Month: June 2006

Sorry if you’re totally bored by the football by now, but I’m afraid I’ve been continuing to enjoy this year’s competition. Last Thursday, I joined a bunch of Aussies in a central London pub to watch their final group game. With a somewhat depressing predictability, the beeb had chosen to show Brazil as their main BBC1 game (which offered only the remotest of outside chances of Japan qualifying), instead of the one remaining group F match that actually meant something, relegating Australia v Croatia to BBC3. After gently assisting the bar staff in locating said digital channel on their Sky system, we settled in for the match. I hate to admit it, but I was rather caught up in the atmosphere, and I actually wanted the Aussies to win (and that’s not something you’ll hear me saying very often): they were far the better team on the night, for one, and they seemed to come off rather worse from Graham Poll’s erratic decisions (even before the revelation that he can’t count to 2). Rugby tackling Mark Viduka to the ground, for example, apparently doesn’t warrant a penalty (nor, for that matter, does a blatant handball). When Australia equalised for the second time, I actually found myself unconsciously leaping into the air and cheering (before I was able to check myself and revert to polite clapping). Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: I feel like I’ve cheated on England.

On arriving at work the next morning, I was amused to see that the Wikipedia monkeys had already been busy cataloguing Poll’s misfortunes. It’s been removed since then, but when I first looked at it, the Croatia v Australia section of that page ended simply with the following final paragraph: “He will be too old for the 2010 world cup.” Clearly he’s a man with many fans around the world.

On Sunday, we joined our friends in South London to catch the England game near their house. Their local, otherwise a quiet gastropub populated by young professionals, had unfortunately been taken over by lairy, En-ger-land-shirted drunks, who were climbing on the bar and filling the room with very loud terrace-style chanting. It gave the pub a deeply unpleasant atmosphere and precipitated 45 of the most unpleasant minutes of my life as we struggled to concentrate on the game. I considered leaving after about 10 minutes, but somehow we lasted for a full half before fleeing to the much more pleasant place round the corner. It didn’t help that the pathetic volume levels on the pub’s TVs struggled to compete with the localised chanting (and, I suppose, the woeful England performance didn’t help matters much either). Suffice to say, we won’t be heading back to that pub for any of their future games.

There’s a sizeable Portuguese community in the Stockwell/Vauxhall area, so we hung around for the other game, Portugal v Holland. In the hours leading up to the kick-off, we barely saw a single individual not wearing some item of clothing proclaiming their support for the red and green team. Most cars that passed us seemed to be engaging in a special one-upmanship contest to see who could fit the most Portuguese flags on their vehicle. We watched most of the bad-tempered clash from a comfy sofa in the pub, but we wandered down to the street to join the crowds for the last 20 minutes: we joined a few hundred people crowded outside the tapas restaurants down the road, chants of “POR-TU-GAL, POR-TU-GAL” ringing out. As we pushed through the crowd to find a spot to settle, a bloke shouted to me:

“Oi, it’s Peter Crouch! Hey Peter Crouch…” (Well, I was wearing a red t-shirt and white shorts).
I did my best attempt at a robot dance as we passed.

When the final whistle finally went, after they held on for some 6 minutes of added time (a testament to the type of game it was), the crowds went predictably crazy. There was much cheering. People climbed up onto lampposts to wave their giant flags around. Car horns were very much tooted. We almost forgot we were in a corner of South London, and not wandering the streets of Lisbon. All that, and they’d only won their second round match. I can only imagine how crazy they’d be if they made it past England and went on to win the thing…

Today I arrived at work at the crack of dawn in an attempt to reach the pub in time for the 4pm kick off in the Australia v Italy game. Surely they can’t do it again, can they?

EDIT: Er, no. They can’t. But pretty close, and if wasn’t for a cynical dive and an unjustified penalty at the death, who knows what might have happened…

Many, many months ago I half considered buying tickets to go to this year’s wireless festival. Not the James Gray/David Blunt/KT Thingie nonsense that happened over the weekend, of course, but just the first day of the event, the “indie” day: I’m very much enjoying The Raconteurs’ album, for one, the Dirty Pretty Things remind me of The Libertines when they were good, and it’s always worth seeing the likes of The Strokes or Belle and Sebastian as a bonus.

In the end I decided that by the time you’d paid 40 quid for tickets, and added on some ridiculous postage charges and ten or so quid worth of various fees, it was all a bit much for a few hours of music, and I didn’t bother. I think too that I half remembered that last year (when this all clashed with Glasto and thus wasn’t an option) they hadn’t sold it out, and ended up selling off tickets cheaply at the last minute on, appropriately enough, Lastminute.com. I guess I was hoping that the same thing might happen this year.

