Amazing Disgrace Read Online Free PDF Page A

of my books were supposed to be ordinary people with extraordinary talents who got to the top without having to resort to screwing their coaches when they were twelve, like gymnasts, or brutally fouling each other in full view, like footballers, or standing in the slips quietly telling the batsman that his wife’s a terrific lay, like Australian cricketers . These days I don’t think the readers care. People expect their sporting heroes to lie and cheat and foul and stuff themselves with performance-enhancing drugs because if they don’t it means they’ve stopped short of a total commitment to winning.‘It’s the money these days,’ they say, as if that not only explained but excused everything. Actually, they’re all shits, the lot of them – sports personalities, fans and my readers alike, and it’s time Samper got out of this sordid business.

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    You think I’m exaggerating. You think when it comes to beloved Millie, the world’s nautical darling, I’m overstating my case. So I will indulge your verdict by not protesting. I am even willing to agree that simple job dissatisfaction leading to total burnout has distorted my view. But there is an unarticulated popular belief that a lone woman doesn’t brave the world’s oceans without mysteriously being rinsed free of the baser human motives. It is as though prolonged and intimate contact with nature automatically made people grander and purer instead of stupider and redder in tooth and claw. Being a one-armed grandmother only hallows Millie still further in her public’s eye: a gallant old sea-dog rather than a poisonous old sea-bitch. ‘It may be that the ghosts of Sir Francis Chichester and perhaps even of Drake himself were standing by her and gave her strength in her hours of lonely agony off Tierra del Fuego,’ intoned the Daily Mail (or was it the Express ?), cunningly conflating Cape Horn with the Garden of Gethsemane . I don’t remember anybody writing in to point out that Jesus Christ had not been miked up, watched by webcams and pinpointed by satellite, and nor is there any record of his having taken frequent nips of Glenfiddich from a plastic bottle on a lanyard around his neck. It’s this aura of sanctity attributed to the woman that finally I can’t bear. Like any professional ghost who writes about popular heroes I’ve naturally done my best to suppress the truth; but in order not to do further damage to my blood pressure it has now become a matter of principle to present to her credulous public an alternative Millie Cleat.
    Principle ? I hear you cry, and I’m duly grateful that you scoff. Under normal circumstances Gerald Samper is indeedthe very last person to invoke principle. In fact, if I had a personal motto it would probably be ‘Expediency Always Trumps Principle’. I now think this might look rather well on the stonework above the sitting-room fireplace: Semper utilitas virtutem superat . Only the sentiment might make the pious monks of San Bernard shudder (if they still exist); the grammar is impeccable. If I had such a thing as a core this would probably qualify as a core belief, but mercifully I haven’t so it will remain a private rule-of-thumb. In any case I hope shortly to convince you that present circumstances are not normal and that I have a duty to blow Millie’s gaff.
    To that end, let me recount an incident that is for me unadulterated Cleat, and one which I have loyally and shrewdly omitted from my book. It is a story I succeeded in documenting in unusual detail, backed up by tape-recorded interviews with twenty-three oceanographers, many of them sober. So vivid were their accounts, but so far removed from most people’s lives their activities, I’m afraid I shall need to do a little background scene-setting once I have fetched a fresh bottle of prosecco from the fridge. Like millions before me, I find alcohol is inseparable from anything to do with the sea. Certainly there’s no possible way I could have