'Batmobile' is dubious honour for superhero Moss
Stirling Moss drove a vast assortment of fast cars during his wonderful career. Some of the cars were beautiful and some less so, but none of them was as downright ugly as the one just named in his honour. The Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss bears a vague resemblance to the car in which he won the Mille Miglia in 1955, one of his most famous victories, but the overall effect is closer to the aesthetics of the Batmobile. Its looks as are vulgar and egregious as its performance: at this stage in the life of the planet, who needs a road car that can go from nought to 60 in 3.5sec and claims a top speed of 217mph? But no insults from this quarter will damage its commercial prospects. All 75 examples have been pre-sold to owners who have £815,000 to spare. Or who had it to spare, before the recession hit. You never know: they may yet be turning up on eBay.
Two decks of heady in herery pleasey herery
With the passing of Harold Pinter, sport lost one of its occasional poets. The Lost Leader, a new collection of verse by Mick Imlah, is threaded with references to Scottish rugby, notably in a lengthy elegy to a late university friend with whom he shared a love of the game as played by men in dark blue shirts: ... Those days, the Scots lost more games than they won, / But the playing parts were mightier than the sum: / The last sparks of the cherub Andy Irvine, / My mother's favourite, "out of Heriot's"; / The hooker, Deans, pent-up, belligerent; / The steep kicks of our fly-half, Rutherford / ("That one's come down with snow on it, I'll tell you"); / Paxton the number eight, who on the box / Was always "thumping on" or "smashing on"; / And Leslie, the deadly flanker from Dundee. Echoes of the Bill McLaren era there, of course – and, in a poem called London Scottish, a moving evocation of the sportsmen who went off to fight in the War to End All Wars.
Two decks of heady in herery pleasey herery
After winning everything else available to him, Chris Hoy will just have to put up with being edged out of the top spot in this column's quote of the year awards. His classic reply to a journalist who asked "What does Chris Hoy think of Chris Hoy?" – "Chris Hoy thinks that the day Chris Hoy refers to Chris Hoy in the third person is the day that Chris Hoy disappears up his own arse" – is narrowly displaced by Sachin Tendulkar's majestically resonant statement of purpose after his match-winning century against England in Chennai earlier this month, in the shadow of the Mumbai attacks. "I play for India," the little prince said, "now more than ever."
Two decks of heady in herery pleasey herery
Lance Armstrong, who had three children with his (now former) wife Kristin by artificial means, using semen stored before his treatment for cancer in the mid-1990s, announced at the weekend that his Australian girlfriend Anna Hansen will give birth in June to their first child, conceived naturally. That's what I call a comeback.
richard.williams@theguardian.com