But then, as luck would have it, I didn’t have to actually pay for tickets, because a few weeks ago an email turned up offering free tickets, in exchange for signing up for some mailing list. I suppose that they must have really failed to flog the tickets this year–they even had to resort to doing the lastminute.com cheap sell off thing as well (and nice to see that so few people wanted to see James Blunt that they were reduced to flogging tickets off for just twenty quid).

Although I’m not sure if I’d have felt it was value for money if I’d had to pay to get in, considering that we all got there for nothing, I actually rather enjoyed it. After a ridiculously early start at work, I’d managed to join Sal in time to have already got inside and to the bar just as the Dirty Pretty Things took to the stage.

For a while it felt like we weren’t in London, having just dashed there from work, but more like perhaps the Saturday afternoon at Glastonbury, when maybe we’d wandered over to the Other Stage.

I particularly enjoyed seeing The Raconteurs, although I couldn’t help thinking that their thing would work a lot better in a Brixton Academy, rather than a big festival area. Later, we wandered into the XFM tent in time to catch the end of the Super Furries (they played Man Don’t Give a Fuck. Yay!) Oh, and the Strokes were a lot better than I thought they were going to be, but maybe that was just because they played so much stuff from their first album, the only one I actually like…

Wireless festival,
Behind Us, watching the Strokes.
IT’S: Edith Bowman

Who’s that on the tube?
Chubby girl in business suit?
Her off Apprentice

– Is it wrong that, on seeing this 1978 photo of Microsoft staffers that’s been doing the rounds again recently, that my main thought was “I wonder what happened to their tech author…”?

– Despite it being nearly three weeks since my (private) company moved into a floor of a building otherwise occupied by a government department, I only noticed this morning that there is a permanent sign in reception displaying the current “bikini alert” status for the UK. Apparently we’re currently on “black special” bikini alert (which appears to roughly approximate to “pretty much anything could happen, at any time, in any place; we’re not really sure, sorry!”) but I’ll be sure to let you know if anything changes.

– Finally, some celeb spotting:

Sal phones, excited
“Liam, at the ATM!”
“Quick,” I say, “Phone Heat!”

Guy from Hollyoaks
(Tony’s brother in real life
and fake) near Euston

For some reason, TNT Magazine have decided that I’d like to receive email updates about the World Cup progress of the Australian football team. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see the Aussies winning for once–it’s got to be good for the domestic game in Australia, for one thing, which, who knows, might come in handy for me personally at some point in the future, and it’s not as if I see them repeating the feat against Brazil–but I’d rather not receive daily email updates on this subject, particularly if they’re written by a imbecile who appears to know next to nothing about football, and contain comments like this one:

Aussies on song
The chants from the Aussie camp are definitely on the improve. Two of the best heard heard yesterday in Kaiserslautern: “Sing when you’re whaling. You only sing when you’re whaling,” and, in reply to the “Nippon,” clap clap clap chant from Japanese fans: “Nikon,” click click click.

I’m sorry, but in most of the rest of the world we’ve been trying to kick racism out of football…

BBC: Release of 53 lifers under fire.

Well, I suppose it makes things interesting, watching them dodge the bullets, doesn’t it?

According to the leaks from the latest report into the de Menezes shooting, Sir Ian Blair didn’t actually lie to the media after all, because the people who knew the truth were too scared to tell him. Apparently, according to some people, that makes everything ok. Well, then… he’s just an incompetent manager, feared by his subordinates, but at least he’s not a liar.

Now, I’ve always felt that he was in something of a no-win drown-him-if-he’s-a-witch catch 22 situation here: he either mislead the media, in which case he should go, or he “runs” an organisation that is so ineffective that it took a full 24 hours for him to discover what many of us suspected within hours of the event.

Either way, I can’t see how he should remain in the job. Can you?

I’ve been rather enjoying the World Cup so far (and not just because my fantasy football team has been doing rather well for once–today’s been particularly good, with both Tim Cahill and Tomas Rosicky in my team). Maybe it’s just because, unlike the European Championships two years ago, this time we’ve got two tellies, so Sal can happily retreat next door with Big Brother leaving me happily ensconced in front of Italy – Ghana.

