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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..

Mystery and Romance or, in the UK, Crime and Romance – two genres which, on the surface, seem to operate in different dimensions and act on different parts of the psyche. In one, the bodice is ripped by the fumbling hands of a brooding, handsome gentleman whose hunger and love are matched by that of its wearer; in the other, the hands don’t fumble because they’re deliberate as the serial killer, intent on adding another mammary gland to the collection in his Sheraton mahogany display cabinet, wields his razor.

But both are subject to often strict conventions. For the most part, Romance calls for happy endings, but then so does Crime – well, endings anyway. The mystery must be solved, the culprit apprehended or punished in some other way. There are, of course, examples which subvert the rules, but we only recognise them because the rules are there. The point is that, in both genres, resolution is reached and fans are happy that their desires have been sated yet again.

In the end, though, the rules are only sacrosanct because the characters accept them as such. Romantic heroes and heroines believe in the possibility of happiness. Not only that, it’s a happiness which, according to the rules, will be eternal – happy ever after – a condition which, for (I’m guessing) the vast majority of real people, is unattainable. OK, so obstacles have appeared, but they’ve been overcome. Does that mean there won’t be any more? Probably not, so how can things be ‘happy ever after’. Does requited love really change the way the world works?

It’s hard to imagine a detective, faced with corpse after corpse, excess after excess in the books in which s/he features, having the same belief in the perfectibility of the species and a rosy outcome. And yet s/he works at solving the problems, bringing light where there was darkness. So the apparent bleakness suggested by all these misdeeds can be overcome. In a way, it’s illusory.

The more you look at it, the less cut and dried it seems to be. And I found this out for myself when I was writing The Figurehead. It was going to be a crime novel, because that’s what I write (apparently). Well, it is a crime novel but it also became a Romance, mainly because, without any planning or direction on my part, two of the characters started being attracted to one another. At the end of the book, I wrote this:

Quickly, she raised her hands to his face and pulled him down towards her. As he leaned forward, he saw her lips part and then, suddenly, felt them warm and soft against his own. It was a lover’s kiss.

But that was all. Their social stations were different and no decisions had been made about their future conduct. The woman had the impulse to kiss the man and that was that. It’s a problem I’ll have to resolve in the sequel but I’m congenitally NOT a writer of Romance, so I’ll be interested to see where they go next.

My point is that, as has been said many times by many people, it’s the characters who drive the plot. Let’s try it. I’ll pluck a name out of the air – Marie-Rose Tremaine. There. I won’t describe her because you, the reader, prefer to shape her to your fancy. The name is slightly exotic, certainly, but it could equally be that of a simple Cornish girl. Remember Tess Durbeyfield, a.k.a. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and look what became of Norma Jeane Mortenson.

Now let’s put her in a setting and see how she decides what the book will be. She’s standing by a gate at the edge of a field at sunset. In the corner of the field is a crumbling old barn. But the view is beautiful, it brings out all her yearnings for the love and affection she never got from her father, a retired Field Marshal. She sighs at the beauty of it all but her musing is interrupted by footsteps. She turns and sees a tall, handsome man walking towards her down the lane, a shotgun cradled over his arm.

Over to you. Is it a Romance, a Crime? What happens next?.