Life as a batsman

Simon Barnes in Cricinfo

Batting is about death. And life of course. It's all about how useful - how good - a life you lead before you die. You are surrounded by pitfalls and bayed about by enemies, but the good person will come through adversity to triumph. And the less good person won't.

That life-and-death metaphor gives cricket its USP: its own particular force and vividness. Cricket - red-ball cricket in particular - is all about the little death of dismissal. Every great innings takes place in the shadow of fallibility. That, in the end, is what cricket means.

Batsmen, writes Simon Hughes, "are walking the tightrope between success and failure. One minuscule error and they're toast. Terminé. Caput."

Hughes has always brought an original mind to the interpretation of cricket. He invented the concept of The Analyst for Channel Four in Britain, and now he tries to analyse batsmanship in his latest, highly enjoyable book, Who Wants to be a Batsman? He calls on his experience of more than 200 first-class innings, and his career-long struggle to add a decent batting CV to the deceptively fast arm he possessed as a bowler.

He returns to the infinitely fragile nature of every batsman's experience. "In tennis, if you lose 6-0 6-0 and haven't returned a single ball, you will have still served a few yourself. You have contributed something to the match. In football, unless you score an own goal with the last kick of the game, you have got time to atone for any mistake you might have made. Hell, even if you have shanked every drive into the bushes on the golf course, there is always hope that you will nail one down the middle on the eighteenth…

"But nought in cricket. What has that achieved?"

Cricketers cherish the notion that a bowler can bowl a bad ball that's whacked for six and get a wicket next ball, but one error - one tiny, measly error - from the batsman and he's gone.

A batsman needs to combine rampant egomania with the selflessness of a Zen monk, and to hold the two things in perfect balance

But it's not necessarily true. And even if it were, it wouldn't be unique in sport. Batsmen make mistakes and survive. Very few batsmen reach three figures without a play-and-miss or a false shot. Perhaps every century is a demonstration of how much the batsman has got away with.

Joe Root made a major error in the first Test of the recent Ashes series. He should have been out for nought and gone back to the pavilion asking himself what he had achieved. But Brad Haddin dropped the chance, Root made a century, England won and Root was the hero.

In other words, and contrary to standard wisdom, there is a margin for error in batting. The top players are better at coping with it, and above all, better at cashing in when matters beyond their control happen to work in their favour.

The routine humiliation of dismissal is not unique to cricket. There are quite a few sports in which your participation can be over before the finish - and long before you're ready to give up. Sonny Liston failed to complete either of his two fights against Muhammad Ali: quitting on his stool in the first and knocked out in the second.

In all jumping competitions in the horsey world your participation can end prematurely with an involuntary dismount. I have watched the Grand National favourite fall at the first fence. I have experienced a public crash-landing or two myself, as it happens, and believe me, it hurts more than being clean bowled - about which, too, I know in more detail than I would wish.

In sports more dangerous than cricket every competitor knows that participation could end with the assistance of a stretcher. In some sports real deaths happen more often than they do in cricket. Let's have a moment of silence for Phillip Hughes at this point - but we should also recall that in 1999 five people were killed in the equestrian sport of eventing.

Back to the pavilion before facing a ball: Usain Bolt is disqualified in the final of the World Athletics Championships © AFP

In track and field, errors are savagely punished, and sometimes it's worse than getting out first ball. It's like being sent back to the pavvy for taking guard wrong. You're out without running a single stride of the race. Terminé. Caput. It happened to Usain Bolt in the final of the World Championships in 2011.

So I dispute the self-pitying notion of all batsmen (and ex-batsmen in the commentary box) who tell us that batting is a uniquely fragile sporting discipline. It just feels like that when you're out there.

That doesn't mean that a batsman is not in a unique position, and that it's not fraught with psychological problems of all kinds. It's just that cricketers - tied up in the intricacies of a single sport - tend not to identify the uniquely troubling aspect of batsmanship. It's the twin load of responsibility. When you fail as a batsman you have not one but two reasons to feel bad. You have lost a contest against another individual - and you have also let down your colleagues. You have failed yourself andyou have failed your team.

That's a hefty burden to bear. Of course there's an essence of that in all team sports - it's rather the point of them. But in most team sports you are operating with others. A goalkeeper in football is not as isolated as he looks: he's in constant dialogue with his central defenders, and his distribution of the ball is a core skill.

A batsman is as lonely as a golfer or a tennis player - but he's also working for other people. In some competitions they make tennis players and golfers shoulder a batsman's twin responsibilities: the Ryder Cup, Solheim Cup, Davis Cup and Fed Cup. Often you see great players unable to cope with a secondary responsibility: Tiger Woods never got the hang of it.

