If you started a sports team, what would the colors and mascot be?
I don’t really see the colour a team wears as having any real impact. When my daughter started playing for her junior football team, she wore a purple kit. When she moved to a new team to play senior football she started to play in red. The kit didn’t affect her determination to do her best, but she became very attached to her number, which was Number 5 in her first year. Ever since, she has chosen that number when she has been able to. It is part of her personal ‘brand’ and she is definitely more comfortable having that number on her back whether she realises it or not.
So, the first thing I would do if I set up a sports team would be to ask my players to choose and keep their number. Colour wise I might choose purple for old time’s sake, but that would be the only reason.
The most important thing for any team is spirit and togetherness. When you have the right coach setting the right direction and encouraging the right approach, the team will play their best. My daughter had really good coaches and really bad coaches as a junior. The really bad coaches had one thing in common, favourites and a focus on results over performance. I saw two or three occasions where the coach damaged the spirit of the team due to those approaches and the performance got worse and worse. When the coaches stopped doing that the performance improved. I could never understand why grown men (and it was invariably men) would come into girls’ football without trying to understand the difference between that and boys’ football. The atmosphere was key. Get that right and you get the best performance. To give the coaches their due, they were giving up their time and often getting loads of criticism from the parents, occasionally justified, much more often not. We had three really good seasons out of seven because the atmosphere was right. It’s interesting to reflect on the way that the girls reacted to their coaches, as they could do so with fear or enthusiasm. When the atmosphere was right that fear of a bad performance was taken away and the result was a much better experience for everyone involved. With one glaring exception, the coaches we came across only ever did things for the best as they saw it, but it didn’t always go as well as they wanted.
Mascots are a nonsense in my opinion. They add nothing to a club and nothing to a team within that club. I would absolutely refuse to have one. When we go to the Emirates to see Arsenal they have a mascot called Gunnersaurus and watching it lumber around the perimeter of the pitch is an unnecessary distraction.
For anyone who is involved in a team the most important things are enjoyment and improvement. If those two aspects are in place everything else is taken care of. The players will want to play and they will improve naturally as a result. That would be at the absolute centre of any club I set up.
How have your political views changed over time?
I was bought up in a staunchly centre right house. My parents were both Conservative voters and as they were my political sounding boards and as we had the Telegraph every day, the idea of voting anything other than Conservative never entered my head as a child. The Labour Party were the enemy of progress and making money as far as my parents and pretty much all their friends were concerned so when it came to the first election I could vote in I put my cross next to the Conservative candidate.
About 18 months later I went into the Royal Air Force, something I have reflected on before, and I was in close quarters with people from a very different background and with very different life experiences. I was from the South East of England, where the extremely negative effect of Conservative policies on the manufacturing workers and the miners was more muted. That said, we lived in the Medway Towns and had seen Chatham Dockyard closed, decimating the area and putting 10000 people out of work at a stroke. Most of my fellow recruits came from the North of England, Wales and Scotland and their families and communities had really suffered as a result of Thatcherism. They were the first breach in the wall of my Conservative thinking because I was faced with young men who had gone into the Armed Forces because they couldn’t see anything else. I had made a considered choice as to what I thought was best for me, which was a very different situation. The conversations we had made me quite uncomfortable because of my relative good fortune and relative family affluence.
A few years later I started going out with Janet who was a dyed in the wool Labour supporter and a year after that I went to Staffordshire Polytechnic where I met people with the whole spectrum of political views. I went through a whole Economics and Politics course learning about ideas from across the political landscape. By the time the local elections came up in Stoke I was a Liberal Democrat supporter. It was very much an expression of my then quite fluid political views. I wasn’t ready for the Labour Party as it then was, but I was never going to vote Conservative again. Now, it’s certainly the case that other people who supported the party did so from a strong political basis, but for me they were a stopping off point on my journey across the political divide.
I became a Labour Party supporter when John Smith became the leader. His vision of a Labour Party for the times was absolutely in tune with mine. I think that had he lived, he and his party would have created a much more equal and much better society than we ended up having. Tragically he died in his native Scotland on a walking holiday and Tony Blair became the leader who would be given the keys to Number 10.
