The Loaf of Bread A few weeks ago, in a school somewhere in France the lunch-hell rang, and the students

made their way, as usu.J, to the school cafeteria. Each of them took a tray, and lined up as usual. to receive whatev.er was on the menu. They were very surpnsed, however, to fmd that, while some of them received a normal ration of meat, vegetables, salad and fruit, approximately half of them were given only a couple of boiled potatoes. They sat down, and very quickly those with a normal meal divided up their portions, and passed half of their lunch to one of the unlucky ones. And the school authorities sat back and said to themselves, 'Now our boys and girls know what we mean when we say that half the world is starving, and that we must try t~ share oU,tthe wealth a little more evenly.' All very well, and It probably seemed a good idea at the time, but unfortunately it isn't really as easy as that. _ Suppose we tried the same thing in Aiglon - of course those of us who received 'a normal meal would share it with.the poor ~tarving friend sitting next to us. But suppose that food was gIven to alternate tables, instead of alternate individuals. Don't you think it would take just a little longer to realise their needs and do something to rectify the situation? And now suppose that food were sent to Alpina, but not to Clairmont or Delaw~re. It would be so easy to assume that somebody else was gomg to sort out the problem, that there was no real need for us to set aside half of our meal and send it down the road. . .y~)U see the point, of course: as long as the person in need IS sitting next to you, it's a natural reaction to share what you have, but the further away that person is, the easier he is to forget- The people who need our help are not at the next table they are not just down the road - most of them are in Asia Afric~. And they are not just missing one lunch, they're missing practically every I?-eal. This is why we need to do something concrete to remmd ourselves periodically of their need. T?day~ssacrifice lunch is intended to do two things: firstly it will raise some money, but also it will serve to remind us of those who are too easily forgotten. Perhaps, during this

morning's silence, you would like to think of some other ways in which we could remind ourselves a little more often of those parts of the world where hundreds of thousands of people starve to death every year. 23.2.82 Joan Mackie

Gifts Many years ago, when I was a boy, an elderly man asked me about my father's library. Proudly I told him about some of the rarer volumes which my father possessed and that altogether there were some two or three thousand books in his collection. The old man smiled and then asked me whether I thought my father had read them all, adding, 'You know, a book isn't really yours until you've read it.' Property and wealth pose great problems and for myself I'm rather thankful that I am not the heir to the Rockefeller millions. Of course, a little more would come in useful, but I suspect that my sleep at night might become even less restful if the burden of such a fortune were laid upon my shoulders as well as the problems of Delaware House. Some of you have probably visited Williamsburg in Virginia where there is what is often described as a 'living museum' of eighteenth century life. As a historian I would dearly love to see this town which has been recreated and equipped with eighteenth century furniture, carriages and works of art. At tremendous cost the Rockefeller Foundation set aside money

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with which to buy every conceivable kind of art object which might have been found in Williamsburg in 1776. As a result, under the terms of the trust set up by Rockefeller, a constant stream of paintings, furniture, harpsichords, costumes, coins, books, fabrics and so on, pour into Williamsburg from the salerooms of the world, paid for out of the Rockefeller Foundation. Now in fact they have already quite enough to furnish the place and, if I am reliably informed, there are some vast underground storerooms nearby, where all these extra items which are superfluous and unable to be used, are accumulating. Day after day the materials pour in and only a minute fraction of them will ever be seen by the public, indeed by anyone. One cannot help feeling that there is a certain irony in the fact that about 120 years ago in 1863 a young man was responsible for the extraction of a certain black liquid from a hole in the ground in Pennsylvania, and for the foundation of the Standard Oil Company. With the huge wealth he acquired, a significant part of the world's artistic heritage is now being stuffed back into a series of holes in the ground in Virginia. The Rockefeller saga seems to have come full circle. Not long ago I read a book, The Vicar of Wakefield, which was printed in 1803. It belonged to my great-great-grandmother. She or a subsequent reader made various inscriptions in the book including a comment on the novel by Dr Johnson. The leather cover is rather scratched - as one would expect it to be after some 180 years of use. I can see from the cover that when my father read it, he oiled the spine, as was his wont, with linseed oil and white of egg. The result is a book which didn't drop to pieces when I read it, and a book which will last a long time yet and which can give pleasure to many more people. In contrast, I can show you .plenty of books which have never been read and which, though they are younger and more beautiful than this one, will crack open very easily if I try to read them now. I think the lesson is very simple and one of which we need to be reminded constantly. Gifts are meant to be used. If we are leaving Aiglon in a few months' time and going to college,

