So, last week water started dripping through a light fitting in my kitchen ceiling.
Now let me be clear: this was not flooding. Flooding is a whole other universe of properly terrible. This was just an annoyance.
But it was very, very annoying indeed.
Naturally, therefore, I behaved as any rational person would, faced with a minor, domestic inconvenience.
I shouted and swore and demanded precise details about the timing of the leak and the name of the last person to take a shower.
But the leak was tiny. So what I did, in short, was lose my sense of proportion.
Now, the lack of a sense of proportion is not my exclusive property.
With the utmost respect to our friends here today, the worlds of popular music, television dancing and comedy are hardly strangers to a somewhat topsy-turvy sense of what really matters.
After all, should it really be front-page news when a dancer dances a good dance on the telly? Does it really constitute ‘history’ when a song becomes extremely popular?
In the bible, the very first line provides a little perspective.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
Now there’s a statement to help us recalibrate the scale of our achievements.
To be fair, though, not all our achievements are small and not all our problems are just leaky pipes. And sometimes, by some miracle of the collective will, we find sufficient clarity to breathe slowly and know that.
Sports Relief provides one of those moments of clarity. Today, we are asked to see the world as it truly, painfully is: full of want, full of inequity, full of struggle. Real problems.
But then, in this same moment, people are inspired and liberated to do things that make a difference. Real achievements.
Pop stars shine their oversized spotlight on the darkest places; DJs, priests and sports journalists complete triathlons to focus attention on maternal healthcare; TV presenters and comedians cross deserts to support people suffering from mental illness.
And the rest of us? What can be our achievement?
Well we, I hope, are moved (as a wise man once said) to give them our…money.
The wise man was in the studio and it was Bob Geldof. It was almost impossible to know on March 13th just how much perspective was going to be required in the subsequent weeks and months. As another man once said, “Too much fucking perspective”. See above.