Not American sport’s finest hour

Gatlin faces prospect of life ban

World and Olympic 100m champion Justin Gatlin is facing a lifetime ban after confirmation that his B sample tested positive for testosterone.

The American announced on Saturday that he had failed a doping test in April.

MORE:

Landis gives positive drugs test

Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has given a positive drugs test, his Phonak team revealed.

The 30-year-old American, who claimed Tour de France victory on Sunday, has tested positive for unusual levels of the male sex hormone testosterone...

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Ok, that was a snide headline in revenge for the endless soccer-bashing. Of course it’s not an American problem – it’s a particular problem in particular sports and is a function of the competitive drive (in which, as in so many areas, America leads the way).

In order to win things, you need the drive to win at all costs, not least the cost to your own body. Heaven knows what horrors these athletes are storing up for their old age.

Cycling, sprinting and weightlifting are three sports which depend on making unusual and unnatural physical demands on individuals. All three have become consumed by depressing, cyclical battles between the drug testers and the drug takers, who seek to find ever clever ways of masking the things that mask the things that mask the drugs.

And it's an open secret that in all three sports the drug takers are, well, everybody.

Memetics

From Ananova:

Jockey faces ban for butting horse

A top jockey is facing a ban after head-butting his horse after it played up before a race.

Paul O'Neill butted City Affair at Stratford after he was thrown before a two-mile hurdle, reports the Guardian.

Having landed on his feet, O'Neill appeared to drop his crash-helmeted forehead on to his mount's nose.

The pair were reunited for the race and finished fourth.

Paul Struthers, a spokesman for the Horseracing Regulatory Authority, said O'Neill would face a disciplinary hearing for improper riding.

John O'Shea, who trains City Affair, said: "Paul rang me and said he was sorry for what
happened. I haven't seen it yet.The horse is a very, very difficult character, but I couldn't comment on the incident until I've seen it."

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Perhaps it called his mother a terrorist.

Congratulations T & P

On Saturday I gained a brother-in-law and a sizeable hangover.

Have a wonderful time in Canada.

A golfing tragedy

From Ananova:

An eight-year-old US boy hit two holes-in-one with the same golf ball within 20 minutes.

Harrison Vonderau and his dad Dave were playing in a father and son tournament at a course in Cleveland, Ohio.

They both started screaming and jumping up and down when Harrison hit his first hole-in-one with his pitching wedge.

"We almost fell down we were so excited," Dave Vonderau told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

"I never had a hole-in-one, but I was happy to watch his."

But they could not believe their eyes when he repeated the feat with his nine iron 20 minutes later.

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Poor lad. Used up his entire lifetime’s supply of holes-in-one 13 years before he’s allowed to buy a drink.

Poet's Corner

These poems all have proper rhymes and some are even funny.

Click here to go to the full Think of England poetry site.

Reviews: ...I give that an 11, on a scale of 10. - Hey Skipper ... Byronic - Peter Burnet ... The stuff of a future poet laureate - Toque ...Chavtastic - Wonkotsane .... A right proper use of the arts; cultural warfare. - Duck

The Art Snobs

The Chav

Gymnasium

Ghosts of Christmas

Outside Wells Cathedral

The Blogger's Lament

Do It Yourself (commissioned)

Heir Apparent - for Prince Charles

A Regular's Sonnet (Spenserian)


Odds and sods:

Cold Calling
Bristolian Limericks
Spam poem
Anthem for American Teeth

The Ballad of Zinedine Zidane

Thoughts on football, the World Cup in general, and the 2006 World Cup in particular


Football vs The World Cup
The football World Cup has very little to do with ‘football’, as most football people understand the term.

Football is about freezing Saturday afternoons spent yelling torrents of fruity abuse at hapless wingers, misfiring forwards and clod-hopping centre-backs in between sips from paper cups of extra-salty Bovril and tentative nibbles at absurdly hot steak-and-kidney pies. Football is about daft one-eyed optimistic views on your club’s prospects at the start of the season followed shortly by extreme pessimism before each actual match, then followed by the crushing reality of mid-table mediocrity, ignominious cup exits and managerial fiascos. Football is the weight of club tradition, character and history, the decades of heroes and villains, thrashings and narrow squeaks, rare triumphs, occasional disasters and very common disappointments. Football is about love-hated local rivals, the supreme, vicious, tribal joy of victory over them and the deep chasms of despair that follow defeat. Football is the brief, ecstatic moments of light between long seasons of darkness and failure. It’s also about having a pint and a plate of chips afterwards and treating all those imposters just the same. Football is about sitting through all the rubbish irrelevant highlights on post-pub-closing Match of the Day only to miss the bit you really stayed up for because you couldn’t wait any longer to nip to the toilet. Football is about wondering why your absurdly hot steak-and-kidney pie has no kidney in it – can kidney really be more expensive than steak? – and if it is, what the hell kind of ‘steak’ is this, and what sort of effect might it be having on my digestive system?