A great batsman must be like a top Ryder Cup golfer, not once every two years but in every single innings. He must - like Colin Montgomerie - find inspiration in this double responsibility. Woods goes straight back to strokeplay golf; for a batsman there is no other game.

If you fail as a batsman, you must deal with your personal inadequacies. Graham Gooch began his Test career with a pair. Repeated failure will cost you your place in the team. Your career will suffer. So will your sense of self-worth. But failure will also cost your team. You will fail to contribute. You will stop feeling like a part of the whole. You will lose matches and even if no one says anything, you know what you've done and what you haven't done.

Every great innings takes place in the shadow of fallibility. That, in the end, is what cricket means

It's the double whammy that's unique to batsmanship. That extends to cricket's bastard sister, baseball; the difference here is that baseball is weighted towards the pitcher and a dismissal is a relatively trivial matter; it's a run that's a big deal. All the same, the batter and the batsman share a double burden .

It follows, then, that again and again Simon Hughes goes back to the mental side of things. He offers "Ten Wanna Be Batsman Rules": of these, eight are mental. One is semi-facetious (this is "Yozzer" writing after all) and rule eight is "play at the Oval." The only physical tip is "Keep the head still."

It's almost as if every batsman had the same amount of physical ability, and that the only difference between good and great was mental posture. That's clearly not true: David Gower, Brian Lara and Kevin Pietersen clearly had something extra. But they also had mental ability: they could put errors behind them, didn't get sucked into the wrong sort of confrontation, knew how to pace an innings, understood when to stick and when to twist.

In cricket you often see a player of (comparatively) limited physical ability playing any number of match-winning innings because of a great mental attitude. Alastair Cook is a classic example of this type.

A player with a lesser degree of pure talent never takes success for granted. He is naturally disposed to make the most of every let-off. Thus you can turn an apparent disadvantage into an advantage. That's one of the most fascinating things about sport - and it's very cricket.

Batting is about shame and guilt: the shame of personal failure and the guilt at playing a part in team failure. It's also about escaping from - or being inspired by - these two things to find individual and corporate glory. You must sink yourself into the common cause without losing your sense of individuality.

A batsman needs to combine rampant egomania with the selflessness of a Zen monk, and to hold the two things in perfect balance. Unsurprising, then, that excellence is a rare thing - and that we value it so highly when we find it.

Man who killed himself at Dignitas explains decision in film

Dan Carrier in The Guardian



Jeffrey Spector, right, at dinner with his family, said his condition could have left him with neck-down paralysis at any moment and he believed in his right to dignity. Photograph: Warren Smith 

A businessman with an inoperable tumour has killed himself at an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland – after spending his last seven days making a film for his widow and three children.

Jeffrey Spector died on Monday, six years after he was diagnosed with an inoperable tumour that was growing near his spinal column.

Doctors had warned him the condition would eventually lead to paralysis and death and so Spector said he decided he wanted to be in control of the final stages of his life.

When his illness began to get worse he decided that he had no option but to travel to Switzerland due to UK law. He said: “Assisted suicide is illegal in the UK so it had to be Switzerland.”

He added that he decided it was time when his symptoms increased in severity. “I put one date off so that my daughter could do her exams – but I was going downhill and was finding it hard to use my hands. I had no pressure in my fingers.

“I felt the illness had crossed the red line and I was getting worse. Rather than go late, I am jumping the gun. I call it the least worst option, which is best for my family in the long term.”

Spector, who was the director of a number of advertising and internet firms in Blackpool, Lancashire, chose to be joined by a film crew for the last week of his life. His decision to be filmed has echoes of the death of Guernsey-based hotelier Peter Smedley, whose assisted death in 2011 was screened in a documentary by the late Sir Terry Pratchett for the BBC.

Spector, whose family joined him at the Zurich clinic, described his condition as “a walking timebomb” as he could be struck with neck-down paralysis at any moment.

In an interview released by Dignitas, Spector said he was not scared of death and added: “Never judge someone until you have worn their shoes.

“I know I am going too early. My family disagree, but I believe this is in their best interests.” Stating he wanted to be “in control of the final stages of my life”, he said: “I was a fit and healthy person and my life has been turned upside down.

“What started as backache in 2008 developed into an illness that led me to having to make this most awful decision. Friends, and most of all my family, have urged me not to go through with it.”

Spector first discovered he was ill when he complained of having a sore back and stiff neck. He collapsed at a hotel after attending a friend’s retirement party and sought medical advice. He said: “I thought I had overdone things. My legs went in the hotel room. I got back home and booked in for an MRI scan.

“The phone call from the clinic asked me to go for another scan, which revealed a large tumour high up in my spine in and around the spinal cord.

“My surgeon was confident he could remove the tumour but tests revealed it would be too dangerous. I woke up thinking it would be out, but he told me he could not even take a biopsy.”

