Katrina's Journal, 10 January 2022, 3/3
Back to school & the Silly Olympics
It’s late evening now. After my heroic efforts this afternoon (we decided if I keep the hurdles higher than normal then when I come to a real race they’ll feel a lot lower; I do a similar thing in swimming sometimes by carrying a bit of weight), I needed some light relief, so I went along to the pool for one of their evening sessions with the younglings.
I can’t believe how early you resume subjecting your children to school. In my world, my two youngest would be going back to school today, Monday 10th January. But you sent yours back this time last week. That’s traumatic.
Which says something, of course. If you want a subjugated population then you have to start when they’re young. When I first arrived in Paris and discovered that Boris Johnson was your Prime Minister I really did ask whether you even had an education system (that and mass brainwashing technology – they’re related, clearly). A properly educated people, after all, would never vote for a scumbag like that. The entire idea of him being PM is, well, for me let’s call it cognitive dissonance, shall we? And people say I’m mad!
So, yes, get them young. Turn the education system into something resembling trauma-based mind control. Bombard their left amygdala with relentless stress. Also, you need to do that to the teachers too, because the monsters well know that young children especially learn what is normal by observation (combined with empathy and mimicry), in particular of grown-ups. I was mindful of this after my husband was killed and I was as distraught as you can imagine, and I had to try and hide it from Niki, who was only three months old at the time. So, stress the teachers and the children will mimic. And the parents too, for that matter. This ‘phonics’ shit, for example, should come in handy there – yeah, that’s right, force children to learn their own language a second time. That’s really clever, isn’t it? Not.
The younglings at my swim club were already moaning about having to go back to school last week. Except then they come swimming after and they’ve got wide smiles on their faces. It’s a kind of happy respite, it seems. And I do my best to assist them in that regard by greeting them with customary ebullience (I like that word) and making our training sessions fun. Like there’s a lovely seven-year-old girl who I challenged to a race, where she would do front crawl and I’d do doggy paddle. Except I was a bit ahead at the halfway point and suddenly realised I was doing the freestyle kick, so I switched to proper froggy style kick and she caught me up and won. Hurrah!
You should definitely have a Silly Olympics and froggy style should definitely be in it, along with the Trudgen. Hmm, you probably don’t know what that is. I’ll try and see if it’s on your YouTube. Well, there are some boring ones, but this one is a lovely quaint old-fashioned Pathe silent newsreel, complete with captions. As a historian, I love that old stuff.
The Trudgen (named after the Victorian bloke who popularised it), basically is the sidestroke, kind of like a weird crawl on your side but with a scissor kick. It’s good for rescuing people, but the rest of the time it’s just silly. Which is why it’s in the Silly Olympics, along with some other silly swim strokes. And there is one race in which the final result depends on points awarded for stylistic silliness. And you know what points mean (aside from prizes) – seconds deducted, that’s what. So, we have invented some strokes you won’t have heard of. The spiralling corkscrew one is a sight to behold and it’s damn difficult and exhausting to boot. You have to alternately switch from front crawl to backstroke and keep it fluid.
Anyway, enough about swimming already. You must be bored rigid by that stuff.
This is another difference between our worlds, by the way – we really, genuinely do have a Silly Olympics. It’s not just because the people are happy and unstressed, it’s because we have benevolent governments. In your world, you have monsters governing you, and it’s not in their interests to make you happy or free from stress (so stop voting for them, by the way). In order to keep their social control (and thus ensure their own survival – because that’s what it’s all about, in the end), they need to keep you preoccupied and anxious. And so, alongside creating one major crisis after another they inflict more personal worries on you, often involving money – or lack of it, rather. None of those major crises are natural, are they? There is no underlying structuralist element to them, is there? They may try and deceive you into thinking they had nothing to do with all these crises, but don’t be fooled by that. War, for example, doesn’t ‘just happen’ – it is decided to happen. Likewise all your personal worries – these are the direct result of government intervention, and the deliberate policies of they who control the economy.
