A Sunday Reflection.
The congregation at the Cathedral is thinning out as the summer sets in. Schools are out so the kids are missing, gone back with their mothers to home countries or off to holiday homes in Europe or Canada, or on the beach in Asia.
Alister Cooke, the great English-American broadcaster wrote about a similar phenomenon when he lived in New York. His wife and their children spent the summers based on their beach house on Long Island, not in the Hamptons, but on the other fork in the Island, a place of working farms and vineyards larger than vanity projects.
He claimed that this involved some hardship for the abandoned husbands, but as in Hong Kong, I am sure this complaint was for effect.
The sound system at the Cathedral this week was pleasingly subdued, the sermon reduced to a series of distant mumbles, and the Gospel more than usually unintelligible. It’s never good, it sounds as though it is being barked in some obscure east european language, as the deacon who is entrusted with reading it has a bit of a speech impediment.
Now I had a stutter when young and I have some sympathy for those who are afflicted with speech problems, but it seems to me that there are some vocations which are perhaps not suitable for the sufferers.
When I was a young man living in rural Victoria the newsreader on our local television station had a similar problem, a difficulty made more obvious as the local Member of Parliament was a Peter Ross-Edwards, and he was in the news most weeks.
There was a convivial dinner not long after my first wife and I had had our first ever telephone connected. It’s strange to relate it now, but this was a bit of an event in the late 1970s. One had to apply to Telecom, the government run monopoly provider, and wait patiently for some time, months usually, for T to supply, install and connect the device.
The food was delicious and the wine well tested, and we flipped on the late news to see our newsreader butchering the name of our MP. I couldn’t resist, I had to use our new toy, so I phoned the TV station to complain that it was unkind and unfair for the newsreader to make fun of Peter Woss-Edwards in that manner. It was tewwible.
The chap at the station was quick. He agreed, and said they were Werry, Werry, Sowwy, and it wouldn’t happen again.
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From X,
Told a guy about how we used to record music off the radio onto cassettes and he looked at me like I saw Lincoln get shot live.
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The AFL have gotten themselves into a pickle again.
They really are inept and slow-moving, made all the more obvious as the NRL, the rugby league competitor, is being run by a decisive, quick moving dynamo. I don’t much like him, and think he gets a bit wrong, but he makes the AFL look like the Indian railways.
Their problem this time was whether to remove Nicky Winwar from the Hall of Fame.
Winmar, an indigenous man, was a player of rare talent, skill, and flair, one of those with the gift of making the crowd grin in appreciation of his play, and he was also pivotal in dragging the sport beyond the casual racism that had held it back for a long time.
After a game when he had been subjected to even more racist comments than was common then, he responded by taunting the crowd, dragging up his jumper and pointing to his black skin with pride.
The moment was captured, the photo was everywhere and the topic could not be swept under the carpet as it had so often been. A very big moment in the history of the game.
Winmar has been convicted of domestic violence, a nasty one at that, and it makes sense for the AFL to review his place in the Hall of Fame. Sports should take some role in combating the scourge of violence against women and girls, because it is the right thing to do, and because it damages their reputation and business not to.
That really should have taken an hour or two around the table to decide, at most, and not the weeks it did.
And then, they could have spent another half hour discussing whether a suspension of rather than removal was best.
Sports can’t just be for the good people. There has to be some room in them for those who make mistakes, who are flawed people, after all it’s the pathway out of that life for a lot of young men and women.
Winmar says he has learned from this and turned his life around, so I say, suspend him for two or three years, and then have a look at it, and if he has, perhaps not judge him solely on his worst days.
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Stay well.