Instead, surgeons removed bones elsewhere in his back to relieve pressure caused by the tumour, but it continued to grow.

Spector added: “Had it been lower down the spine, and I lost the use of my legs, I would have been distraught but I could cope. Where it was meant total paralysis from my neck down.”

As the tumour grew, Spector visited the Dignitas clinic and decided that he would kill himself before the tumour’s advance meant he would be unable to do so.

He said: “I know I am going too early but I had consistent thoughts without peer pressure. It had to be a settled decision by a sound mind. If I am paralysed and cannot speak, then what hope is there? I am a proud person – a dignified person, independent and self motivated. It is me who is doing this.”

In the UK, anyone convicted of assisting a suicide can face a 14-year jail term. Pressure group Dignity In Dying, which counted Pratchett as one of its patrons, have long campaigned to change the law.

Labour peer Lord Falconer proposed a bill stating that if someone has a prognosis of less than six months to live, they should be allowed to have an assisted death subject to a number of safeguards and checks. His private member’s bill was debated in the House of Lords in June 2014 and reached the committee stage in parliament in January. However, due to opponents delaying its progress, the bill did not reach the Commons before parliament was dissolved ahead of the general election.

“Some people will criticise me, but do not judge me,” said Spector. “I believe in my human right to dignity. I want the ability to have a cup of tea and hold a phone – I want to be able to do those things myself.

“I believe what I am doing is in the best long term interests of my family. They disagree, but they do accept I have my own opinion.”

A family friend said on Monday: “Jeffrey was not for changing his mind. He did not want to be unable to walk or talk.

“From the outside he appeared as normal – chatty, driving his car, but inside he knew he was getting worse. People have tried to talk him out of this, his own family have begged him.

“But if Jeffrey Spector could not be the Jeffrey Spector we all knew, because of this tumour, this was his way out.”

We can’t control how we’ll die. The limits of individual responsibility

It’s important to live healthily, but scientists also tell us that the majority of cancers are down to chance – a good reminder of the limits of individual responsibility

• 
• • Owen Jones
  • theguardian.com, Friday 2 January 2015 11.25 GMT

'Most cancers are a random lightning bolt, not something we can avoid by keeping away from tobacco or excessive booze or by going for regular morning runs.' Photograph: Alamy

Our terror of death (happy new year, by the way) surely has much to do with a fear that it is out of our control. The lifetime risk of dying in a road accident is disturbingly high – one in 240 – and yet the freakishly small chance of dying in a plane accident generally provokes far more fear. We dread a final few moments in which we are powerless to do anything except wait for oblivion. So perhaps the news that most cancers are the product of bad luck – rather than, say, our diet or lifestyles – is scant reassurance. Most cancers are a random lightning bolt, not something we can avoid by keeping away from tobacco or excessive booze, or by going for regular morning runs. That’s something we have to live with.

But perhaps the news should be of comfort. It is, of course, crucial to promote healthy lifestyles. Regular exercise, a good diet and the avoidance of excess does save lives. Yet the cult of individualism fuels the idea that we are invariably personally responsible for the situation we are in: whether that be poverty, unemployment or ill health. Cancer is more individualised than most diseases: all that talk of “losing” or “winning” battles. A far wiser approach was summed up by DJ Danny Baker after his own diagnosis. He said he was “just the battlefield, science is doing the fighting and of course the wonderful docs and nurses of the brilliant NHS”. The cancer patient, in other words, was practically a bystander in a collective effort.

One of the heroes of 2014 was Stephen Sutton because of his infectious optimism and cheerfulness in the face of cancer. But his battle was about not letting cancer consume his final few months on earth, rather than a superhuman quest to miraculously defeat the disease himself. What struck me about Stephen was that a situation that seemed nightmarish to most of us became an opportunity for him to take control of his life. It is what struck me, too, about Gordon Aikman, a 29-year-old Scot with a terminal diagnosis of motor neurone disease. There is no right way to die, but he has learned how to live.

So that’s why I have some sympathy with Richard Smith, a doctor who once edited the British Medical Journal. He has upset many by suggesting we are “wasting billions trying to cure cancer”, when it is the “best” way to go. I certainly would not advocate cutting back on cancer research, quite the opposite – even if other fatal diseases don’t receive the same amount of attention – and cancer can be a horrible way to die. But his point was that it provided an opportunity to make peace, to reflect on life, to do all the things you always wanted to do – to finally have control over your own life. Other ways of dying simply do not provide that option, either because they are so sudden or because of the form they take.

We have less of a say over how and when we die than we thought. That may be a cause for anxiety: it may actually frighten us more. I think it’s liberating. If only we learned to live like many of those – like Stephen or Gordon – facing death, taking control of their lives, we would be so much happier than we are.