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especially if we are ':Insure as to our final aim or ambiti~n in life, we need to keep in view the challenge of our posseSSIOns. Whether we are rich or poor, we have to ask ourselves whet~er we are using what we have or merely keeping it. Are we usmg our wealth to make money which will in turn make more money ... or are we at the end of our lives going to be able to point to happier people and richer lives, to people who have benefited from our money and to lives that we have been able to enrich. . Perhaps you have some special ability: you pla~ the trumpet or the oboe; you can write well or have a flair for design; perhaps you have a special way ",:ith animals and understand them; or are you a natural mechamc or carpenter? Could it be that you have found that you can help abnormal or retarded children and with training could do the same for others? Perhaps you have some deep enthusiasm for the mountains, or for wild life, or for the study of the stars, or for cooking? I don't know what your gifts are but the question is whether you will pursue these interests and use the gifts or will they be buried under the dead wood of a life given to the pursuit of wealth and physical comfort? Will the people who leave this school turn out in the end to be hidden storerooms of artistic, academic or moral gifts unused and unenjoyed by the world in which they will be living? Or will they be people whose abilities have been shared with humanity, and as a result of whose lives the world will be a richer place? Our abilities are rightly called gifts because we didn't earn them. They were entrusted to us to use for the community. If we use them they really become our own: otherwise we neglect them and they spoil and go to waste. December 1984 Timothy Stunt

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Time and Balance Somewhere in the middle of the smart part of New York city there is a small church in a street of skyscrapers, It looks hopelessly out of place -lost among the towering office blocks, and one can only marvel at its survival in such an alien landscape. I wonder how it has managed to survive. Was it just an oversight, a forgotten corner overlooked by the city developers? Or has it been deliberately preserved as a small concession to the past? A tacit admission that the past might, after all, have something to offer in a world which otherwise seems to live only for the present? For whether we like it or not, we do live in an 'instant culture'. Our society places a premium on what can be made to happen here and now. People "arereluctant to wait for time to take care of change. And so we have instant news and entertainment - a row of buttons on a TV or video; instant communication - the telephone and telex; instant" friendships people instantly call each other by their first names without waiting to see if they really have something in c,ommon. And in some parts of the world we even have instant marriage and instant divorce. A celebrated French philosopher claimed that 'in most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed'. This is a difficult message to get across to people especially young people - in the western world today. Our society puts the emphasis on speed and convenience and we are surrounded by instant-acting products and rapid transportation. Fortunes are won and lost overnight on the Stock Exchange, and 'overnight stars' in the entertainment world carry the message that you don't have to spend years training your voice or learning to play an instrument in order to win wealth and fame. The search for quick and easy ways of getting things done is universal; even in schools and universities there is demand for fast knowledge to go along with fast food. I suspect that this 'instant culture' is a corruption of time at least as dangerous as the corruption of the natural world about

which we hear so much. We may be able to salvage the natural environment. The air can be cleaned up, animals can be saved from extinction. Water can be recycled. But not time. We cannot put back the clock of our own temporal existence. Once time has passed, it cannot be recalled. To lead healthy and successful lives, I believe that as well as cleaning up the atmosphere, thereby saving our forests and lakes, we must also learn to see life in the natural temporal scale of a beginning, a middle and an end, and not just in terms of the present ~ and of what can be had instantly. We may live in an electronic age of instant information, but it has taken millions of years for man to reach his present stage of physical and mental evolution, and despite all the advances of science in the last fifty years, our bodies and minds are still in the sluggish backwaters of earlier pre-electronic generations. If our lives are to have meaning, we must have a past to look back to and a future to look forward to, as well as a present to live in now. Older people must make an effort to look forward with younger people. Albert Schweitzer said, 'It is through the idealism of youth that man catches sight of the Truth.' But it is equally important that each new generation of young people should look back and listen to the wisdom of their elders. In the words of an old proverb, 'Dwell in the past and you lose an eye. Forget the past and you lose both eyes.' December 1978 and 1984 Philip Parsons

