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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jun/29/my-world-cup-goal-avoiding-the-singing-monkey-plate-of-shame
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| Version 2 | Version 3 |
|---|---|
| My World Cup goal: avoiding the Singing Monkey Plate of Shame | My World Cup goal: avoiding the Singing Monkey Plate of Shame |
| (about 2 months later) | |
| Monday | Monday |
| What’s wrong with me? When England went 1-0 up against Panama in the eighth minute, I jumped up and punched the air. When England went in at half-time 5-0 ahead, my main feeling was of disappointment. Somehow I felt as if I had been robbed. This wasn’t how watching England in a World Cup was meant to be. We were supposed to be squeaking home thanks to a Harry Kane injury-time winner, as we had against Tunisia, not efficiently crushing lesser opposition. Where was the pleasure in that? The three friends who were with me all felt the same and none of us could be bothered to watch the half-time analysis. Instead we turned over to watch 15 minutes of the England v Australia one-day cricket international. More out of duty than anything else, we switched back to the football for the second half but basically nattered our way through it with only half an eye on the game, as we all knew that nothing of any real consequence was going to happen. England would slack off and close things down, Panama would try not to be embarrassed and the match would peter out. Bring on the suffering. | What’s wrong with me? When England went 1-0 up against Panama in the eighth minute, I jumped up and punched the air. When England went in at half-time 5-0 ahead, my main feeling was of disappointment. Somehow I felt as if I had been robbed. This wasn’t how watching England in a World Cup was meant to be. We were supposed to be squeaking home thanks to a Harry Kane injury-time winner, as we had against Tunisia, not efficiently crushing lesser opposition. Where was the pleasure in that? The three friends who were with me all felt the same and none of us could be bothered to watch the half-time analysis. Instead we turned over to watch 15 minutes of the England v Australia one-day cricket international. More out of duty than anything else, we switched back to the football for the second half but basically nattered our way through it with only half an eye on the game, as we all knew that nothing of any real consequence was going to happen. England would slack off and close things down, Panama would try not to be embarrassed and the match would peter out. Bring on the suffering. |
| Tuesday | Tuesday |
| I’ve become a huge fan of Radio 4’s My Teenage Diary, a programme that is basically a real-life Adrian Mole in which well-known people read out extracts of their diaries with a bit of prompting from the comedian Rufus Hound. This week’s episode with Anneka Rice was possibly the best yet. The contrast between her outrage at Tony Blackburn talking over the intro to David Bowie and the matter-of-fact way she dealt with her parents’ divorce was touching, funny and revelatory and made me re-evaluate someone to whom I had previously given little thought. It’s also a programme that invariably makes me sad for my teenage self because it reminds me of how little self-worth I had at the time. While people like Anneka kept a record of their adolescent crushes, frustrations at being misunderstood by their small-town parents and genuine crises, my own life went completely unnoticed and unrecorded. Not least by me. Not because I didn’t have similar crushes, feelings of alienation and real personal loss but because I considered my life to be too unimportant to be documented. Life was just something over which I had no agency. It would never have occurred to me to write a diary, let alone keep it for posterity. Even to myself, I didn’t really matter. | I’ve become a huge fan of Radio 4’s My Teenage Diary, a programme that is basically a real-life Adrian Mole in which well-known people read out extracts of their diaries with a bit of prompting from the comedian Rufus Hound. This week’s episode with Anneka Rice was possibly the best yet. The contrast between her outrage at Tony Blackburn talking over the intro to David Bowie and the matter-of-fact way she dealt with her parents’ divorce was touching, funny and revelatory and made me re-evaluate someone to whom I had previously given little thought. It’s also a programme that invariably makes me sad for my teenage self because it reminds me of how little self-worth I had at the time. While people like Anneka kept a record of their adolescent crushes, frustrations at being misunderstood by their small-town parents and genuine crises, my own life went completely unnoticed and unrecorded. Not least by me. Not because I didn’t have similar crushes, feelings of alienation and real personal loss but because I considered my life to be too unimportant to be documented. Life was just something over which I had no agency. It would never have occurred to me to write a diary, let alone keep it for posterity. Even to myself, I didn’t really matter. |
| Wednesday | Wednesday |
| Cabinet splits and Brexit are very much of a second order of interest for many people in Westminster at the moment. Everyone’s attention is focused on the Lobby World Cup League, a competition that began 20 years ago and whose exact rules are only really known to Paul Waugh of the Huffington Post, who dreamed the whole thing up. The basic rules are that everyone – hacks, special advisers and selected MPs – stumps up £5 to enter and selects 10 World Cup teams (four seeds, four others and two outsiders) in order of preference. Thereafter you get awarded a certain number of points – depending on whether it’s a group or knock-out game, the number of goals scored and red cards – each time your teams wins or draws. It makes for an unusual World Cup experience as you can find yourself taking unfamiliar sides. Normally I would have been thrilled to see Germany go out of the competition early, but as I had them as my top pick I was absolutely gutted. Nor was I too impressed that Argentina got an 87th-minute winner, as I had left them out of my squad and they were highly ranked in many other people’s. Their gain is my loss. From a high of 19th place (out of 209) after two rounds of games, I am now down to 69th and look likely to tumble further. As long as I don’t come last and pick up the Singing Monkey Plate of Shame. The sports minister Tracey Crouch is currently in second place, so there is clearly one member of the government who knows what she’s doing. | Cabinet splits and Brexit are very much of a second order of interest for many people in Westminster at the moment. Everyone’s attention is focused on the Lobby World Cup League, a competition that began 20 years ago and whose exact rules are only