, a sense of “hey, they are just better than us, but we did well and there’s no shame in it”. Which way one goes really depends on the opposition concerned and one’s way of handling failure (refer to my back catalogue for more details) but a good example of the latter course occurred during the Rugby World Cup in 2007 when Portugal, never noted as a great rugby side, lost to the rugby powerhouse that is New Zealand by 108 points to 13. That was a definitive thrashing, but Portugal had nonetheless scored a try against the world’s best sides, hot favourites to win the overall competition (although they subsequently didn’t) and had played with pride and tenacity. The sight of their side, chests puffed out and eyes flush with emotion, singing the national anthem at the start of that game was a truly heartwarming one.

Subtly distinct from, but similar to, a thrashing is the collapse, the different being whose fault the scale of the loss is. A thrashing is very much won by the winners, but a collapse is caused by the losing party allowing everything that could go wrong to go wrong, performing terribly and letting the result tell the story. The victim of a collapse may be the underdog, may be expected to lose, but certainly should not have done so by quite so spectacular a margin as they do. This generally conjures up less depression than it does anger, frustration and even shame; you know you could and should have done better, but for whatever reason you haven’t. No excuses, no blaming the ref, you just failed- and you hate it.

Next in the order of frustration is the one-aspect loss, something generally confined to more multifaceted, and particularly team, occasions. These centre on one individual or aspect of the situation; one’s left back failing to mark his man on numerous occasions, for example, or a tennis player’s serve letting him down. Again the predominant feeling is one of frustration, this time of having done enough and still not won; in every other aspect of one’s performance you might have been good enough to win, but because of one tiny aspect you were let down and it was all for nought. The one-aspect loss is closely related to the ‘kitchen sink’ loss, such as Spain experienced at the hands of Switzerland at the football world cup two years ago. Spain were clearly the better side in that match, and but for one lucky goal from the Swiss they surely would have won it, but after that Switzerland holed up in their own penalty area and defended for their lives. Spain might have thrown everything they had and then some at the Swiss after that, might have struck shot after shot, but no matter what they did it just didn’t come up for them; luck and fate were just against them that day, and for all their effort they still managed to lose. A kitchen sink loss is also characterised by frustration, often made doubly annoying by the fact that the one aspect of one’s performance that has let you down has nothing to do with you, but can also summon depression by the seeming irrelevance of all the hard work you did put in. A match you should have won, could have won, often needed to have won, but no matter how much effort you put in fate just didn’t want you to win. Doesn’t life suck sometimes?

The even loss also records significant frustration levels, particularly due to the nature of the games it often occurs in. An even loss occurs between two closely matched teams or individuals in a close contest, and where portents at the start say it could go either way. Sadly, in most sports a draw is rare, whilst in many it is impossible, and in any case such a situation satisfies nobody; there must be a winner and, unfortunately, a loser. Such a loss is always hard to take, as one knows they are good enough to win (and usually have done so in the past; such occasions are often repeat fixtures against local rivals, meaning the prospect of a year’s gloating must also be considered) but that, on the day, it went the other way. On other occasions, a sense of anticlimax may be present; sometimes losses just happen, and do not inspire any great emotion (although the near-neutral loss is a category unto itself), and after a tight game in which you played alright but were fair beaten there’s sometimes not too much to get emotional about.

And then, we come to perhaps the strangest form of losing- the happy loss. It’s often hard to be comfortable about being happy with a loss, particularly in a tight game decided only by the narrowest of margins and that one could have won. There are some people who will never feel happy about a loss, no matter how good the game or the opposition, constantly striving for the concrete success a victory can show; but for others, there is still comfort to be found in losing. There lies no shame in losing a match against a good, deserving opponent, no shame in losing when you could not possibly have given more, and no shame in doing far, far better than you were expected to. I have talked before on this blog on the value of learning to fail with grace; just as important, in life as in sport and such, is learning how to lose.

Other Politicky Stuff

OK, I know I talked about politics last time, and no I don’t want to start another series on this, but I actually found when writing my last post that I got very rapidly sidetracked when I tried to use voter turnout as a way of demonstrating the fact that everyone hates their politicians, and I thought I might dedicate a post to this particular train of thought as well.