This (structuralism) is the great deceit of Marxism, by the way. And the so-called ‘Left’ are still falling for it today. Likewise all these ‘economists’. Put simply, Marx blames the system, not the people who control the system. And that’s a deliberate misdirection. Capitalism doesn’t have a consciousness of its own, does it? It’s not even a thing, it’s just a description. Capitalism doesn’t make decisions! Prices don’t put themselves up, people put prices up. Money doesn’t restrict its own supply, the bankers restrict that supply. Same for every commodity. And so on.
You see, it’s all just psychology, in the end. All this chronic psychological stress they inflict on you is enervating. It takes up all your time and energy in worrying and pursuing only survival and the necessities of existence. So you don’t have the freedom and the guile to rebel. Or even to ask questions. And so you are controlled. They create your problems, then create an opposition which promises to resolve those problems. But not all of those problems, of course not! That would be fiscally irresponsible! Indeed, they will create new problems! How long have successive governments had to make a utopia? Hundreds of years. Has anything improved? No, it’s only gotten worse. And yet, I bet you any money that come another election, at least 95% of the population will vote for the same monsters.
We don’t do that anymore in our world. We have benevolent government. And that government simply enacts policies designed to remove stress. And so the people are happy, and have the opportunity to fulfil their aspirations. Like with money, for example. In our system, everyone is guaranteed a cost of living allowance if they need it. So no one worries about struggling to survive. We took control over the money supply (the central bank, that is – if you’re English, that’s the Bank of England; or the Federal Reserve if you’re an American). Likewise the commodities market. The price of all those necessities is permanently fixed, regardless of supply and demand fluctuations. So no inflation. We then have a beautiful education system and since more people have more money everyone has the chance to pursue those aspirations. And everything on that spectrum of human needs is open to fulfilment. That’s the essence of Liberal Socialism.
It’s just psychology, in the end.
And that’s why we have a Silly Olympics. Because it makes people happy and they get to have fun and express themselves like grown-up children should be able to do.
Hmm. You really want me to tell you what’s in it, don’t you, readers darlings? Yeah you do, admit it! Ok, far from me to disappoint.
Well, whilst I did have a paw in initiating the first Silly Olympiad, I can’t claim the invention. That accolade, naturally, must go to the glorious Monty Python.
Specifically, this sketch from the Fliegender Zirkus (the special German edition they did; the sketch was repeated when they performed live at the Hollywood Bowl – which is this one):
Definitely watch that, reader dear.
Anyhow, the idea for the modern (or postmodern, even) Silly Olympics arose following London’s successful bid for the 2012 Games (06 July 2005 – note what happened in your world the following day – like I said, the monsters hate the Games and really don’t want you to be happy), along with the growth of my streaming service. One of our channels is devoted to comedy, and so during one of our production meetings we thought about organising some kind of Silly Games. We already had a lot of fun stuff on our PAWS-Retro channel, like ‘It’s a Knockout’ and the like, so it was a natural evolution from that. During that meeting, everyone had a great time throwing in increasingly silly suggestions for events, until we realised what we actually had was a genuine schedule of events for a Silly Olympics. So we compiled our first list of events and copyrighted it (yeah – it’s all about Intellectual Property rights in our world too – and yeah, I may well be my world’s richest socialist but I have no qualms about resorting to predatory capitalism when it suits me – as Frankie Boyle regularly reminds everyone on Dogpile – ah, people have been asking me about that, after I mentioned it in my last journal entry – it’s just a regular comedy panel show in which we take the piss out of the dumbest stuff on social media – I’m one of the regulars, along with Frankie and a lot of other comedians you’d be familiar with in Britain; it’s presented by the eternally acerbically sarcastic David Mitchell, so I would imagine you can visualise it pretty well yourselves). And then we organised a national Silly Games to whet people’s appetite (and, yeah, maybe give Team Britannia a head start). Given that I was definitely about to face competition for my first mover streaming service (ask Bezos) it also happened to be a canny business decision.
