h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

England have just trounced the Aussies at Lords and are 2-0 up in the Ashes series. Chris Froome has won the Tour de France, giving the UK back-to-back wins after Sir Bradley of Wiggins won it last year, the first British person ever to do so. A Scot (so, technically British) won the mens' final at Wimbledon for the first time since Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister, Adolf Hitler was the Chancellor of Germany, Stalin was in the Kremlin and FDR was POTUS. The British and Irish Lions won some rugby tournament or other, and last summer Great Britain won a truckload of medals at the Olympic Games in London which by all accounts went swimmingly, organisation-wise.

Since when did we start getting good at things? It's very disconcerting.

For those of us who remember the dark days of the 70s, and especially the 80s when all the West Indies had to do was land at Heathrow to beat England, and The Ashes were something Australia kept in perpetuity, this is a very odd feeling. The thing about being top is that everyone wants to be where you are, and sooner or later someone will be, as we saw earlier this year when England were no longer number one cricket team any more. Being not very good at things is safe. It's comforting. The man who started The Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain found that out the hard way when the club became so popular (as a result of the bestseller he wrote, thus making him quite good at something) that the members ruled that it actually was quite good because so many people were joining, and threw him out, then disbanded the club for being a failure at being a failure. Now that's the sort of performance all these successful British sporting types should be aiming for.

I think we had a Not Terribly Good Club of h2g2 for a while. It must have been very good at being not terribly good because I can't remember the last time I, or any of the other four or five members we attracted, posted there. So I suppose that nullifies its existence.

With regards to all this British sporting success, I've some to the conclusion that this must be the end times. The Great Prophet Zarkwon is making ready for his second coming. The Flying Spaghetti Monster will be touching us with his noodly appendage. And if King Arthur and his knights are to awaken and ride forth to save Albion they'd better get a wiggle on before we win another bloody sporting trophy.

Don't worry. We are still, as a nation, pretty rubbish at football. And strangely, to some people, that's the only sport that matters, even though we may be beating the world at everything else.


Geggs

No real need to be concerned if you are English. The cricket team is a combination of South Africans and Yorkshiremen (never considered a part of England I understand), the cyclist is Kenyan, the tennis batter is Scottish and the British and Irish Lions are mostly Welsh with a smattering of Irish (southern section) and Pacific Islanders.

There is an English golfer and he magnificently threw away the lead to an ancient American in the Open hitting-a-small-ball-with-a-stick competition yesterday.

I see no problem with any of that. The definition of Britishness has always been fairly elastic.


Geggs

OI!
we all know the planet is divided into Yorkshire and The Suburbs of Yorkshire.

If we let England join us at something, well that's our business.

Sho, you know that's not true - there's London and there's NorthofWatford

Well, it's comforting to know that I'm Not Terribly Good at remembering how to spell Zarquon, or that The Ashes is singular (see my current tag), so it should be "The Ashes *was* held in perpetuity". Phew

Football. I'm as clueless as to its appeal as BG is to sports in general, and even though we've been Not Terribly Good at it since 1966 it gets all this attention and money. I don't get it

Well, we've retained, and now won, The Ashes.

Feels pretty good, truth be told

Indeed it does. Fantastic evening session yesterday, just when it looked like it might be slipping away from us the boys pulled out the stops and got 9 wickets in 2 1/2 hours.


Geggs

I was listening to TMS for almost the whole day's play, from an hour into the morning session right through to the end. It was one of the most exhilarating day's cricket I can remember, topped only by that day at Headingley in 1981 when Bob Willis knocked Australia over for 111 and took 8 for 43 I was listening to it at work, on a little tranny with an old school deaf-aid style earpiece in my lughole as I was making toffee and nougat

And TMS were all doom and gloom and pessimism when Australia were 170 for three Sports commentators really do have the memory of a goldfish, don't they. Despite all the batting collapses that have happened in this series, and over the past three days - pretty much one each innings, not to mention it being England's MO for so many years, Aggers et al were virtually predicting a win for Australia at that point. I doubt anyone could have predicted the events of that last session but I was certain that Australia's batsmen weren't going to make the 299 runs required and that once the first few wickets went down the rest would follow.