Why the bouncer is not essential to cricket

Pranay Sanklecha in Cricinfo

The bouncer: not worth the risk  © Getty Images

Enlarge

The death of Phillip Hughes was also the death of a certain kind of false, if sincere, innocence about the game. We are reminded that cricket balls can kill. So what should we do about bouncers?

The standard answer - unanimous, even, when it comes to the old pros who constitute the majority of those who write and talk about cricket, is: nothing. There is nothing to do. Keep calm and carry on. We must understand that what happened to Hughes was a tragic but freak accident (by the way, as Andy Bull wrote in the Guardian, such tragedies happen more often than we might unthinkingly assume). Be sad because it's a tragedy, but don't let it change anything because it was a freakish one. 

Let one view stand for the rest. This is what Mark Richardson had to say:

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to see people getting seriously hurt and what happened to Phillip Hughes is just awful but what people have to accept is that this was such a freak occurrence and serious injury is still so rare that it does not in any way suggest cricket has a problem with the short ball at all. In fact, if cricket took away the bouncer, then we would have a problem. So let's mourn the loss of Phillip Hughes but not use it to grandstand unnecessarily.

I agree. Let's not grandstand unnecessarily. But let's also realise that this is a difficult question, and to dismiss the view that bouncers ought to be banned is itself unnecessary grandstanding, just from the opposite direction.

Let's first realise that there is a moral question here. When you run in and bowl a bouncer, you are (often, not always) aiming it at the batsman. If you're even halfway quick, you know - or after the death of Hughes you ought to, anyway - that you're doing something that carries a risk of causing death, a much greater risk than most other actions carried out while playing cricket.

It doesn't follow that you ought not to do it, or that you are to blame for doing it. What does follow is that you need a valid justification for doing it, and this is not provided by the trope that the bowler doesn't intend to hurt the batsman. Good for the bowler, but it still doesn't address the question of whether he's morally justified in imposing the risk of a very great harm on the batsman.

Now imposing a risk of a very great harm is not the same as imposing a great risk of harm. For instance, each time you fly, you run a tiny risk of a very great harm, while if you gently lob a pebble at someone from a few metres away, you impose a very big risk of a very small harm.

We seem comfortable with the former. Driving, for example, kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, but we do not believe that it should be banned. Why not? Because of roughly these two reasons: first, we believe that the benefits of the practice of driving outweigh the harm of the tragedies it causes; second, we believe that the risk of causing those harms is to some extent unavoidable. We try to minimise those risks, but we accept that given current technology we cannot eliminate them, and we accept them because of the value to us of being able to drive.

And this has been roughly the argument when it comes to bouncers. People outline its benefits: it's thrilling (which Test cricket needs to stay alive), it maintains the balance between bat and ball, it's a test of courage and thereby reveals character (men from boys and all that), it is part of the tradition of the game.

We can accept all of that, for the sake of the argument. But even after we do, we haven't justified the use of bouncers because there is one crucial difference between the practices of driving and of bowling bouncers.

For the justification of driving, it's crucial that its benefits can't be realised without running the accompanying risks. If they could, there would be absolutely no justification left for running those risks.

The bouncer does indeed create benefits. But it does not seem indispensable to creating them. Tradition is not justification, and even if it were, our traditions are mostly the innovations of an earlier time. Eliminating the bouncer would end a tradition, but it would simply be part of the story of the evolution of cricket, and many other traditions would remain. And if you want thrilling Test cricket and a competitive balance between bat and ball, you can achieve both by the simple expedient of making pitches better.

Eliminating the bouncer would end a tradition, but it would simply be part of the story of the evolution of cricket, and many other traditions would remain

One way of doing this would be, of course, to make pitches bouncier, which would increase the risk of inflicting harm, and this might seem to contradict my argument. To quote Mill, via Kipling, "nay, nay, not so, but far otherwise". First, leaving grass on, and allowing pitches to take spin, both make pitches more competitive without necessarily imparting greater bounce. Second, a bouncy pitch would certainly make it more likely that harm will be inflicted, but it's short-pitched bowling that would make it more likely to inflict great harm. And my argument is in part to do with proportionality. I'm not saying take the risk of harm out of the game, I'm saying (well, I will be shortly) that I can't see a good argument from risk vs benefit for imposing the great risks of bowling bouncers.

Make boundaries bigger while you're at it. As for courage and revealing character, well, there are any number of ways cricket does that without the bouncer. Sacrificing your wicket, playing in an unnatural style, bowling into the wind, your response to defeat and victory and misfortune - all these things reveal character. Facing spin on turning pitches is a test of courage, of confronting the fear of looking stupid. Calling for a crucial catch, standing under a ball that steeples high into the air and on which the fate of the game depends - this requires courage.