really known to Paul Waugh of the Huffington Post, who dreamed the whole thing up. The basic rules are that everyone – hacks, special advisers and selected MPs – stumps up £5 to enter and selects 10 World Cup teams (four seeds, four others and two outsiders) in order of preference. Thereafter you get awarded a certain number of points – depending on whether it’s a group or knock-out game, the number of goals scored and red cards – each time your teams wins or draws. It makes for an unusual World Cup experience as you can find yourself taking unfamiliar sides. Normally I would have been thrilled to see Germany go out of the competition early, but as I had them as my top pick I was absolutely gutted. Nor was I too impressed that Argentina got an 87th-minute winner, as I had left them out of my squad and they were highly ranked in many other people’s. Their gain is my loss. From a high of 19th place (out of 209) after two rounds of games, I am now down to 69th and look likely to tumble further. As long as I don’t come last and pick up the Singing Monkey Plate of Shame. The sports minister Tracey Crouch is currently in second place, so there is clearly one member of the government who knows what she’s doing. |
| Thursday | Thursday |
| The behaviour of Iain Duncan Smith is beginning to make even some of his colleagues in the Tory party feel a bit uneasy. Last week he denounced a report from the independent National Audit Office as “a shoddy piece of work” because it dared to criticise universal credit and the Department for Work and Pensions – and, by implication, him. “A shoddy piece of work” might be exactly how the NAO would describe IDS. Today, though, the former Tory leader took his vendettas to a new level by comparing the Confederation of British Industry to Nazi appeasers for allegedly telling lies about Brexit. He also said Britain should spend more time listening to small business. Unpicking all this would keep a psychotherapist in work for years. It’s not the obvious errors in his argument – the Federation of Small Businesses has said it is just as worried as the CBI about the government’s handling of Brexit – so much as the irony and self-delusion that are breathtaking. The CBI are Nazis? Really? Even Boris wouldn’t go that far. And let’s not forget that it was Tory party policy to support appeasement of the Nazis in the late 1930s, so the implicit message IDS is sending out is that no Tory government can be trusted. To cap it all, IDS’s piece appeared in the Daily Mail, a paper whose former proprietor Harold Harmsworth, the first Lord Rothermere, was for a time a fan of Hitler. | The behaviour of Iain Duncan Smith is beginning to make even some of his colleagues in the Tory party feel a bit uneasy. Last week he denounced a report from the independent National Audit Office as “a shoddy piece of work” because it dared to criticise universal credit and the Department for Work and Pensions – and, by implication, him. “A shoddy piece of work” might be exactly how the NAO would describe IDS. Today, though, the former Tory leader took his vendettas to a new level by comparing the Confederation of British Industry to Nazi appeasers for allegedly telling lies about Brexit. He also said Britain should spend more time listening to small business. Unpicking all this would keep a psychotherapist in work for years. It’s not the obvious errors in his argument – the Federation of Small Businesses has said it is just as worried as the CBI about the government’s handling of Brexit – so much as the irony and self-delusion that are breathtaking. The CBI are Nazis? Really? Even Boris wouldn’t go that far. And let’s not forget that it was Tory party policy to support appeasement of the Nazis in the late 1930s, so the implicit message IDS is sending out is that no Tory government can be trusted. To cap it all, IDS’s piece appeared in the Daily Mail, a paper whose former proprietor Harold Harmsworth, the first Lord Rothermere, was for a time a fan of Hitler. |
| Friday | Friday |
| Despite air-conditioning units failing all over the country (no names, no pack drill) because temperatures are too high – a design flaw you’d have thought someone would have noticed by now – I’ve been loving the hot weather. Even when I wake up feeling particularly anxious and useless, I only have to make it out of the front door to absorb the light and the heat to feel at least partially healed. Our dog is rather less keen. He’s given up lying on the bed because the duvet makes him too hot and instead lies on the floorboards in the shade, panting heavily. Part of the problem is that he badly needs a haircut, something that is almost impossible to get in our patch of south London because every dog groomer is booked up for weeks in advance. We first rang to book Herbert Hound an appointment in early April and were told the earliest available was the end of May. Which we gratefully accepted, only to have to cancel it at the last minute when our daughter told us she was getting married in the US that weekend. We tried to rebook, only to be told we would have to wait until the end of July. By which time the poor dog would be a fur ball. In desperation, my wife found a place miles away that had had a cancellation and she is taking a day off work to get the dog his £50 haircut. He’d better be grateful. | Despite air-conditioning units failing all over the country (no names, no pack drill) because temperatures are too high – a design flaw you’d have thought someone would have noticed by now – I’ve been loving the hot weather. Even when I wake up feeling particularly anxious and useless, I only have to make it out of the front door to absorb the light and the heat to feel at least partially healed. Our dog is rather less keen. He’s given up lying on the bed because the duvet makes him too hot and instead lies on the floorboards in the shade, panting heavily. Part of the problem is that he badly needs a haircut, something that is almost impossible to get in our patch of south London because every dog groomer is booked up for weeks in advance. We first rang to book Herbert Hound an appointment in early April and were told the earliest available was the end of May. Which we gratefully accepted, only to have to cancel it at the last minute when our daughter told us she was getting married in the US that weekend. We tried to rebook, only to be told we would have to wait until the end of July. By which time the poor dog would be a fur ball. In desperation, my wife found a place miles away that had had a cancellation and she is taking a day off work to get the dog his £50 haircut. He’d better be grateful. |
| Digested week, digested: Belgium 1 (Theresa May og), England 0 | Digested week, digested: Belgium 1 (Theresa May og), England 0 |
| Politics | Politics |
| Digested week | Digested week |
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