Yet it has also been an easy week for Chris Smith the Culture Secretary For none of this
Yet it has also been an easy week for Chris Smith, the Culture Secretary For none of this is his direct responsibility. The man in charge of the country’s arts doesn’t actually fund a single theatre or regional art gallery. Groups from schools chant “Oxford! Cambridge!” in high-pitched voices. A Tannoy asks the schoolmaster from St Neot’s to collect Josh from Information.
And the programme notes are full of sophomoric quips about how this prop has been turning heads all year, or how that fly-half could fill the stadium with pretty admirers (if only he could be bothered to get out of bed!!!!).An Oxford man myself, I tried to feel partisan, to punch the air when the dark blues scored But it wasn’t easy. IT HAS been a bad week for Chris Smith, the Culture Secretary. Perhaps, when we berate our sportsmen for failing to project more dynamic images of our nation, what we are truly dismayed by is our own vexed failure of pride.Fossils and Minerals Exhibition, 275 Kensal Road, W10 Saturday and Sunday. Is it really the case that even Oxbridge can’t rely on British talent any more? Given the pitch and frequency of the moaning that accompanies each new nadir in the story of British sport, you might have thought we would take such a well-appointed athletic breeding-ground a bit more seriously.In America, college games between Notre Dame and Indiana command a national TV audience, and pundits fall over one another to spot the stars of tomorrow The Varsity match, on the other hand, feels childish. If anything, we ought to wonder why, if the match is so out-of-date, so many ambitious young players from real rugby powers in the southern hemisphere want to come and play in it. This year, Oxford’s captain was from Stellenbosch, Cambridge’s from Brisbane.Not that this is something we need to bemoan, as such. Around 50,000 people paid good money (about the price of two shark’s teeth) to watch Oxford and Cambridge continue their 118-year-old tussle.
The standard reaction to this is that the fixture is an anachronism: our class-consciousness is such that the game is seen as little more than a picnic for toffs. But as it happens, this is itself rather an anachronistic attitude. It is not as if the game were genuinely a contest between two of our top universities: it is usually a question of whether our South Africans are better than their South Africans. It isn’t though, is it?Speaking of fossils, I went to the annual Varsity match at Twickenham this week I wasn’t the only one. But the top guys in Dorset or wherever cost pounds 120 per hour In Morocco it’s pounds 2 per day.
Otherwise fossils would be unaffordable.”If life were a movie, Rogers would be slipping into the Ritz by now, or leaping the railings with Jerry Hall in the moonlight. That is one of the reasons why fossil-hunters head for Africa and China. “They used to use a sculptor’s hammer and chisel,” said Rogers “Now they use dentists’ drills. The reason they are expensive (the Lyme Regis Ichthyosaurus in the exhibition is pounds 16,500) is that it is very labour-intensive to tease them out of the rock. But now I buy mostly from dealers.”Fossils are not actually all that rare. Millions of them are casually crushed in phosphate or marble quarries – it’s too much bother to extract them You might have a few ground up in your fireplace.