The news today is all about Manchester City. And the shifting sands of Abu Dhabi. Vast sums of oil-derived money funding an English football club, some of it illegally, and taking it to great heights. Let’s remind ourselves where the money comes from – crude oil, laid down in the Jurassic era 150 million years ago. And how recent is its exploitation. I remember reading Wilfred Thesiger’s account of crossing the Empty Quarter of Arabia, when it was an empty quarter, reaching Abu Dhabi and seeing surveyors looking for oil. We’re back in 1948.
Let’s go back further. We’ve been in Galloway, south-west Scotland, and up in the hills. The glaciers retreated there 15,000 years ago, leaving glacial moraines, drumlins, humps of rock scraped and carried under glaciers. Go back another 450 million years and we have two continents colliding, one sliding under another, and the top level being scraped off, a mixture of mud and sand which hardened into what’s now known as greywacke. Those grassy humps in the green fields of Galloway have history.
Move forward, we’re still in Galloway, to the 18th century, and enclosures: a demand for meat and leather from expanding towns encourages landowners to consolidate their estates, throw tenants off the land, take down the old and build new walls around bigger fields. Today, further consolidating, bigger farms, and the old farm buildings left to decay.
I used to wake each morning, looking out to a field with mainly Ayrshire cattle grazing and, beyond, to the open sea. On a far coast, just visible, lay Garlieston, from where steamers took migrants, escaping lands which could no longer give them employment, to Liverpool and a life over the ocean.
The timescales of the wide world in which we’re embedded are vast and yet we proceed entirely oblivious of them. We lay down a concrete world, as if it’s forever, with no thought of what it will look like when it decays. The finer Victorian buildings were built of solid stone and that at least weathers into the landscape. We fire up a world based on oil, which has a time-limited future, and cities, and countries, whose prosperity is oil-derived, will have to rapidly adjust if they’re not to become relics themselves.
If I was a City supporter (I am Manchester born and bred and my allegiance is United), I’d have been in a sorry state this morning. City’s recent fortunes have been built on the shifting sands of Arabia. (Until sixty years ago United had a local butcher as chairman and majority shareholder.) Football is of course all about short-term and never-lasting glory. Not for a moment would I devalue it as a sport but it does entangle itself in extraordinary nets.
Manchester has the Pennine moors. Abu Dhabi has the sand and Persian Gulf. Galloway, cattle and the Irish Sea. Trump has maybe never walked a mountain path. He aspires to a vast ballroom and the infamous Trump arch. Owning football club is always a vanity project, though a far more reasonable one.
I’ve never tried it but climb to a highpoint on Man City’s Emirates stadium, and the moors will be your near neighbours.
Head there for a walk.