So that first National Silly Games happened in summer 2006 in the very silly city of Sheffield and was a roaring success. For my business too – we got at least another 50 million subscribers just for that (each paying 5 quid a month, or 50 a year – we nearly on a billion now, so you do the math). The clamour for an international version was inevitable, so the following year the inaugural Silly Olympiad took place in that even sillier city, Liverpool (I’ve always been fond of Liverpool, not just because I’m a socialist and I like music but also because I like football; and the people of that city are wonderful). The British government, obviously, had zero objections to any of this, given how much money it would bring in to the country, and besides it gave the Prime Minister for Economic Affairs (Derek Wall – a cheeky cunning bugger of a Chancellor if ever there was one) to print even more new money (just to rub it in to the Conservatives when it didn’t lead to inflation).
So then, events. Firstly I should say that some of the events in that Python sketch are just too silly. Besides, trying to find enough people in the world who think they’re chickens, let alone also willing to do a steeplechase, is an Olympic sport in itself. We did think about this, though, and tried to think up ways we could replicate the events in that sketch without making them, well, manufactured and pretend, if you see what I mean. So, instead of the ‘Marathon for incontinents’ we have the Marathon Pub Crawl (or Race, rather – well, it’s supposed to be a race, but it can degenerate into a crawl by the end), which is usually only allowed for students. There are two versions of that, over the usual Marathon distance (26 miles and a bit), one in which you have one drink/pub every mile, and the hardcore one where you have two every mile. Each drink has to be one unit of alcohol, and you’re not allowed to have the same drink twice.
For the ‘steeplechase for people who think they’re chickens’ we had to think hard about that one. Fancy dress is an option, and maybe balancing on each hurdle doing a chicken impression. Or, of course, just doing it as an egg-and-spoon affair.
So yes, we do have all those school sports day favourites – that was kind of a must-have. Egg and spoon, three-legged, sack race, and so on. Likewise the It’s a Knockout and Gladiators kind of stuff. And for all you dog-lovers out there, yes, there are doggy events, like obstacle courses and then the artistic doggy dancing stuff (think Kate & Gin off Britain’s Got Talent). Everyone loves that.
With regards to the ‘100m for people with no sense of direction’ that one was much easier to work out. We would simply either blindfold them, or each competitor would be spun round and round a dozen times and then the starting pistol would go off immediately. Then we thought, well, why not combine the two? So that’s what we did. Notice that also means we can have some ‘Paralympics’ within the Games. Putting a blindfold on a sighted runner levels the playing field, so to speak.
Another, related one is backwards running (from 100m up to 1500m). Likewise the monkey race – that’s on all fours, of course. This is where the silly walks insinuates itself into the Silly Games - there are various distances and you can work the rest out yourself.
When some bright spark suggested the steeplechase should be having to go under the hurdles (possibly whilst doing a chicken impression), this opened up a whole new world of options. Adding (see-through) tunnels also got in there. Along with some more creative (and moving) obstacles. So this got us onto field events. Thus, instead of high jump, we have the limbo (which originated in Tobago, so those islanders were happy) naturally accompanied by the appropriate music (try watching that to Aga-bloody-doo without your brain getting messed up).
With the other field events, we decided to make the throwing events all about accuracy rather than distance. So, for example, with the javelin you have to hit targets and throw it through suspended rings and such like. Gongs a necessity for added comedic possibility. Those targets are like the Guys you put on bonfires, made up to look like various horrible people from the annals of history, each of them representing a degree of difficulty and distance and, of course, corresponding points. People do argue about the points allocations here – like should Thatcher really get you more points than Henry Kissinger? It is, I know, a tricky philosophical question (unless you’re from Liverpool).
Similar applies to the other throwing events. Shot put, for example, you need to throw varying sized shots into holes of varying size and distance within a time limit. Kind of like World’s Strongest Man (all those events were incorporated later, by popular demand). I can’t stand shot put, by the way. It’s bollocks.