Ah, but the bouncer is special, people will say, because it's about physical courage. I agree with the latter but disagree with the former. A game with a hard ball travelling at speed will necessarily test physical courage. A game that requires the kind of unnatural exertion demanded of fast bowlers will necessarily test physical courage. A game that people play with niggling injuries, with broken fingers and torn hamstrings, as with in Michael Clarke's case basically no back - this game will test physical courage.

Some may have the intellectual honesty here to go the extreme position. The bouncer is special, they will say, because it tests - especially now, after the death of Hughes - the fear of death. And this testing creates benefits that nothing else can.

But even this, sadly, isn't true. It is not special in carrying the risk of death. To take the most recent example, think of the Israeli umpire who died because of a shot that ricocheted off the stumps. Simply by virtue of the hard ball, and the speeds at which it can be thrown and struck, cricket will always intrinsically carry the risk of causing death. People can die without bouncers being bowled. So even if you maintain that the fear of death is an essential part of cricket, you don't need bouncers to do it.

The point is not that we must make the game riskless. The only way this could even be attempted to be done is to make the ball soft. This would indeed destroy cricket. The point is that we must aim to reduce unnecessary risks. What are unnecessary risks? Well, a pretty good example is something which is not essential to creating the benefits associated with it, and something which directly increases the risk of deaths on the cricket field.

The bouncer.

I love the bouncer. It's electrifying, both to play and to watch. Atherton v Donald, Morkel v Clarke, Johnson 2.0 (or 3 or 4 or 7.7, new Mitch, moustachioed Mitch) v everyone. Who doesn't want to see that?

But I can't see an argument from the morality of risk that justifies it. I can see one other possibility, an argument from, roughly, the value of self-realisation. But reasons of space mean that will have to be the topic of a separate piece.

Anni Dewani has been failed by South Africa

She died alone and terrified in one of the bleakest parts of the country, and after the collapse of Shrien Dewani’s trial her family still has no answers

• 
• • Margie Orford in The Guardian

Anni Dewani, a young woman shot dead in Cape Town, has haunted South Africa for four years. After the collapse of the trial of her husband, Shrien Dewani, accused of masterminding her murder, she will continue to do so. Not only because she was young, beautiful and just married; not only because her heartbroken, desperate parents have been taken into so many South African hearts; but also because the country, its police force and its justice system failed her so completely.

Anni and Shrien honeymooned in South Africa after an extravagant wedding in India in 2010. After going on safari they came to Cape Town and, on Saturday 13 November, went out for dinner. On their return their taxi was hijacked. The taxi driver, Zolo Tongo, and Shrien claimed they were forced out of the car and that the hijackers drove off with Anni. Her body was found in the abandoned vehicle at dawn the next day. She had been shot at close range in the neck.

Shrien was apparently a victim of the criminal violence that plagues South Africa. The police, goaded as they were by the press frenzy, were under huge pressure to find the killers because hijacking and murder are so commonplace, but there were anomalies from the start. Gugulethu, where the hijacking occurred, is notorious for its murder rate. Why would Tongo take them there at night? Shrien, allegedly forced through a window, did not have a scratch on him, and neither did Tongo.

Whispers of disbelief quickly began to swirl. Shrien looked less and less innocent as detectives and journalists picked apart the sequence of events described, and the statements he had made. The police, however, allowed him to return to England before the inconsistent aspects of the case – and his possible involvement in his wife’s murder – were properly investigated.

Tongo was soon arrested. He pleaded guilty to being party to the murder but, in return for a reduction of sentence, said he would tell the truth and claimed that Shrien had asked him to organise the killing. The hitmen, Mziwamadoda Qwabe and Xolile Mngeni, were subsequently arrested, tried and jailed. Monde Mbolombo, the receptionist at the luxury Cape Grace hotel where the Dewanis were staying, said that he had put Tongo in contact with the hitmen. In exchange for immunity from prosecution – now under review due to the case collapsing – he agreed to testify against Shrien.

The idea of hiring people to commit murder is not that shocking in South Africa. Firearms are cheap and easy to find, as are hitmen. In 2006 a young woman, Dina Rodrigues, went to a taxi rank in Cape Town and hired four strangers to murder the baby daughter of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. She paid a similar amount to that which Tongo claimed Shrien paid.

It is notable that Anni’s murder took place just four months after South Africa had successfully hosted the football World Cup, when the country was under intense scrutiny because of its record of violent crime. This coloured the investigation from the start.

The then-commissioner of police, Bheki Cele, is reported to have said: “A monkey came all the way from London to have his wife murdered here. Shrien thought we South Africans were stupid.” There seemed to be a great sense of relief that responsibility for this awful murder, a public relations disaster for South Africa, lay elsewhere.

