The Ashes? Sorry, not interested. No, honestly, I’m not

Only a game! Millions of fine words are penned about sport every week. But few come close to explaining the irrational yet irresistible psychic force that compels so many of us to shackle our emotional states, like puppets on strings, to the fortunes of a bunch of ludicrously overpaid, underachieving jockstraps bashing a ball round a field.

What causes this blind obsession? Is it the flickering remnants of the tribal loyalties felt by prehistoric man? Is it the perpetual search for unsullied heroes in an unheroic world? Or is it that people like me, leading humdrum lives, desperately want to experience, if only vicariously, the gladiatorial passions felt (or at least faked) by professional sportsmen? (It surely wasn’t chance that the birth of professional team games in Britain coincided with the rise of drudge labour after the Industrial Revolution.)

Probably all of that comes into it. But what chiefly interests me is not so much the spell cast on us by sport, but the difficulty of breaking away from it. For most fans, supporting your team “through thick and thin” is regarded as a moral obligation. Especially in Britain, where the only thing we love more than dogs are underdogs. Indeed, to be called a “fair-weather supporter” — the sort of fraud who turns up at the turnstiles only when the team is top of the table — is almost the worst insult you can hurl at a bloke. But why? Surely it makes sense to detach yourself, emotionally and physically, from something causing you anguish?

What we come up against here, however, is a deep, dark, psychological imperative that goes far beyond the realms of sport. It’s the force that stops so many of us from cutting ourselves loose from the wreckage of any lost cause or doomed enterprise. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” Pope wrote, and that partly explains what keeps us going long after we should have moved on. It’s always more comforting to believe that next year your team will win the cup, or you will get promoted out of that dead-end job, or your marriage will miraculously be patched up, or your middle-aged spread will disappear, than it is to acknowledge that some facet of your life is, quite simply, beyond hope of repair or redemption.

But fear also plays a part. The fear that, if you relinquish interest in something you have struggled to do for so long and with such emotional energy — whether it’s clambering up the corporate ladder, or clinging to some vestige of your youthful looks, or merely keeping faith in a team that won’t win a trophy in a thousand years — your life will lose a significant part of its purpose.

I can relate to that. There’s something very courageous and appealing (as well as very Welsh) about Dylan Thomas’s glorious injunction that we should “rage, rage against the dying of the light” — that we should never give up on a cause, in other words, however faintly its embers glow. The reality, however, is that raging against the inevitable usually produces only bitterness and humiliation. Sometimes the only sane thing to do is to let go. I often wonder what I might have made of my life if I had taken all the nervous energy I have invested over the years in supporting lame-duck football and cricket teams (not to mention several other ailing institutions) and poured it into some truly worthwhile activity instead.

Still, it’s never too late to reform. From this day I have resolved not to give a damn about sport. No, not even cricket. Overrated pastime, anyway. Let the Aussies win everything, if it makes them so bloody happy.

Mind you, in the end Brisbane wasn’t that bad a defeat, was it? If Harmison can get his reverse-swing going, and Freddie’s on fire, and McGrath, Ponting and Warne happen to eat a dodgy lasagne the night before ... well, who knows what might happen in Adelaide? Actually, on second thoughts, I might just tune in to the commentary on Friday night. But definitely only for a minute or two. And purely as a dispassionate neutral, you understand.

Though of course if we look like winning, that puts a whole new complexion on it.

Britain’s playing the right tune

You could hardly turn on the radio yesterday without hearing the whine of music industry suits huffing about the decision not to extend copyright on sound recordings from 50 to 95 years. You might have thought that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had galloped into the music world, dropping polonium-210 on all and sundry. Well, it pains me to write this, but the Government is right. The words and music on recordings are already protected for a massive 70 years after their creators’ death. The notion that recordings themselves should also be sacrosanct for a century has nothing to do with musicians’ livelihoods. It is all about powerful multinationals stopping little companies from selling old recordings cheaply to the public.

Sooner or later all creative work must become the common heritage of humanity. That is how civilisation works. In so many areas vested interests have contrived to delay that “sooner or later” moment by decades. At last the British Government has recognised the public interest. Pity that the US Government was too enthralled by the entertainment giants to make a similar stand.

People like us?

Talk about adding insult to injury. A man from Russia’s “foreign intelligence service” declares that poor Alexander Litvinenko couldn’t have been murdered by them because he was “not the kind of person for whose sake we would spoil bilateral relations”. May we have a list of the “kind of people” for whose sake the Russians would spoil bilateral relations? I’m sure many dissidents living in the UK would love to know how big an irritant to the Kremlin they have to be before their sushi starts glowing in the dark.