But I digress. The point is that for 99% of football-lovers in football countries, football is about following a football club.

The World Cup is a different animal altogether. Football is a fan’s day job – it goes on week in, week out for most of the year, every year. The World Cup is a unique, bizarre, far-too-big festival that happens for a month, one summer in four. It has a superficial resemblance to football, but it is really about two things quite unrelated to football…


Patriotism vs Nationalism
Firstly, the World Cup engenders thinking about your country’s place in the world. Football happens to be the physical game that teams play in the World Cup, but fundamentally the actual game played is secondary to the questions about patriotism versus nationalism.

Patriotism is a good thing, nationalism is a bad thing. When it comes to the World Cup, patriotism means supporting your country and hoping that it wins, but accepting rationally that other countries might play better football in a better way, and enjoying others’ success when they deserve it. Nationalism is the irrational belief that your country is superior to all others, has nothing to learn from them and if it loses then someone else (referees, cheating foreigners, Cristiano Ronaldo etc) is to blame.

Watching the World Cup in a World Cup-mad country like England (or Germany, or Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Sweden, Ghana, Czech Republic etc) focuses on this tension between nationalism and patriotism all the time.

Now that we’ve given up world wars, this doesn’t happen to the same degree with any other event. The Olympic Games foster patriotism, but they are too unfocused, too splintered, too much about individual achievement to raise serious questions about nationalism. The World Cup allows each qualifying nation to compete on a level playing field at the same game, and thus to discover how their particular national approach stands in the world.


Football vs Soccer
The second thing that the World Cup is supposed to be about, is a joie de vivre celebration of ‘soccer’. Here, I idiosyncratically define ‘soccer’ as ‘the game of football in its highest-quality expression.’ (In the World Cup, people start talking about ‘the good of the game’. The good of the game is of practically no interest to the football follower: his club comes first, his country some way behind that, and the good of the game an extremely distant third.)

In theory, the best players from the best football nations are all gathered together in one place, and thus the best possible soccer will be played, with the best possible soccer team eventually triumphing, all for the shared entertainment of the big happy family that is humanity. In theory, of course. But as with so many things in life, there is a significant gap between theory and practice, of which more later.


The 2006 World Cup then, should be judged against all preceding World Cups in the light of these two spheres: nationalism/patriotism; and the soccer spectacle.


Germany vs History
In the first sphere, the competition was an undoubted triumph for the host nation. In a country where games were held at places like Berlin and Nuremburg, and where guests included the Polish, the French, the Dutch and the English, the spectre of Germanic nationalism was a rather awkward presence.

But in perhaps the only instance of the World Cup working some magic, the German people discovered something remarkable: it is possible to be patriotic without being nationalistic. The German football team itself had an unexpectedly successful tournament, playing great attacking football all the way to the semi-final before losing in the best game of the tournament to Italy. The Germans waved flags, hooted horns and sang about Deutschland without shame, and without alienating their guests. They even seemed to take great joy in winning that most worthless of games: the third-place play-off. For the first time in memory, English fans were hoping Germany would win after their own knockout.

If the discovery of positive, healthy German patriotism is the only worthwhile legacy of the 2006 World Cup, then it’s no small one.


Coaching vs Talent
If the World Cup was a success from the patriotism/nationalism point of view, it was a pitiful failure from the soccer spectacle angle.

The great pity was that it started so promisingly. A rush of thrilling games (Germany 4 Costa Rica 2; Argentina 2 Mexico 1) and great football (Argentina 6 Serbia & Mont 0; Spain 4 Ukraine 0) in the Group Stages fooled us into thinking we were in for a classic competition. But as soon as the knockout stages arrived, fear of losing conquered the will to win well, and the defensive shutters came up. Sven Goran Eriksson, England’s overpaid idiot of a coach who managed to take the best set of naturally-gifted attacking players the island has produced in 40 years and make them play with all the grace and instinct of a team of shop window dummies, was merely the worst. Brazil and Ronaldinho never got going and even Argentina sacrificed their attacking sprites Riquelme and Messi in favour of midfield thugs when they came to the quarter-final.

