Year: 2003

Our cable decoder is broken. It’s a rather grim state of affairs, actually, as it won’t be fixed until next week at the earliest. When it first went, it just made all the channels look like a piss-poor second-generation VHS copy. With each passing day, the picture gets slightly worse, and it’s now almost unwatchable.

No doubt by the time the engineer comes to look at it, it will have approached the quality of the worst TV picture I have ever tried to watch for any extended period of time, during my attempts to watch the England – Argentina match during the 1998 world cup finals while working in the states. The only channel that we could even remotely get that was showing it amounted to little more than moving blobs of fuzz. I could almost hear the commentary though. In Spanish. Surprisingly, I managed to just about follow what was going on for most of the game, although I did have to phone home for updates during the penalty shoot out.

Losing TV does have some advantages, though. Not in a “Why Don’t You…” turn off the TV and do something more interesting instead sense, but rather in that we have rediscovered the house’s collective DVD collection. Already we’ve watched
Crouching Tiger, Gladiator and Moulin Rouge this week. I’d forgotten how good those films were, actually.

Pete Libertine gets 6 months in prision for breaking into Carl’s flat. I guess that just about dashes any hopes of them getting back together to make the second album then…

I made a significant impact on my unwritten “things to do before I’m 30” list this weekend, by finally managing to get to see a match at Twickenham. Either on my way back from work, or on my way to Tesco’s, I’ve probably walked past that stadium at least a hundred times in the (nearly) three years that I’ve lived in London. I finally made it inside there for the first time on Saturday evening to see England take on France.

Unlike last week’s narrow defeat in Paris, this time the team actually included the players who are likely to be going to the world cup next month, and it showed. Having said that, for the first half an hour it looked like Jonny Wilkinson’s superb kicking would be the sole difference between the sides. Once the tries came, though, England quickly built up a commanding lead, and the game was effectively over by half time. In fact, such was the extent by which the game was wrapped up that, in a particularly quiet moment midway through the second half, a mexican wave started its way around the crowd and didn’t stop until it had done at least three full circuits – much to the amusement of the two American guys behind me (one of whom had brought a radio along to help him understand what was going on. They had both earlier been having the rules of the game patiently explained to them by the English guy sitting next to them).

All of which Top Trumps Pete by some way, considering he’s lived in the area for his entire life and hasn’t made it to a match yet. At least it only took me 2 1/2 years…

Has anyone else noticed how chubby that David Blaine chap is looking these days? Of course I’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he’s about to spend the next 44 days in a perspex box dangling over the Thames.

Honestly, who the hell cares? I might have seen a fair bit of Big Brother in my time, but even I’m not going to be watching live coverage of the nappy-wearing fool slowly wasting away until his inevitable triumphant emergence. It’s one thing making yourself levitate to freak out Americans on the streets of New York, but does he really expect people to be interested in this?

I mean, we can’t all be secretly hoping for the wire to snap, can we?

I see that that chap who crashed his plane into someone’s house this week is a brain surgeon. He’s just been cleared of the charges of “endangering the aircraft and the public”. Still, I’m sure on the kind of salary he gets he could afford to pay for the damage to be repaired…

I’ve been comfort shopping already this morning. It’s the only way I can cope with the twin gloom of it not only being Monday morning, with the full week in all its depressing glory stretching out before me, but also the indignity of having had to watch Everton get thrashed by Liverpool on Saturday in a pub full of (cocky and cockney) Liverpool supporters (by that I mean that I watched it in a pub full of Liverpool supporters; that’s not where the game was taking place – although that might have made for a more interesting prospect). My question for them, as for a selection of Liverpool-supporting Aussies at the afternoon’s barbeque, is, I’m sorry, what part of Liverpool are you from again exactly? C’mon Andrew, you’re from Melbourne for fecks sake, “the red part” is not the right answer to that question.

Anyway, if it makes me feel better, I’ll be having some of this, a bit of this, and oh, I don’t know, maybe Ross Noble tickets for next week.

From a preview report on the Everton v Liverpool derby match, which takes place tomorrow:

“PREDICTION: You just can’t predict this one. It is a derby match with so much resting upon it. As I have to, I’m going to go for a draw.”

Reminds me a bit of these.

In the end it only took me an extra hour to get home last night. I may have waited 20 minutes for a train that didn’t come; got a bus to a tube that wasn’t going anywhere; sat on the tube for 10 minutes in the station; got off the tube; shared a taxi to Islington; got on another (surprisingly on-time and quick) train to Richmond; and finally got another taxi home, but it could have been a lot worse. If I’d left a little earlier I would have probably been stuck in a tunnel [CAUTION: article satisfies legal obligation to make reference to “Blitz spirit”].

The only reason I mention it, is because the whole London power-cut incident brought to mind a rather prescient article by David Aaronovitch in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago following the one in New York: “Stiff upper lip? Don’t make me laugh“.

Read it first, and then you may want to read these:

“Demand for power cut answers”
“Tube sell-off blamed for blackout“

Oh, it was lovely and hot. If you want to see more, you’ll have to e-mail me.

When we finally got there, after spending a fun-filled 5 1/2 hours hanging around Gatwick while Air Europa fixed the dodgy left engine on the plane we had almost left on (there’s only so much sock shopping one person can do, and 5 hours is pretty much the limit), we discovered that Madrid is a lovely city. It may be oppressively hot at times, but if you need to cool down you can always catch the air-conditioned subway whether you need to go somewhere or not. They even have TVs on the underground, which altogether makes it is something of an improvement over the Victoria line. Maybe I’ll move there; the commute would only be marginally more ridiculous, after all. If you’ll forgive the awful pun, Madrid is also a city apparently overflowing with fountains, which is always good for cooling down. Judging from the Plaza de Espana opposite our hotel, I wondered whether perhaps, if he’d been around today, Franco would be something of a Ground Force fan. Parts of the city seem to be one great big water feature.

The locals are also surprisingly friendly, like the chap we encountered selling (or more accurately not selling) cheap sunglasses on the street near the Palacio Real, who was more than happy to take group photographs of a succession of passing tourists without seeming to mind that none of them bought anything. Or, for that matter, the guy selling knock-off CDs near Sol who opened the (apparently) hermetically sealed plastic casing containing the memory card I had just picked up for my camera with his keys (one up from the pen that I had been struggling with). Comically, before opening the package, he pointed to the little picture of a pair of scissors and a dotted line that the good people at Kodak had seen fit to include on the back (perhaps to taunt those without scissors while explaining how to open things to the hard of thinking at the same time). It was all I could do to mutter “No tengo” and laugh. As if I’d be trying to open it with a biro if I did carry a pair of scissors around with me. Then again, maybe he thought I was just a bit thick.

On the other hand, they were probably all just happy that we weren’t the Policia Municipal, who seemed to have nothing else to do but harass street traders. On Saturday evening we were sitting outside a cafe in the Plaza de Santa Ana when we saw at least four or five police cars converge on the square as their occupants got out to start chasing street handbag sellers around. One of them dropped a selection of handbags, which were instantly seized as evidence by the crack Spanish police force, who, committed to the hunting down of the purveyors of shoddy merchandise to unsuspecting tourists, returned to drive round the square several times over the next hour or so.

It was all surprisingly entertaining, actually.