When the Greek hero Theseus returned to Athens after turning the Minotaur into half a tonne of fillet steak that tasted oddly of chicken, the ship he sailed in became something of a national monument. Planks grown salt-water fat were instantly stripped out and replaced, ragged sails were patched, and any empty bottles of Ouzo in the executive cabin minibars were silently refilled. Within a few years, the cosmetic surgery had grown so extensive that a popular theme in the letters pages of Athenian philosophy periodicals was to question whether it was still the same ship of Theseus. (Well played, Perplexed of Ephesus, well played).
I’m reminded of that story every time I play volleyball. The ship, of course, has in my case been replaced by a low-level Wednesday night amateur volleyball team, Theseus has been replaced by me, and the picturesque Mediterranean setting transformed into 21st century London. With so many changes, is it even the same story? Who knows, Perplexed of Ephesus, who knows.
Our lowly volleyball team, whose name is (as all volleyball team names are) isomorphic but not equivalent to “Dig of the Dump”, “The Volley and the Ivy”, and “Keep the Ball in the Air Like You Just Don’t Care”, is now entering its eighth consecutive season in the same league. Every time a new season starts, new players spring forward and old players fall back. The regular injection of fresh blood has done us nothing but good, but in one respect my antibodies rebel.
I don’t know if you could tell, skimming through the elaborately manicured topiary of these transcendentally unimportant autobiographical dioramas, but I am – spoiler alert! – enormously dependent on the good opinion of others. I know. Shocking. What a plot twist.
As a consequence, an overriding concern I carry about with me is that what little respect I have won in the world has been predominantly a matter of circumstance. Were I to meet the same people again, at a different point in time, divorced of the precise incidental syzygy that won them to my side, they would find me slightly ridiculous and scrub me from their lives.
My Thesean volleyball team is no different. In season 1, for example, a spectacular spike convinced number 6 that I was rather tall, a fact that she had never heretofore noticed given its relative irrelevance off the volleyball court. In season 2 I proved to Helen and to Marie – names changed letter by letter so as to philosophically speaking keep them the same – that I had decent reflexes and a serve capable of potent if erratic spin. At the end of season 3 we lost Frankie and Tim, shortly after I had proved to them my Washington Post-like coverage of the court. And then in season 4 we were joined by Silvio and Mathilde. Now, to your seasoned team player, such a boost to our playmaking potential as is offered by Silvio and Mathilde is to be welcomed with nothing but rhapsodies of bliss. For me, however, cue agonies of self-doubt.
How was Silvio to know, I wailed, about the spectacular diving ability I had displayed in an earlier season? How could Mathilde visualise the blocks I had almost made against the league’s foremost spiker? It was all to be done again: every scrap of respect I had clawed from the jaws of ignominy to be fished back out again with those weird 18th century cages used for the extraction of tapeworms.
As it happened, things were not quite so bad as all that. Indeed, for a few months now, our tight little bark has weathered the oceans in a spirit of complete harmony. But now – weep, O you Muses – on the eve of the new season we must bid farewell to Helen and to Mathilde. The metaphorical gunwale and mizzenmast of our little boat (so named because I have no idea what either of them does but those more knowledgeable than me won’t shut up about them) have taken on too much salt water and must be cast aside.
Whoever comes to take their place, my most serious challenge will be to somehow convince them of my worth. Perhaps I’ll hit them with my Ship of Theseus anecdote. That one’s bound to be a winner.
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