With the sole exception of the Italy-Germany semi-final, all the knockout games were pretty dismal affairs. There was no single outstanding teams and no outstanding strikers.

But why did this happen? Where are the unexpected superstars? Where was this year’s Maradona or Roger Milla or Carlos Alberto or Paul Gascoigne? Where was the exotic spectacle we used to associate with World Cups, when young, wide-eyed geniuses we’d never heard of appeared from some godforsaken South American ghetto to shock and awe us with fearless, joyful, raw talent?

Sadly, the chances of World Cups recapturing those glory days are shrinking every year. The single biggest reason is that the World Cup is no longer the place to find soccer in its highest-quality expression. The place for that is in club football: specifically, the European Champions’ League. That’s where all the best players in the world actually are, including those from countries who miss out on the Finals due to the positive-discrimination of the qualifying rounds. And since the richest clubs buy up all the world’s talent in its teens and play them against each other every year, there’s no longer much chance of the ghetto kid shock. Familiarity – of the players of even the more obscure countries to the fans, and of the players to each other – deadens the exoticism of the spectacle.


Zidane vs Zidane
This was a tournament in which cheating, diving and referee-baiting reached new lows of frequency and sophistication, and the time has come for retrospective punishment using video evidence. Portugal were the worst offenders, but not the only ones.

Germany, coached by Jurgen Klinsmann, the man famed for taking the dramatic dive to laughable extremes in the 1980s, were ironically the best-behaved team by the latter stages.

When they went out, the only ray of light left in the soccer spectacle stakes was Zinedine Zidane, the Marseilles magician who won the 1998 World Cup and the 2000 Euro Championship largely by himself. Zidane came out of retirement and ignored the universal consensus that he was too old and too slow, to play football that confirmed suspicions that of the two current players with claims to Pele/Beckenbaur/Maradona/Cruyff-style ‘greatness’, his was still much stronger than Ronaldinho’s.

But alas. ‘King Zizou’, the Algerian-heritage backstreet boy with an other-worldly aura who was worshipped like a god in France, performed a banlieue back-alley bit of GBH on Marco Materazzi’s chest with ten minutes of his illustrious career to go, created the unforgettable image of a very forgettable tournament, shocked and awed his faithful followers and instantly proved once again that men are not now, never were, and never will, in fact, be gods.

Days later, it was announced that due to an unfortunately premature voting schedule, Zidane was officially the player of the tournament.

So much for joie de vivre….






…but what the heck, roll on the next over-hyped, far-too-big, Yank-ignored, nationalistic jamboree, and South Africa in 2010!

On finding yourself turning into a personification of your own Quinglishness parody

We went to see an outdoor production of The Importance of Being Earnest* in Queen’s Square last night…


…soft rain fell, intermittently.





*The Importance of Being Earnest contains more laughs per minute than any other literary work except perhaps Austin Powers 2 and Orrin’s Collected Thoughts on Darwinism, so with a competent cast you can’t go wrong. This was a competent cast, but they didn’t quite have that little extra spark which can send an uncontrollable, constant, building wave of mirth across an audience throughout every scene.

On finding yourself in the odd position of celebrating a French victory

From the Times:


SMILE, smile and be a villain. And how we love a villain — someone who can be blamed for all the wrongs of the recent past, someone to wish harm on for ever, someone to inspire a gloat at every hint of personal failure.

Cristiano Ronaldo has become the scapegoat for England’s defeat in the World Cup, as Portugal beat England on penalties in the quarter-finals last weekend. Ronaldo played a significant role in Wayne Rooney’s sending-off and sent his own gloating levels into hyperspace after scoring the decisive penalty.

The Portuguese were an insufferable lot even before the Rooney-Ronaldo incident. Every bit of niggling, diving, faking and whingeing had been indulged in, every aspect of Latin football that most grates on the English psyche.

Ronaldo might be custom-built to get up the noses of all the followers of English football. He is good-looking in a gloriously smarmy, Italian-waiter fashion and is seriously vain about this. He has the air of a man who thinks that the world in general, and football in particular, not only owes him a living but also a perpetual gratitude at being privileged to know him.

