A sumptuous summer

Quaintly, you could say that what the BBC in its heyday used to call ‘this great summer of sport’ finally ends this weekend in Shanghai. It may be two weeks until we adjust the clocks to signal the closing-in of winter, but 2005’s summer calendar snaps shut tomorrow with the running of the final round in China of the Formula 1 motor-racing season. Or nearer home, if you prefer — and even more cockeyed for old timers, seeing as it was traditionally the most mud-slurped and frost-bitten of wintery games — with the final whistle of today’s rugby league Grand Final at Old Trafford. The air-raid siren squeal of Formula 1 raucously, fortnightly, punctuates the soft sotto soundtrack of summer. I have seldom bothered with it — fumes and vrooms, oil and water and din — but was occasionally told to buy some ear-muffs and go and cover it. I was there for the grievous lamentations around the wailing wall in Italy that Ayrton Senna had fatally driven into the day before; a few years earlier I was in Mexico when dozy Nigel Mansell, going for the world title, couldn’t get into first gear on the grid and just sat there with a dopey grin of panic on his face like you and me at the traffic lights; I covered Mike Hawthorn’s funeral for the Surrey Times; oh yes, and I once got heat-stroke at the Australian grand prix and, for the only time, put in a proper, swanky foreign correspondent’s expenses form which read: ‘for ambulance to airport $400’.