Total Fouling, and Two Traveling Circuses

Inevitably, someone's won the World Cup. And more inevitably, because I'm a mug, I watched them do it. So far as I can work out, the most entertaining aspect of debacle we were subjected to yesterday was that I was convinced to watch it in the same room as my grandma.

For the many of you who have had the privilege of not meeting my grandma, she's from that wonderfully old, flagrantly racist, and brilliantly mental breed of OAPs who you have to shout lies at to make them stop asking questions ("Yes Nan, there are normally this many bookings in a match!"). Mid way through the second half I was treated to a verbal treatise on how the Spanish manager might (or might not) look a bit like some film star from the 50's (or possibly the 60's) which she saw in that cinema in Barnsley before it burned down and was replaced by something that was inferior because the seats weren't quite so comfy. All of which was welcome, because even though Spain did win eventually, it was a dirty disappointment of a match.

Bernie Ecclestone's Flying Circus finally landed in Silverstone over the weekend, which was always set to be a bit of an event after the period when we all thought that the track had been consigned to the dustbin. As it was, Red Bull pulled out all the stops to provide us with a spectacular showdown both on and off the track. My current theory is that the team principle for the team is either spectacularly clever, or (as is more likely) is just a little dense. Whichever way round, the team managed to grab most of the attention all weekend after introducing a new, much faster front wing - which Seb Vettel promptly trashed in practice, and his team mate Mark Webber was ordered to surrender his wing to Vettel, and use the older, slower one. Having his team apparently discriminating against him did the emotional equivalent of setting the Australian on fire, and he went on to pull an astonishing drive out of his hat to win the race. Like I say - either very, very clever team manipulation, or blind luck and stupidity.

Finally, I spent the last week in Wales, and so far as any Welsh person ever talks about cycling, everyone was talking about Geraint Thomas. He's a cyclist for Team Sky, who's actually been around for a while - he was even in the gold medal winning team pursuitists on the track in Sydney 2008, it's just no one's ever really heard of him, and for a couple of heady days last week he was inside the top five of the Tour. For now, he's faded back into the main pack (as has Lance, after two crashes yesterday), but he's a name to watch - if not in this tour, then the next one. In terms of real results, Cadel Evans is currently in yellow, and Mark Cavendish has become the first British man to ever win two stages in a row.

In a few days I'm off to Hawaii to languish on a beach and ogle sea life, so unless I can wangle net access, there'll be no posts for a couple of weeks. I'm sure you'll manage.

One Day On

For those of us inclined to be English, these are now what might be termed Troubling Times. We had to wake up this morning, and remember again that we're now in an era when the biggest World Cup defeat we've ever suffered was at the hands of Germany. Every generation of England football watchers has their defining game against the Germans that will forever remain in their memories as that game. The match you can mark your life by, with a time before it happened, and all subsequent times since.

For me (and the rest of us that became sentient in the early nineties) it was the semi-final of Euro 96, and our reoccurring ineptitude with spot kicks. For kids of the noughties, yesterday was your rite of passage. Well done, you're now truly inducted into the cult of the three lions.

We learnt a lot of new words yesterday too (and not just the ones David James was yelling): "goal line technology" being the most irritatingly haunting three. I'm not going to wander into the debate as to whether if that goal had counted England would have done better, or even if that now makes it 1-1 on dodgy crossbar based ball antics, but I will say that if I ever meet Sepp Blatter, I will follow the stern advice of Alan Rickman, and take out his heart with a spoon ("because it hurts more").

If you breathe more, and munch the calm pills, you might notice that other things happened last week too. Andy Murray's waded his way through a wall of grump into the quarter finals of Wimbledon (beating the winner of Queen's, and without a fish joke in sight). And as far as I know, Isner and Mahut are still playing.

The Valencian Grand Prix added its own degree of confusion to the weekend, firstly because what's usually billed as a poor man's Monaco (all of the dis-excitement, but none of the dancing girls) turned out to be actually quite exciting, and secondly because Mark Webber decided to fulfill his boyhood dream of becoming a Fighter Pilot (unwisely though, because he was in a car at the time), resulting in some spectacular (but shortlived) aerobatics courtesy of Heikki Kovaleinen's car-cum-launch ramp.