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False Values One often hears from platforms like this one of false values in .the world today, but I wonder exactly what this means to most of us. I would like to consider some of the dominant social attitudes that shape our society today and, I think, cheapen life and make it a little less worth living. Perhaps you would like to measure what you believe against these attitudes. Firstly there" is what one might call a 'simple absolutism', the search for the 'quick fix', for simple fast solutions. The multiple-choice mentality of today in which any question can have four or five answers, only one of which is right, which reduces education to finding the right answer, regardless of how it is 'found. Only what is tangible and instantly accessible what you can feel and what you can have NOW - is real. Our world seems to be afraid of anything ambiguous or mysterious. H.' L. Mencken said, 'For every complex problem there is a solution that is concise, clear, simple and wrong.' Which of these two questions would provide the more interesting answers: 'What statement could you make that would be true for you and everyone else in the room?' or 'What statement could you make that would be true for you and nobody else in the room?' Secondly, there is 'hedonism', the pursuit of pleasure. The current dictum, 'If it feels good, do it', reduces life to a matter of animal sensation. Anything hard is a chore, work is 'stress' and to be reduced, real life begins on Friday night, and so on .. 'If it feels good, do it' at its worst can justify anything, even rape, because it does not take into account whether it feels good to other people. At its best this philosophy produces gutless and undeveloped people. Did it feel good to get up this morning to be here at 7.55? The real discoveries we make about ourselves are so often the consequence of doing things that we had to push ourselves to do (or someone' else had to push us to do): that difficult book that turned out to be great, that hard expedition that you'll never forget. Pleasure is only a feeling, and you can't run your life on feelings alone. Next there is 'privatism', perhaps the consequence of over-

crowding in so many parts of the world and too much emphasis on the individual and his rights. This attitude is leading to a very real decay in the sense of community. Some years ago Ray Bradbury wrote a Science Fiction novel called Fahrenheit 451 about a society of the future in which books were banned, and burned, because ideas make people unhappy. One of the details of his vision of this future hell was little personal radios that everyone carried in their ears. We live in the Walkman age with everyone locked into a private world, and everyone else locked out. As a consequence increasingly we confuse 'cause' with 'responsibility'. 'Pick up that litter,' we say, and quick as a flash you reply, 'But I didn't drop it.' There is a difference only in degree between this attitude and that of the man who walks past the mugged woman on the pavement. 'It's nothing to do with me.' The Good Samaritan is the symbol of the Christian; the ideal citizen is the one who always considers the interest and feelings of others, who feels responsible for the world around him, not just himself. Then there is a kind of 'relativism': the view that personal opinion is truth and that everyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's, that right and wrong are up to the individual. But right and wrong are based on universals, they are outside individuals and are true for all individuals. If I say that Shakespeare is a better writer than Jeffrey Archer, it is not just a matter of my personal opinion. A graphic example comes from Australia where areas have been handed back to aboriginal tribal law, on the assumption that 'their law is as good as ours'. This assumption was not shared by a doctor who had to treat a young girl whose legs had been beaten to pulp, a tribal punishment for the crime of drinking at the waterhole before the dogs. No, morality is not up to the individual, but moral a:ction, that is, acting on what you know to be right, that is up to the individual. Lastly, and perhaps most seriously, there is a kind of 'pragmatism', the belief that efficiency is the only measure of value. Anything is OK if it works, and you don't get caught. Cheat for a better grade, lie to get out of trouble. 'Winning is not the most important thing: it's the only thing.' I wonder

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if you realise just how appalling a thought that is. It means that for every winner there is a loser and for every big winner, a champion, there are hundreds of losers; not just losers, but people ~ho have completely wasted their time' and derived absolutely nothing from participation. No wonder that that attitude is killing sport. Let me quote Barbara Jones, the wise American teacher whose ideas" have inspired this meditation, 'Always and everywhere some things are right even if nobody does them, and some things are wrong even if everybody does them.' There are more important things than winning ~One is living with yourself for the rest of your life - remember Lady Macbeth - and another, perhaps, is living with God. January 1988 Richard Lunn

