Eaaaagles!
Stoke 1 – 2 Palace
We weren’t at home after all, so I watched it at the Half Moon, which I have long thought was a scrubby dive of a place, but which is actually fine for watching football in, and does really good pizzas, and has a Monday night “2 pizzas and a bottle of wine for £20” deal. I shall return.
Anyway, it was a really good game, with some actual playmaking by both sides. There was a 20-minute period early in the second half where they hammered us relentlessly and it looked like they were going to score, but the luck didn’t run their way and they didn’t manage it until the 85th minute, by which time it was too late for them to claw anything else back. I don’t know who Sky’s Man of the Match was, but mine was our keeper Julián Speroni, who rescued us on various occasions when nobody else managed to get to the ball. I’ve just googled him to check how to spell his name, and it turns out he’s Argentinian. I always thought he was Yugoslavian, even though none of his name sounds Yugoslavian, and I’m not even sure there’s still a country called Yugoslavia. Then I wondered if I was confusing him with Gábor Király, but he’s Hungarian, so now I have no idea what I was thinking.
But we’re back in the playoff spots, and it looks like we’ll have another nail-biting end to the season, one way or another. Hurray!
Stoke, and the FU Cup semi-finals (but not at the same time)
We’re at home to Stoke tonight. Stoke are the kind of team we should definitely beat, only unaccountably they’re in second place and look as likely as anyone to win automatic promotion. I don’t understand football. Anyway, a win tonight would see us in sixth (from tenth), so fingers crossed for that.
I’m feeling generally cheery about football today, after seeing Portsmouth and Cardiff win their respective semi-finals this weekend. Radio 5 had a caller on who had been at Wembley the last time Cardiff won the cup, in 1927. He was ninety and blind, and said that the R5 commentary was so good he felt as though he’d been there. The boorish phone-in host – who I’m told is called “Spoony”, which probably tells me as much as I need to know about him – was charmlessly dismissive, but it was a good story all the same. I was also cheered and heartened by the Southampton fan who called in to wish Portsmouth luck in the final (really!) and the Man U supporter who said that Middlesbrough had played “as though it was the Champions’ League final” in their 2-2 draw. He went on to be churlish about Chelsea, just to maintain the reputation, rather than smear it by being accidentally nice for a whole minute.
Small pleasures: number 3
…getting in to work on a Monday morning and being greeted by an empty email inbox. At least, there were five new messages, but two of them were about cake and three of them were telling me my mailbox is over its size limit, which I already know.
Baffled
Adventures in Austin
Adventures in shopping
A photo
My camera isn’t working so I can’t take any new photos, but I wanted to celebrate the sun coming out, so here’s one taken two summers ago. I like it because they’re having so much fun, and because M looks like a lion hiding in the undergrowth. Also because the thing at the front on the right looks like a giant cartoon bug, but probably isn’t.
A profitable lunchtime
…by which, obviously, I mean one in which I spent money, rather than earned it. Last year, when my income went up from “I can pay the rent and go out to eat” to “I can buy an iPod on a whim” (it’s since gone back to the first one), I decided that rather than spend £10 on boots that last three months, I would invest wisely in expensive but high-quality items that would last forever and end up costing me less money than the cheap version.
Well, it turns out that expensive boots (and bags, and clothes) don’t last any longer; they just cost more. So it’s back to spending £10, or in this case £5, on a new bag, which is bright blue and doesn’t go with anything, but that’s ok, because it only cost £5!
I thought I had done more shopping than that, but it turns out the rest of what I bought was my lunch. Well, that’s ok too.
Also, and not unrelatedly (the sun makes me spend money): it’s spring! I know I’ve said it before, but this time it’s properly true. I even had to take off my incredibly warm and deeply impractical fake fur coat while I was outside. You know, for a bit.
Overheard
Snippets of two equally alarming conversations being had by people on mobile phones whom I passed on my way to a meeting earlier on:
“…do you get it? It has to stop and it has to stop now…”
“…because that’s it, if I have to, I will use your children against you…”
Both of which made my most aggressive phone conversation today (“I don’t think you’re listening to me, I don’t want to transfer any funds anywhere”) seem positively playful in comparison.
(My favourite ever overheard phonecall was on a bus on Oxford Street, when a guy answered his phone and said “Yep…no…no…NO! NO! That’s it: I’m closing the Bureau de Change!”)
Glad All Over 