It’s bread and circuses, except there’s no clowns or sad, unkempt lions, just some people having a wee swim and a shot on some horses
Posted by Rogue Reporter, Graham Martin. Originally posted 
Mister Sport - David Beckham fronts up London Olympics 2012
Sport, sport, sport, Clarkson, sport, sport, David Beckham’s dick, sport, more sport, sport, some fucking pandas, sport, sport and sport.
That’s pretty much it these days, isn’t it – that’s the National Conversation.
It’s all we care about. Sport and David Beckham’s dick, and even that’s quite sporty because the person that pees out of it plays some SPORT.
Sport. You can stop reading when the over-use of that word gets annoying. Here it comes.
Ever feel like you’re out the loop? Then the next time you’re standing at a bus stop, grab the person next to you by the lapels and scream into their face: “Sport, sport, sport, sport, Clarkson, sport, sport, David Beckham’s dick, sport, more sport, sport, some fucking pandas, sport, sport and SPORT.”
They won’t be annoyed. No, they’ll shake you by the hand and take you for a pint, because you too like the SPORT, and the pandas, and can talk about it as well.
This might be the time to add that sport is pretty much a closed book to me. I’m not talking about football, which as a male from the west of Scotland I am obliged to admit that I like, because I don’t regard the watching of football as anything to do with sport, it’s more a therapeutic way of giving the part of your brain that last saw action when we were sprouting limbs in the Carboniferous a wee run-around, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Playing football on the other hand, well, that’s sport again and it’s utterly mystifying. Why would you?
It’s the other sports I really don’t get. Golf, rugby, tennis.
Throwing old batteries at stray dogs down the lock-ups. Believe me, that’s a sport in Lanarkshire. All essentially rubbish.
And then we move onto the frankly unpopular sports, the ones that involve running from one spot to another or throwing things.
Because they’re everywhere these days. We’re supposed to be creaming into Union Jack hankies because it’s the London Olympics this year.
Now, we’ll put aside the odious politics and the obscene waste of cash here, though we may stop to reflect upon the arrogance of those who think that a boring vanity festival of people rowing and playing ping-pong based in London can somehow wipe a magic sponge over the cracks in the Union. It that sense, they’re doing us a favour.
What annoys me is having all these essentially minority pursuits foisted on us. Let’s face it, most people think athletics is deathly dull. There’s maybe a few thousand people who are truly into it, and fair enough. Good luck to them.
It’s the same with gymnastics, though there is at least some interest there as I’m told there’s an event called the Men’s Rings, but maybe I’m being wound up, because I’m too scared to Google it.
But I play this game where I use a dice to eat a tube of Smarties.
It’s a great game, and political as well. I call it my Smarties General Election game. You should try it.
It goes like this – there are eight colours in a Smarties tube, you divide them all up into their colours and you eat the two with the least colours, they’re out of the race, leaving you six colours. You then assign tags to the remaining colours all the way through the political spectrum the black ones are fascists, blue ones Tories, yellows are liberals etc. all the way through to reds, which are us.
Then you give them a number – one is the fascists, through to six, the socialists. And then you roll the dice, and you eat one from whatever number you roll. Roll too many fives, and whoops, it’s not looking like a good night for the social democrats. The winning party is the one with the last Smartie standing.
It’s a great game, it really is.
You can rig it as well. If it looks like the fascists are about to seize power, you can just eat them. For all the sense Trotsky talked about how to stop the Nazis in Germany, he never thought of that one.
So I’m beating him there.
Anyway, I admit this game is probably somewhat more of a minority pursuit than athletics. Or Men’s Rings. In fact, it might just be me that plays it.
But it’s still a minority pursuit and I’m not demanding that whole communities are bulldozed out of the way, a la Glasgow’s ridiculous Commonwealth Games (a colonial, throbbing Ralgexsprayed bell-end of an event) so people can go and watch me eating Smarties.
In a velodrome.
But that’s what’s happening with the SPORT and the Olympics and all that. It’s bread and circuses, except there’s no alcoholic, pee-stained clowns or sad, unkempt lions, which are at least worth watching (or even any bread, thinking about it), just some people having a wee swim and a shot on some horses.
Oh, and come the summer, we’ll be able to add exciting words like “Chris” and “Hoy” into the aforementioned National Conversation. I think he’s famous for being quite good on a children’s toy. He can go round and round on it dead fast.
He even gets to advertise things like cereal in some of the most comically stilted ads that have ever been broadcast.
I see he’s now punting razor blades for Gillette or someone.
Well, come the summer there might be a use for those at least.
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