INTERNATIONAL FUN & GAMES

There it is, a stupid, ugly, meaningless logo typifying an increasingly irritating branch of show business. Much is made of the global camaraderie inspired by the Olympics. We hear little of the accusations and counter-accusations of what must be increasing levels of the sly use of performance-enhancing drugs. It passes belief that the human body has steadily improved in performance over the decades - evolution doesn't work like that. What has improved is the camouflage of dubious aids.

The Olympics are supposed to inspire young people to participate in sport. Certainly people of all ages identify with favourite young contestants - we watch with great pleasure the career of our Tom Daley. But at the same time as we hear of the millions being invested in providing temporary accommodation for international athletes we also hear that a local local leisure centre, complete with a pool where scores of children learn to swim, is in danger of closing. Presumably the children will have to be content with watching a handful of top stars doing their swimming for them. This seems to typify this celebrity-based approach to getting youngsters off the sofa.

We are told of the economic benefits of the expected surge of tourists to this country, but Tiresias wonders exactly how the figures are arrived at. Do they fully include the cost of the massive security operation that will be necessary? And what price do we place on the tensions created by the congregation of activists for various causes, not to mention those who, disguised as fans, are present in the hope of a really good punch-up.

It seems a pity that the Olympian Games did not confine themselves to the area of Much Wenlock.

So far the vocal opposition to the whole sorry enterprise seems to be confined to Ian Hislop, Janet Street-Porter, and myself - an unlikely trio, you may think. We can only hope that the cause will gather momentum. But then, Tiresias warned a deaf world to the dangers of credit run mad long before the current financial crises, and nothing was done. So - here we are. Don't blame me if there are tears before bed-time in 2012.

MORE ILLUMINATION

Here it is, then - what I have been doing while I have not been blogging for some time. Some improvement, technically. I think the calligraphy requires a good deal of practice, though.

Click to enlarge, if you want to criticise.

So the rotweiler of the vatican has been magically transformed into a dear little benign pope, sitting on his portable throne like a child on a bouncy castle, waving at the assembled gullible (with a noticeably high proportion of shipped-in children).

As to that nasty business of the pederastic priests, he has made ample atonement, has he not, by apologising for their regrettable behaviour? Well, only after the truth of the whole sorry story had at last been uncovered.

What he has signally failed to do, and clearly has no intention of doing, is to apologise for his own part in the frantic efforts to obfuscate the whole issue by shuffling proven pederasts to alternative posts, where although abominably guilty they could continue to function as priests; and by doing his utmost to prevent the facts becoming known.

It has been suggested that he should be prosecuted for obstructing the due process of the law. While it is obvious that in any society with a sense of moral standards he is manifestly guilty, the power of the papacy, though diminished from the good old days of the Inquisition, is probably still enough to ensure that any such charge could be conveniently lost in interminable legal flummery. Hardly worth the effort, merely to demonstrate the invisible worm in any religious bud.

UNCORKED

A particular nastiness has crept into the sybaritic world of wining and dining. I refer, of course, to the screw-top wine bottle. This seemed at first sight a trivial matter, but subsequent experience has shown that there's more to it than this. With the increasing use of this penny-pinching device are disappearing a whole range of minor traditional pleasures. We are assured that this glib new trend will ensure that our wine will never be corked.

So there is no need now for the happy ritual, is there? The display of the label. The careful cutting of the capsule with the wine waiter's knife. The swift realigning of the tool to expose the corkscrew. The skilled turn of the wrist as the screw is driven home. The flick which exposes the fulcrum on which the cork is withdrawn. And then - oh, happy moment! - the plop of the release. The assumption that one will want to check the state of the wine; a little poured into the bottom of the glass. A quick check of the nose, a swirl around one's tongue, and the word of acceptance. Only then can the pouring begin.

And to replace this? The bottle plonked down, a muscular twist of the wrist, and there you are, mate. What next? Crown corks, I shouldn't wonder. All this, of course, is seized upon by the colonials, for whom hygiene is all and mystery nothing. All these bottles of wine ruined because it is corked! After a long life-time of happy bibbing I can recall only two occasions on which the wine had in fact deteriorated: surely a small loss for the vintner to cover.

How to avoid this grossness? Stick to the great wines of France, Germany, and Italy - which is far the best advice, anyway - and search the upper shelves. Presumably the good wines will always be traditionally presented, but I have an uneasy feeling that that the ordinary drinker will find his choice gradually more and more restricted.

And how about spin-off, in this global age? The little cork-oak plantations of Portugal where a whole way of life is threatened by the drying-up of demand for the crop of these strange trees? Well - tough.

ASTONISHING COALITION!

So - we are all settling down to this dangerous new idea in British politics. What tense negotations brought it about! How loud were the forecasts of disaster! And what an unheard of thing it is!

Why? Even our present mediaeval system of elections brought about a pretty accurate reflection of the will of the electorate. A large proportion of the population is interested only in football. So only a little over half of the electors voted at all. No-one believes that any one party has solutions to all our problems. So voting was pretty evenly divided between Conservative and Labour, with a bit of a tilt to the Tories. A sizeable proportion of the population thought that neither of the main parties knew what was best. So there was a block of votes for the Lib Dems and other minorities.