Shrien was charged and four years later returned to stand trial. Everyone seemed to have a view on his innocence or guilt. It was revealed early on that perfect wedding photographs masked Anni’s doubts about marrying Shrien. There were sensational revelations about Shrien’s bisexuality and his involvement, both online and offline, in sadomasochistic sex with male prostitutes. “At last,” people thought, “a clear motive!”

Shrien’s sexual orientation and sexual practices clearly indicated a double life. But when put forward by the lacklustre prosecution as the reason for the murder, the judge, Janet Traverso, ruled this testimony irrelevant and the state’s case unravelled rapidly. This may not have been a popular move, but prejudice about a gay lifestyle should not subvert the need for hard evidence.

During the trial it became apparent that the investigation had been botched, and that much of the police work had been shockingly incompetent: lost paperwork, incomplete statements and unreliable ballistics reports.

Traverso chastised the National Prosecuting Authority. “You have had four years to prepare,” she told them when she dismissed the case. The evidence of the main witnesses was “riddled with contradictions” and fell “far below the threshold” of what a reasonable court could convict on.

Anni’s family, the Hindochas, have said that they – and by implication Anni – have been failed by South Africa’s justice system. They are right. Their daughter came here on her honeymoon and died alone and terrified in one of the bleakest parts of the country. Her grieving relatives have sought answers, as have South Africans.

In a country with such high levels of violence, there are so many who have failed to receive a robust investigation followed by the satisfaction of justice. As the Hindochas stood tearfully outside the courtroom after the verdict, there would have been so many South Africans sharing the family’s anguish at not knowing how or why a loved one died.

The age of loneliness is killing us

For the most social of creatures, the mammalian bee, there’s no such thing now as society. This will be our downfall

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 14 October 2014 19.49 BST

‘Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity.’ Photograph: Feri Lukas/Rex

What do we call this time? It’s not the information age: the collapse of popular education movements left a void filled by marketing and conspiracy theories. Like the stone age, iron age and space age, the digital age says plenty about our artefacts but little about society. The anthropocene, in which humans exert a major impact on the biosphere, fails to distinguish this century from the previous 20. What clear social change marks out our time from those that precede it? To me it’s obvious. This is the Age of Loneliness.

When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war “of every man against every man”, he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominins of east Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any that has gone before.

Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults. Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction of older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50, and is rising with astonishing speed.

Ebola is unlikely ever to kill as many people as this disease strikes down. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity. Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut. We cannot cope alone.

Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage.

British children no longer aspire to be train drivers or nurses – more than a fifth say they “just want to be rich”: wealth and fame are the sole ambitions of 40% of those surveyed. A government study in June revealed that Britain is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are less likely than other Europeans to have close friends or to know our neighbours. Who can be surprised, when everywhere we are urged to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin?

We have changed our language to reflect this shift. Our most cutting insult is loser. We no longer talk about people. Now we call them individuals. So pervasive has this alienating, atomising term become that even the charities fighting loneliness use it to describe the bipedal entities formerly known as human beings. We can scarcely complete a sentence without getting personal. Personally speaking (to distinguish myself from a ventriloquist’s dummy), I prefer personal friends to the impersonal variety and personal belongings to the kind that don’t belong to me. Though that’s just my personal preference, otherwise known as my preference.

One of the tragic outcomes of loneliness is that people turn to their televisions for consolation: two-fifths of older people report that the one-eyed god is their principal company. This self-medication aggravates the disease. Research by economists at the University of Milan suggests that television helps to drive competitive aspiration. It strongly reinforces the income-happiness paradox: the fact that, as national incomes rise, happiness does not rise with them.

Aspiration, which increases with income, ensures that the point of arrival, of sustained satisfaction, retreats before us. The researchers found that those who watch a lot of TV derive less satisfaction from a given level of income than those who watch only a little. TV speeds up the hedonic treadmill, forcing us to strive even harder to sustain the same level of satisfaction. You have only to think of the wall-to-wall auctions on daytime TV, Dragon’s Den, the Apprentice and the myriad forms of career-making competition the medium celebrates, the generalised obsession with fame and wealth, the pervasive sense, in watching it, that life is somewhere other than where you are, to see why this might be.

So what’s the point? What do we gain from this war of all against all? Competition drives growth, but growth no longer makes us wealthier. Figures published this week show that, while the income of company directors has risen by more than a fifth, wages for the workforce as a whole have fallen in real terms over the past year. The bosses earn – sorry, I mean take – 120 times more than the average full-time worker. (In 2000, it was 47 times). And even if competition did make us richer, it would make us no happier, as the satisfaction derived from a rise in income would be undermined by the aspirational impacts of competition.

The top 1% own 48% of global wealth, but even they aren’t happy. A survey by Boston College of people with an average net worth of $78m found that they too were assailed by anxiety, dissatisfaction and loneliness. Many of them reported feeling financially insecure: to reach safe ground, they believed, they would need, on average, about 25% more money. (And if they got it? They’d doubtless need another 25%). One respondent said he wouldn’t get there until he had $1bn in the bank.

