Excellence

I was going to tell the tale of my mother chasing young Polish men around Europe today and it will make a fine story but I save it for the appropriate moment – which is probably at the moment of bankruptcy, consummation (unlikely) or divorce.

But today I want to say something about excellence in two very different fields. Caroline returned yesterday afternoon and I went to pick her up at Nimes airport just after lunch. I spent the morning cleaning the house and while I did it I put BBC Interactive on so I could have the Federer-Roddick match on while I cleaned. Every generation produces a sporting genius and in our era we are lucky to have Roger Federer. Roddick had been playing very well and more than a few experts thought he was playing well enough to beat Federer. It went to four all in the first set and after that Roddick won two games. It has been described as one of the greatest performances in Grand Slam tennis and having watched and enjoyed a lot of tennis over the years (it is my favourite one-on-one sport) I have not seen anything better. Let’s rejoice in genius. I write on Positive Thinking and always say that so few of us ever realise in reality what we are capable of with the gifts we have been given. Federer has – and I freely admit that his ability is a birth gift - and seems to be able to find new parts of himself mentally whenever he has to.

Excellence also exists in the world of art and art commentary and in Andrew Graham-Dixon we have a commentator who continues the TV legacy of Kenneth Clarke. BBC4 have recently started his new series on religious art and this week he took us through Byzantine treasures. Perhaps this series is not quite as great as the one he did on Italian art a few years ago (and clearly that is his first love) but nonetheless it is streets ahead of anything else in its genre at the moment. He ‘reads’ a painting or sculpture back to the viewer without pretension and with absolute involvement in it’s ‘story’. I remember around ten years ago he described a Vermeer and all the possibilities that lay within the picture and he was totally comfortable shedding a few tears at the emotion of it all. A man totally and sincerely in love with his subject. In the era of the autocue it is great to see someone who can bring you with him into his world through his language. Of course, that this programme should be on BBC2 rather than BBC4 hardly needs to be said.

Music of the day is the latest Gotan Project album ‘Lunatico’. Better even, I think than their first album ‘La Revancha Del Tango’ which was great. I saw them live in the courtyard at Somerset House a few years ago and they were terrific.