When Van Der Valk Almost Made Me Watch The Olympics

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

I must admit that despite being a sports fan the Olympics is  just passing me by. This started in 2012. Sometimes I have an instinctive aversion to following the herd. Not every time and it seems to come onto me in fits and starts but it does occur.

2012 remember was held in London. The nation was encouraged "to get involved" by people who probably considered them normally as lower orders and/or marketing fodder. I reacted against. When Olympic flame was passing through Bridgend on its way to London. Wife and daughter went out to see it. Me? I watched TV. Can't remember what I watched...didn't care.

During the tournament made it a point of scrupulously ignoring it on TV.radio,online. Didn't work all the time of course. There were moments when smiley faced announcers were cheerleaders for sports that few people would bother to watch if they paid them to do so because "Team GB" was on. Just reached for my nearest book and ignored it. That Saturday evening when Britain won three gold medals in the athletics? I was busy reading.

What made me act in this way was not a lack of respect for the participants but an aversion to the hype that surrounded this event. Four years later nothing has changed. It's being held in Brazil, a country with political,economic and health problems and yet we're being meant to forget about it for the duration of the games.

I switch on the TV in the morning. Thankful that most of the action occurred when asleep and find presenters with those same smiley faces telling me that a bunch of divers won a bronze medal. Let's pause with that for a moment. Wales only recently came joint third playing in one of the biggest tournaments of the biggest sport in the world and as I recall not once did it make the top story on the UK TV news. Yet two men in a sport that few people would notice normally get into exactly the same position and it's the headline.

And again I should stress here that I'm not belittling the achievements of the people participating. What I'm belittling is the media hype that surrounded them.

So I pay little attention to the Olympics. But if we go back to 2012, there was one moment that I wobbled.

We were at a friend's house. The Olympics of course was on. Specifically the gymnastics. Wife/daughter/friend were astonished that I'd brought a book along with me. They watched the television. I was reading.

That book was Because Of The Cats by Nicolas Freeling. I'd been looking forward to reading this thriller, part of the group of novels about Dutch detective Van Der Valk, because as a child I was a fan of the subsequent seventies TV series.

When we arrived though I knew a difficult afternoon awaited me. A quarter of the way through this story and I didn't like it. It was dull and predictable. What was probably the worst thing though was that after the first few chapters it didn't strike me as being all that Dutch either. Full disclosure here. I've never been to the Netherlands but when I started reading George Simenon's Maigret novels I'd never been to France either but you know exactly where you are in those books.

It did not improve that afternoon. I was bored. There was a clear temptation to just put the thing down and watch the sport. I persevered. Wish I could say that there was a reward as a reader in persevering but no. Not the worst book I read in 2012 (take a bow The Silver Spoon by John Galsworthy) but far and away the most disappointing.

Ah well you can't have everything. Be it an Olympic bronze or knowing every book you'll read will be good.

Until the next time.