For this, we have ripped the natural world apart, degraded our conditions of life, surrendered our freedoms and prospects of contentment to a compulsive, atomising, joyless hedonism, in which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. For this, we have destroyed the essence of humanity: our connectedness.

Yes, there are palliatives, clever and delightful schemes like Men in Sheds and Walking Football developed by charities for isolated older people. But if we are to break this cycle and come together once more, we must confront the world-eating, flesh-eating system into which we have been forced.

Hobbes’s pre-social condition was a myth. But we are entering a post-social condition our ancestors would have believed impossible. Our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long.

Why chess is really an extreme sport

The deaths of two players at the Chess Olympiad in Norway shows that it’s time tournaments came with a health warning

• 
• • Stephen Moss
  • theguardian.com, Saturday 16 August 2014 09.00 BST

Chess. 'One false step and you will have lost. This imposes enormous pressure on players.' Photograph: 18percentgrey/Alamy

It seemed to me one of the strangest coincidences of all time: two chess players dying on the same day at the end of the biennial Chess Olympiad in Norway. But when I spoke to a chess-playing friend of mine, he said “Is it really so odd?” There were almost 2,000 players taking part in the event, quite a few of them – especially the men – getting on in years, unfit, sedentary. Healthwise, they were high risk. Are two deaths really so surprising?

My friend is right and wrong at the same time. It is a bizarre coincidence that two players – one from the Seychelles, one from Uzbekistan, the former at the board, the latter in his hotel room after the tournament had ended – should die within hours of each other. That’s why there has been news interest in the case, and why he is wrong in this respect. But he is spot on about the susceptibility of chess players to stress-related conditions. Chess, though the non-player might not believe this, is in many ways an extreme sport.

At the Olympiad, participants were playing a game a day over a fortnight – 11 rounds with just a couple of rest days on which to recuperate. For up to seven hours a day, they would be sitting at the board trying to kill – metaphorically speaking – their opponent, because this is the ultimate game of kill or be killed. In some positions, you can reach a point where both sides are simultaneously within a single move of checkmating the other. One false step and you will have lost. This imposes enormous pressure on players.

These days, some top players use psychologists to help them deal with this stress. They are also paying increasing attention to diet and fitness. I was staying in the same hotel as many of the world’s top players during the great annual tournament at Wijk aan Zee on the Dutch coast in January, and was struck by the regime adopted by Levon Aronian, the Armenian-born world number two, who started each day with a run followed by a healthy breakfast.

These elite players, however, are the exception within the chess world: they have the money and the specialist entourage that allows them to put a high priority on fitness and well-being. They realise that to play top-level chess, you have to be extremely fit and mentally settled. Any physical ailment or mental distraction is likely to stop you playing well. You need to be at the top of your game to perform. In that sense, it is as much a sport as football or rugby; indeed, it has been suggested that in the course of a long chess game a player will lose as much weight as he does during a football match.

Outside the elite – among professional players who are struggling to make a living, or among the hordes of us middle-aged blokes trying to get to grips with this stressful, frustrating, exhausting game – there is far less attention paid to health. Chess clubs often meet in pubs and many players like a pint; the number of huge stomachs on show at any chess tournament is staggering. The game – and I realise this is a wild generalisation, but one based on more than a grain of truth – tends to attract dysfunctional men with peculiar home lives. You can bet their diet will not be balanced; many will be living on bacon and eggs and beer. This is not a recipe for a long, healthy life.

The great Soviet players of the postwar period had the most ridiculous lifestyle: they more or less lived on vodka, cigarettes and chess, and many of them died young. Take Leonid Stein as an example. A three-times champion of the USSR in the 1960s, he dropped dead of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of just 38. Mikhail Tal, world champion in the early 1960s, was dogged by ill health during his career, and died at the age of 55 – a desperate loss to the sport. Vladimir Bagirov, who was world senior champion in 1998, was 63 when he dropped dead at the board while playing in Finland in 2000.

The current crop of top players have learned from the mistakes of their Soviet predecessors, but those outside the world elite haven’t. Too many are overweight, keen to have a drink, too sedentary – and then they try to play this game which makes huge demands on mind and body. I know, because I do it too. I spend a day at work, rush home, bolt down a meal, then go to my chess club and play a three-hour game which often makes me feel ill, especially if I lose. After that, usually around 10.30pm, I go home, go to bed, and frequently fail to sleep as my moves and mistakes revolve around my head.

So next time someone suggests a nice, quiet game of chess, or paints it as an intellectual pursuit played by wimps, tell them they’ve got it all wrong: this is a fight to the finish played in the tensest of circumstances by two players who are physically and mentally living on the edge. We all need to get fitter to play this demanding game, and society should recognise it for what it is – a sport as challenging, dramatic and exciting as any other. Such recognition would be a tribute of sorts to the two players who sadly played their final games in Tromso.

