Cupid's Dart by David Nobbs

Author:David Nobbs
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Humorous, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Fiction, Fiction - General, Modern fiction, General & Literary Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780099469124
Publisher: ARROW
Published: 2008-03-18T07:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

I was living in suspended animation, waiting for our week together to begin. I found myself getting dressed, making coffee, even giving supervisions and lectures, but I felt detached from it all. I was doing it all from memory, as if I was a computer just following a programme that it had been set. I found it impossible to do any work on the Ferdinand Brinsley. Had I been Descartes, I might have said of myself 'I don't think, therefore I'm not.'

Then I discovered that the World Darts Championship was on the television, not just in little bits but almost the whole thing, on and on and on. And on and on and on. And on and on and on and on. I hadn't even begun to realise how big an event it was. I thought I ought to watch a bit of it, so that I wouldn't seem like a total idiot next week with Ange. So, between supervisions and lectures, there I was, in my rooms in the cloistered calm of the college, with the sound on fairly low so that nobody would know, watching this extraordinary happening.

It seemed to me to be the most boring activity that I had ever witnessed. I didn't know how I could stand a week of it, even with Ange.

The commentators went from banality to absurdity to an enthusiasm which seemed to me at first to be totally false, to be a desperate attempt to breathe life into this deadly dull sport. 'The nation is awash with darts fever.' 'There's a global explosion in the world of darts.' 'He comes from a town called Alpen, so he obviously likes his breakfast.' 'Northern Europe is on fire this week.' 'That was the biggest come-back since Muffin the Mule.' 'The passion is tangible.' 'The crowd are braying for a result.' 'This is World Championship darts. This is the greatest pressure you can feel.'

But as the week wore on – not that I was watching all the time, of course – a far worse interpretation dawned on me.

They meant every word of it.

I imagined Kant and Spinoza sitting watching the darts, hearing the Master of Ceremonies yell out at the top of his voice, 'Let's play darts', at which the crowd . . . well, they did what you learn that crowds always do when you watch sport on television – they erupted.

The maximum score you can get on a darts board is one hundred and eighty. Every time this happened – and it happened amazingly often – the score was yelled out – 'One Hundred and Eighteeee' – and large numbers of boards with 180 on them were held up amid wild cheering. The room in which the matches were played was huge, and filled with tables of casually dressed, mainly young people drinking pints of lager. There was lager as far as the eye could see. I would be there next week, feeling a real fish out of water, but with Ange.

'Pint of

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