Doldrums

I have always rather liked this word, even though its meaning isn't all that positive. My first encounter with it was in its figurative sense in some children's story or other, and it was only when I was en route to failing O Level Geography that I came across its true meaning, some winds (or more accurately, a lack thereof) in the South Atlantic (Pacific?) (well I told you I failed it) which don't do very much, in that if you are stuck in the Doldrums, you are immobilised, though always with the underlying implication that there will be a solution eventually.

This is what life is like right now. I am over the hectic pace of the beginning of term; I have met my students, mainly, at least twice and in some cases four times, and things are beginning to fall into place, but of course this is the way things are now going to be for quite a while.

And Table Five, our quiz team, are also in a bit of a rut. David and his fellow Old Farts will claim that we are going through a bad patch, but that would as yet be an exaggeration. Last Monday (for we are happily back to Mondays again) they won with a total of 144 points; we had 138. But there were two other teams: Edu's, who got 142, and a scratch side made up of our very own Antony; his visiting parents, and a couple of other people. This team got 141 and thus we came last out of four teams, and the Old Farts had won for the second week in succession (or 'on the bounce', as the sainted Alan Curbishley would put it).

You would have thought, from the way they carried on after this, that they had won the Champions' League together with the thing that whoever wins the Champions' League gets to compete for afterwards (Liverpool played in it last year and I neither recall nor care whether they won it or not, whatever it was), while simultaneously condemning us to a few seasons in the Unipart League. And yet whenever they are going through one of their exceedingly frequent bad patches, what they get from us are expressions of sympathy, in true British fashion: a tight-lipped "hard luck old chaps" and the subject changed swiftly to something more congenial.

But then, they are very fond of quoting something I first heard in an early episode of Yes Minister: "in victory, malice, in defeat, revenge". This has, for them, become akin to one of those dreary mission statements which abound in modern Britain, like "Moving People Round the Community" painted on the sides of buses, presumably on the off-chance that someone might see a bus and not know what it is for.

There have been five quizzes since we restarted, and we won the first one, and have given a reasonable account of ourselves most of the time, and 138 points, anyway, is quite often a winning score, even if it wasn't last week. But there is a slight feeling amongst ourselves that the team is in the Doldrums, for all that.

And then there's Charlton, stuck at the bottom of the Premiership. The basic arguments here are that Charlton's opening fixtures have been relatively tough, which is true enough, and that there have been injuries, which there most certainly have, and that if the results are studied, most of the defeats have been by the odd goal.

All the same, people are beginning to regard Charlton's next outing, at Fulham tomorrow night, coinciding once more with Quiz Night, as a kind of indicator of whether Charlton will ever get out of the Doldrums. If they lose at Fulham, then there is no reason, the logic runs, why they should not proceed to lose, albeit honourably, a bit like Sunderland often did last season, practically everywhere.

But if the quiz team don't come out on top on Monday, I don't think it will indicate anything quite so serious, though maybe we should start work on finding ourselves a mission statement of our own, and then we can start dishing out the abusive comments along with everyone else.