The arrest of Dave Winfield - 12 August 1983

I've noticed an odd thing about commentators during the silly season or the dog days or whatever you care to call this appalling summer, which unlike the brief but stifling European heat wave gives no sign of ever letting up. The oddity is the fact that whereas in the spring or the glory of the fall, we don't feel we are failing in our duty if we talk about things that maybe trivial to governments but important to us. But when the winter blizzards paralyse the cities of the plain or when as now 95% of the country is panting in temperatures somewhere between 90 and 105 degrees, we feel guilty if we don't go on about Chad and Nicaragua and Lebanon and whether the United States had anything to do with the latest coo in Guatemala.

Well I'll tell you as one who battles everyday not very successfully to become what are fathers and grandfathers called the well informed man, I have to confess that like the rest of the human race, a revolution in Central America maybe a catastrophe but a toothache is an emergency. Something almost as bad hit me the other day and for 48hrs or so, I honestly didn't care very much whether Mr Reagan overthrows the INAUD or becomes their buddy.

For some reason I've forgotten, I had to fish out an old video tape. I put it on and what I saw was a shower of sparks, visual sparks and the colour wobbling through the spectrum. The sound was okay, the tape was listenable but un-watchable, weird. I put the thing aside as a defective tape though nothing had been wrong with it the last time I played it and then I put on a fairly new tape, the same thing. In increasing alarm, I went to one or two cherished sets a series of my own programmes, some dramatic series I'd kept, some of the more memorable things like 'Upstairs, Downstairs' to serve them all my days, several golf championships, the head to head battles between Nicholas and Watson, which if they aren't unforgettable ought to be. About 100 tapes in all, same thing. I called in the doctor in the person of the BBC's, the New York BBC's Television Engineer, the tapes had shrunk in the inferno of my apartment, which is a delight for most of the year since I'm on the top floor the 15th floor of a building overlooking the lush foliage of Central Park at a height, which offers the view of an airplane coming in for a landing. The effect of a shrunken tape I gathered is rather like what would happen if a gramophone record had shrunk and the needle instead of hitting each track precisely hit somewhere in-between at a wider interval than is necessary. Anyway, apparently nothing can be done.

Like about 4 or 5 million other people in this country in Britain I believe a much larger proportion of the population, I have over the past 10yrs or so acquired a library of video tapes, some kindly provided by the parties of the first part the BBC, a couple of American networks, the rest taped by me during the transmission of the programmes. By the way, this is still an illegal act in the United States, the movie studios are fighting it and we may have to wait for the Supreme Court to tell those, us 4 or 5 million when we may expect to go off to jail.

If I seem to be offhand about this prospect, I ought to say that every Constitutional lawyer in the country believes that this crime is practically un-punishable and the law it breaks is enforceable just like prohibition when more Americans drank hard liquor first manufactured and then drank frightful stuff it was than ever before it since. The way it could have been stopped just as the way they can stop us taping Coronation Street or the Wimbledon Finals is for the Department of Justice to recruit several million new agents who would invade our homes and flourish a warrant with the cry you can't do that their here.

The Reagan Administration devoted as it is to low domestic spending and high deficits, figures that to stop you and me in our career of crime would require a new bureaucracy at an additional cost to the budget of billions of dollars, the price say of 1 supersonic bomber their not about to do it! Well to put an end to this melancholy story, I should explain the one unexplained item, have I not got air conditioning? I have very effective, its mounted in a bathroom that then through ducts and vents feeds a study and an adjoining bedroom, but when I go off to the country at the weekends I turn it off and the apartment is left to the mercies of being on the top floor of a building with a tar roof, which has the effect of charcoal broiling grilling a tender steak. The Superintendent of the House came in the other day and almost keeled over when he saw that the temperature in the kitchen and the long hall was 104. My engineers tell me it is too much, I am the victim of the magic of modern technology, you can open and read a a very old book that's been slumbering in 100 degrees, a video tape apparently boils and expires.