Notice how a lot of these field events are more about skill than strength, albeit with added comedy value. This means a wider range of people can participate (yes, a lot of current and former regular Olympians did decide to have a go, with varied success – yours truly included – they insisted). One of the delightful and unintended consequences of all this being more people are now interested in doing sports, and a lot of schools and universities provide opportunities for Silly events. And some countries and institutions, ironically, actually take the entire thing seriously. The marathon, for example, which can also be a team event, to the extent that some of them have even developed strategies. Madness. The world record, if I remember correctly, for the Marathon Pub Crawl is just under three hours! That’s just crazy. I think that guy must’ve gotten totally lucky with the queues at the bar.
I don’t do marathons, by the way. Not out of principle, I just don’t think the human body is evolved for that stuff. I’m a sprinter, not an endurance person. As I may have said, I can do my Vmax for around 15 minutes.
Now let’s talk about golf. The golf, believe it or not, is one of my personal favourites. Aside from the classic Crazy Golf (greatly extended), we have Pinball Golf, which takes place on the driving range. You have twenty balls and five minutes. The range is strewn with gongs. Now doesn’t visualising that put a smile on your face? Who ever said golf was a good walk spoiled never envisaged Pinball Golf. Obviously you get different points depending on the difficulty (size of target plus distance). Round one is each individual having their go. Round two is the knockout in which more than one person goes at the same time. It really does get totally mad when you reach the quarter finals and there’s eight people all whacking balls around simultaneously with a decreasing amount of time available.
We do a similarly silly thing with other ball games (football, handball, basketball, volleyball and so on – also water polo), in which we simply have more than one ball in play. So we’d usually split the game into four quarters, and starting with two balls in the first quarter, add an extra one each subsequent quarter, until at the end there are five balls in play. With football, by the way, the regular Olympic version has switched to a kind of indoor five-a-side version where you can play off the walls, so it’s a lot more fast-paced, skilful, and exciting (a bit like futsal). Normal football has more than enough competitions of its own to warrant not being in the regular Games. Besides, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) realised they were attracting competition from the Silly Games, so they needed to up their game a little, so to speak. I’ve noticed, in fact, that your version of the IOC is including some increasingly unsuitable – or even silly – events in your regular Games. Personally I think that’s to deliberately undermine them – like I said – your bad guys really don’t like stuff that makes you happy.
Like BMX and Skateboarding, for example. Nothing against those games, by the way, but they don’t belong in the real Games. We have these in the Silly Olympics, except they’re a lot more creative, especially when someone suggested they should be rolled into one combined event, and then infused with some BMX Bandits shenanigans. I read somewhere they’re thinking of including Breakdancing in the next Games – now that, really, is just silly.
What else? Ah, well there are some cool action-oriented events. Archery, for example, isn’t just people sitting or standing around taking their time shooting unmoving targets. There’s a course, in which targets just, well, you know, pop up randomly. And you have to do it in proper medieval costume (Robin Hood etc.). You have to be careful though because not all of these targets are bad guys – some of them are innocent peasants, men of the cloth and assorted ladies-in-waiting, albeit with apples on their heads.
We do the same thing with shooting (not just pistols – little miss 9mm and pump action shotguns also allowed). Guy wanders into arena armed with various weapons, cardboard bad guys pop up randomly, minus points for shooting hostages. You get the picture. The CIA enjoy that one. Given that our military don’t really do war anymore, and we can’t have them just sitting around getting bored, they decided they wanted to have a go, and promptly demanded the inclusion of some of their obstacle courses. Fair enough, was the answer. They were quite right, though – we did need some endurance events. So instead of stuff like the triathlon/modern pentathlon we have a long adventure course. We call it the ‘Tarzan’ course, which includes swimming across a river, rope swinging and a kind of Greco-Roman wrestling thing with a dude in a crocodile costume. And the unwary may well get their foot caught in a giant clam. This one is a time trial. There can be base jumping involved too. Kind of combination of silly plus really quite exciting.