He is distinguished more than anything else by his use of the stepover, a showy and — occasionally — effective footballing ploy. Someone once claimed that he set a world record for stepovers in a single match — 504 — beating the previous record of eight.

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Cristiano Ronaldo’s pantomime villainy in getting his own club team-mate sent off in the biggest game of his life should not be used as an excuse for England’s own dismal performances at the World Cup.

But nonetheless, the despised Portugese winger does seem to embody everything that the English loathe about what the Latins have brought to our beloved game: diving, shameless cheating and gamesmanship, injury-feigning, arrogance, lack of team spirit or dignity or sportsmanship, and worst of all, great skill and usually, victory over us.

A talented player, I grudgingly admit, but by goodness Ronaldo’s face is one that it would take a very, very long time indeed to tire of punching.

Idiot

From Ananova, some short time before England’s traumatic but predictable exit on penalties against Portugal:


A man has bet £200,000 in cash on England to win the World Cup.

If England become World Champions he will win a world record pay-out of £1.2million.

The gambler, an Arab in his 40s, went to the William Hill in London's Park Lane two days before the tournament began with a Fortnum and Mason hamper holding £50,000.

He bet on England at 6-1.

It took staff 30 minutes to count the money which was all in £50 notes reports The Sun.

The next day the punter returned with two hampers with a total of £100,000. And he came back again on day three with another hamper with £50,000, making his total bet £200,000.

A spokesman for William Hill said: "Our eyes popped out when we opened up the first hamper. When he came back on the second day with £100,000 it took over an hour to count it."

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I can only think that he was trying to make some sort of artistic statement, a la the KLF.

The USA (and other third world countries)

Simon Barnes in The Times:


WHEN SPORT mirrors the real world, it frequently does so in a bizarre and distorted fashion. How else would you get the United States in the third world? For the world of football, like the real world, can be readily divided into three and, as with the real world, it is the third one that demands the best care, attention and love that the first and second can offer.

Soccer’s first world is Europe. This is where the game began, where its first skills were developed, where its culture and its philosophy took shape, where its commercial possibilities were recognised. There are 14 first-world nations here at the World Cup and if that seems a lot, plenty have missed out: Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Hungary, Romania, Russia.

Soccer’s second world is Latin America, starting at Mexico and working south to Tierra del Fuego. Here, the European game was taken, reinterpreted, redeveloped and, most would say, reached its highest form of expression — whether you are talking about potency or mere beauty — with the 1970 team from Brazil. There are six teams of Latinos in Germany and that’s without Colombia and Uruguay.

Football, then, was a war between these worlds: the old and the new, the rich and the poor, the pedestrian and the poetic. The best team in the world has always come from one or other of these worlds.

There was a time when the World Cup was invariably played in one or other of these worlds and, generally, whichever world had home advantage won. And if you wanted to have a gathering of all the best footballing nations in the world, you might as well stop there. You could say that bringing in teams from anywhere else is counter-productive, lowers standards and produces a lopsided competition.

But as with the real world, the third was clamouring for recognition, for a fair chance, for an opening-up of the closed shop. The expansion to a 24-team competition in 1982 and then again to 32 teams in 1998 brought third-world participation in the World Cup to a level a good way beyond tokenism. They were the years that Fifa, the world governing body, legalised hope.

There are five African nations here, four from Asia, and then there are the United States, Australia and Trinidad & Tobago. At the weekend, six third-world teams were in action and five of them put on stirring performances, the US holding Italy and South Korea doing the same with France, Japan drawing with Croatia. Ghana beat the Czech Republic. I was at the Brazil game to see a marvellously spirited Australia side lose 2-0, and they were a shade unlucky to do so.

The World Cup needs all this. It needs more than excellence, it needs the feeling that footballing people have gathered together in one country from all the four corners of the earth. Togo and Australia are as important as Brazil and Germany. Trinidad & Tobago matter as much as England — and, indeed, they have embarrassed England and given Sweden a bloody nose. Without the third world, the World Cup is just a football tournament. As it is, this is a tournament that means the world.

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Pele once famously predicted than an African team would win the World Cup by the year 2000.

Yet it hasn't happened, and the 2006 quarter-final line-up now contains Brazil, Argentina and six European teams,

The footballing third world still has a way to go.

The gap is narrowing – as it should do since the majority of the best players from Africa, Asia and America all play for European clubs – but it’s narrowing a lot slower than people thought it would.

More torture please, we're English

Given that following England's adventures in the World Cup is currently my (and the nation's) chief preoccupation, TofE has been strangely silent on the matter.