You see, across the world, but predominantly in the developed west where the right to choose our leaders has been around for ages, less and less people are turning out each time to vote.  By way of an example, Ronald Reagan famously won a ‘landslide’ victory when coming to power in 1980- but only actually attracted the vote of 29% of all eligible voters. In some countries, such as Australia, voting is mandatory, but thoughts about introducing such a system elsewhere have frequently met with opposition and claims that it goes against people’s democratic right to abstain from doing so (this argument is largely rubbish, but no time for that now).

A lot of reasons have been suggested for this trend, among them a sense of political apathy, laziness, and the idea that we having the right to choose our leaders for so long has meant we no longer find such an idea special or worth exercising. For example, the presidential election in Venezuela – a country that underwent something of a political revolution just over a decade ago and has a history of military dictatorships, corruption and general political chaos – a little while ago saw a voter turnout of nearly 90% (incumbent president Hugo Chavez winning with 54% of the vote to win his fourth term of office in case you were interested) making Reagan look boring by comparison.

However, another, more interesting (hence why I’m talking about it) argument has also been proposed, and one that makes an awful lot of sense. In Britain there are 3 major parties competing for every seat, and perhaps 1 or two others who may be standing in your local area. In the USA, your choice is pretty limited to either Obama or Romney, especially if you’re trying to avoid the ire of the rabidly aggressive ‘NO VOTE IS A VOTE FOR ROMNEY AND HITLER AND SLAUGHTERING KITTENS’ brigade. Basically, the point is that your choice of who to vote for is limited to usually less than 5 people, and given the number of different issues they have views on that mean something to you the chance of any one of them following your precise political philosophy is pretty close to zero.

This has wide reaching implications extending to every corner of democracy, and is indicative of one simple fact; that when the US Declaration of Independence was first drafted some 250 years ago and the founding fathers drew up what would become the template for modern democracy, it was not designed for a state, or indeed a world, as big and multifaceted as ours. That template was founded on the basis of the idea that one vote was all that was needed to keep a government in line and following the will of the masses, but in our modern society (and quite possibly also in the one they were designing for) that is simply not the case. Once in power, a government can do almost what it likes (I said ALMOST) and still be confident that they will get a significant proportion of the country voting for them; not only that, but that their unpopular decisions can often be ‘balanced out’ by more popular, mass-appeal ones, rather than their every decision being the direct will of the people.

One solution would be to have a system more akin to Greek democracy, where every issue is answered by referendum which the government must obey. However, this presents just as many problems as it answers; referendums are very expensive and time-consuming to set up and perform, and if they became commonplace it could further enhance the existing issue of voter apathy. Only the most actively political would vote in every one, returning the real power to the hands of a relative few who, unlike previously, haven’t been voted in. However, perhaps the most pressing issue with this solution is that it rather renders the role of MPs, representatives, senators and even Prime Ministers & Presidents rather pointless. What is the point of our society choosing those who really care about the good of their country, have worked hard to slowly rise up the ranks and giving them a chance to determine how their country is governed, if we are merely going to reduce their role to ones of administrators and form fillers? Despite the problems I mentioned last time out, of all the people we’ve got to choose from politicians are probably the best people to have governing us (or at least the most reliably OK, even if it’s simply because we picked them).

Plus, politics is a tough business, and what is the will of the people is not necessarily always what’s best for the country as a whole. Take Greece at the moment; massive protests are (or at least were; I know everyone’s still pissed off about it) underway due to the austerity measures imposed by the government, because of the crippling economic suffering that is sure to result. However, the politicians know that such measures are necessary and are refusing to budge on the issue- desperate times call for difficult decisions (OK, I know there were elections that almost entirely centred on this decision that sided with austerity, but shush- you’re ruining my argument). To pick another example, President Obama (and several Democrat candidates before him) have met with huge opposition to the idea of introducing a US national healthcare system, basically because Americans hate taxes. Nonetheless, this is something he believes very strongly in, and has finally managed to get through congress; if he wins the elections later this year, we’ll see how well he executes.

In short, then, there are far too many issues, too many boxes to balance and ideas to question, for all protesting in a democratic society to take place at the ballot box. Is there a better solution to waving placards in the street and sending strongly worded letters? Do those methods at all work? In all honesty, I don’t know- that whole internet petitions get debated in parliament thing the British government recently imported from Switzerland is a nice idea, but, just like more traditional forms of protest, gives those in power no genuine categorical imperative to change anything. If I had a solution, I’d probably be running for government myself (which is one option that definitely works- just don’t all try it at once), but as it is I am nothing more than an idle commentator thinking about an imperfect system.

Yeah, I struggle for conclusions sometimes.