Wilders’ main bar screens the ‘big games.’ And going there to watch these is always a guilty pleasure. Calculus, Manu and i can not resist the charms of live football. In fact we more than willingly succumb to them. The bar’s atmosphere granting us a lull from all the cosy comradeship of the commune. Only human to crave a little contrast, says Manu who, along with Calculus, is prone to pontificate at half time. i don’t say anything as my expected role is to nod solemnly. “To spectate is to meditate.” Nod… more pontificating… nod, nod.
A lot of their talk is self-justifying, but they have a point. Moreover, football is seldom devoid of its transcendent moments, which quite override the fundamental banality to any sporting contest. Calculus has thought long and hard about the sublime skills of players like George Best and Johan Cruyff. (The latter with whom Calculus had a special affinity owing to his serious smoking habit.)
In the nineteen seventies Calculus achieved international recognition thanks to three works of startling academic originality. The first being a treatise on why and how it is that people in large crowds avoid – seemingly without effort – bumping into each other. To do this Calculus dipped into graph theory, producing a crazy looking series of diagrams with nodes and edges. He called these pictures ‘ants on acid!’ Next, he studied peeing in public; from the Middle Ages through to modern times. And his third and last academic project concerned football and the fanaticism that it generates among its many followers. This transformed in a Ph. D. with extensive references to football in literature. It was completed in haste because he and his supervisor – the philosopher A. J. Ayer – wished to spend most of their time collecting data. I.e. attending matches. In the 1950s Ayer wrote for sports pages of The Observer, typically beginning his match reports with the following astute observation: The match kicked off at 3.00 pm prompt! i should imagine that watching footy for both men was a means of escaping the sheer overload of hard conscious thinking. (Non-Kommunards now watch the sport primarily as a release from that feeling of drowning in digital information.) The Ph.D. concluded, somewhat controversially, that the sport of football is ‘more important than its associated tribal loyalties… manifest individual brilliance being ultimately for undifferentiated public enjoyment.’
Calculus carried out his research in the library where worked Martha whose contribution – to the Ph.D. – cannot be underestimated. She could recall the names of all the books – during a forty year span of extensive reading – in which football featured. Being of a literary bent, she came up with the following titles:
The Unfortunates, an experimental ‘book in a box’ published in 1969 by English author B. S. Johnson.
One Moonlit Night by Welsh writer Caradog Prichard (when the Wanderers came from Holyhead to play in the Cup against the Celts of Bethesda in Robin David’s Field.)
The Blinder by Barry Hines
Europe in the looking-glass by the travel writer Robert Byron (Alba v Bologna in the field in the Via Toscana at Bologna (p.74)
Soccer War between Honduras and El Salvador by Kapuscinski
The Football factory by John King.
Roy of the Rovers
The Abominable Man by Maj Sjowell & Per Wahloo. (The mind of Kristiansson, who squanders all his money on the footy pools, ‘was completely occupied by the question of how Millwall, one of his key teams, would fare in its difficult match against Portsmouth.’ The authors had been referring to the clubs’ teams, i believe, and not their legendary ‘hard’ supporters.
The above list represents less than ten per cent of what she turned up. She had certainly done Calculus proud. When she inquired as to how the project had come about, he certainly owed her a fulsome explanation. Which, to be fair to him, he unhesitatingly gave.
Reading newspapers has become of course an archaic and dangerous activity. But apparently this was once not so, for the footy project had occurred to Calculus one Sunday morning while relaxing with the broadsheets. (Admittedly they had then been in their death throes.) Suddenly Calculus had sat bolt upright. The cause being a simple photograph in one of the weekend supplement magazines that lay sprawled across the kitchen table. It was of an old brown football (circa late nineteen sixties) with chunky tessellations, and, crucially, smeared with dubbin. An affable male television presenter was holding it in a scene that had been got up as a prelude to that particular World Cup (held in the previous millennium.) It wasn’t just that the football jarred with the modernity of the competition and the exoticism which Calculus associated with Brasil, the host country. It was as though, through the ether of time, he caught actual whiffs of dubbin which evoked, in Calculus, memories of a football obsessed youth. Such as going to professional football match for the first time and seeing the sheer green turf; an experience whose intensity had been every bit as startling as an acid trip. Phweet! (Full time whistle.)