The crafty chutney

Last weekend was spent mostly transfixed by darts. No, not Darts, the darts. I also made medlar jam, medlar syrup and apple and medlar chutney – each was a reasonable success. The darts though, was fabulous.

I’m not under any illusions that most of the rest of the world shares my pleasure. A good wedge of me wants to convince you of the magnificence of darts, another sizeable quartile quietly rejoices in the fact that only some of us can see the beauty. But I’m going to make a little effort – not to persuade you to love darts, but just so you might see a little of the magic therein, even if you then choose to step away from the oche. Give me a couple of minutes grace if you would, and I’ll try and weedle food in there somewhere. I think I’ve got a bigger point to make, but I’m not sure.

Darts is considered by many as a rather ludicrous spectacle. It’s often viewed from above, looked down on by some who feel that if it’s worthy of anything it’s a raised eyebrow. Many of these tutting folk will happily tell you there is beauty in everything, maybe because Jane Austin once said so in one of her few novels, yet find it difficult to exercise that fine sentiment other than about the very obviously beautiful. That’s a bit like loving someone in health and for richer, or having a year of eternal summer. I think it’s worth looking a little harder for less obvious beauty.

The essence of sport is in the competition – I don’t mean ‘the winning’, or even ‘the taking part’. Competition is a state of mind, an agreement you make with yourself to engage with another. The rules are irrelevant, this agreement is essentially a personal one: you will conduct yourself, you will display yourself, you will reveal yourself, having made the agreement to compete. Even though it is an agreement you make with yourself, you may have very little understanding of the nature of that agreement, much less an idea of the consequences.

When the pressure is on, when you have greatness, qualification, glory or even just a perfect moment beckoning, how will you be? Or more accurately, who will you be? These milliseconds don’t replay, we have no opportunity to see how the ramifications compound and unravel. Would you handle (even instinctively) as Thierry Henry did a fortnight ago? With a moment to choose, would you slam the ball into the net or do this? Would you do as Andy Roddick did in the final of the 2005 Rome Masters – with a triple match point in the final set, his opponent Fernando Verdasco double-faulted and lost the match. That was until Roddick disputed the call and said the serve was in. Verdasco won the point and went on to turn the game around and win. Extreme moments maybe, but smaller, often unnoticed instances happen in every contest and help make sport much more than the sum of the rules and the fundamentals.

We tend to value the feats of the mind, the intellect, the cultural creations far more than the merely physical. Brain over brawn. Even when it comes to something as apparently physical as sport, we allow ourselves to enjoy a psychological battle. Donald and Atherton’s battle of wills was as good as aggressive cricket gets, and, for all the leather and willow, an entirely mental tussle. Coe v Ovett was as much about a clash of personalities as it was about simple running speed. Even when it gets to the most physical of physical sports, it’s where your head and heart is as much as anything that separates A from B.

This is what makes football so little about hoofing a pigs bladder around a wet green rectangle, what makes the Tour de France so much more than simply pedaling and dropping cogs, what separates men like Sugar Ray Leonard from other more powerful boxers, and what makes sailing around the world on your own much more than just sitting on a boat in bad weather. It asks questions which you may or may not have any answers to – you may not even be aware that you have or haven’t the answers. You may not like what you see. You may surprise yourself. This is what I love most about sport, about music, about pretty much anything – not the ‘thing’ so much as what the ‘thing’ reveals.

This is a goal that made me cry when I saw it. He may be the only person alive who would have imagined that possibility, never mind be able to execute it. He knew, I think you can tell, that for a moment he had been touched, that it wasn’t really he alone that should be congratulated. A moment made of exactly the same material as this. And this. I could go on, but you get my point. We all recognise magic where we see it.

We seem to withhold this understanding somewhere just short of darts. Perhaps it’s one mental leap of faith too far to entertain the idea that beauty is in everything if that everything includes darts. I’d urge you to look again.