A Story from India In today's meditation I am going to tell you a story from India. Once upon a time there lived two businessmen, Kupaswamy and Ramaswamy, in the same town. They had a great spirit of competition and each one wanted to outdo the other. So they worked very hard and their respective businesses prospered. If Kupaswamy bought four extra cows to work in the fields, Ramaswamy would buy five. If Ramaswamy had a three-bedroomed house, Kupaswamy would build four bedrooms. When Ramaswamy got married, Kupaswamy immediately announced his marriage, although he did not yet know who to. Kupaswamy had twelve children, Ramaswamy aimed at thirteen. A healthy competition is a good thing, but there came a time when it took an ugly turn and jealousy crept in. Each one wanted to disgrace the other and make him feel small. One day, Ramaswamy got a bright idea. If he could some-

how manage to meet God and get him to grant a boon, then he, Ramaswamy, could ask Him something which Kup~swamy could not get. The only way to meet God was to practise great austerity as this would attract God's attention. So he started to miss one meal a day. However, when Kupaswamy came to know the reason why Ramaswamy had lost weight, he immediately began to skip both meals a d~y: When R~maswamy heard this, he increased his own austerrtres by sleeping on the hard ground outside his house, without any shee~ or blanket. He withstood the heat and the cold and kept chantmg the name of Lord Shiva. Kupaswamy, not to be outdone, did away with sleeping altogether, and stood on one leg and chanted the name of Lord Shiva. Months went by and then years. Each one increased his austerities to such an extent that, other than this one thought, there was nothing else left in their minds. Lord Shiva was sitting on Mount Kailash in the Himal~yas ~hen h: felt the tremor of these austerity waves disturbmg hIS meditation. He opened his eyes and decided to appear before th~se two ascetics. As Ramaswamy was a little ahead, Lord Shiva went to him :first and appeared before him in his divine splendour, and offered him a boon. 'Ask of me whateve~ yo~ want, Ramaswamy. I am very pleased with your austenties. Ramaswamy extremely flattered, folded his hands before , ?' the Lord and asked, 'Lord, have you been to Kupaswamy yet. 'Not yet,' replied the Lord Shiva. . 'Please , Lord , do me this favour. Go to Kupaswamy first, , and find out from him what he wants. Then come to me. 'All right,' said the Lord and disappeared from h~s sight. 'Open your eyes, Kupaswamy. I am very pleased WIth you. Ask of me whatever you want, and it shall be yours.' 'Lord, it is very gracious of you to come to me all th~ ~ay from Mount Kailash, but have you by any chance VISIted Ramaswamy?' , 'Yes, I have already been to him,' replied the Lord. 'And what did he say?' asked Kupaswamy. 'He said that I should come to you first and then go to him.' 'Hm,' thought Kupaswamy. 'Ramaswamy is trying to be clever. OK, Lord. Thank you very much for your boon, and

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I ask of you that whatever you give to Ramaswamy, you give me double.' Lord Shiva said, 'So be it,' and appeared before Ramaswamy. When Ramaswamy heard that Kupaswamy had asked the Lord to give him double of what he was to' get, he started thinking for a while. 'Lord, are you sure that you will give Kupaswamy double of whatever you give me?' 'Of course;' replied the Lord. 'I have promised him that. I never go back on my word.' 'All right, Lord. Grant me this boon -let one eye of mine be plucked from its socket. And remember to do double for Kupaswamy.' 'So be it,' said the Lord, and took one eye off Ramaswamy and both eyes off Kupaswamy, and returned to his meditation seat on Mount Kailash in the Himalayas, thinking that perhaps humans were not the best specimens of creation after all. In the meanwhile, when Ramaswamy, blind in one eye, and Kupaswamy, totally blind, met each other, they realized the extent of their folly. Their family members cursed them, the townspeople laughed at them. Here were two men at the top of their professions. They performed so many austerities that they even came face to face with God himself. He offered them the whole world, but what did they choose? They chose to blind each other. The moral of the story is that unless one's heart is free of negative tendencies such as jealousy, hatred, greed, etc, then any amount of effort one puts into an endeavour will not ultimately bring great results. What we already have in life is God's gift to us. What we do with what we have is our gift to God. In any exchange of gifts the giver is the master while the receiver is the slave. At the moment God is the Master and we are the recipients. But when we use what we possess for the welfare and happiness of others, we are giving gifts to God. Then why not make God the recipient with the beauty of our actions. -;
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Drugs About twenty years ago, a lot of people were trying to persuade me that I should become a fighter pilot. The Royal Air Force taught me to fly aeroplanes and offered to pay for my education and look after me and pay me and be my guardian angel for fifteen years with a choice (by me) of an extra ten years if I was a good boy. But, I thought, before that fifteen years is over, there won't be any aeroplanes, just missiles, and all I'll be doing is sitting around pushing buttons. So I said 'No' to the Air Force and rushed off to University. There 1 studied Geography and Geology, and took up mountaineering and made lots of friends. The Geography and Geology were OK; the mountaineering was great. It was the friends that were the problem. The trouble is that when you have friends you learn to love them - and then you get hurt. There's Paul Simon song with the line - 'if I'd never loved, 1 never would have cried.' How true. Perhaps it was the mixture of mountains and friends that was so bad; with seventeen dead climbers to fill my memory, there is a lot to think about. But sixteen of the seventeen don't count; they knew that somewhere, sometime there would be a falling stone, or a crevasse in the ice or a big white avalanche that would have their name written on it. That's the way it is . it's the same for me, every time 1 climb. No, sixteen don't count - but one did, and her name was Jane. Jane was one of those people whom we all love and want: full of life and energy and intelligence - a real giver. She had all before her. She was attractive if not beautiful; she had a sparkling wit, but was never unkind; she had a degree in Mathematics, but chose to teach mountaineering - which was a great joy in her life. And, like most mountaineers, one day she just had to go to the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world - not to climb Everest, but just to go and see and wonder: to climb, to travel and experience. So I encouraged her to go, despite all my fears. She went and it was all she'd ever dreamed of and she came back and she was happy and so was I. But, like all experiences, the trip had certainly changed

