Mistah Kurtz - he dead

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

This is not the way it was supposed to be.

The ballad built up to Ragnarok, to a mountain-breaking sky-shattering finale screaming with the thrusts of straining heroes. The earth lay dark, the air thrummed. A twilight of the gods?

No. A frickin' weather bulletin.

Thank you very much, Mr. Warne, but we fear the weather does not permit the staging of the final production. So nice of you to have dropped by, Mr. McGrath, such a pity we couldn’t do it today.

Damn it all, even Matt Hayden, that caricature of a troll on steroids, deserved better than this. These men have been heroes. Champions. Show-stoppers. They don’t deserve a hurried exit down dank corridors and out the back door; they deserve a dying scene before the aiudience with the full Mazoomba and a 100-piece orchestra. They should get to spill their guts on stage. They should have the chance to go back “with their shields or on them”.

Granted that Braveheart Freddie and his mates had seized the standard along with the first-innings lead. Granted that the afternoon belonged to that outrageously gifted boy (but how did he spill Chlorox on his hair?). The last evening of this English summer should still have been Kipling rather than Kingsley Amis. We should have “seen the knights in armour come / singin’ something about a Queen ..” Instead of which, we have Messrs. Koertzen and Bowden, all stuffed shirt-front and crooked finger, coming out to remove the bails. A bloody stock-exchange ticker instead of the last hurrah from tattered banners.

Perhaps that self-important old cloud of flatus, Sir Vidia See-the-sun’s-in-my-bunghole Naipaul, was right when he bollocked the Brits for losing their culture. No sense of drama at all, at all.

Blame it on the weather, then. They’ve been doing it for at least 939 years now.

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