TheBanyanTree: Some Muvvers really DO have em!!

[Peter Macinnis]

On 24/05/2010 21:17, Roger Pye wrote:

> As for McManly - only pity is they don't play REAL football down there!!

I agree with Nigel Kennedy: if the Deity gave us the power to make a 
perfectly spherical ball, it would be blasphemous to play with an oval 
one.  I follow the world game, Roger--is that the one you meant?

Oddly, I can date myself by recent World Cups.  It wasn't planned, it 
just happens that I know what I was doing for each of the last four.

I fell out with my then deputy principal in 1994, when I let the Italian 
students into my lab to watch the World Cup match that saw the Italians 
eliminated.  He was what we civilised people call a rugger bugger.

In 1998, I changed jobs, just as the playing started, so I missed most 
of the fun.  New jobs are like that.

In 2002, I was in Worcester Massachusetts during the later stages of 
play, and having just been in Dublin, I had all the Irish gossip that 
was required in the pub where I watched Ireland's last game, where the 
Irish Americans had been sadly deprived of news by Ted Turner and his 
kind.  I was made welcome.

In 2006, I was in the Greek islands for most of the World Cup, and saw a 
couple of games in the Greek evening.  I arrived in London on the 
afternoon that England was eliminated in a penalty shoot-out (I think it 
was a quarter-final).  After walking most of the way because the cabs 
were all off the road, I checked in and headed down to a bar that I wot 
of in Earl's Court (there is a TARDIS over the road, and a stuffed 
kangaroo in the bar), and watched with a bunch of lads in bovver boots, 
two Chinese, some Poles, three Indians and a few other typical Londoners 
as England got done over, to our great and mutual annoyance.   I was 
made welcome.

I'll be back in that bar in a month and a day, with Chris along with me 
this time, and a week later, we'll be in Italy.  I guess we'll see the 
odd game on television again.  We'll be welcomed.  The world game is 
like that, and any two nationals can always find some other nation that 
they'll agree to jointly hate.



-- 
  _--|\   Peter Macinnis, feral word herder, & science gossip.
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