AWW 23.11.2010 Am I alone in thinking...(1)

No regular walk this Wednesday because the fit, the fanatical and the foolhardy were engaged on Day One of the 2010 Round-the Corner. But we have to keep the weekly blog going, else the RCB will no doubt cancel my licence. So I will abandon my motto of "Let thy words be few" on this occasion with these ruminations:


Am I alone in thinking...

that the world of football is too pervasive in our everyday news? One way or another, football appears in contexts for no possible reason, apart from journalistic attempts to “dumb down.”

For example, the other day I was glancing through a relatively serious article about the cyber threat posed by hostile hackers to national security. You know the sort of scary stuff – a modern day Fu-Manchu, a jihadist, a mega-Mafioso, whatever, who with a single malicious press of a button can knock out our entire military capability, close down all the country´s power and utility grids, fuse intruder alarms the length and breadth of Downing Street and, horror of horrors, disable every ATM in the land.

It´s enough to give Dismayed of Tunbridge Wells nightmares. You may well ask what is our defence against all this?

Well, in the UK, we have a man.

By the name of Lobban as a matter of fact: until recently a shadowy figure, the Director of something called GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) which deals with Signals Intelligence. The other day, however, he stepped into the limelight (as our Secret Service chiefs seem increasingly wont to do these days) and the resultant newspaper report went like this:

“ In his speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (I.I.S.S.), Mr. Lobban, an Everton supporter who took charge of GCHQ in 2008, revealed the alarming state of the cyber threat.”

Do you see what I mean about pervasive?!

Ever since reading that short paragraph, I have had sleepless nights, but these have been caused, not by nightmares over cyber-terrorism, but by astonishment and despair that our powers-that-be could ever let something as vital to Britain´s SIGINT as GCHQ be in the charge of an avowed Everton fan.

Where is our bulwark against the storms of evil now that a whole swathe of our national security is entrusted to someone emotionally linked to the fortunes of the soccer club that spawned Rayne Wooney?

Now we Brits prefer our spies and counter-spies to have a certain idiosyncracy and, when it comes to their sporting preferences , then we rightly expect those preferences to add to, not detract from, that aura of eccentricity.

Surely, the sporting links we look for in a man with such as DGCHQ are those, say, of a super-fit James Bond type (team suggestion – Alloa Athletic?), or of a brilliant counter-terrorist micro-engineer like Q (Forres Mechanics?), or of a deeply intellectual savant with a Mensa-rating of 185 plus (Hamilton Academicals, definitely), or of an irrepressible, mentally mercurial cryptologist (Preston Grasshoppers – different game but you catch my drift), or of a supremely gifted amateur sleuth (I Zingari by choice), or of a member of the minor aristocracy, superficially effete but with ice in his veins (Leander, Corinthian Casuals and The Athenaeum)....We could at a pinch accept a Belgian with spats and a waxed moustache.

But what do we get these days but an Everton supporter.

Finally, we are indebted to Ian S for this excerpt from the Court Circular for 24th November:

CLARENCE HOUSE: 
The Prince of Wales, Patron, the Poultry Club of Great Britain, this morning received Master Raven Power (Keeper of the Buff Orpingtons) at Sandringham House.
Mr. Simon Power (Father) was present.