The reason is simple: it's hard to write about something so painful. So I'll let Robert Crampton in The Times do it for me...



...There are few experiences, surely, as worrisome as watching England play competitive football. Never mind anxious, it’s agony. We’ve had a fortnight now of utter misery with, one hopes, another fortnight of utter misery still to go. I sit chewing my nails, silent, brooding, watchful for whatever is about to go wrong, occasionally furious, very seldom happy. It’s exquisite.

I say a fortnight, more like as long as I can remember, back to the age of nine and the Poles at Wembley in 1973. Crunch qualifiers, gritty groups, knuckle-eating knockouts: dozens, scores, hundreds of games, every one spent win, lose or draw in abject gut-churning displeasure, writhing on a sofa or a stool somewhere, watching the pictures coming in from Spain, Mexico, Italy, France, Japan, the decades passing, pleas and curses and vitriol muttered to brother or father, wife or child, God or barman. Nausea beforehand, emptiness afterwards, because either they’re out or they’re not, and you can’t wait to be sitting suffering again.

For many of us, there are two World Cups going on in Germany. One involves watching England, the other involves watching teams we don’t care about. This second World Cup is great fun. Germany-Poland last week, for instance: a bunch of us watched it together, making fun of mistakes, names and hairstyles, cheering the plucky Poles, keen for the Germans to lose, but then, when the inevitable winner came, experiencing it as a momentary disappointment rather than a bayonet to the belly.

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The actual personnel that makes up the players and the management of the England football team at any one time seems to be irrelevant: there's something deep in the national psyche that means England will always play incredibly badly (but not quite badly enough to lose) against weak teams, and then incredibly well (but not quite well enough to win) against great teams.

Nothing different this year. Without doubt this is the most talented generation of footballers that England has produced since 1966, but do they sweep past the likes of Ecuador, Paraguay and Trinidad in the riot of joyous free-flowing football that each member regularly produces for his club?

They do not.

They sweat, toil and struggle in the sun, cursed with self-consciousness and weighed down with the hope and expectation of a super-critical yet hopelessly optimistic nation, doing just enough to scrape agonisingly through each round, always on the brink of national humiliation and disaster, frightened witless by each minnow, making Himalayan mountains of every molehill until, with tedious predictability, they come up against Brazil or Argentina, and then, freed from the burden of being 'favourites', they suddenly produce a performance of sustained brilliance and bravery that ends, inevitably, in desperate ill luck and glorious failure.

Watching England is mass masochism - but would we have it any other way?

Bristolian Limericks

On having one’s reading interrupted by the insect-like noise of teenagers riding mopeds up and down the street outside

Now reading The Brothers Karamazov
May not have the razz-a-matazz of
Your glamorous scooters,
With their engines and hooters,
But all the same, do please goddamn buzz off.




A Bristolian* invites his friends for a cheap curry on the night before his wedding

(*a curiosity of the local dialect is the ‘Bristol L’, whereby a superfluous ‘l’ is added to the end of words ending in ‘a’. Most commonly, ‘idea’ becomes ‘ideal’.)

The Taj for a bhunal’s the ideal,
To celebrate the end of an eral,
You don’t pay no extral
For poppadoms, et cetral
(But there is an off chance o’ diarrhoeal).

Cold Calling

Cold Calling

Of all the world’s appalling callings,
Sales cold calling’s worst of all.

All the mornings of verbal maulings,
From those you’re calling, starts to pall.

All the more galling is that my appalling
rates of commission are so small,
That even four successful callings
barely pays for one pub crawl.

Why the English weather is the best

In response to Peter’s challenge, I shall embark on my most ambitious piece of patriotic nonsense yet: a defence – nay, a celebration ­– of the English Weather.

Some short time ago, we discovered that Britain’s weather is not in fact determined by a collection of impish and malicious demi-Gods, but by such mundane things as the westerly winds from the Atlantic, which bring rain when you least expect it, and the Gulf Stream, which heats our island in winter and chills it in summer. Obtaining this knowledge, however, has in no way improved our ability to predict the weather even on a daily basis, let alone at long-range.

But it is my contention that the English weather – a national icon and character in its own right – is the very source of our Greatness. In gloom lies our glory, in drizzle our destiny.

So here are my ten reasons why English weather is the best in the world:

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1. It is the foundation of social interaction

"When two Englishmen meet their first talk is of the weather..."

