While watching the snooker World Championship this afternoon for some reason I started to ask myself if it mattered to me which of the players were to win. After some deliberation I decided that I was not very bothered either way. It did occur to me to ask myself, however, on what basis I might conceivably reach such a decision.
I am left-handed, and I did look to see if either of them shared that with me. No! One of them was bearded, as I am, and although the other was ill-shaven this didn’t qualify as being having a beard. One was English and the other Scottish, but somehow I couldn’t persuade myself that this mattered. In fact, I have never been able to call myself a fan of anybody or anything.
It goes back to my secondary school. Situated half-way between Blackpool and Preston the boys tended to take sides between their respective football teams (or, more specifically, between Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews). As a boarder from another part of Lancashire none of this meant very much to me. In fact, the migrant character of my life, before moving to Bradford, militated against any kind of local identification that could have made me a fan of any team. The same lack of personal commitment holds in the area of music too. I’m very fond of music, and although I have gone to the trouble to hear both Eric Clapton and Leonard Cohen in concert in recent years, I’m not sure that I am a fan of either. (I come pretty close, I suppose, with Cohen, although the fact that I find some of his earlier work to be tedious means that I can’t make that “leap of faith”.)
Am I missing something?