The Met's problem isn't bad apples, it's the whole barrel. Abolish it

After Stephen Lawrence, Ian Tomlinson and countless other scandals, it's clear the Metropolitan police is institutionally rotten. London deserves better

• 
• • Owen Jones
  • The Guardian, Sunday 9 March 2014 18.29 GMT

'It's all over for the Met.' Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

If hacking someone's voicemail is a gross invasion of privacy, what words are left to describe agents of the state with fake identities having sex with women they're spying on? One activist who had a child with the undercover police officer Bob Lambert has offered four words: "raped by the state". She is among a group of women activists currently fighting attempts by the Met to sabotage their quest for truth and justice. If phone hacking provoked anger, the use of police spies should chill.

But police spies stealing the identities of dead children and duplicitously sharing the homes, beds and lives of women is only the latest in a string of damning scandals about the Metropolitan police: Stephen Lawrence, and the Macpherson report's subsequent conclusion that the Met is institutionally racist; a stop-and-search policy that discriminates against black people; deaths in police custody; the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes; the unlawful killing of Ian Tomlinson; the treatment of protesters as social problems to be contained; the stitching up of a Tory heavyweight.

Each scandal is examined in isolation, treated as the action of rogue officers. But together they suggest an institutionally rotten system. Londoners need a force devoted to protecting their security, which treats all sections of the community equally, and which enjoys the consent and trust of everyone. Currently they do not have one, and so it must be built on new foundations.

This is a suggestion that will infuriate some, not least Met officers. Easy for a columnist, issuing grand proclamations behind the safety of his desk. Met officers, on the other hand, are taking rapists and killers off the streets, putting their lives in danger as they do so. More than 3,000 British police officers are injured a year; about 800 seriously. But this is not about individuals: it's the system that is the problem, and it traps good and bad officers alike.

The government has finally announced an inquiry into police spies, driven on by the revelation that a police force supposed to be solving the murder of Stephen Lawrence was actually spying on his grieving family. But Doreen Lawrence is right to state that police failings go to "the highest level", and the Macpherson report's damning conclusion – that the Met is "institutionally racist" – is as true as ever.

 Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, 'is right to state that police failings go to the highest level'. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

I've never been randomly stopped and searched by a police officer, but I've met plenty of young black men who have. The experience varies: sometimes officers are almost apologetic, other times full of intimidation and aggression. The evidence shows that black people are significantly less likely to use drugs, and yet black Londoners are six times more likely to be stopped on suspicion of possession. It is difficult to conclude that this is anything but racism.

It is not just black Londoners who have described the Met as "the biggest gang around here": senior officers have self-described as such. "You might have 100 people in your gang," publicly declared Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite, of Enfield police, in 2012. "We have 32,000 people in our gang. It's called the Metropolitan police." But a "gang" does not serve a community: it has a turf, a demand for prestige and status, a desire to smash enemies.

When Andrew Mitchell was stitched up by Met officers, the lesson was frightening and instructive. The number of officers involved – including PC Keith Wallis, jailed for falsely claiming to have witnessed the infamous bicycle incident – must give pause to those who think it is a story of "bad apples". If an upper-middle-class Conservative cabinet minister can be stitched up, what hope for the rest of us? It is a point he has passionately and rightly made himself.

A story of conspiracy and cover-up is all too familiar, although other victims do not enjoy anything approaching the power and influence of a Conservative chief whip. There have been 82 black and minority ethnic deaths following contact with the Metropolitan police since 1990, and not a single successful prosecution. Among them is Sean Rigg, a black musician who died in Brixton police station in 2008; four years later, an inquest jury found that police had used unnecessary force against him. It was in stark contrast to initial police claims, and – after a prolonged fight by Rigg's family – three officers were arrested on suspicion of perjury.

When the newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson died after being thrown to the ground in 2009 at the G20 protests by PC Simon Harwood, the initial police narrative – faithfully repeated by so many news outlets – blamed protesters, claiming that officers coming to his help were bombarded with "bricks, bottles and planks of wood". It was all lies, and symptomatic of a force that saw protest as something that had to be contained, not facilitated. Young people had been patronised as the apathetic "X Factor generation": when they mobilised on the streets, they were met with batons and kettles.

What would a new police force look like? That should be left to a royal commission – headed by an independent figure, not an establishment patsy – which calls evidence from all sections of the community. Structures, training, forms of accountability: all need to be designed from scratch. It needs to be a body stripped of prejudice and bigotry, that defends hard-won democratic freedoms, as well as protecting people's security. It is all over for the Met, and time to debate the police force that London deserves.