The country as a whole operates only as a compromise between a great variety of interests. So what more natural than that we should have a government that goes some way at least to representing this kind of mixture? It would be ridiculous to have a government that presented a picture of Britain as a monolithic Tory stronghold, or as exclusively Labour. As it is, some of the dafter policies of the extreme wings of the parties have had to be dropped or modified, and a good thing too.

'But a coalition government won't work!' Then how about all the countries where it works very well, and people have long ago stopped getting all pink and excited about it?

Even the out-dated electoral system we have inherited has presented us with a more rational mix of political opinions in power. The presence of the Lib Dems will ensure that a new electoral system will approach even nearer to ideals of a just representation of a highly diverse population. All that then remains is to get rid of the yah-boo arrangement of seating imposed on the re-built House by Churchill after the war, and there is a real hope that debates may begin to sound like serious discussions of real problems, and less like witty point-scoring in the Oxford Union.

May coalition government have come to stay, is what Tiresias says.

EUROPEAN CONFORMITY

Europhobes are constantly trying to frighten us with the idea that closer contact with Europe will enmesh us in an ever-closing net of dull uniformity. How far that is from the truth can be easily established by a glance at any range of medications.

I, for example, like many of my age take six forms of medication daily, some many more. Some old people find it difficult to keep track of their dosage. You would think then that a simple standardisation of packaging, with clear instructions, would be of great advantage to all concerned, and easy to achieve. Not a bit of it.

Of my tablets and capsules, three come in packs of fourteen; but two come in packs of ten, and one in packs of seven. Consequently, over time, I begin to run out of some types of medication before others. One type, ordered on the prescription form in batches of eighty-four, is marketed only in packs of twenty, so I am constantly being cluttered with cut-off bits of pack containg twos or fours to make up the number. Of the packs of ten, one is arranged as two rows of four and a split row of two, the other consists of two rows of five each. Of the packs of fourteen, one displays two rows of seven with a calendar marking, another shows two rows of seven without a calendar, and one runs vertically, four down the left side, four up the right side, and two down the middle, like a country dance. Oh, and it displays a calendar, but in Spanish. All right as long as you remember Placido Domingo.

Perhaps the finest example of the pill-packers art is the pack of seven; not, as you might expect, a small pack, but in a form larger than any of the others, displaying ten huge pods, three of which are empty, and none of which contains anything larger than a standard capsule.

Add to this that most of these medications have at least two names - one, indeed, oscillates between three - and you have the perfect formula for confusion. It's a wonder that little old ladies aren't dropping like flies all over Europe. I exclude the possibility of securing co-operation from the Americans, who still measure screws in inches and always write the date backwards, but I do feel that sensible Europeans could collaborate in a more rational system of presenting medication.

TRADITIONAL BRITISH SPORTS

Ideas, as well as the language that expresses them, can become down-graded by usage. Take the idea of grooming - taking great care of a well-loved horse, or, if you are wealthy enough, employing a servant to do it for you, as in Stubbs's painting celebrating such a gentlemanly interest. And now it has become a furtive activity performed by the sexually frustrated under cover of the internet, to seduce young girls who think they understand the modern world, but are foolish enough to believe what they see on the screen. Often the consequences are saddening, or even tragic.

Or stalking. Why anyone should want to crawl about on a damp bleak moorland in order to observe, or photograph, much less kill, a stag is a puzzle in itself. But it was, even perhaps including the matter of slaughter, an undoubtedly gentlemanly occupation; engaged in by the heir to the throne, no less. Now it has come to mean hanging about on street corners with intent, or worse; with the intention of establishing a relationship which is doomed from the start.

These are aspects of a grey and sleazy world which hides behind techno-glitter to deceive itself into believing that it is engaged in the pursuit of happiness.

And yet - Morecambe & Wise sang of stalking avant la lettre - "You walk fast, I'll walk faster; I'll stick close, like piece of plaster; Get my kicks, following you around", and no-one thought them any the worse for it. But then, those were the days when two men could share a bed, and all you waited for was the ice-cream van gag, or talk of Ada Bailey. How naive we were.

GOYA'S HAT

What a remarkable man Goya was! His ability to show the obscene horrors of war, or the grotesque limits of the human face, or to depict the Spanish royal family as if they were a problem family who had just robbed a theatrical costumier's store - and get away with it - places him in the forefront of fascinating characters.

But for me one of the oddest aspects of this man lies in his own self-portrait. He wears a torero's jacket from a suit of lights, because that was the macho thing to do at the time, though he never appeared in the bull-ring. But the hat? No self-respecting bull-fighter would appear in such an odd thing. We are assured that it was a hat he wore for painting details in a poor light, and that it was fitted with candles to light up his work. But look at these candles - about 1 cm away from the crown of the hat. Surely if they had ever been lit the whole hat, and possibly Goya himself, would have gone up in smoke.

Or is this hat really just a project, like Leonardo's flying machines and battering rams, that never got past the design stage? He glowers at us under the brim, as if defying us to disbelieve him. But I for one am not convinced. None of the candles are lit, because there is plenty of light in his studio, which he has painted in for us. So why is he wearing the hat at all? Trendy showing-off, which always appears daft to succeeding generations.