Here’s what we know about Eleanor Rigby. We know that at some stage, probably on a Saturday afternoon, she picked up the rice in a church were a wedding had been. Apparently she lived in a dream. We know that she waited at the window, and that she had a jar by the door, since this is where she kept her face. We still don’t know whom it was for.
We also know that she died in the church and was buried along with her name, and that nobody came. The grave-digging duties were carried out by a Father McKenzie.
But what did Ms Rigby usually do between putting on her face and getting stuck into the rice? What about the other six or seven hours in her waking day? Certainly, there was a fair amount of waiting by the window, but if she had the motivation to open the jar, apply her face, select a rice receptacle, go to the church and get down on all fours, she was far from catatonic. Miserable, yes, but mobile.
It is here that Ms Rigby’s prospective biographer must pause and ask: What do depressed, lonely, abandoned, socially inadequate people do?
Obviously most go and live in Switzerland, where they congregate on the shores of Lake Geneva on chilly autumn evenings to skip gold coins out into the dusk, recognising in the slowly diminishing ripples the onrushing reality of their deaths. Then they turn for home to dine alone on swan, mink stew and grief.
But not all losers are resigned. Some can simulate enthusiasm, cutting out and cataloguing John Pilger columns into folders labeled ”Somebody should do something”, ”Too right” and ”Bloody Jews”. Sometimes, if the light is dim enough for them to go outside, they even dabble in sports. And on very rare occasions, emboldened to reckless exhibitionism by a satisfying heart-to-heart with the talking clock, they invent new ones.
Take pickleball. Take it and put it in a bag and hit for an hour with pipes. This sport is tennis played on a tiny court with a perforated ball. According to the United States Pickleball Association, the game ”builds self esteem in youngsters” and ”provides competitive competition for active athletes”.
Clearly American youngsters need all the help they can get, in this case a ball that moves slowly enough for obese pre-teens to get their flab rolling in formation before the drifting orb has bounced twice. The sport’s degrees of competition must also be terribly reassuring to children oozing mayonnaise from every pore: if competitive competition is too strenuous, you can always opt for something like shooting fish in a barrel with an assault rifle.
But not surprisingly it is the Swiss who have shown the greatest inability to grasp the point of sport by inventing the awful pantomime known as tchoukball. Not to be confused with the Australian sport of chookball in which chickens are randomly kicked over fences, tchoukball was invented by a doctor Hermann Brandt in the 1960s as a result ”of a critical scientific study of the most popular team sports”.
According to Geneva’s leading tchoukball club, the impossibly dull doctor noticed that most sports injuries ”resulted from performing movements inadequate with the individual’s physiology, as well as from the many forms of aggression present in some sports”.
Clearly appalled at the elitist and murderous cult of sport in general, firecracker Brandt set about levelling the playing field to prevent asthmatic cheese-tasters from Basle from tripping over their shoelaces. His first drafts never saw the light of day: walking rugby with a beach ball, played on a shag-pile carpet; high-jump over an ear bud held aloft by two marshmallows; bathtub waterpolo with a balloon for a ball and soap suds as opposition.
But in the end his brainchild was born, a runt bastard of volleyball and pelota, and he rejoiced that it was ”characterised by the suppression of any form of corporal aggression between the opponents”.
Next to Herr Brandt, Eleanor Rigby was a biker slut on crack, but perhaps she too indulged in sport. Maybe even tchoukball. And if this was the case, it’s not impossible that she met Hermann, perhaps even invited him to church on a date.
And so the questions remain. Did Eleanor Rigby die from complications after slipping on rice, or was she bored to death one cold evening by a Swiss blancmange?
All the lonely people, where do they all come from? And how many of them play pickleball?