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From Ed Stourton...
Until the late 1980s the dons (male ones) of Oxford were accustomed to sunbathe and swim in the nude along a bend in the River Cherwell known as Parson's Pleasure. There is an old joke about the day when a women's eight rowed past and all the dons leapt up and tried to conceal their private parts behind the copies of Herodotus they had been idly perusing in the sun - all, that is, except one, who raised his book so that it shielded his head from the river. When his neighbour asked why he replied "I don't know about you, but most people recognise me by my face". An old joke, but a good one.
I am sure the traditional donnish fascination with rowing and the river is tied up with all sorts of splendidly inappropriate and suppressed imaginative yearnings for gilded youth and classical athletic perfection - the Bumps and the Boat Race evoke thoughts of triremes and the Battle of Salamis, Rupert Brooke in his watery grave on the island of Skiros ( "A young Apollo, golden-haired, standing on the verge of strife, magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life"), and Byron swimming the Hellespont too (come to think of it, they are both Cambridge men, but I am sure Oxford can come up with something similar).
All of this is a roundabout reflection on the reasons for our editor's curious obsession (see last week's newsletter) with what I have been up to in my spare time - this latest development in his Oxford don fantasy life was entirely predictable, and those of you who have been following the development of this side of his character closely may be interested to know that he has now done out his office to look like High Table. For the record, and lest his increasingly imaginatively accounts of our really rather mundane life in Television Centre have confused you, I am training for an oldies version of the Boat Race which the 成人快手 is staging to mark the 150th anniversary of the real thing.
For the first three days of last week we rowed 22 kilometres a day on an artificial lake in Berkshire. On Thursday we did a couple of 2 kilometre "pieces" at race pace, and on Friday we tried our hands at the three kilometre stretch of the real Boat Race course - from Putney Bridge to Hammersmith Bridge - over which we will challenge Oxford when the day of the race comes.
This kind of focus has had a very odd impact on my perspective towards the rest of the world. When I came back to London to work on the programme, I found that the sort of interviews which usually get the adrenalin going seemed oddly unreal - I had Michael Howard on immigration on Thursday, a record producer who had turned Margaret Thatcher's speeches into rap music on Friday and on Saturday an interview with the Australian Attorney General about Guantanamo Bay which I know will have had some people doing that "Did you hear what he SAID" thing over breakfast. All I really cared about after our week of "Boat Camp" was getting our stroke rate above the comfortable 38 or so at which we can now stride along into the low forties we need to hit to humiliate the Oxford team.
And I was not alone in this. This is going to be a telly programme, so it has to include the odd humiliating moment to keep people watching ("panem et circenses", as Professor Kevin might put it). On Thursday afternoon they threw us an IQ test, and the cameras were provided with the no doubt gratifying picture of a group of people who are used to thinking of themselves as clever being completely stumped by such questions as "Find three animals by using each letter in the phrase "ROTTING HEAPS". All we could think of was that stroke rate, and afterwards we faced a terrifying possibility; were we undergoing some bizarre metamorphosis? Would the IQ rate keep going down as the stroke rate went up?
Fortunately the four real athletes in our boat (and we are talking serious stuff here, they have all competed at Olympic or International level, and the clinking in their tracksuit pockets is medals, not loose change) provided some reassurance; they include a surgeon, a budding MP and a couple of high-powered teachers (one of them a Phd), so clearly sport does not rot the brain. The truth is that we have become horribly, obsessively determined to beat Oxford, and nothing else matters very much any more - Humphrys looked me in the eye after Saturday's programme and said, in that annoyingly penetrating way he has of identifying weak spots, "I bet you really, really want to win, don't you?". He is right.
We'll win of course - the only worry is Kevin, who has been asking the forecasters what the weather is going to be like on Wednesday. It seems he is trying to get a little bit of the Surrey side of the Thames declared a temporary "Parson's Pleasure", and he has been spotted in second hand classical book shops trying out quarto volumes of Greek poetry in the fig leaf position. It could be terribly distracting.
Ed
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