Jeremy Clarkson, pugilist
WHO has Jeremy Clarkson punched now? The Top Gear host has
been suspended by the BBC for involvement in a "fracas" and this
Sunday's episode has been canned.
Top Gear is not quite my cup of tea – I find it puerile and repetitive,
vroom, vroom! – but the last time Clarkson punched anyone I
tipped my hat to him.
The punchee in that case was a poncey little twerp named Piers
Morgan, who was then editor of the Daily Mirror, on Fleet Street,
and if anyone deserved to be popped on the schnozz it was he.
Private Eye, the satirical magazine, always used to call him Piers
"Moron" Morgan. Lately they've changed it to Piers "Morgan"
Moron. I don't know why, but you can always trust the instincts of
Private Eye.
Let's hope Clarkson has this time clipped another deserving case,
though it seems it might have been just an obscure assistant
producer who failed to hustle up some grub after a long day's
shoot.
We hacks and scribblers are agog.
Last chance
IT'S the Last Chance Saloon in Bloemfontein tomorrow. Blow this
one and the Sharks have every chance of ending up next season
playing against the Purple People-Eaters and the rest.
Yet - the gods of rugby being apparently in a perverse mood - we
could still, along the way, win the Currie Cup. The mind, senor, she
boggles!
What's gone wrong? We should never have lost to Free State in
that first match. We should have beaten the Bulls.
But things went oh so badly wrong last weekend. It was just
embarrassing to see our front row being hoisted like that.
Jannie du Plessis (who wasn't playing) says he's studied the
footage and has some ideas. May he put them into practice.
The big test tomorrow is whether the fellows have recovered
psychologically. One thing they have to ignore is that they have
the same TMO and the same ref, this time running one of the
touchlines, as in Pretoria.
Is this a nightmare or what?
Penalties
MY OLD Duikers Club pal John Donkin replayed last week's
footage and he says the Sharks conceded 15 penalties (the first in
the 25th
second of the game).
He calculates that at least two minutes of playing time are wasted
by penalties, either in kicking for the posts or forming a line-out.
That's 30 minutes taken out of an 80-minute game.
Makes ya think.
Pom exit
HERE'S an interesting theory. Steve Chatteris, of Durban North,
says the reason the Poms bowed out early from the Cricket World
Cup is that they don't have any South Africans in the side any
more.
I checked, He's right. When England tour this country they can't
stay with their parents any more.
Bring back Kevin Pietersen. Nick Compton (nephew of our cricket
writer, Patrick)? He'll make a return to the Test side, I reckon, but
he could be too much the genuine article for pyjama cricket.
Essex
I'D NO idea the Mercury's circulation goes as far as Essex,
England, but an e-mail comes in from Mike Holliday, of Colchester,
responding to a piece of February 21 on soccer-style rugby place
kicks.
Mike thinks his brother Norman originated the kicking style in a
match in 1965 at Luansha, on the Zambian copperbelt, between
the local team, Roan Antelope, and Mufulira.
The more one hears about the development of the round-the-
corner kick, that is standard today all over the world, the stronger
the impression that it was some sort of evolutionary thing
that was happening spontaneously in all kinds of places.
Dutch Quarter
COLCHESTER is a place I know quite well.
Perched on a hill and clustered round a Norman
castle, it was once the Roman capital of England.
The town is in rural Essex, not the overspill from the
East End of London, where the Essex Girls and the
Essex Men have created a new culcha.
Colchester even has a "Dutch Quarter", settled by
religious refugees from Flanders. But they were
assimilated long ago. Try speaking Afrikaans in the
Dutch Quarter and they think you're a Welshman.
Tailpiece
HOW does a Russian commit suicide? He smells
his armpits.
How does a Ukrainian commit suicide? He tells this
joke to a Russian.
Last word
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity -
romantic love and gunpowder.
Andre Maurois
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