Finally, rightly back on two wheels (where we belong on this blog), the Tour De France starts next weekend, which means this week most cycling teams will be getting outside their own weight in pasta, and thinking tactics rather than actually riding too much. Sadly, Tom Boonen (perhaps the closest thing we've got to a Cycling Rock God) will miss the Tour, because he sustained a pretty nasty knee injury while running over Mark Cavendish's head.

Public Service, Errant Communists, and Two Spanners

Because this is the first time my weekly sports report has been unleashed in a public sphere, I reckon an introduction is in order. I produce a weekly Sports and Society e-message for Mansfield College, and by (slightly inexplicable) popular demand, I'm going to continue publishing my weekly take on the sporting world here over the vacation (instead of sending everyone drivel they don't necessarily need or want) - updated Mondays.

I have a new theory as to what the England team are doing - they've decided that the World Cup is the perfect time to offer everyone in the British Isles a public service. The Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish are having a fantastic time watching the English flail like a jellyfish drowning in Marmite (more than they could get from having their own team in the tournament), and what more could the English want than the perfect excuse to moan, and spit disappointed scorn into our pints, before whiling away the evening telling our friends what we'd be doing were we Fabio? (You could argue that's not so much a theory as a coping mechanism).

Sadly, as I write, my adopted second team of North Korea (and that's nothing to do with the post below this - I'd forgotten I'd written that) are getting the kicking of a lifetime (outside of the jail they'll be thrown in when they get back) from Portugal; and to answer a question lots of people have asked me, I believe that (disappointingly) the North Korean authorities are showing all North Korean games, whether they win or lose, but re-scheduling them so people can watch the game in the evening, and not three in the morning.

My favourite moment of the week in the tournament was the outbreak of lust and desire for human contact that paralysed the Slovenian team just before a USA free kick, causing a number of Slovenians to vigorously embrace the Americans, such that in the sheer confusion of this sudden penalty-box love in, the spectacular goal the USA scored was disallowed.

If you like your balls a bit smaller, then Wimbledon starts up today. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on tennis (though any sport that incorporates strawberries as part of its identity has to be brilliant), but I have finally decided that I don't like Andy Murray. Anyone who can tweet that interestedly about tuna sushi, and has his bio as just "I play tennis," is clearly (in my books at least) a spanner of the finest, iron-clad, ocean going variety.

In other spanner related news, Jenson Button has thrown his toys out of the pram, and taken Mercedes to court because they wouldn't give him his £1 million championship winning car as a gift. I do quite like Jenson, but sometimes he can seem such a wazzock (and I don't know what he's planning to do with the car, F1 cars these days are so complicated you need four beardy blokes and a laptop to even think about starting them).

Finally, the impossibly named Thomas Lofkvist (some say he's The Stig), lead Team Sky Cycling to 12th in the Tour De Suisse, though with quite a few of the key riders now resting for the Tour De France, this result is respectable.

Do the Pyongyang Shuffle

Avid readers of the blog (of which I think I am all there is), will remember, if you've been paying attention and staying away from the magical leaves, that I wrote a hurried entry last week about Jesus Camp. I promised that I'd come back and make my position on it clearer/funnier at a later time when I'd been on enough train journeys to have thought about it. I'm going to go back on that promise, because something else has come up. Something which I've talked about in the past, though never on this blog; North Korea.

They're a country akin to heavily floral wall paper, or Ford Cortinas, in that every time I look at them, I can't but help having to double take to check I'm not suddenly in the 60's. Struggling with massive humanitarian and social problems at home, and growing international condemnation, they've opted for the well trodden Outcast Country path of starting a nuclear program. Akin to the loner kid on the corner of the playground, who eventually, after a long stint of listening to the Smiths and wearing black t-shirts, shows up to school with a knife and scares the shite out of Lucy in the toilets, before being carted off by the authorities. Sadly, in our case, there are no authorities, Lucy is Japan, and the knife is a nuclear tipped missile.

Some years back, N Korea tested a nuclear weapon, which was more akin to some bloke in Pyongyang getting a bit excited with a champagne bottle than anything I was prepared to get very worried about. And you know what? I'm still not worried.

Kim-Jong-Il, the world's only hyphenated dictator, has heralded the launch of the communication satellite as a victory, and predictably, the US, and Japan (among others) have publicly made a show of bricking it over what they claim is a cover for a test of a ballistic missile. So let's have a look at this satellite (that may or may not be there, no one is as of yet really sure what happened).