Well not too worry, some things are too big to morn about. Some years ago, an old Secretary of mine being instructed while I was out of town to throwaway all bills, bank statements, tax returns more than 6yrs old, which is the statutory limit on the governments power to do an audit, she unwittingly shall we say threw away 25yrs of my diaries. She was being a sensitive soul slightly aghast, I said this is so awful, we'll say no more about it and we never did! That is one ill wind that blew some good, no reader is ever going to have to sit down to my memoirs.

Well I was saying the dark days abound in fascinating stories, which are always being nudged aside by our foolish feeling of obligation to talk about the burning issues which after all are going to be resolved one way or another without our help, so I propose to catch up with a few things that have fascinated more Americans than can ever know where Chad is or who is on who side in Nicaragua.

First, there is the heartbreaking case of the murdered seagull, a case which riveted the attention and inflamed the emotions like nothing since the arrest of Dr. Crippon and Ethel Le Nerve on that transatlantic liner. The scene was deceptively serene, pastoral a night baseball game, a hot night in Toronto with a sever of a wind picking up the mist coming off Lake Ontario. The New York Yankees were playing the Toronto Blue Jays as always the outfielders were warming up tossing the ball between innings to each other, seagulls floated over the stadium and winged over the field. One valiant and very popular Yankee Dave Winfield finished warming up in the middle of the 5th inning and tossed an extra ball to a ball boy standing near the Yankee ball pen, the ball took one hop and landed on the head of a seagull that was taking a brief nap in right centre field, death of one seagull. The ball boy got a towel and wrapped the little corpse in it and respectfully left the field. Dave Winfield was overcome. When the game was over, he was more literally overcome by plains clothes officers who arrested him for the crime of murdering a protected species an offence under Canadian law punishable by a fine of $500 and 6 months in jail. He was taken off to a nearby police station to the stupefaction of his team mates and the next morning the disbelief of the baseball fans of North America.

You know American Presidents whenever their called on to pay tribute to our neighbour to the North always boast about the undefended frontier 3,000 miles long. Well I can tell you, the United States Army Chief of Staff was about to send to that Frontier the 57% of the Army that is not watching the American ramparts overseas, but in the nick of time, the Canadian Crown Attorney in charge of the case looked over Section 4.02, sub-section 1A of the Canadian Criminal Code, had a long telephone conversation with Dave Winfield and to the enormous relief of the Pentagon and the American population dropped the charges.

I don't know if anyone told the Crown Attorney that the odds against hitting arresting seagull at 50 yards with a tossed baseball have been figured at 1,000 to 1. The other items that have struck me as being probably more important to most people at the moment than wars or rumours of wars have all to do with women. Sigmund Freud after 40yrs or more studying and listening to women for the 50 minute hour on the coach said in something close to despair "what do women want?" Well we've lately learned that most women have had the effrontery to want to equal pay for equal work and equal rights under the law for everything that has been considered since Roman times a peculiar privilege of men. As I said last time, bully for them!

We've also paid respectful attention to social scientists who've told us that marriage is on its way out especially the nuclear family, which has nothing to do with radiation except for the initial radiance of the June ride. Well we knew all this until last week when a comprehensive survey came out and it turns out that about 80% of women want marriage, they hope for a lasting marriage and 75% of them expect fidelity on both sides. This is a shocker, I don't think Queen Victoria who had considerable experience of the relations licit and illicit between men and women would have put those figures any higher. On top of this, there's just appeared a survey of what American woman want by way of giving nourishment to their babies and here there really has been a dramatic change of mind.

In 1900, 80 American women in 100 breast fed their babies, most of the rest employed wet nurses. In 1970 only 5.5% of American mother's breastfed, today almost 6 times as many and the preference still going up. It does look as if the sociologists were going to have to go back to their drawing board or astrologer or abacus or whatever it is they use to make their profound predictions of the next lurch or trend in human society.

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