...said Samuel Johnson, and that’s as true today as it ever was.

The second thing two Englishmen talk about is the respective fortunes of their football teams. Occasionally, you meet a chap who has no interest in football, so you talk about cricket or rugby or, in a real emergency, tennis. Now, just very occasionally, you meet a fellow who has no interest in sport whatsoever. This is when one’s mettle is really tested, and you have to eke every last conversational drop out of the weather. At such times, you can only thank heavens that the English weather provides so very, very much to talk about.

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2. It builds character, particularly stoicism and an acceptance of the fickle nature of fate

“Whether the weather be fine, Whether the weather be not, Whether the weather be cold, Whether the weather be hot, We'll weather the weather, Whatever the weather, Whether we like it or not” Anon


When they consider those poor primitive sorts in Hot Countries who leap about, bellow and chant, wave sticks and otherwise engage in activites that might be described as a ‘Rain Dance’, the British shake their heads in pity. For they know that summoning a deluge from the weather gods is as easy as pie: just hang out the washing, or better yet, utter the magic words “let’s have a barbeque.”

There is no midsummer wedding day, no long-anticipated tennis tournament, and above all no big family-and-friends barbeque that can’t suddenly be washed out without a moment’s warning.

But do we moan and curse our fate? We do not. We bloody well put a big umbrella over the stove, don our macs and have that barbeque anyway. Century upon century of ruined plans means that making the best of things is in our blood: the Blitz was a doddle.

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3. It instills an appreciation of, and gratitude for, life’s transient and fleeting moments of pleasure

“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.” John Ruskin


A corollary of stoicism in the face of fickle Dame Fortune, is the ability to make the most of unexpected gifts. No spoilt children of California are we. Stroll out at lunchtime on a warm sunny day in any English town or city and you’ll see that every possible patch of green is occupied by a reclining, sunbathing Limey, munching on a sandwich and soaking what rays he can into his pasty white skin.

Crunching up lanes on crisp, cold, clear winter days, mowing the lawn on bright spring mornings with cuckoos calling, kicking a football around the park on a golden autumnul afternoon, and sipping wine in the garden on a glorious long summer evening – when the drizzle clears, our seasons are wonderfully distinct, and we make the most of them.

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4. It has enriched our language

Without the factors mentioned above, we wouldn’t have such pearls of wisdom as: ‘make hay while the sun shines’ and “If you don't like the weather, wait a minute’

Nor could we keep a weather eye on our fair-weather friends, in case they rain on our parade. After all, it never rains but it pours. But even when you’re feeling under the weather, hearing the expression ‘brass monkeys’ generally brightens your day and makes you feel right as rain.

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5. It is the source of much merriment and humour

"Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way... well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't!"

So said TV meteorologist Michael Fish on 15 October 1987, hours before the worst storm to hit Britain since 1703, thus sealing his place in British comedy folklore.


This May, due to chronic reservoir mismanagement, some parts of southern England were officially assigned ‘drought’ status and the use of hosepipes was temporarily banned. Naturally this coincided with three weeks of incessant, relentless, driving rain – the wettest May for two decades. You need a sense of humour for that sort of thing. As Terry Wogan said on his radio show: “Good thing this drought is so wet…”

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6. Poetic inspiration

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world began,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night


On shallow slates the pigeons shift together,
Backing against a thin rain from the west
Blown across each sunk head and settled feather.
Huddling round the warm stack suits them best,
Till winter daylight weakens, and they grow
Hardly defined against the brickwork. Soon,
Light from a small intense lopsided moon
Shows them, black as their shadows, sleeping so.

Philip Larkin, Pigeons


From the dew-soaked hedge creeps a crawly caterpillar,
When the dawn begins to crack.
Its all part of my autumn almanac.
Breeze blows leaves of a mustard-coloured yellow,
So I sweep them in my sack.
Yes, yes, yes, it’s my autumn almanac.

Friday evenings, people get together,
Hiding from the weather.
Tea and toasted, buttered currant buns
Cant compensate for lack of sun,
Because the summers all gone.
Oh, my poor rheumatic back!
Yes, yes, yes, it’s my autumn almanac.

The Kinks, Autumn Almanac

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7. Joseph Mallord William Turner

...could only have come from England

Rain, Steam and Speed

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8. Everything in moderation...

...is the English way

No tsunamis, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no volcanoes.