North Korea is a communistical country, so is obsessed by the revolution in the same way that the Daily Express is obsessed with "values." It's really just used a word that endorses anything it's tacked onto. So the satellite has been put there under the express purpose of broadcasting "revolutionary melodies." Presumably under the hope that farmers in the American Mid-West will tune into the tinny Korean jingles, realise what they've been missing all these years, and rise against the oppressive western capitalists. What would have made me stop and worry would have been the satellite pounding out some AC/DC riff, or drenching the world in the radio waves of Pink Floyd. Then I would have been convinced we were faced with a country of nutters, who not only had technology, but weren't taking it seriously! As is, all we've got is another dictator with his trousers down in the boy's toilets, trying to convince everyone how his willy's bigger than everyone else's.

Confessions of a Northerner

The North has an image problem. I love meeting new people, because inevitably at some point I'll have to tell them I'm from Huddersfield, at which point people delve into their attic of facial expressions, and dust off the one reserved for the relatives of recent car crash victims. A mix of pity mingled with a thank-chuff-that-didn't-happen-to-me sentiment. 

This is a widely held belief. In a recent comprehensive national survey I undertook myself; when given the choice between waking up to find yourself in Angola, within a five mile radius of Huddersfield, and newly employed as Satan's toilet cleaner, Huddersfield came a resounding third. The weather does little to help, the only reason Huddersfield has hotels is so it can house the large number of fact finding missions for black and white printers, who come here to stare at the clouds and concrete to make sure that their pantone scales contain every conceivable shade of grey.

However, The North has a bigger problem. It is this: it's not actually that bad. Some places, like Brixton, or the West Side of Baltimore (yes - I've just started watching The Wire), have a reputation for being bad-ass, and some people are attracted to it, presumably on the perplexing grounds that they might get killed at any moment (before the angry emails come, I appreciate that it isn't always a choice to live in these places, and that socio-economic circumstances may force you to live in these, or indeed any other places - see how marketing executives are forced by circumstance to live almost exclusively in leafy suburbs). The North however, is rubbish at being rubbish. No longer do we all slave in mills, no more is the beer seasoned with gravel, though admittedly, we can't do much about the weather. It's actually quite a nice place to be, or at the very least, no more grim than anywhere else.

As Exhibit A in what, for lack of a better name, I shall call, The Campaign for The Resurrection of The North, (or perhaps the Aye'Up Lazerus Project?), I present the Canal System. Canals have had a pretty bad press over the years. A failed technology that was never cool, even in it's heydey. Not like steam engines - kids have never grown up wanting to be canal boat pilots, or the woman who makes the sandwiches on a barge. Grown men have been known to cry at the sight of a wooden galleon docking alongside modern cruise ships, but I've never heard anyone say they miss the days of leading the mule along the tow-path as it hauled a barge load of coal from Newcastle to Manchester. Think of canals like Beta-Max. An old technology that has completed the slide into obscurity by being unnoticeable as well as obsolete.

Canals have a reputation for being dirty as well. Not for nothing does the early scenes of The Full Monty see the protagonists standing on top of a car in a canal, and when what passes for a criminal underworld up here had a body to dispose of (autopsy pronounced death by acute latitude syndrome), they put it in the canal. Sleeping with the fishies, if you will, except there were no fishies, them having been killed off by arsenic poisoning.

In a roundabout way here, I'm getting to the point of this entry, I've spent the best part of the last few days cycling along canals, and the one thing that has stuck out to me is that they're actually quite enjoyably places to be. They've been cleaned, invested in, and there's no-one on them that's not there in some sort of leisure capacity, whether it's the tow-path cyclists, the tourists on the boats, or the inhabitants of the barges who actually live there (for who I still can't see the attraction, or where the money would come from). In the last decade or so, councils have actually got their act together, and actually spent some money in places people might appreciate it. That's not to say the region's perfect, you only have to look at the road quality in Sheffield centre to remember it's not one of the poorest regions in Europe for nothing. But by and large, The North is an alright place to be, it's just we're crap at being crap now.

Slow Bus to Where?

I'm a Tourist Board's worst nightmare. They attract me to a locale with hard fought-over advertising money, I show up, fling myself at the local hills, bring my own tent, own foodstuffs and provisions, and camp on some remote hillside without paying a penny for the privilege. I then leave; with the Board getting little to no return on their investment. In short, I'm a backpacker. 

