Respect without love

Once again, dear readers, I find myself at loss for a word. (Billy Connolly: “I know at least... oh my God, at least 127 words. And I still prefer ‘Fuck’.”) Once again, too, I suspect our German cousins have some coinage for what I’m trying to express. Anyway, what I’m talking about is things which I believe to be good, virtuous, almost, worthy of respect and study, but which I do not myself like. Two things in particular fall into this category for me.

The first is baseball. Now, I grant you, this does not impinge on me or my life very much. Certainly not to the extent which football (which I loathe) does. It is true that my father, stepmother and brother are avid fans and passionate members of the Red Sox Nation, but they are polite enough not to inflict very much of that passion on me.

Why do I say baseball is good and worthy of respect? Partly it’s the historian in me. Baseball fans take their sport very seriously, and obsess over its minutiae and its statistics. They will tell you earnestly about the “stolen” World Series of 1919, and that’s before we even get on to the Curse of the Babe. Now, this does not especially interest me, but I doff my cap in its direction. I like that people bow at the altar of the past and, in their own way, strive to accumulate knowledge the better to understand the sport they love. I am much the same about motor racing, so I can read across to stick-and-ball, and I respect baseball fans for that.

I have, I should say, been to one single and solitary ball game in my life. Back in the early 2000s, on one of my first trips to Boston, I was persuaded to go to Fenway Park to watch the Sox play the Toronto Blue Jays. As a life experience, I rather enjoyed it: the roar of the home crowd, the relatively tight confines of the ball park, the beer, the dogs. I was one of very few who – purely in the interests of impartiality – sang the words to both national anthems. (I think O Canada is marginally better.) So I was glad I went. However, I have declined subsequent invitations, even when the rest of the family are going. They go to Fenway, and I sit in the bar with a book. It suits everyone.

The second object of my – well, ‘affection’ is the wrong word; shall we say ‘admiration’? – is the blues. When I was at school, my friend Jon Burley was a huge fan of blues music, and I used to spectate as he pored over the CDs in the library. And, because I am by nature curious, I listened to a few myself, to see what all the fuss was about.

Like baseball, blues is big on history. Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil at the crossroads, the birth of the genre in the Mississippi Delta, the sharecropper origins of its first exponents. All of that I find quite interesting, and, as with baseball, I admire the fact that people are interested in it. I wrote last week of my hatred for intellectual incuriosity, so it is only right that I salute those who want to know where the music they love comes from. I am much the same with country music (I am currently watching “Country at the BBC”): the roots of the genre are fascinating, and I have just drunk in a documentary about the Carter Family and the Appalachian origins of what we know as country music today.

There’s only one problem. I don’t much like the blues. I know it’s tremendously influential, and I’m sure there’s quite a lot of music I adore which couldn’t have existed without BB King or Lead Belly. Fleetwood Mac came out of the British blues explosion of the 1960s, for example, as did Led Zeppelin, and that’s before we even consider Clapton. But it simply doesn’t speak to me. It’s not that I think it’s bad music. There is a lot of bad music around, and I don’t think the best of the blues falls into that category (though I’m sure there is bad blues).

Unlike baseball, I’ve never been to a live blues concert. Maybe I should. I love live music, even if it’s not my usual genre, and perhaps that would convert me. Somehow, though, I suspect not. I’d probably enjoy it more than I would expect, but I don’t think it would be Damascene.

What does all of this say about me? (Because blogs, dear readers, are nothing if not self-referential.) I suppose – and this goes back to my earlier entry about lack of curiosity – I like people who are enthused by things, even if they are things I do not like. (This does not apply to football, a boorish, thuggish pastime which brings out the worst in people.) More than that, I like people who appreciate the history of their enthusiasms. The past makes the present what it is. To use the example of my own obsession, if you’re a Formula 1 fan but don’t know about Fangio and Clark and Fittipaldi and Prost and Senna, you’re missing the point, and missing out on so much. One of the reasons I warm to Sebastian Vettel is that he understands the past, values what has gone before.

So I have taken you from baseball to motor racing. Which is perhaps as it should be. Johnny Cash is now on the TV (the Carter Family – everything is circular) so I will leave you be.