There is, however, a proper Modern Pentathlon (I also do this competition, I should add – aside from obvious swimming and running, in which I have a distinct advantage over most modern pentathletes, I also happen to be pretty good at fencing, shooting and I can ride horses over jumps – I don’t have time to do that now though, what with everything else I’m doing – maybe when I’m older). The original Modern Pentathlon competition really was conceived through imagining a kind of spy trapped behind enemy lines with a message to deliver back to his own people. So he has to ford a river (the 200m freestyle, the first event), then he has to shoot some bad guys, then he runs out of ammo and has to take them on mano-a-mano with his trusty sword, then he has to steal a horse (this is why it’s randomly allocated horses in the modern event, with only 20 minutes to get to know that horse), gallop over hedges and the like until the horse runs out of steam then the spy has to run the rest of the way (represented by the two-mile cross country). It’s a really cool competition, which I love (not just because it’s spy-related), because it tests all your different capabilities. In our Silly version, you have to do it in costume, and it’s a continuous event, starting with a real open-water swim (usually a river, if possible). Then there’s a pop-up target range, followed by what are essentially NPCs (non-player characters) armed with epees, who you have to get around somehow. Then there’s a bit of a run to some stables where it’s first come first served with the horses. You then have to guide that horse (who you haven’t met before) over a mile-long steeplechase, then you do your cross-country which, hehe, does have some hidden traps for the unwary. It is a seriously challenging event but it does get really exciting.
So yeah, for all you LARPers out there, you’d love our Silly Games too. So we also have the adventuring party event, which is time-trialled again (and no expense spared so in the previous few olympiads an entire dungeon was constructed – with CCTV – or think that classic children’s TV show Knightmare – which was always one of my favourites) – there’s a bit of orienteering (or at least map-reading) involved here, and naturally your wizard has a limited number of spells, so use them wisely. Then to culminate there’s the team event, which is essentially just a huge free-for-all battle, followed by a complementary medieval banquet.
Given these are the kinds of people who enjoy classic tabletop board games, they were eventually included too. This is another team event, lasting a whole week, with two randomly selected games a day (each team member only allowed to play two games) finishing up with a pub quiz. This can sometimes include arcade games and more action-oriented ones like Subbuteo and table-hockey. We got this one from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, of course, so we had to include Twister in there.
On a similarly amusing note, we do have Greco-Roman wrestling, except they do it wearing pyjamas (or onesies), on a court over varying levels, the aim being to get your opponent up staircases and onto a bed (yes, it does take some time). This led to us developing some ridiculously grandiose ideas about having real life computer platform games. This also grew out of one of the original events which was the school gym classic Pirates, in which you have to get the entire way round the gym without touching the ground.
We briefly considered Rollerball, but that’s just too dangerous and violent and dystopian (I’m surprised you haven’t got that one yet – give it time, give it time). I did tell you, I’m sure, what a huge fan of all those classic sci-fi dystopias I am. And that one is a classic and if you haven’t seen it I urge you to do so (make sure it’s the original 1975 one, though). Accept no substitutes.
We also have a sort of Mayan ball game, not that dissimilar to indoor football actually. And whilst we’re on the subject of movies we have another new game called Pawball, which comes from a movie I wrote and starred in called Meet the Paschats (2012), in which humans do their first interstellar voyage to Alpha Centauri and, well, meet the Paschats (they’re leonine, in case you were wondering). Pawball is a team game played on a court, in which the goals are just holes in the ground about twice as big as the ball, and to score you must have your back to the goal. You can use any paw you like (for humans that’s hands and feet, obviously). There aren’t many rules aside from that. So that’s quite fun.
