Our sporting life

The British are a great sporting nation, but it’s the English who excel at summer sports, not least by managing to persuade people that half of the bloody stupid things they do are actually sports and not, as it appears, some sort of folk rite. If bowls is a sport, morris dancing should be an Olympic event.

The English are good at summer sports because they get the weather for it. True, at present the weather favours summer sports like rowing, but usually the gentle summer sun favours the gentler sports. An Englishman likes a sport where he does not have to actually physically exert himself.

For the Scots, golf is the game they can claim to have given the world. It’s a good fit for the national character, as there is nothing quite like teeing off into the teeth of a howling gale and losing, in no particular order, ball, match and bet in order to set one firmly on the path to alcoholism.

The Welsh have made rugby their own. Large men rub up against one another, sweating and heaving in a dirty and brutal struggle. Then they come up from the pit and play rugby.

The Irish have hurling. Pints of second hand Guinness into the gutter on a Friday night.

For the English, essential sporting equipment is not a bottle, box or hurling tongs, but a panama hat, blazer and club tie.

Croquet is the epitome of an English summer sporting pastime. It is, to begin with, insanely complicated. Not just a matter of thumping your opponent into the ground like a tent peg using your mallet, you instead have to go round and through various hoops before hitting the pin to finish. There is a rumour that Dan Brown’s next book is about somebody who uncovers the hidden meaning in the game and then spends the next 200 pages feverishly wanking with assorted objects, including a pine cone and a small bust of Queen Victoria, up his arse. Erotic fiction is quite the departure for Dan and it will be interesting to see what his fans think of it.

But back to croquet. Apart from being so complicated that ironically the only person who can understand it enough to play tactically is Stephen Hawking who, of course, is unlikely to be swinging a mallet any time soon, it has a reputation for being played by posh people. Presumably this is because like shotguns, the only people trusted not to go bonkers when handed a mallet are those with breeding. When handed a double barrel shotgun, the correct response is to drive immediately to a grouse moor and attempt to depopulate it, not to drive immediately to a Natwest and attempt an unconventional withdrawl.

So posh is croquet that here in the village the bowling club briefly became a croquet lawn (croquet is played on nothing as vulgar as a pitch) and croqueters were to be seen enthusiastically knocking balls through hoops with every indication that they knew what they were doing. Possibly they were using an app but I suspect they were simply using the same English Assurance About Being Right that allows them to express forthright views on immigration at dinner parties. Not that I’d ever criticise a croquet player, the way they swing those mallets they could do me more damage than a chaffing pine cone.

There is something splendid about croquet though. Like bowls which requires the sort of green that more resembles a snooker table than a lawn, like cricket where the leather and willow are incidental to the tea and the quality of the light on the pavilion, so it is the sport entire that we hold dear; the English summer sunshine on a blazer’s brass buttons, the quiet applause as a player does something unfathomable yet obviously popular, the congratulations through gritted teeth as matches are won and lost and, of course, the shrieks of fear and terror as the president of the bowls club finds out that the captain of the croquet team has defiled his beautiful lawn by knocking bloody great hoops and pegs into it and goes absolutely fucking mental.

Oh, sorry, he’s English…absolutely fucking eccentric.