Friday, 14 February 2014

Ice Issues.

This has nothing to do with the awful weather my friends in the US are having to put up with at the moment. It's about skating.

The Winter Olympics TV programme last night covered the ice dancing. I dislike ice dancing (quite a lot.) The way I see it, ice dancers can’t dance properly because they’re too busy keeping their feet on a slippery surface. Neither can they skate freely because they’re too busy trying to dance at the same time. The result, as I see it, is an example of the whole being less than the sum of its parts, which is an unsatisfactory state of affairs.

Tonight’s programme featured the figure skating, which I also dislike for broadly similar reasons. It got interesting, though, when the man who looked vaguely East Asian fell over. ‘Oh dear,’ I thought. ‘I hope he’s Chinese and not Japanese, because we don’t want any more blood and viscera staining the snows of Sochi, not to mention the compassionate decapitation once the poor chap has done his social duty by suffering sufficiently. It would give the place a bad name – not to mention a bad smell – and then nobody would want to stay there and there’d be nothing to watch over dinner by the fireside.’ I waited with bated breath until the score was announced and the man’s name came up on a board. Turned out he was from Kazakhstan, so I was none the wiser.

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