You Have to be In it to Win It

On Sunday I went to a Taekwondo seminar in Manchester. This included 45 minutes each of step sparring (attack, block, counter-attack), one-for-one kicking and free sparring, self-defence, destruction (breaking things by kicking or punching), and poomsae (patterns, essentially choreography of series of techniques). It was a terrific training session, but it was also there to help you assess whether you were ready to grade up (in my case to second Dan) in December. I decided that in view of my rather inconsistent performance in certain areas that I am not ready. This makes me a bit sad. If I don’t go for it, I can’t grade up. There’s no point praying to God that you’ll win the lottery if you won’t meet him half way and buy a ticket. However, there will be another chance in six months. I feel that I would have a very good chance of laying an egg if I made the attempt now, and my self-esteem is quite sufficiently low already.

My dad was a great believer in entering competitions and frequently won things. Not the luxurious house or the car, but more modest prizes. He did the Guardian prize crossword every week, and after he had won the dictionary which was the standard prize, he would fill in the names of his children on his entry. I think at least one of my brothers vicariously received the Guardian dictionary.

Incidentally, it does occur to me that if you have successfully completed the Guardian cryptic crossword, you don’t really need a dictionary. Perhaps instead the prize should be something to take you out of yourself, give yourself a life. Roller skates, or a banjo, maybe.

Dad would enter all sorts of competitions, and if the opportunity for multiple entries arose, again he would enter on behalf of myself or one of my brothers and sisters. I remember my bemusement when a package of toiletries and fragrances arrived for me in the post one morning. I wondered if perhaps my friends or colleagues were dropping a less than subtle hint that my person gave off a noxious odour, and had ordered me a bulk quantity of canard de toilette, or whatever it was called.

On another occasion, a box of bars of Fry’s Chocolate Cream arrived. This was much more welcome than the toiletries. Who is going to turn up his or her nose at free chocolate?

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All this talk of my dad has reminded me of something someone once said about his appearance. A friend described him as looking like Max Schreck playing the vampire in the 1922 film Nosferatu. Actually, my dad looked very much like me now, except that his nose was much more hooked than mine. This was due to his breaking it several times as a young man. He did a bit of boxing when he was in the army (that was all the fighting he saw). He also had a motorbike for which the easiest way of stopping the engine was to stall it. He would do this by gently driving into a wall, which would stop the wheels and the engine would then cut out. One day he did this at rather too high a speed, and after the motorcycle stopped, dad’s face continued on its merry way, his nose smashing into the brick wall.

Another unfortunate incident for his proboscis was when he was speed skating (he had a bit of a misspent youth, bunking off school and going to snooker halls and ice rinks). According to his own account he was coming in first in a skating race, when he fell at the last lap due to the ice being a little too warm and slushy. He completed the last forty feet flat on his face, his hooter ploughing a furrow in the slush. Anyway, the old fellow had a nose which was aquiline, to say the least.

                                                                            Dad

                                            

                                                                    Nosferatu

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To come back to entering competitions and winning them, do you remember the early days of the national lottery when there was considerable excitement over the televised generation of the winning numbers, and avid discussion of the chances of winning and so on? There is an email group for statisticians called allstat, in which the exchanges when I belonged to it were mind-numbingly tedious. I recall a long thread in the early years of this century when there was a considerably quantity of rather dry academic discussion of rollovers, when the unawarded quantity is added to next week’s pot, so that the prize becomes greater and the initial outlay of a pound more justified. So this allstat discussion went on and on. This is about the possibility of winning hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of pounds, and we statisticians managed to make it boring.

Incidentally, did I ever tell you what our friend Sheila Bird, herself a statistician, said about our profession? She quoted someone, no idea who, saying that statisticians are people who are good with figures but don’t have the personality to become accountants.

Anyway, I got a bit fed up with the rather abstract and theoretical discussion, and the almost hypnotic frequency with which the word rollover appeared, so I threw this into the mix: ‘It was a rollover week for the dustmen in Cambridge this week, as I forgot to put the bin out last Wednesday.’

You could have wrung buckets of withering contempt out of the ethereal silence which followed my contribution. Which illustrates the well known maxim: nobody likes a smartarse.