Then there is the wonderful and ever popular Hide n’ Seek. We have the quick version that takes place in the stadium field (various hiding places are set up – the spectators know where the hider is, but they’re not allowed to tell, apart from ‘warm’ and ‘cold’). But if you want to get an idea of how the longform version of that works, you must watch this sketch:
Obviously, going that far would just be too silly. Well, it wouldn’t be too silly it would just be unworkable. So our version involves a kind of clue hunt. There are teams of two, in which one hides and one seeks (not each other, mind). The hiding locations are dotted around the host city and drawn randomly out of a hat. The seekers, meanwhile, are randomly assigned a hider from another team to find and given their first clue. As you can imagine, this gives a host nation a huge advantage, although we had to change the rules there after those pesky Liverpudlians started moving clues around and providing misinformation to competitors. But it does last all day, and it is great fun to watch these people navigating foreign public transport, rummaging around in bins and asking policemen for directions. They all wear little headcams, in case you were wondering (plus we have them all monitored via the CCTV network). It’s nearly always a case of ‘ah – something’s happening in the hide n seek – over to Carol. What’s up Carol? Well, David, the Portuguese seeker is getting very warm indeed! Just one more clue to go, except, hold on, he’s been arrested! For trespass! Doesn’t he have an exemption for that in the rules, Carol? Yes, David, and he is protesting but the policeman didn’t get the memo! This could get nasty, David. Oh! He’s gotten free! He’s biffed the policeman on the nose and now he’s legging it! Wow! Well, thank you Carol, you don’t see that every day. Now back to the Philosopher’s football, where it’s Greece twelve, America zip.’
Yes, of course it wouldn’t be the Silly Olympics without a philosophers’ football match now, would it? We had to put a lot of thought into this one because replicating the Python sketch just wouldn’t work. So we drew up some rules. First, your national team must be composed of actual philosophers. Which is to say, people with at least a postgraduate degree in philosophy. Second, they do indeed have to do it in costume. Third, there are no fewer than twelve balls on the pitch to begin with, and if you score, you have to fetch the ball yourself, run all the way back to your own goal, around the back of the net and put it in the skip. During which time, one of the linesmen simply chucks another ball on to the pitch. This keeps going until someone has a Eureka! moment and just happens to discover the magic ball, which is worth twenty-two points for a goal. And no, of course I’m not saying how you can tell which is the magic one. They have to work that one out themselves.
But to return the swimming pool, where I started, I mean. As with those silly strokes, like Trudgen and doggy paddle, in place of diving we have the classic bombing competition. And you do get extra points for style (and according to difficulty). And yes, of course wearing a costume and shouting ‘Geronimo!’ or, with great kudos, ‘Remember the Alamo!’ (before chucking the Mexican out), has become somewhat de rigueur.
And great fun is had by all. Because humanity should be able to smile more often, don’t you think?
So this was all à-propos of my mentioning froggy style. It’s because my breaststroke, according to most observers in the club, is shit. So that’s where we’re going to be doing a lot of work. My other three are beyond perfect, say my coaches, but breaststroke – shit. “You’ll have to sort it out soon enough, Katrina,” they keep saying, or you’ll have Adam Peaty on your arse. And you really don’t want to see him get mad.” “The tattooed tank, you mean?” “Ah-huh.” “Yeah,” says I, “that may be, but I can still do a 400IM in less than four minutes fifty, eh?”
Anyway, all of this demonstrates my mischievous streak. My coaches were minded to inform British Swimming about me so I said “No! No! No!” They looked at me oddly. “If I’m going to this Edinburgh competition in March then we’ll submit my personal bests say a month earlier, or I could even swim slower when we do my timings, then I get to Edinburgh and win and totally surprise them. How about it?” “I think they’ll ask serious questions if you fake your PBs, Katrina.” “Hmm, fair enough,” says I. “But still, let’s be mischievous and not tell them, eh?”
They relented. No informing of British Swimming. Obviously if someone involved with them, or in the team, happens to come across this online journal then the Katrina’s out of the bag. So don’t tell them, reader dear. Don’t tell ‘em!
Anyhow, I still feel sorry for all the kids having to go back to school. It’s no fun. And it should be fun.
In my world, it’s not parents who have trouble getting the children up for school in the morning. It’s children who drag their parents out of bed.
And teenagers, well, they have a different circadian rhythm to us grown-ups, so they don’t have to start lessons until ten, rather than nine. Then again, I’m a teenager again now, aren’t I? That maybe explains something.
Hmm. I think I should maybe tell you a bit more about our hallowed education system, eh?
Another time, reader darling. Another time. I’m a good girl now, so I’m off to beddie-bows to ride the silvery wings…
Sleep well until next time…
you never cease to amaze me, Evelyn. Quite hilarious and also python. I mean. Yes.