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her; she seemed always a little bit far away. Six weeks later she fell a hundred metres down a rockface in Britain. To be honest, she should have died instantly. But she didn't. Her friends picked up the broken body and somehow she 'lived long enough to get to hospital and everything seemed saved. No one could understand why she fell or why she was alone. She was a good climber, it was an easy climb and she had never before climbed alone. But she did and that's that and, anyhow, now she would be OK. But she had three major operations and after each operation she seemed very weak - surprisingly so, and with no will to live - but then she recovered. Except from the third and smallest one. After the third one, she simply gave up and died. So there was a post mortem - a special examination to see why a person has died. The answer was that she had some side effect from the anaesthetic used. The anaesthetic which should have saved her all the pain of the operations simply killed her. The hospital was amazed at this, for the pre-tests had shown nothing. Another examination was made in great detail and the reason became clear. Very, very few people were allergic to that particular anaesthetic UNLESS they were smoking pot. And when Jane had gone to the Himalayas, she had of course gone to that part of the world where pot is a way of life, and it became part of her life. When she fell from that innocent little British mountain, she was as high as a kite. And as she lay in hospital being visited and helped by her friends, it was inevitable that she would die. So, I gave up having friends that would leave holes in my mind and my heart. And I have very strong feelings about drugs. jane's parents aged ten years in a day at the knowledge of her death - not a mountain death, just a drugs death. Jane was introduced to drugs by her friends. Who needs enemies with friends like that? 1978 Roger Mansfield
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The Flying Sheep Some years ago a friend and I were walking through a disused railway tunnel on our way to a place where we were going to do some climbing. As we came out of the tunnel, my friend suddenly shouted a warning. Instinctively I stopped and froze on the spot. A second later there was an enormous crash and, to my surprise, a sheep lay in front of my feet. !he sheep had fallen so close that its wool had brushed my face In the last seconds of its flight. Unfortunately the animal was don~ for and lay at my feet dying. It was a bi,g sheep, and th~re IS no doubt that had it landed on my head It would have killed me, almost certainly. Only my friend's warning cry had saved my life. You might be wondering where the sheep came from. The kamikaze flight had started on a bank hi?h up above the entrance to the railway tunnel. A close shave indeed. One of the things that worried me after this was, what would have happened if I had been killed. It would have been an unusual death, to say the least, and I'm sure the newspapers would have got hold of the story. No one would have taken my death seriously. Even my friends would say to each other 'Did you hear Hugh's been killed?' 'How did it happen?' they would ask shocked, imagining a climbing accident or a spectacular car crash. 'Oh, he was killed by a flying sheep,' would come the reply, and then they would laugh. . Death is a serious business these days, a taboo subject, not for dinner party conversation. Why is this? I think that one o,f the reasons is that we no longer have to face up to the pOSSIbility as a common event. It is something ~ long way, off f~r the majority of us, We all expect by right to live a long life. We perhaps all~w ourselves the remote possibility of a car accident or a plane crash, and we would consider that very unlucky, but otherwise we would consider it very unfair to be struck down by a fatal disease, for example. It hasn't always been like this. A hundred years ago death was only just around the corner. , !h,ere were ~any fatal diseases and before the age of antibiotics even a SImple cut could prove fatal. One would be very lucky to survive a serious

