Donkin's World: Rattled By The Vuvuzela
...Yes, THAT noise. That noise anyone would do their utmost to silence if they had not been brainwashed for weeks previously that it was all part of the unique atmosphere of football in South Africa. Come on now, how many of us in the UK had heard of a vuvuzela before this year's World Cup Finals? One in 10? One in a hundred? One in a thousand, more like...
Richard Donkin has found a way of getting rid of the horrible racket which is plagueing millions of TV viewers.
The first thing we made in woodwork class at Wheelwright Grammar School for Boys was a boat. The third thing was a pencil case with a sliding lid. Up to a few days ago I had clean forgotten what the second thing was... until I heard THAT noise.
Yes, THAT noise. That noise anyone would do their utmost to silence if they had not been brainwashed for weeks previously that it was all part of the unique atmosphere of football in South Africa. Come on now, how many of us in the UK had heard of a vuvuzela before this year's World Cup Finals? One in 10? One in a hundred? One in a thousand, more like.
Yet this thin trumpet-like piece of rasping plastic has become both the symbol and the nightmare of this World Cup. Yes I know that hearing the so-called England band playing the theme to the Great Escape ad nauseum, and England fans chanting the National Anthem is grating. If the vuvuzelas have served any purpose, it is to drown out the braying English fans.
But the problem is that they drown out everything. If an aeroplane flies overhead the noise comes and goes but this noise goes on and on for the whole 90-odd minutes. You could clean up outside the grounds, selling ear plugs and Anadin marketed as soccer survival kits.
And yet we still watch the games. If I had been watching a normal British game on TV, say, and a bluebottle had entered the room, I wouldn't rest until it had been silenced, yet a noise far worse than a whole squadron of bluebottles, we try to tolerate as all part of the fun.
Sainsbury's imported 56,000 of these instruments of aural torture and sold 17,000 of them before the competition started. Surely they could never catch on here, I thought. Then I remembered those woodwork classes and exercise number two. It was a football rattle. I had clean forgotten football rattles. They were already losing their popularity when I went to my first big football match at the end of the 1960s (Huddersfield Town v Wolves). Waving rattles had been superseded by waving fists as football hooliganism took root on the terraces.
They were nowhere near as noisy as the vuvuzela but they were reasonably noisy. In Judesim this ratchet-like instrument is called a gragger, rattled every time Haman's name is mentioned during the reading of the Megillah in the festival of Purim. In the second world war they were used by policemen to warn of poison gas (so they weren't used).
Somehow I think that putting the football rattle up against the vuvuzela would be about as effective as assegai spears against the Martini-Henry rifle. If only the Zulus had possessed vuvuzelas at Rorke's Drift, the 24th Regiment of Foot would have been driven nuts at one hundred paces. It wouldn't do for the England band to play Men of Harlech but if you have to stand up against massed ranks of vuvuzelas, what else can you do? I have my own solution: turn the telly off.
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