Just the wettest droughts in the world, and a comforting soft drizzle to caress you from cradle to grave.

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9. Rain breaks in the cricket


Cricket is a rare sport in that it works best on radio. The commentators on Test Match Special, especially Blowers (right), CMJ, Aggers and the late Johnners, are national treasures. And true aficionados know that they really come into their own during the rain breaks, when there’s nothing to do except talk glorious cricket nonsense.

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10. The civilisation of the planet

People in warm countries like Spain are lazy. When the English go on holiday they get lazy, because they are too hot and their brains melt.

English weather keeps you busy. Why invent Parliamentary democracy if you can lie around in meadows all day? Why formulate the Magna Carta if you could play beach volleyball instead?

Would Shakespeare have bothered to write all those plays if he could have spent the time sitting in his garden wearing a string vest, and a knotted handkerchief on his head? No – with so much weather, the English need indoor entertainment, and what better than a good tragedy?

If it wasn’t so cold, we wouldn’t have needed furs. If our native plants weren’t so soggy and bland, we wouldn’t need to import spices. Without English weather: no Hudson’s Bay Company, no America; no British East India Company, no Empire; no rule of law; no modern world; no civilisation; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short!

So raise your glasses, cry three cheers for the constant drizzle and thank the Lord we don’t live in Scotland, where the weather’s even worse.

The beauty of the ugly game

Trinidad dig in for dream draw
By Oliver Kay

Trinidad & Tobago 0 Sweden 0

WHATEVER HE HAS ACHIEVED AS A footballer, Dwight Yorke has always come across as someone whose biggest highs came away from the pitch. The playboy image is one he has done little to play down, save for during that annus mirabilis with Manchester United, but finally, having found a cause worth fighting for, he has rediscovered the kind of joys that only sport can bring.

Saturday in Dortmund brought a Trinidad & Tobago performance that astounded on many levels — the heroics of Shaka Hislop, who had been brought in at the last minute; the resilience of a couple of centre halves from Gillingham and Wrexham; the cavalier tactics of Leo Beenhakker, the coach, after he had had a player sent off — but no less remarkable was the sight of Yorke, reinvented as a holding midfield player and with his familar smile replaced by a determined grimace as he cajoled his team-mates towards a result the significance of which far transcends the state of play in group B.

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Now there’s a headline our American cousins might never understand. That’s right, a dream 0-0 draw.

The Trinidad & Tobago fans went mental at the final whistle. Just imagine what will happen if they score a goal.

A standing joke in Britain (which Budweiser are milking in their ‘You do the football, we’ll do the beer’ ads –actually, we’d prefer to do the beer as well, thanks) is the hypothetical American millionaire trying to ‘improve’ the game by making the goals ten times bigger, introducing scoring zones, making draws illegal or any other artificial mechanism for ensuring games finish 15-13 rather than 1-0.

In other words, making the beautiful game more like that most excruciatingly tedious (and interestingly, uniquely pure American-origin) sport, basketball.

But beauty is only the most superficial of football’s pleasures. A key part of football’s worldwide appeal is that the goal is still one of the highest-value currencies in sport.

Basketball reminds me of people who swear constantly. If everything gets a cuss, there’s no impact when something really deserves it. How anyone can be bothered to cheer one ‘basket’ amongst so many is beyond me.

Football, meanwhile, is about long periods of frustration, tension and brooding terror, interspersed with rare moments of genuine ecstasy. And the rarity is crucial. Cricket is my favourite sport for its own sake, but nothing beats the sudden, explosive, deafening roar of a crowd when the home team scores. Wonder goals are best, but even scruffy, bundled own-goals do the trick.

The same goes for denying the opposition a precious goal, especially when it's against all the odds. Hence the Trinidadian delight at 0-0.

Drubbing a hapless bunch of no-hopers like the Faroe Islands 8-0 is no fun at all. But scraping agonisingly past Argentina 1-0 thanks to a dodgy penalty – now that’s what what I call sport.

Nice try, Jerry

Local newsflash today:

Police have closed Bristol's central Broadmead area following the discovery of a suspected wartime bomb.

Officers were called to the new development off Bond Street after workmen unearthed an object believed to date back to World War II.

Police have cordoned off the site and surrounding roads including Newfoundland Street and Bond Street.

Many roads in the area have been closed and police are advising motorists to use alternative routes.

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How do they expect our football fans to cut out the WWII jokes at the World Cup when the Germans are still trying to nobble us even now?