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accident. A long life wasn't a right, it was just good fortune. Thus death was talked about much more freely and, although death was no less tragic than it is today, people were better equipped -to deal with it. Religion, of course, played a major role and it seems that as the potential of life increases in a society, the more secular it becomes. By the same token, those faced with death will often turn to religion. Thus ChayBlyth, the first man (with John Ridgeway) to row the Atlantic in an open boat, wrote: 'It was a Sunday and our minds were filled with religious thoughts. What hypocrites we both.were, It was expedient at the time to believe in God and have faith in His power to help us.' One of the more interesting side effects of the AIDS problem is that it has brought the subject of death a bit more out into the open. We find the prospect of an incurable disease most unfair, even though we have aIot of control over whether we may catch it or not. However, people are already adjusting to the reality of AIDS, and whatever the extent to which it spreads, I think that most people, especially the young, will ultimately accept it as just one of life's hazards. I welcome a more open attitude towards death. I think it makes it easier to deal with. Not surprisingly, it is an open, .talked-about. subject in the climbing world, and I feel that this has made it easier for me to accept the deaths of many of my climbing friends over the years. I miss my friends who have been killed, but sharing memories with others can recreate those who have died, so that they exist even when their physical presence is removed. September 1988 Hugh Clarke

Games People Play (A Meditation given on 7th October 1988, after the Seoul Olympic Games) Funnily enough, or rather sadly enough, it's been a rotten month for sport. In fact, it's been a rotten year for sport. To start with, I want to call the roll of sporting dishonour in 1988 Cricket, for example, is a game traditionally viewed as a vehicle for the morality of decency 'and fair play. Once upon a time it was the social cement of an Empire, uniting Englishmen with Indians and West Indians; South Africans with Pakistanis, with New Zealanders. No longer. 1988 began with an England Cricket captain and a Pakistani umpire publicly abusing each other. By midsummer a luckless West Indian was in an English hospital recovering from brain surgery, having been hit on the head by one of many balls aimed at the body rather than the wicket. The year draws to its close with the English cricket team denied access to India because of its players' sporting and commercial links with South Africa. It is autumn, and Cricket has given way to other great games: Football and Rugby, for example. There is little to cheer about. In England, Paul Davis, an Arsenal soccer star, has just been fined 3,000 and banned by his club for a record nine games. His offence? Breaking an opponent's jaw with a televised punch.' In last week's Olympic soccer final, two players, one Russian, one Brazilian, were sent off in a game of rugged physicality rather than silky skill. Physical contact is all part of Rugby, yet to leaf through the sports coverage of a recent English newspaper was to find remarks such as these: , The technical incompetence of the two teams was marked, compensated for only by their physical commitment, in some cases aimed only at hurting. In Yachting, the oldest sporting trophy of them all, the America's Cup, has been fought over more in the courtroom than on the water. While the Americans now claim to rule the waves, the New Zealanders counter-claim that they just waive the rules. 'The lawyers, meanwhile, grow fat on the argument.

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The hare this time beat the tortoise but in the American legal system there is always a second lap. Boxing this week has suffered a number of body blows. Its professional heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson, has reportedly added the crazed destruction of his ~3m Manhattan apartment and further wife-beating to a list of psychotic outbursts that include flooring a fellow professional boxer on a New York street one early morning ('I was visiting my tailor,' he claimed) and driving his car into a tree, at speed, quite possibly a suicide attempt ('At least it shows he can be knocked out,' said his forthcoming British opponent, Frank Bruno). 'How are you?' is an innocent enough everyday question. 'Fit and well' is a simple enough reply. In the case of Mike Tyson we have a sport'sman who is extraordinarily fit and quite obviously extraordinarily unwell. This week, too, came a demand for the banning of Boxing as an Olympic sport following disgraceful scenes in Seoul when a referee was attacked after a bout (ironically, Korean security police were among his assailants). That outrage was to be followed by some quite bewildering refereeing decisions. It took a pair of phlegmatic Swedes, Stephan Edberg and Mats Wilander, to restore some calm to the turbulent world of professional Tennis by winning this year's Grand Slam tournaments with hardly a curl of the lip, certainly not a lobbed racket or volleys of abuse. And yet, even here, a strong memory of 1988 is of Boris Becker stalling, clowning, tying, then re-tying his shoelaces in the Queen's Club semi-final. He did so, coincidentally, when he had a break point on Edberg's serve, and that at a crucial point in the match. Here was 'Gamesmanship' without its Stephen Potter fun. Well, Becker won Queen's but lost Wimbledon, to Edberg, so perhaps there is justice in the world. In Cycling, the winner of the Tour de France, Pedro Delgado, failed a drug test just two days before the Champs Elysees and sporting glory. The result? 180 fellow riders refused to re-start the next day because they believ~d he would be disqualified. They didn't want him disqualified. It was a clear enough statement that some drugs are reckoned a part of

