Apart from the times when I get angry at people who refuse to acknowledge that access to healthcare should be available to all, whatever their financial circumstances, and that we all belong to the same species (are you reading this Romney, Ryan, Cameron et al? No, of course not), I try to keep these blogs upbeat. Most of the time they try to be funny (although I realise that I sometimes have to excuse the apparent impenetrability of my version of ‘British Humour’). When they’re about writing, they’re basically serious because I think that’s how writers should treat the profession and all its aspects, but when they’re about me and my seeming obsession with the absurdities of life, they’re meant to entertain.

That won’t change but this one will be threaded through with a tiny melancholy. The reason? My publisher Diane Nelson has had to close down her Pfoxmoor company. Diane published most of my books, spent time on them all, tolerated my constant emails pointing out things I’d missed or forgotten or just got wrong. It was thanks to her submitting them that two of them won awards, and she even sent The Sparrow Conundrum to the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair, where it briefly aroused the interest of a German publisher. And she’s been generous to a fault with all her authors, sometimes sacrificing her own precious writing time to accommodate them. She regretted having to close down but it was the obvious thing to do and she can now concentrate on writing and providing editorial services to others. So this is my big public thank you to her for everything she did on my behalf.

And, as millions all over the world read this, I can almost hear their wails of anguish at the thought that my priceless tomes will no longer be available, but cease your weeping, un-gnash your teeth, because (again with Diane’s help) I’ve re-published them myself. At the moment, only the Kindle versions are there but I’ll be publishing them all as paperbacks as soon as I can. European literature needs them and this starving author in his garret, surrounded only by his laptop, desktop and iPad, will still be able to feed off the crumbs from Amazon’s table.

Amen..

OK, it’s about the Olympics, but I’m not going to wax lyrical or anything. Nor am I going to moan. I’m enjoying all of it, whoever wins, and the only thing that detracts from it all are medal winners who talk and act as if silver and bronze are badges of shame. One of our oarsmen wrote a whole article about how gutted he was to ‘only’ get silver. Really, these people need to get a sense of perspective – and probably some counselling.

Anyway, as I’ve been watching this orgy of sport, I’ve been doing the usual idle speculation about how it could be even better. Statistics, training routines, sports psychologists and the like are making too many results predictable. In order to sustain the value of the Olympics as spectacle, we need to subvert this tendency and add even more value. How we do so will depend on which events interest you but I can simply list a few ideas which occurred as I was watching some of them.

Judo.
Players seem to opt for very untidy gear. They start with the jacket folded over and the belt secure but very quickly, they look dishevelled. And dishevelled is not a good look. I think it would be much more entertaining if the men wore lounge suits, with a tie and waistcoat and brogues on their feet. For women it should be straight skirts, smart jackets, stilettos and a chiffon scarf in their national colours.

Athletics (sub-title for USA readers: Track and Field).
There seems to be a fashion (in many sports, not just this one), for athletes’ children and families to join them after the event to parade round the arena as if they, too, were participants. I see no reason, therefore, why the relevant parent shouldn’t carry his/her child/children during the race. An appropriate handicap system would cater for the difference between individuals who create serial siblings and their infertile or celibate opponents.
As for the longer races, we need to introduce something to counteract the mid-race monotony (apart from withdrawing Brendan Foster’s licence to broadcast). Maybe if the runners had to stop after every kilometre, do a mime and only continue when the judges had guessed what it was. Or, in the case of the steeplechase, install a heater below the water jump (fed, of course, by a pipe leading from the Olympic flame), and bring the water up to boiling point as the race progresses.
On the other hand, the marathon is so enthralling with all the suffering it involves already that it should be extended – two or three heats, quarter and semi-finals, final.

Cycling.
The team pursuit is highly technical and difficult to cover adequately on TV. My proposal is that each race should continue until one team actually catches the other. What they then do with them will depend on their national culture and their government’s policy towards aliens, but marks will be awarded for creativity.
And that rather strange race, the Keirin, where the riders have to follow a motorised bike around for the first few laps, would be much more exciting if they followed a Harley Davidson.

The possibilities are endless – make dressage horses move to different dance beats, get rid of the gloves in the boxing, bring an equestrian element into the water polo, fill the volleyball court with the sort of things you find on normal beaches.

And, for the swimming, a new event which I’d never have thought of. It comes courtesy of Charlie Brooker in his column in yesterday’s Guardian. He advocated ‘swimming while thinking about Fleetwood Mac’. Genius..

Are you feeling happy? If so, exactly how happy? I ask because of two pieces of recent news. One is the Olympics. They always seem to give people a lift, maybe just an escape from the mundane, but they do seem to make life/things different. I don’t just mean the inexplicable elation induced by the opening ceremony, I mean all the striving and efforts and humanity of everyone involved. I won’t dwell on the ceremony. Opinions vary. Mine was that it was spellbinding, uplifting, funny and an astonishing achievement by an ego-lite genius. It wasn’t about politics, corporate sponsors, self-important administrators – it was about people. It was about priorities, an awareness of who we are – not in a restrictive ‘We’re such and such a nationality and therefore we’re better than you’ way – but in a recognition that we’ve been formed by a particular culture, one which works best when it’s inclusive, which values effort, endeavour, commitment, wit, honesty. It also implied the wider culture, the one that the Olympics is supposed to embody, of being human, of belonging to the same species. (OK, it’s the species of Mitt Romney, George Osborne and the rest, but it’s also the species of Danny Boyle.)

Unfortunately, there’s someone called Aidan Burley who’s also a member. He’s a Tory MP – the one who went to a Nazi-themed stag party  a while ago. He has every right to express an opinion, of course, and his reaction was as legitimate as mine, but I also have the right to find it offensive and to suggest that the bigotry implicit (and explicit) in it diminishes us severely and carries a vitriol which we can only hope will be self-destructive.

His tweet ran thus: “Thank God the athletes have arrived! Now we can move on from leftie multicultural crap. Bring back red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones.” Like most of those whose tongues outsprint their reasoning faculties, he later had to start insisting that his tweet had been ‘misunderstood’. Hmmm. Misunderstood, eh? His grasp of language is clearly greater than mine because the subtler, perhaps gentler meaning of ‘leftie multicultural crap’ escapes me.

Still, his respect for Shakespeare suggests an evolved sensibility and a level of linguistic sophistication that he should exploit to correct the widely held belief that he’s a dickhead. I look forward then to his thoughts on the theme of regeneration in King Lear or the textual authenticity of the disputed passages in Cymbeline. Once that’s out of the way, he’ll maybe also give us his exegetical analysis of the Jungian semiotics in the lyrics of I can’t get no satisfaction.

Anyway, back to the question of your happiness and the other news item. A year or so ago, our government decided to take time off from the crashing economy, deepening austerity, widening rich/poor gaps and so on and find out how happy we are. And last week we got the results. In fact, not only that, we got a ‘Happiness index’, which revealed, among many other things, that people in the Shetland Islands were far happier than those in Thurrock in Essex. I’m sure the data and stats were/are immaculate and that the reseachers’ methodologies were completely watertight. I’m in one of the two age groups that are happiest, I own a house and I’m married, all of which put me much closer to delirium than to suicide. But, despite the fact that there’s an actual index, with figures such as 7.8 and 6.9 on it, I’ve no idea where I come on the scale. Still, that’s just a personal deficiency. I take great comfort in knowing that we can now actually measure happiness. Soon we’ll be able to say exactly how attractive our partners are or how beautiful our sunsets. Let’s just be grateful that, like money, everything is becoming quantifiable..