The Icemen Cometh

When I was younger, and had time on my hands and nothing better to do, I frequently fell ill. Nothing particularly debilitating or life-threatening, you understand, only regular healthy doses of the common cold or flu. Influenza, as they say, and out flew my health. It is possibly one of the best indications when a happy childhood that memories of sickness past are fond and reassuring ones. The cramped stomach associated with food poisoning is forgotten, but the meal of chicken nuggets we were allowed to enjoy afterwards remains. The swollen throats and broken fingers pale by comparison with the sympathetic bedside visit from our grandparents, or the presents waiting for us when we started to recover.

There are, of course, moments of childhood hardship we all remember with pride, and whose real or imagined scars still provide us with stories worth dining out on. Even if our dinner companions may not be too keen on eating while we tell them.

I suppose I've been comparatively lucky to make it through the long and deformative years of adolescence without looking noticeably different to when I started out. Well, I use 'lucky' in a relative sense. I might have come out looking like George Clooney.

Other than a cross on my finger to mark the spot where a sailor's son once buried the blade of his father's Swiss army knife, I survived my teenage years unharmed. I look slightly less like a potential fullback than I did when I first came through the uprights, perhaps, but I've made up for that with a luxurious head of hair and a splendidly Roman set of earlobes.

As a result of this idyllic youth, my own memories may not represent an accurate cross-section of The Great British Public. But as The Poet once said: “when did that ever stop me from shooting my fat mouth off anyway?” Sorry, that should be A Poet. Why should the sons suffer for the crimes of the father?

Amongst my warmest and fuzziest memories are those of winters where the outside temperature continued to fall as my internal temperature rose, and I was sloshing to the gills with decongestive syrups and warm chicken soup. My pajamas laced with eucalyptus capsules, I would lie on my bed for all the world like a koala caught in a rare moment of insomnolence.

What I remember as being hours of coughing and restless sub-duvet gymnastics probably lasted no longer than a few minutes, but if I am happy with the illusion then who are you to rob me of it? If that's the way you're going to behave, young reader, then why don't you just go back to where you came from and read the Catnip section, where they're used to this sort of puerile interruption. Now where was I? Oh yes, tossing and turning till the early hours of the morning.

It's one of life's facetious little ironies that bed is possibly the hardest place for a tired pair of eyes to finally close. I can happily slumber in planes, I will cheerily doze on sofas and the pen will eventually, though inexcusably, drop from my relaxing fingers during the odd lecture. But turn the airplane seat into a bed, make me lie crosswise on the sofa and not lean against the armrest, or infuse the lecture theatre with a nocturnal degree of peace and quiet, and I suddenly find myself alert and restive and reaching for my fallen pen.

So if falling asleep in bed proved too difficult a task for the misguided child I once was, I would creep to the television room, blanket held cape-like around my shoulders, and sit in my father's armchair opposite the bulging screen. My parents have since got rid of that deep burgundy leather armchair, but it will always furnish the salon of my memory with its baroquely curlicued armrests, its rows of shining metal studs and an overwhelming smell of French polish.

Once I had satisfactorily ensconced myself in the armchair's all-embracing folds, I would reach for the remote control and, making sure to press the mute button simultaneously with the on switch, turn the television on. And so, late into the night, 'ickle me would be lulled into the inviting arms of Morpheus by the gentle sound of EuroSport's English-language commentators discussing the latest curling championships.

For this reason, more than any other, more even than the little-known and rarely-admitted fact that I once spent a week of evenings in an alpine resort learning how to curl, I have a great and overriding sympathy for the sport of curling. For the stones which bruised and battered my ankles, for the ridiculous plastic brooms which made me lose whatever grip I claimed to have on the ice, and the rules which I would certainly have forgotten had I ever bothered to learn them.

Being neither a psychic nor one of those curious individuals whose secretive and intriguing profession it is to gather statistics about television viewing figures, I am unable to guess how many of you have been watching coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. A few of you, I'll wager, or else Hazel Irvine will be in for a nasty shock when she returns next week to find a nation desperate to know where she's been.

Those of you, however, who join me in frying the midnight oil will doubtless have your own preferred sports, your own most memorable moments and least interesting commentators from these XXIst games. But as civilised people, the one thing on which I hope we can all agree is that the BBC's choice of lead-in music and animation sequence grows on one like a bad case of Rhizopus Stolonifer, the so-called 'Galloping Grey Ghost' of fungi.

For those of you who have so far not been exposed to the aforementioned expository footage, it can be viewed for a reasonable licence fee on BBC2, or for nothing on Ye olde Tube.

To my initial mystification, we are shown a hooded Canadian surrounded by wolves in a dark forest. Following a rapid escape on makeshift skis, an improvised snowboard and a lightweight luge, our hero faces the spirit of an angry bear locked inside a glacier. To increasingly dramatic chords, he curls what I can only assume is a hockey mask into the wall of ice, thereby freeing a missing section of the Vancouver Olympics totem. In the process, of course, he causes a glacier to disintegrate. I'll let you-all speculate as to the message behind that one.

All I know is that when I return from late nights at college or the union, and collapse in front of BBC2, it's a delicious treat for me to find that the winter Olympics are being broadcast. There is something so much more comforting about the pristine whiteness of the snow than the harsh colours of the tarmac or the gymnasium.

The sports may seem sterile and distant, but human nature is such that the simple knowledge that there will be a winner and a loser is enough to suffuse the most banal of endeavours with a degree of interest worthy of 1980s America. As the skiers carve their way down the slopes, their bodies almost entirely hidden in protective soft-shells and goggles, and the lugers are flagged up by the metal detectors before they have a chance to fire, it's easy to forget the pressures these athletes are putting on their bodies. There's no need to focus on the unpleasantness of sweat or perceived effort: the Winter Olympics always take place in a protective cocoon of snow and fairydust, and that is why they will always be so magical.