this gruelling sport. Britons, of course, need little reminding of the agonising, drug-assisted death of rider Tommy Simpson during the 1968 Tour. In the placid world of Horse Racing, the great jockey Lester Pigott was jailed in 1988 for monumental tax fraud, and I read this morning that a favourite Snooker star, 'Big Bill' Werbenuik, has been banned from tournament for drug abuse. 'Big Bill' has a nagging nervous disorder and must take medication to steady his potting arm. It used to be pints of beer: now, apparently, it's beta-blockers. And so to the Olympics and to Weight-lifting and Athletics and Ben Johnson. Or rather, first to David Jenkins, the former British 400m track star and an Olympic competitor throughout the 70s. Clean, crew-cutted, fresh-faced, dependable David Jenkins. Now in a US jail for pushing steroids to American athletes. Another smear on our sporting 1988. And behind all this, what? In a word, 'Greed'. Those of you who have seen the film Wall Street will remember the rhetoric of the anti-hero financier, Gordon Gecko, on the subject of greed: of how greed in all its manifestation (greed for life, for learning, for .prestige, for power, for wealth) is a positive force, driving on human endeavour, spurring creativity and- cunning, inventiveness and problem-solving. Well, those who study literature know that the Devil often gets the best lines. Because behind sporting dishonour lies greed: an overweening desire to win and to prosper from doing so. Listen to former Olympian Mark Spitz, winner of seven gold medals at the Munich Olympics of 1972: I believe that money is the common denominator of excellence and the more money you put into programs and the more money you give to winners, then the more participants you have and a higher degree of competition evolves from that. Here is Spitz on how the money from TV companies (in the case of Seoul, between ~350m and ~500m) might be spent: If you took each of the contested events and divided the actual TV fees to those events you'd have a little over ~lm per event for the prize money. _That would mean they

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could give like ~800,OOO to the winner and ~150,OOOto second place and ~50,OOOto third. Spitz points out that, on this basis, the Russians would have made ~lQOm out of the 1984 Los Angeles games. Now, why on earth did they boycott them instead? . Spitz is right about the Games being big business. Why else would so many cities now bid for the honour of hosting them? The city of Montreal, site of the Summer Games of 1976, is still paying for the privilege. But ever since Los Angeles' 1984 profit of over ~200m the chase has been on for this sporting money-spinner. Preliminary estimates put the Seoul surplus at ~350m. To those who watched the TV coverage and saw halfempty stadia for even major events, that figure will come as some surprise. But, when you've got a US TV company, in this case NBC, to pay some $400m for coverage, who needs people in the stadia? As The Times Athletics correspondent said, when writing about the fortunes top athletes were amassing. 'Amateur athletics is the fastest growing professional sport in the world.' It is estimated that Ben Johnson will lose as much as ~5m because he mistimed his steroids. Consider the fate of an Olympian of another day, Jim Thorpe, winner of gold medals for both pentathlon and decathlon in the Games of 1912. Thorpe was immediately stripped of those medals when it was revealed that he had accepted small sums of money for playing holiday baseball three years earlier. After a campaign lasting seventy years he was reinstated in 1983. Alas, the medals had to be presented to his children since Thorpe himself had died, still disgraced, in 1953. 'Greed' has so much to answer for in modern life. Within sport, greed has devalued and may eventually destroy the integrity of athletes' ambitions and achievements. Ben Johnson cast a long shadow over the Games of the XXIVth Olympiad as each new victory, each new record, was greeted by the inevitable whisper: is he, is she on them too? We have come a long way from the old sporting motto 'The game's the'thing' to the new one 'I'm here to win'. Money turns sportsmen into glove puppets for the impresarios of TV; drugs taint excellence with