On Saturday, with Rhys in town, we got up early and headed East to fit a suitable venue to watch the England match. I had briefly thought that maybe we should head for the big screen at Canary Wharf (although it turns out that that would have been a mistake), but instead we had intended to watch it at the Vibe Bar, on Brick Lane, labouring as we were under the misapprehension that their big screen would be in their big beer garden. When it turned out that they were actually showing it inside, in a big hot stuffy room, and that we had to pay for tickets, and that they were in fact already sold out, we decided that maybe we’d go somewhere else. Helpfully, when Sal asked the girl on the ticket desk if she knew anywhere else in the area that was showing the game, she said “Yes”.

So, left to find somewhere on our own, we went to investigate the local pubs, and ended up in a real East-end boozer round by Spitalfields, perhaps the biggest contrast we could have picked from the overtly trendy ShoreditchTwat-esque location where we’d originally planned to watch the game.

The pub we ended up in came complete with an authentic eccentric East End landlady, who popped up with five minutes to go in the game, and began removing furniture. I’d barely got up from my chair to peer around the bloke in front of me whose head was obscuring my view of the screen when she’d whipped it out from underneath me and carried it outside. “I’ve got to make room” she said, as she came back to relieve us of our table. All very sensible, if she’d chosen to do this at the start of the game, but with 85 minutes on the clock this seemed a rather odd move. Ah well, a good result anyway, and the less said about the game itself the better.

Yesterday, we spent a pleasant afternoon loafing about in sunny Regent’s Park, with our picnics, beers, and boules. We even staged our own mini football match, which I enjoyed a great deal (partly because, although I’ve always been rubbish at football, I don’t seem too bad when everyone else in the game is an Aussie more used to kicking a brown oval ball). Now, there’s officially a “no ball games” in the section of Regent’s Park where we’d chosen to picnic, but it’s a rule that’s largely ignored by most visitors. At one point, long before we began our actual football match, a crazy old lady came round the park, telling each and every person in the park who looked like they might be about to break this rule that “there’s no ball games in here, you know”.

“Are you Australian as well?” she said to our friend Andrew, who had been throwing around an AFL footie with a couple of other Aussies who randomly turned out to be in the park too. “It’s no ball games in here don’t you know!”

When he tactfully pointed out that most of the park’s other visitors were ignoring this rule too (some of whom were probably Brits), “Oh no,” she said, “they’re all Arabs,” and with that she was off to tell the rest of the park off, one by one.

Today, I took a late lunch and popped out to catch the first half hour of the Australia – Japan game, before I had to dash back, unpleasantly sweaty, to sit in a meeting. Luckily the guys from IT were setting up the projector/TV tuner combo in our big meeting room, so I got to see the cracking last ten minutes–all three Australian goals–back at the office. Not bad so far, anyway. Roll on Trinidad and Tobago…

In response to a blog post I made almost two and a half years ago, “brookfield” writes that [s]he is “terribly sorry that [I’ve] gone entirely mad”.

From what I remember, at the gig in question, Damien Rice was being a bit of a petulant, precious, artiste, and I believe that was the point I was trying to make in the blog. I do actually quite like Mr Rice’s music, but apparently I “wouldn’t understand, obviously”.

Well, fair dos, Mr[s] Brookfield, you’ve got me: clearly by googling for “Damien Rice Dallas November” and reading something I wrote 2 years ago you know everything about me that there is to know. I’m sorry that I can’t be included in the select group of people who do understand the tribulations of being an emotional man with an acoustic guitar.

I have failed as a human being. Obviously.

I didn’t have my book today, so I found myself sitting on the tube reading Metro this morning. After I’d got past the utterly vacuous Rumsfeld quote on the front page (“no single person on this planet has had the blood of more innocent men, women and children on his hands than Zarqawi”–look Rummy, I know you are contractually obliged to pretend that getting the terrists is the most important thing ever, but think about it: that’s not even close to true, is it. What about Hitler? Pol Pot? Genghis Khan?) I got to a bit about “Get Loaded in the Park”, a Metro-sponsored music thingy that’s happening on Clapham Common in July. I was interested to read that Badly Drawn Boy is playing, but confused about their write up, which talked of him being about to release his new album, One Plus One is One. It’s funny, because I’m pretty sure that came out a couple of years ago and promptly sank without trace.

It was only when I looked at his website to check that I realised what must have happened. You see, the esteemed Metro, rather than bothering to write their own copy, simply swiped a chunk of the description from BDB’s website without bothering to check when it was last updated. Because if they had, they’d have realised that when it says the album will be released on June 21st, that’s June 21st 2004. Now that’s professional, fact-checking journalism in action…