Last month I was privileged to arrive in County Cork, decked out in the red and white colours of its hurling team, the day before they played Clare in the All-Ireland final.
Hurling, for the uninitiated, is an exhilarating team sport of ball and sticks with the speed of basketball, the grandeur of rugby and skills all of its own. The match, won by Clare by one point in extra time, was one of those thrillers that draw new audiences into a sport, including British viewers who could watch it on BBC for the first time.
Even a post-match speech by Jarlath Burns, the president of the Gaelic Athletic Association, touched the heart. “We thank the countries who took you in,” he said, addressing the Irish diaspora, “and gave you jobs and allowed you to make a new name for yourselves,” which sounded like a call to treat modern migrants into Ireland in the same way. You might wonder why hurling isn’t a global sport, but it’s unexportable. It’s an amateur game, played by teachers and office workers and farmers in their spare time, rooted in the 32 counties of Ireland, and long may it remain so.
I also witnessed, in Sneem, County Kerry, the sport of tractor backing, in which a farm vehicle and its trailer reverse through a slalom of oil drums and beer barrels. This, too, deserves wider audiences, while keeping its tyres firmly planted on its home soil.
Bakewell hearts
My friend the bass player alerts me to sad news from Bakewell, a town that he and I visited recently, where there is a bridge whose balustrades are thick with padlocks left by couples as tokens of love. Derbyshire county council plans to remove the locks in order to carry out “maintenance work”, and redesign the railings to stop more being attached in the future. They cite health and safety concerns, flimsily claiming that these round-edged objects create a serious risk of grazing. Some residents complain that the locks make the bridge “an eyesore” and that they attract too many visitors.
I’m sorry, but how mean of spirit can they get? Why erase this harmless, sweet pursuit? Why throw away the memories of the bereaved, who make pilgrimages to see the locks they installed with their now-lost partners? The functional 25-year-old bridge is not some historic treasure that the locks desecrate.
And it seems weird to complain of something that attracts visitors in the Peak District, which thrives on the tourism drawn by its beauties and distinctive eccentricities. You might as well straighten out the crooked spire of the parish church in nearby Chesterfield, replace the vast Tudor windows of Hardwick Hall with energy-efficient UPVC-framed double glazing, or substitute the jam in Bakewell’s famous tarts with healthier tofu.
Paris confounds critics
One area where AI could easily replace humans is in writing of the doom-laden articles that precede every Olympic Games – and I have been guilty of doing this myself – to be followed almost as often by the joy and delight of the events themselves. Paris 2024 has been no exception. The Daily Telegraph (for example) predicted, with its usual calm understatement, that the games would be “Macron’s final humiliation”, a catastrophe for a great city.
While it’s true that the organisers struggled to clean up the Seine in time to hold the swimming legs of triathlons there, memories of the Paris Olympics will overwhelmingly be of skateboarders, cyclists and indeed triathletes doing their astonishing stuff against some of the most beautiful backdrops in the world.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
