Last week I wrote this:

Normality will resume; flags will quietly be binned, Tim’ll lose at tennis, Andrew will lose at Cricket and the Rugby team will forget that once they were quite good”

Do I get a prize? No? So it seems me and the other 10 million people who predicted the same will be disappointed. Still we can at least assuage our disappointment by drinking deep from the fountain of I told you we were rubbish“. If it’s good enough for the media, it’s good enough for me.

Watching the game, buffered from its’ awfulness by a bucket load of beer, it rapidly became clear that neither side deserved to progress further. The Portuguese play in a playground style of mum, he’s hit me, he did, he did, he did, honest” and after one particularly petulant incident, I fully expected them to collectively blub, before taking their ball home. Our team was separated from greatness by exactly the same gap which separate the hype from reality. For the first sixty minutes, we seamlessly transferred our dreadful, laboured form from the first four games into this one. And then their was the small matter of Shrek and the Groinal stamping. For which he was given his marching orders.

I dunno. In my day, playing at a level which generally involved drinking before the match, an opposing defender attempting to violently harvest your bollocks through a scything challenge, grudgingly engendered a little professional respect. Aye, he was hard bastard but fair” you’d wince while examining the stud marks marching up the inside of your thigh.

Still with Rooney in the changing rooms presumably laying into the kit man or chewing on the benches, those left on the pitch did their best. It was almost enough with a Canadian who thinks he’s a German playing with a verve and passion that best defines an Englishman. I know I said he was rubbish but this was merely a clever motivational strategy.

And then the inevitable penalties. Martial law was declared in our house and a media blackout followed in the barn. Children were banished as were any electronic devices that could broadcast the inescapable nay predestined outcome. For want of anything better to do, my time was occupied polishing a set of wheels and pretending I didn’t care. When I finally returned to the house and the glum faces surrounding the TV, I found I still did.

Everyone knows sport is just nationalism dressed up in a tracksuit but we’ve been so comprehensively stuffed this last couple of weeks, we’re reduced to supporting a Scotsman. Oh he pretends to support the English and talks of British Sport” but the United Kingdom was just a crappy marketing Brand nearly four hundred years ago, and it’s fooled almost no one since. You only have to listen to the second verse of the national anthem to see that.

Maybe we should change the Anthem to something more uplifting. Land of Hope and Glory perhaps although Land of Mope and Snory seems more appropriate (the first post result, the second post result hangover). Or maybe we should just set more realistic expectations. No, /Sven mode/ *sorry, sorry, sorry*, I’m just being silly.

Still, it’ll be good to see the end of the flags though. Patriotism is one thing; exploding children cooked in the back of window locked cars is quite another.

UPDATE: So Murray lost. Never mind eh, misery loves company. I have it on good authority that we’re in with a sniff of a medal at the under 13 allcomers tiddywinks competition.

Sherlock Holmes used to talk of a 4 Pipe Problem? when pontificating on a complex mystery involving an overgrown dog, a villainous character superbly defined by the simple culinary definition of a bad egg? and the odd dead body. From this our hero pulled together the wispy threads of evidence before delivering the guilty verdict with hardly a tip of his ever present deerstalker hat.

My life isn’t as complex as that but roll forward a hundred years and watching the England football team becomes a four beer problem.

Continue reading “Watching England.” →

From the times today

Well that’s university funds well spent. Did they go visit these turretless tank driver’s co-workers and friends to discover if they were arrogant wankers as well? Actually they needn’t bother; I’d wager they are based on no research nor statistical corroboration other than bouncing off these pointless symbols of supposed status and actual twatiness.

Jeez, that must be most pointless piece of research since men would rather watch football and drunk beer than discuss shoes?. It’s put me in mind of the IG’s.

That’s warm if you live down south and wet if you venture into the Penninian rain shadow that is Manchester. My arrival at the city limits triggered a downpour that if not exactly biblical certainly made you wish for rubber shoes and some anti-smiting cream. Having covered the hundred and seventy miles from home to Manchester in just over two hours, it only took me a further hour to find the hotel.

That’s the problem with technology you see. My PDA/TomTom thing reverted to the ground state of anything running WinDoze which is a blue screen, an unhelpful error message and the occasional apologetic electronic chirp. The backup plan of a printed map with detailed directions would have worked so much better had I completed the simple sequence of print, collect and carry. One out of three isn’t bad I suppose.

After attacking the city in a one man pincer movement, the Hotel appeared (well not exactly appeared as teleportation is still a young science) all concretey and welcoming out of the gloom. I then handed my car keys to a man I’d never met who aside from a Liverpool accent and a pair of Winkle Pickers looked every inch the valet parker they’d promised. I never expected to see the car again but my faith was partially restored in humanity the following morning when – aside from a tired looking interior obviously the result of a night’s hard taxi-ing – the vehicle was returned with the same number of wheels, and hardly any new “custom bodywork” as I like to think of the litany of every increasing dents.

The hotel was another one of those contemporary ones. You know, sink on the outside of the bathroom, remainder of bathroom designated a “wet zone” meaning everything you own disappears underwater and you must gain rapid surfing skills to remain upright on the way back into the bedroom. There was a mirror in the shower for shaving that had it not steamed up within one millisecond of the water being turned on may have had some possible use. The whole place was designed by a women because one of the few joys of hotel occupation was cruelly denied me.

I speak of leaving the toilet seat up. Being surrounded on three sides by women in my family, it’s a guilty pleasure not oft repeated. The sense of power being able to stumble into the bathroom unencumbered by difficult aspects of motor control involving seats and er, other things. But no, the flusher was cunningly hidden behind the seat meaning short of punching a hole in the ceramics, there was no way to have the whole seat up experience.

I will obviously be writing to the manager to complain in the strongest possible terms.

I didn’t bother with the in room dining on the grounds that there is only so much lettuce a man should see in his lifetime. And one day, I’ll rediscover the knack of sleeping in hotels. Last night failed to blaze that trail of discovery sadly.

Behold the tool wall. Imagine a expensive funnel directing building traffic to a defined end point. This best describes the journey from a useful outbuilding to extended house. And at the cusp of that funnel is a vertical representation of all things tool shaped. Not that I’m obsessed or anything but this is about as good as it gets.

For some reason, my picture links seem to be broken, rather than try and fix then, here’s a link

Once sufficient elbow room is allowed, there’s the capacity for a biblical event that’d make Noah consider the rising of the water as localised flooding. You have to think big when considering the consequences of a talentless Alex, armed with dangerous hardware and aimed at an unsuspecting bike. Really don’t consider this as a victim, what we’re really talking about is a blast radius.

Still it’s all indoors and unlikely to frighten the horses so I’ll file it somewhere between a hobby and a mental illness. Somewhat like this blog which has crested a hundred posts and , more worryingly, attracts five hundred hits a day. Surely you’ve got something better to do.

No, I haven’t in case you were going to ask.