For the bulk of the first two Labour terms of office I was abroad but I had nailed my colours to the mast by then. I was Labour but I was more of the Gordon Brown Labour. As Chancellor he made a massive difference to the poorest people in the UK. When I came back from teaching abroad no one would employ me as a teacher in the UK because there was, and still is, a massive snobbery about other education systems, despite the fact that the UK has one of the most unequal in the world with richer students getting every possible advantage and poorer students being basically ignored. Anyway, we were on one wage and would have struggled enormously if it hadn’t been for Working Family Tax Credits. That allowed us to give our children the chance to do activities outside of school and go on the occasional day out. By the way, despite the narrative, then and since, we weren’t living in luxury on benefits. We were keeping our heads above water but only just and only by cutting back as much as possible. If anyone tells you how good people on benefits have got it, take it from me they have never been poor and they are talking total nonsense!
Nowadays, my political views are pretty much as left wing as they could be, sometimes more than my wife! This means that in an increasingly uncaring right wing world even the nominally left wing or centrist parties are to the right of me. If we had proportional representation I would almost certainly vote for the Green Party, but where I live that would be pointless so I vote Labour but without the same enthusiasm of years ago.
So there you have it. The old saying my Dad used to use was ‘If a man is not a Labour supporter before he is 30 he has no heart. If he is still a Labour supporter after he is 30 he has no brain’!! I sincerely hope I have proved that completely wrong, but who knows?!
You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?
My perfect space for reading and writing is mental not physical. I need to get rid of the ‘open tabs’ in my head and to unsubscribe from both websites and from areas of everyday life. The latter idea came from last night’s Calm app. As human beings we are not designed for modern life. Evolution has not equipped us for constant screen use and our instincts that we had as a species for danger have been hijacked by otherwise unimportant aspects of the Internet. If we get into arguments online, or if a friend posts something that unsettles us, or if we read an article that really annoys us we go into fight or flight mode far too easily. Our brain is prehistoric and was designed purely to deal with survival. A post on social media that annoys you is not life or death but we can treat it as such on an unconscious level. When Darwin figured out Evolution of the Species he only did so from a physical standpoint. In his time, life was moving far more quickly than ever before and since then it has accelerated, particularly in the past 20 years, and we are woefully unequipped to deal with it as we are the only animal species that has to navigate technology not just in our lives but dictating our lives.
So, what does my reading and writing space look like? It is a time of the day when I am on my own and won’t be disturbed. It is a space both mental and physical that will require me to leave my phone out of reach and try to stop thinking about it. It is a very relaxed time when I reconnect with the enjoyment of the printed word and the joy of creating a piece of work that is enjoyable to write and, hopefully, enjoyable to read. It is, and always will be, a work in progress.
What is your all time favorite automobile?
I was never interested in cars as a child and I am not interested in them now. For me they are simply a way of getting from A to B and a square box on wheels in that order!
There is one main difference between cars I saw as a child in the 1970s and cars now, namely that when I was younger the car makers were far more innovative with design. Every make had a different appearance and there were a huge variety of colours. Now I couldn’t tell the difference between one make of car and another. I can’t imagine that children of today get the same excitement with cars all being the same shape and with a choice of maybe two or three colours.
If you love cars then I am sure you get the same joy out of them as I do out of music. That’s brilliant and I know the fascination of a real obsession from a couple of car enthusiasts in my youth. Sadly it’s not one I have ever shared.
How are you creative?
When we think of creativity, we usually think of the arts side, acting, dancing, painting, writing etc. I like to think I am quite creative when it comes to the last of those, but there is one area where my creativity really comes to the fore, Cooking.
It’s Christmas Day as I write this and I am looking forward to cooking my 36th Christmas Dinner in a row, having promised Janet when we got married that she would never have to cook one as she never enjoyed it when she was living at home. Every year I try to improve and every year I try to think of a new element to introduce. This year, for example, I am going to be cooking a carrot and parsnip loaf to go with the turkey along with my usual salads. Even that changed last year though as I made my pasta salad with pesto instead of mayonnaise having seen the recipe in a magazine in Australia, where we spent Christmas 2024 for my cousin’s 80th birthday. I brought the recipe back and I will be making it today.
When I do cook something for a second or subsequent time I am more than happy to experiment with the ingredients to make it my own dish and I have a real feel for what will work. That’s where my creativity comes in, because to me you never follow a recipe slavishly unless it’s really complex. Where is the challenge in that?! So, today I will be using my own mix of vegetables when making my pesto salad, concentrating on what I think will really lift it. I also change up the spices to give an extra kick to my dishes. A few years ago I started making cucumber relish and I tweaked the recipe each year until I was happy with it. My version definitely has more of a kick than the original as I have substituted cayenne pepper for the milder paprika I used when following the recipe.
Whatever you do, do it with flair and give free range to your creativity. Good luck and enjoy yourselves.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 