And for the past few days, that's what I've been doing over the Yorkshire Dales, the plan being that I'd climb mountains, wander hidden valleys, and generally forget work and responsibility for a while. 

But the plan didn't quite work, because high on a limestone pavement above Kingsdale (which incidentally, is now a close second to Upper Eskdale in the stakes to be my favourite place in the world), my stove decided the scenery was just too good for it, and stopped working. Half an hour of deconstruction, reconstruction, flushing, and many Bad Words later, I admitted defeat, and resigned myself to a diet of marmalade sandwiches, and the fact that I'd have to go home the next day. 

In the morning, The Weather Gods decided that Mike hadn't quite had enough urine extracted from him, so supplied the most astonishing dawn weather (pale clamminess quickly followed by a gorgeously warm sunrise), and after another half hour of stove based aerobic exercise, I headed for the village of Ingleton in the hope of either someone who could help me with the stove, or transport home.

The former came in the guise of the man who runs the outdoor shop in the village, and even he couldn't persuade the thing to light, the latter was a little more exciting. My initial plan had involved more days walking, and a train home from a completely different village, and with the first one ruled out, and the second possible only via a full day's walk, I was forced to indulge in one of my personal delights - slow rural buses.

One of my heroes, A. Wainright, shared this love with me (for the uninitiated, to his fans, A. Wainright is not just a walking writer, he is the walking writer), both of us appreciating the relaxation possible on them, and the fabulous cross-section of humanity on display. On the bus I boarded, I was the only one not to know everyone else, including the driver, who took us on a tour of not only his family, his pets, and his financial situation, but the surrounding countryside as well. I think Britain must be fairly unique in having an under-resourced, and under-appreciated bus system, that has access to an extensive and exciting road network. Occasionally I get the feeling that bus companies set up some bus routes because the roads they take in might be fun to drive over. My bus, which contained six people, cannot have been profitable. 

By long ways, we arrived in Settle. Which is a town that attracts the young and trendy like a magnet does, but entices in the elderly and bikers (of the motorised and un-motorised variety) faster than an unguarded piece of flapjack. From there, things got less exciting in a direct-bus-to-Skipton kind of way. Pausing only briefly to be fleeced out of 20p by a malfunctioning automatic public toilet, which decided that opening and closing the door was so much fun, it would continue to do it, regardless of whether I wanted privacy or not, and on discovery that there were only two buses a year to Bradford, I gave up and opted for a train home.

Scary, Scary, Scariness

In the beginning, there was God. And he did talk to some bloke called
Abraham, and Abraham did some things with his son and a lamb, and God
saw that it was good. Then God did talk to Moses and Aaron, and
persuade them, and an entire race of people to take up extreme desert
ulrtramarathoning from Egypt to Israel. And God did see that it was
good (if a little tiring). God did then rest for many years, until he
was bored, and did pick some poor unfortunate called Jesus to be a
prophet, and cause him to be executed by the Romans.
Many more years did pass, and God did have an identity crisis. Bored
again, God did simultaneously (theologically speaking), talk to a guy
called Mohammed, and create an entire set of Kingdoms and realms for
an Indian named Siddharta Gautama to discover, explore, and invite
others to be quiet for a very long time, and explore with him too.
God saw that he had inspired many nations, through many forms of
herself, and had caused many people to see along a common theme of
being nice, and ignoring CofE hymns, which he granted to Lucifer in
return for a section of hell to heat his hot-tub, God saw all was
good. He did rest for many centuries, and recline in clouds, playing
table tennis on Wednesday evenings with his host of Angels. But the
twentieth century did come, and God did go off his rocker. He did
whisper sweet nothings into already unstable men, and inspire them to
take their riches, and build an ENOURMOUS gold plated shrine in
Japan. He told these men to tell others that shining crystals at soil
counted as organic farming, and that people could be healed by
shining these same crystals at them. The men were inspired to build a
neon fish tank to line this shrine - as God did say she liked feeding
the fish, especially those little blue twinkly ones.
Then God did come to his senses, did stop eating the sushi, and did
see that he was talking to mentals. She did realise her mistake, and
did make the rest of the world wary and cynical about such scary,
scary, crazies.

I shit you not. http://www.sukyomahikari.org/
Guess how I spent my day.