Wii conquer Wimbledon...

I have never been a ‘sportie’. From my earliest years, I hated having to chase a dratted ball around a pitch, either to get it to some place or stop it going to somewhere else – I was never sure which. School games were a nightmare. I simply couldn’t get to grips with the perverse plastic bubble that always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, namely, wherever I was. Why did it always seem to be shooting in my direction, however fast I ran from it? Why was it my job to stop it, or catch it, or whatever?
I didn’t invent the horrible game, nor lay down the tarmac pitch and paint the white lines, as mysterious and incomprehensible as prehistoric markings on a lump of old stone. I didn’t ask to be on the dratted pitch on a freezing Monday morning with a flock of lively, noisy females, whose credo seemed to be ‘I score, therefore I am’.
Even today, I break out in a cold sweat when I so much as hear a ball bouncing off of concrete. Netball was bad, volleyball horrible and tennis the worst of all.
In games like netball, you are shielded by gangs of said females – they did have their uses, after all – but in tennis, you are alone on the court, blindingly obvious for all to see. I couldn’t play the game, I just could not. I just could not run quickly enough to hit that white little blob that seemed to have a life of its own. When my long-suffering opponent cottoned on to this, she (if a nice person) made life easier by pitching the ball in my direction. But then, I just couldn’t return it to the ‘right’ part of the court. I always seemed to be ‘out’. Soon, I was ‘excused’ from tennis, at official levels. I grew up with a tennis phobia, unable even to watch Wimbledon for a goodly number of years. When I eventually overcame this, I found tennis an oddly watchable game, the more so because the television viewer is elevated slightly over the court. He or she sees what is happening on the entire pitch, the total picture, something the players cannot – just how do they do it?
When my young niece asked me to join in a game of screen tennis, thanks to a Wii delivered by Santa Claus, I had misgivings. No-one wants to look foolish in front of a very young relative., but, oh joy! The view on the screen is that of an elevated TV viewer, rather than the spot of a professional player. I threw myself into it. For the first time in my life, I saw the words game, set and match to… Delighted, I let little angel win the next game, and the one after that. One must encourage the young, after all.

No Mona Lisa?

Often, I speculate on what the world would have been like, if a certain Leonardo hadn’t been born in the town of Vinci, Tuscany, in 1452. By then, the Renaissance had sprung into being under the auspices of artists like Sandro Botticelli and Andrea del Verrochio. Without Leonardo, it would have been carried along by Michelangelo Buonarotti and Raphael Sanzio.
The world would not lack the helicopter, nor the submarine. Engineering teams in universities and in the better class of workshop would have subsequently developed these technologies. Nor did we need that vast collection of notebooks. William Harvey had laid down the human circulatory system by 1628 and in the following decades, Isaac Newton was busily unravelling the rainbow. On the balance, I would say the march of scientific discovery was not going to be hampered by lack of another genius. But, oh, what about Leonardo’s paintings?
Can you imagine a world without the Mona Lisa and her enigmatic smile? No generations of tormented men, no Nat King Cole hit song, no mysterious face drawing hordes of visitors to the Louvre museum – and without Leonardo slinking about Florence, Michelangelo would have been even more insufferably arrogant than he was, believing himself to be the only artist of note, in the universe. (The reader must refer to Vasari here.) In short, the scientific principles Leonardo happened upon would have been uncovered in the longer term, but the world would be greatly impoverished without his art. Even so, the multitude of drawings in his notebooks have inspired artists from Liechtenstein to Picasso – ah, there is another artist we could never have done without. Watch this space.

Lock Smith out...

In language and imagery, the key is both a symbol and very useful object. We talk about the key to the situation, with the same aplomb that we guard those items that allow access to our domestic and business kingdoms. The key came with the invention of the door, and the door has a particular importance as it opens and closes, makes visible and conceals. This has endowed the entrance door to a building with magical significance. In many cultures, the door is the subject of ritual, i.e., first-footing and carrying the bride over the threshold. The exit and entrance are one and the same, a fact not lost on surrealist artists like Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989) and Max Ernst (1891 – 1976). In their paintings, open doors and windows appear as figurative routes to other modes of consciousness.
Ali Baba elided the key business with his cry of ‘open sesame’, but it is known that simple keys existed in ancient Greece and Rome. By medieval times, the chatelaine or keeper of the castle wore her keys on a belt on her waist, not only for convenience but as a visible symbol of her authority. By now, the key was also a symbol of power. In numerous medieval paintings, St Peter is seen holding a large key. The trade of locksmith had its own guild, the word ‘smith’ conferring a dark respectability to those with the knowledge to mysteriously open locked doors. The symbol of the guild was, of course, a key. By Enlightenment, people in high places began to take an interest in keys. Louis the Sixteenth was, reputedly, an amateur locksmith, a skill that did not save him and spouse, Marie Antoinette from an unfortunate end on the guillotine. Keys crept into literature.
In Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens, locksmith Gabriel Varden is held to ransom until he opens the doors of Newgate prison. It is an act of protest by Chartist rioters, one that echoes the storming of the Bastille, in France. Alas, the danger to key-holding citizens have become all to apparent in our times. Many traditional entry systems have been replaced by magnetic cards, voice recognition, eye and face scanners, though these can be just as hazardous to the entry-authorized subject. When you think about it, it is better to have an object that you can throw to the infidels, and run...