artificiality; nationalistic fervour reminds us of Orwell's taunt that sport is just' ... war without the shooting'. On the day that I pick up The Times Educational Supplement, and read page, a story of drug-testing at a school sports day (youngest competitor, l4) I offer, to finish, some sketches from the life of a gentleman-athlete from another era: the American golfer Bobby Jones, whose career was so movingly described in one of Alistair Cooke's Letters from Amenca. By winning, in the same year, four great golf championships (the Amateur and Open events of both Britain and America), and by doing so stylishly and modestly, Bobby Jones became a sporting legend. Moreover, as a handsome, courtly figure and the epitome of gentlemanly good-sportsmanship (Cooke relates the story of a championship in which Jones penalised hims.elf two shots for brushing a ball while addressing it, before gomg on to lose the same championship by a single stroke), he won the hearts of millions. Later, when a rare and crippling disease (in Cooke's words, 'a neurological nightmare') struck, Jones would show a courage to match his courtesy. Crippled and wasted, Jones retained hIS gentleness and his charm. Alistair Cooke continues: Un til he could not longer bear to read, he answered every letter, and his mail was enormous. When an old golf writer lost his house in a hurricane and wrote to say that his greatest loss was a hundred-odd letters received down the years from the great man, Jones went through twenty years of files, had all the letters copied, and signed them again with his pitiable scrawl. Well, the word 'gentleman' is by now very much an anachronism, but it fitted Bobby Jones like no man I have known.' Sport keeps alive a number of ideas central to our morality: honesty, decency, fair-play. In the words of Baron de Coubertin, the 'Father' of the modern Olympics, 'Athleticism can occasion the most noble passions or the most vile; It can be chivalrous or corrupt.' Where such as Ben Johnson fail, such as you can succeed. October 1988 Ian Corkett

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The Game of Life - A lazy Sunday afternoon with nothing of any significance left to do My computer chess game lay defiantly on the table daring me to match wits with it. I turned my head away and put the thought out of my mind, but even as I gazed steadily in the opposite direction I felt myself slowly giving in to this silent challenge. I sighed, poured the cat off my lap, walked over to the insolent device and plugged it in. _I entered difficulty level three and watched the lights flash on and off as it woke up out of its lethargy to accept my challenge. I usually played at level three as it provided a degree of difficulty which tested my ability as well as the fact that the time taken for it to calculate a move was rapid. I tended to lose interest if the game took too long. I was confident of my ability to win at this level and had done so many times before. I pressed in my first move, the machine responded and the game was underway. Not many minutes had passed when I saw my chance for a kill and moved ~y bishop forward to the centre of the board. The computer's lights flashed nervously as it realized its dilemma. Several seconds and beeps later my electronic opponent responded by removing the offending bishop with a knight which I had managed to overlook hiding among a group of pawns. Not to worry: I was still in a very advantageous position and this minor setback was not serious. I did, however, become slightly more cautious, not wishing to repeat my mistake. A short time later another opening appeared and I quickly formulated a master plan. It was obvious that if one black pawn were to be moved out of the way, I would soon have the machine in checkmate. I moved a knight to where it could be taken by the obstructing pawn hoping that the stupid machine would, in its greed, take the sacrificial piece and look no further. To my delight it did just that. I went for the kill, moving my queen into position with the grace and confidence of a grand master. It was only a matter of time now. Electronic circuits worked frantically to find an escape. Then from out of nowhere came a renegade rook threatening my queen. To my horror I realized that if I were to move her out of the way, my king would be

threatened (the object of chess is to capture your opponent's king). There was nothing for it but to trade my valuable queen for a less valuable rook. My confidence and self-esteem were still intact, although I determined to play out the rest of the match with the utmost care. Shortly thereafter, due to my own stupidity, carelessness and lack of depth of thought, I had managed to lose one more major piece and make two dangerously unfavourable exchanges. My predicament looked bad but I still did not worry. I had no intention whatsoever of being beaten by this stupid piece of electronic equip~ent. As things went from bad to hopeless to totally lost, I realized that I had to rectify the situation and knew exactly what to do. I had done it many times before and it had saved me from defeat without fail. The ultimate move! I pressed the RESET button. The threat vanished and all my pieces instantly reappeared in orderly rows ready to fight another day. It was of comfort to realize that no matter how badly I played, no matter how many inexcusable mistakes I made, no matter how serious the situation I landed myself in, I could always wipe the slate clean and start again by pushing the RESET button ... Oh, while I'm on the subject, I should probably point out that the game of life does not have a RESET button. Duncan Maxwell

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