There are some unique aspects to darts. They are worth considering when you compare darts to other sports. Your opponent can’t block you, can’t put you off, can’t change the terrain or the target of the missiles. They can’t alter one single thing about your opportunity. In short, your opponent can’t stop you winning: it’s down only to you.

Every single time you go to throw it is absolutely the same as it was last time. Apart from in your head.

Stripped of other complications, what is left is boiled down to the absolute essence of sport, without the usual distractions. There’s no pretty Beckham, no excuisite physique, no erroneous decisions, no flukey advantages, no need for outside adjudication. It becomes almost entirely mental, almost completely about what you have inside on the day. Almost everything we’d normally admire above the predominantly physical in other areas of life.

With darts, many of us seem to be distracted by the appearance of the players. We are, apparently, allowed to make remarks about them that would not be tolerated if they were said about their wives. If they were from China or Japan no doubt we would be admiring them as proponents of such a singularly Zen pastime: they imagine the throw, they imagine the dart arc and land, they quieten and focus, then they execute the throw…wwwoooooowwww. Perhaps we don’t mind fat sportsmen as long as their foreignness confers upon us a little exoticism.

Stephen Fry has spoken beautifully about the magic of darts and his love for it. There is nothing quite like it for watching a player at the very doorhandle of victory lose it – utterly exposed, completely undiluted by teammates, the collapse often entirely unprompted by their opponent. A single dart can sow the doubt. It’s almost properly cruel. Defeat can be naked in darts in a way unlike another sport. And victory uniquely singular also.

Yet most of us don’t notice it. We celebrate and knight a canoer who (with a few mates to help him row the way he’s not looking) wins a race once every four years, and virtually ignore the astonishing genius of a 14 times world champion who dedicates himself to the practice and execution of his art over many many years, and has it examined against many many hundreds of opponents. I’m not sure why that would be.

There’s been a lot of guff and hot air talked recently about gardens and what they might mean, as opposed to just what they ‘are’. Many have had their say, and for all the arguments, if there’s a commonality it’s that gardens can be full of meaning, cultural references and represent far more than an ordered display of plants. Obvious enough you might think. The disagreements seem to come along when some won’t accept that they don’t always have to. That they can just be enjoyed as a place to barbecue a fish. Or that their cultural importance is not necessarily more significant than their ability to host a game of badminton or to look nice.

If there’s a point I’m going round the houses to make, it’s probably my first one: you can find whatever wherever you choose to look for it. I’m not here to argue that darts stands alone as the repository of meaning and beauty, just that it has every single milligram of ability to so as a book, an opera or indeed a garden.

And if anyone feels superior to those who can see in darts, Hendrix, Di Canio, Diabate, Korbet, Corbett, Schnorbitz or Ritz biscuits what they can only see in a meaningful garden then I know who I feel sorry for.

What has this to do with medlars? Medlars were hugely popular a century or two back. Then came sugar. Then came supermarkets. And our view of fruit became guided by them. Medlars stopped being appreciated as widely as they had – they didn’t fit our new-found prejudices about what fruit should be. They look like an open-ended apple (the french call medlars ‘dogs arse’) – and if we can’t tolerate a wonky carrot, what chance we’ll accept a fruit that looks like canine’s tea-towelholder? And medlars need to soften, as if rotting, before you eat them.

They are truly delicious – with a taste somewhere between apples, dates and figs. They are perfectly easy to grow, plentiful in production and easily sourced from plant nurseries. There is absolutely no reason why medlars aren’t widely available. No reason except we can’t be bothered to pay attention to what they are really like rather than just the immediate impression next to their more ‘beautiful’ cousins.

Part of their pleasure is in uncovering such a fabulously unique rich flavour in such an unlikely packaging. It’s the same with darts. But we tend to prefer our sport and our fruit (and our music for that matter) as exotic, good looking, and full of uncomplicated one dimensional sweetness.