A reunion lunch and afterwards
Yesterday I had lunch with Bill, one of my old golfing partners, whom I hadn’t seen for about four years. The parting of the ways was originally prompted by a lunch at which our group of four regulars sat down and took a decision to give up our club memberships simultaneously.
We had concluded that in the scheme of things they were expensive at a time when our life circumstances – we were all over sixty and one fast approaching seventy – meant we’d be playing less often in future.
Instead we adopted the practice of paying ‘green fees’ at a range of different clubs when and as the mood took us, i.e. rather than always playing at the club to which we belonged just because we’d paid the membership fees and felt the need to get value for our money.
For a couple of years the new arrangement worked well – in fact we never looked back. Over time we played at maybe a dozen different courses and (as they say) the change was as good as a rest. Then one of us lost his wife to cancer and things – well, for me in particular, having issues with my hip which later caused me to give up playing regularly and then have a hip replacement operation – caused a drifting apart.
Yesterday Bill, now in his mid-seventies, was looking not just not a day older than when I had last seen him but about ten years younger. Last summer he’d had a quadruple heart by-pass operation and, under orders, had since been on a fitness campaign and lost two stone. I kid you not, the years had fallen off him. During our meal he cheerfully admitted that he’d had Type 2 diabetes for years and also had his prostate removed plus some other operation designed to improve the circulation in one of his legs. He put all these down to ‘fifty years of hard living’ about which he was totally unrepentant in the sense that, if he should ever had the opportunity to have his time again, he wouldn’t change a thing.
All this had left him having eased off the alcohol – “I just can’t drink much anymore”, as in ‘didn’t want to’, not that he was heeding advice against it – and now visiting a personal trainer twice a week, a concept that that in his (our) heyday would have had him snorting with derision at the very idea.
The upshot of a very pleasant meal is that I made a commitment to play a round of golf in the next week or so with a couple of the old crew.
Having strolled back home shortly after 3.00pm, I heard on the radio the news of the terrorist incident at Westminster Bridge and the House of Parliament and gathered myself in front of the television, flicking back and forth between the BBC 24/7 News Channel and Sky News.
I would deny that I was ‘rubber-necking’, which I believe is a term used to describe people (e.g. on motorways) slowing their vehicles down to gawp at the aftermath of motor accidents that may have occurred on the opposite carriageway, so much as firstly, just wanting to find out exactly what had happened; and secondly, being by nature inherently fascinated by the process of news journalism at times like these.
The details of what occurred yesterday may already be known by Rust readers from their own eyes watching the 24/7 news channels and/or (as I have been doing since rising early this morning) reading the reports and analysis newspaper websites, so I shall not comment upon them here.
Rather I shall direct the remainder of this piece to my impression of the television news coverage that I watched between about 3.15pm and 6.15pm yesterday.
Both the BBC and Sky News did very well in my view. Probably in part because at one stage in my career I worked in a minor capacity at Sky, generally for ‘breaking news’ I tend to find the Sky News coverage marginally superior probably because it seems that their resources are greater and their camera crews generally faster to the scene of the action.
Yesterday their queen anchor Kay Burley – a bit of a marmite figure within the industry – had got herself down to the Embankment from where she did her usual efficient and officious job of talking to camera, interviewing on-site experts who had put themselves forward and then continually ‘throwing’ (and collecting back) the coverage to and from a raft of reporters dotted about the scene, from the vicinity of the London Eye on the south bank of the River to College Green, New Scotland Yard and beyond on the north.
From my channel-hopping it seemed that the first time the BBC pipped Sky News in their coverage was when a Police Commander– I think his name was Harrington – gave the Met’s first statement outside New Scotland Yard, albeit almost exclusively providing headlines and broad details that we all knew already. I was watching Sky News at the time and the best they could do was supply coverage on a shaky and blurred mobile phone. Switching to the BBC News channel, they not only had a proper camera there and perfect pictures but they also had a reporter ready and waiting to do a piece to camera immediately afterwards.
A case of ‘One-Nil’ to the editorial and logistical team at BBC headquarters for that.
Overall I would give the British news organisations collectively about 7.5 out of 10 for yesterday’s coverage.
To be fair, that might be about 0.5 too light, but I take that much off for my own personal trait of slight ennui when watching any ‘live’ news coverage of an incident over hours at a time during which – because nothing much new is happening for periods of twenty to sixty minutes – the anchor presenters and others have to endlessly repeat themselves and/or extemporise blandly but authoritatively and/or re-broadcast previous footage their organisations have amassed earlier, just in order to fill the time.
It’s not an easy issue because, of course, hardened news junkies like myself find the necessity mildly irritating and yet (in the wider scheme of things) the practice is not just understandable but actually very helpful for those who have been temporarily away from their televisions – or indeed who have only just arrived in front of them – and want to get up to date on what has occurred.
