‘Pumblechook’ explores a sumptuous array of Heated Rivalries.
I do not know anything about Heated Rivalry (Heated Rivalries?). I thank God I have never seen it. I think it immoral to produce a television programme that pretends to concern ice hockey and then spends less than all the time available showing men playing icehockey, than which no better entertainment can be conceived. (Perhaps it just comprises match highlights — again, I have never seen it — in which case I shudder to think how they have combined all that ice time with some of what I understand are the themes of November, the month in which my fiancée and her the programme.) I shall proceed momentarily to the loose contention of this article, which is that there are ‘heated rivalries’ more worth your contemplation in this hot, sweaty season of five-on-five love thatsurrounds, for good or ill, the feast day of that Roman bishop of sainted memory. While I have your attention on the subject of ice hockey, though — and not on anything that has nothing to do with ice hockey — no — down, boy, drop it — I beg leave to state that you folks really ought to start calling it ‘hockey’, seulement ‘hockey’. What you call ‘hockey’ we sensible Canadians, the clever folks before, behind, between, above, and below Heated Rivalry, call ‘field hockey’. The reason for this preference is obvious. Simply put, there is no Cleated Rivalry. Field hockey has no attractive qualities. If it had, somebody would have produced a television programme so bonkers popular that Waterstones would have created a nice little Cleated Rivalry table. There is no nice little Cleated Rivalry table. There is, God forgive us, a nice little Heated Rivalry table. His name is Hockey.
November v. February
What different months these are! November, a cold and dreary month, forlorn and without hope; February, a cold and dreary month, but hopefully so. November, the month in which my fiancée and her mother were born; February, the month in which my sister was born. November, the month of the dead; February, the month of making love in the parks. (I do not mean for you to align these things. They are facets of a point.) And yet there is between these months a quiet, tortured affinity. Ever noticed how many of your friends are born in early November? You had better count.
Birmingham v. Toronto
It is likely you have not travelled to Toronto. Well and good: you probably have travelled to Birmingham— and really they are astonishingly similar. Now, I have only been to Birmingham twice, and both times I did not leave the train station. I have, on the other hand, there. The evidence of these cities’ barely suppressed passion is, allow me to say, palpable. The beautiful, resonant, musical accents occupy similar positions in their respective, benighted nations. The skylines are both grey, but oh! grey with a grey that out-colours the very rainbow. The New Street train station is certainly more fully featured than any in Toronto, but we are making our way. In sum the two cities at once languorously salute one another from their municipal pleasure couches and bare towards each other in a threatening manner their unusually square teeth. Most significant of all is the matter of the bulls. We have a bull: it was recently installed outside Blue Bovine Steak and Sushi House at Union Station. It is very small. And Birmingham! She has a great bronze bull, pawing the ground and snuffling erotically, standing in New Street. One day soon these bulls will charge at each other. Then there will be a ruckus to shake the earth.
Hall fruit salad v. Every other dessert
My comments on this head might prove controversial, so I shall not say too much. Let us agree, in the first place, that the fruit salad in Hall is far and away the best dessert available. It is cool and refreshing. It has an attractive look in the bowl. It brings a piquant touch of the exotic to your tray. At least in theory, it prevents illness, though I still suffer from eight weeks of lurgy every term. The problem is that it is costly — truth be told I am not sure if it is more expensive than the other desserts, though I think it is — and sometimes you do indeed desire an obscenely large cookie. Mostly, I have set this opposition up as a problem to fill out this article, as the solution is quite obviously to just keep getting the fruit salad, since it is the Barbour jacket of the dessert options, but the other problem it raises is: perhaps the obscenely large cookie desires the fruit salad, in an objet petit a sort of way. It makes you think.
Hockey v. Hockey
It turns out there is or must be more to this comment, which I thought was incidental but have found it necessary to bring to centre stage, since there are not after all that many heated rivalries in the world of today — or perhaps there are, but it is impolitic to discuss most of the ones that do come to mind, and all the rest diffuse into a facile, orgiastic haze of division: Cambridge v. Oxford, Trinity v. St John’s, Trinity v. Trinity, St John’s v. St John’s, oil v. vinegar, good v. evil. As regards the subheading: which is which? Obviously a clash of nations is at stake here: colony v. metropole, Victoria (long may her reign be praised) v. Charles, rink v. field. And so the divisions multiply, even as — to come to my point — the subheading indicates that they are finally divisions between the same and the same, between what was primordially one and might be one again. Notwithstanding my harsh earlier words about a basically uninteresting field sport, my friends, I tell you that they have stoked such divisions to… divide us. In a culture of either / or, choose both / and. In a world of Edwards and Jacobs, be Bellas. Beat your swords into ploughshares, my friends — or into hockey sticks.
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