Sports, sports, sports etc

No prizes for guessing the subject of this blog. You know what, a quick thing. These bits are no longer called blogs. The word blog shall refer to the collected entity. These little bits are called blogules. Like it?

Anyway, this blog as the more lexically gifted amongst you may have deduced is about sports. As mentioned elsewhere, I love sports. Sports are brilliant, I watch just about all of them. Except golf and boxing, just don't get them whatsoever. The rest though are brilliant. Utterly incredibly brilliant.

I love to watch them a lot. For example as I am typing this I have recently finished watching the quite frankly brilliant Twenty 20 Semi final between England and Sri Lanka. Twenty20 is quite frankly brilliant, a real slog fest with added drama. Each and every ball is different, the whole game can change on a single delivery. I've seen this myself when I saw a Yorkshire v Durham game a couple of seasons ago. This game could have gone either way and when it came to the final ball, Durham needed a 6 to level, unfortunatley they got it but this didn't matter because the whole game had been so brilliant. It's my hope that when I'm older I can move somewhere and join a little village cricket team. It just seems such good fun.

From Twenty20 I've moved on to the Darts. Now most people are rather snobby when it comes to this sport, believing it to only be for lager swilling louts. IT ISN'T! Stephen Fry loves it, he is neither of these things. The sheer brilliance of darts lies in the sheer mathematics of these people. To work out what they need to score in such a short space of time is very impressive. I don't want to join a darts team.

Formula 1 continues this weekend in sunny Monaco. Fast cars, thrilling crashes, brilliant scenery. What more could you want? I wish I could do some pro-driving.

Now, football. I've already blogged my views on football. I really want to start playing more sports besides my weekly fencing, which I am still sitting out due to my elbow not being right. I enjoy playing football in friendly kick arounds and the occasional little game I played in fencing warm ups was good fun. I would ideally look to join a five-a-side team of people of a similar ability to me (mildly average with occasional skill). This may well become an aim of mine at a later date.

Until tomorrow and the next book blogger hop...

Author! Author! 2: P.G. Wodehouse

Lets get the shameless plugging out of the way first. OMPADC is here.

Now that the shameless self promotion is out of the way. Let us move on to more serious matters. Namely the next name to join Alan Bennett in MFWE (for those who don't remember, this stands for My Favourite Writers Ever).

The next name to join this list (yes it is a list now there is more than one person, I asked someone) is the delightfully named Pelham Grenville Wodehouse or P.G. to his friends. Although, many would think this would lead to confusion with tea makers P.G. Tips it doesn't, Mr Wodehouse was never pyramid shaped nor advertised by chimpanzees. At least, not to my knowledge.

"The Aberdeen terrier gave me an unpleasant look and said something under his breath in Gaelic"

Wodehouse is perhaps best known for his series of books featuring errant foppish fool Bertie Wooster and his personal gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves. It was reading these that first put me on to Wodehouse's writing. To me, old Pelham, is one of the finest and funniest comic writers of the 20th Century. Many comedy types, including the wonderful Stephen Fry (more on him at a later date) and his equally good friend Hugh Laurie (both of whom have appeared in an adaptation of the man's work) have cited the works as being lifesaving and as containing some of the greatest examples of comic literature.

One of these is the brilliant sequence at the Market Snodsbury Prize giving with an inebriated Gussie Fink-Nottle giving prizes to schoolboys and throwing various accusations of cheating around. Something that really has to be read to be fully appreciated. I strongly urge anyone who hasn't done so already to do read it. Failing that you should also see the brilliant Fry & Laurie (told you they would reappear) staring adaptation of the Jeeves & Wooster books.

However P.G. didn't just do Jeeves & Wooster he had a whole variety of other characters, which would occasionally crop up or be at the very least be mentioned in each others books. These are no less funny than the Jeeves series and are also good for a laugh.

I have recently started reading the Jerome K Jerome book "Three Men In A Boat" a book that many claim to be a precursor to the Wodehouse style. Personally I find this to be a lot less accessible than Wodehouse, for a full review go here.

Wodehouse critics often claim that he can't be that great a writer due to the lack of different plots across the 70+ he wrote. To a certain extent that is a largely true statement. However it is all irrelevant because what he does is write these plots and build incredible layers of intricacies and details around the plots. This creates such high levels of farce to make the book so enjoyable that you don't notice. They are simply blissfull, light reading. Which is sometimes all one can really ask for in this world.

Before this goes on much longer I shall finish and advise you to take some time to read Wodehouse. If you want to have a book of pure enjoyment, read some Wodehouse.