Football daft

The Asian Cup starts here on Friday.  I've bought tickets for six group games in the nation's capital then three others in Sydney.  Football daft it would seem.

Naff video but the competition should be fun.

I’m going to the first of my 6 games being played in Canberra on Saturday – South Korea v Oman, which is not quite Argentina v Brazil but it’s still international football.  I’ve got tickets for the Quarters, Semi and Final as well but they’re up in Sydney at the end of the month.   

My highlight is looking forward to the Palestinian team play Iraq in two weeks’ time. Five of the Palestine team were not allowed to travel.  Maybe some ‘war on terror’ dickhead thought they’d suicide bomb the goalie.  I saw players interviewed by Guardian Online (here) at the Palestinian Social Club in Sydney.  It’s the first official tournament a Palestinian team has played in and the players are saying, ‘yes we’re here for our country and the people and we are proud.  But we also just want to play football.’  The world over.  A bunch of lads just want to kick a football around a pitch.

That's a lot of melon for two people

Cat with melon - getting to know one another

That, I thought, when I saw Spike approach our car parked outside the supermarket, is a big melon.  It seemed to weigh her down, as an obdurate child who did not want to leave the chocolate aisle might weigh down a mother forced to carry her reluctant four year old off the premises.

Since I first set eyes on the monster melon, however, I have been contemplating the many and varied ways it will be incorporated into our diet over the next few months ... melon juice (obviously), fruit salad with extra melon, melon on toast, deep fried melon (in honour of my Scottish culinary roots ... but even that may be a deep frier too far), melon au gratin ...

No, I don't think so either.

As for Thistle - well, she's in charge of everything so the melon (having been scrutinised carefully) was deemed to be a) not an immediate threat, b) not edible (if you're a cat with a discerning palate) and c) not really that interesting, not even as a plaything.

You lost what ...?

I'm in the middle of writing a letter to my good friend Martin Currie in Edinburgh, whose birthday it is next Monday.  I hope the missive reaches him in time. I have a tendency to ramble.  

I don't propely know what prompted the recollection below but these things do happen when you're around Martin.  Except maybe he wasn't even there.  It's simply the sort of bizarre occurence that you stumble across in any city from time to time.  So I wrote this to my mate Martin who I love dearly and miss a great deal ...

South Clerk Street, Edinburgh

Here’s a thing about South Clerk Street while I’m on the subject.  Maybe you were with me when this happened because I can’t think of any other reason to go into a pub on South Clerk Street – it was across the road from where the ABC Cinema used to be or was it the Odeon?

There was time to kill because the movie wasn’t starting for a while.  Whoever it was, we went for a drink in the pub.  Shortly after we got settled at our tables a moderately anxious looking man entered the rather deserted pub and started hunting – not quite frantically – for something he had lost.  He checked every chair, table and down the back of the red PVC (I doubt it was leather) benches running along the walls.  He clearly had no success. Running out of options he approached our little group then spoke in a quiet, secretive voice; as if was looking to buy or sell Class A drugs.

"Sorry to bother you”, he said.  “You haven’t seen a snake anywhere, have you?”

One of us said “a snake?” feigning composure, as if it was the most natural question in the world.

Another asked, “What kind was it?”

I like to dwell on the underlying assumptions of that question; as if maybe we had indeed seen a snake wandering around the pub or enjoying half a pint and a cigarette quietly in a corner, disturbing no one and we wanted to be sure the guy searching for his lost snake was genuinely connected to and could correctly identify the particular snake with which we’d been discussing the weekend’s football not half an hour before.  Or maybe we thought there might have been more than one snake in the pub – different types - and we wanted to make sure we returned the correct species to its owner.

Anyway, he said it was a” wee python”.

I’m sure he said it was a python and that it must have slipped out the carrier bag he’d brought with him into the pub.  He held up the empty pollie bag to show us.  In his mind it may have been some kind of proof.  Then he said “it must be somewhere” before heading back out the door.  I think we looked nervously around the pub, sipped our drinks casually – maybe a wee bit too casually in case any one of us thought the others suspected we were more than mildly hesitant about sitting in a pub that might have pythons of any size slithering around the furniture – then we decided it was time to drink up and make our way – early or not - to the cinema.

We live in a large country

The other day - it may have been yesterday (one forgets so easily at my age) - a tweet from @amazinmaps caught my attention.  I retweeted it to my modest little band of followers (currently 125 rather disparate souls).  It was the map of Australia below, which I think gives you a clear picture of how very big this island continent I now call home truly is.  
 

My mind has played tricks on me in the past when I've looked at maps of Australia - maybe before setting off on a long drive.  On a page the maps look the same as maps I used when I lived in Scotland.  In books of maps the territory you want to cross may fit on a page or across several pages if it's a route map from A to B via C, D or E.  But when I look at maps of Australia or parts of it I often forget scale when I'm trying to process how far a drive or flight might be.  One inch on a map of Scotland may be the same as one inch on a map of Australia or NSW but if you forget that wee word scale you run the risk of making a big mistake.  So when I saw this collage of other countries with NSW and southern Queensland about the same size as all of South Africa; all of Italy barely a fraction of West Australia the map caught my fancy.

Kersbrook, Adelaide Hills.  Pic: David Mariuz/EPA

This too makes think about the size of Australia and the contrasting forces that play upon the land and its people.  Down in South Australia thousands of folk are watching and / or fighting fires that have spread across the bone dry land to the north of Adelaide.  Homes have been consumed by unstoppable flames, vast tracts of bushland burnt to ash, dog and cat kennels razed to the ground and thousands, probably tens of thousands of domesticated, farmed and wild animals killed.  Fortunately there's been no loss of human life.  At the same time, up here in Canberra, we've been sheltering from the torrential rain of another massive summer thunderstorm.  It was not easy to hear what we were saying to one another because of ferocious rain drops pelting the roof of the pergola, the crack of lightning and roar of thunder near and far made me jump at times and our poor wee cat has been hiding under the bed.  Even I have been a source of comfort and reassurance for Thistle the cat this afternoon.

The storm is now subsiding, the rain abating.  Soon ten squillion snails and slugs will emerge from their hiding holes undergroud to assault the seedlings - sweet pea, sunflowers, peas and beans and other veg - planted not so very long ago.  Then we'll witness terror as the avenging arm of Spike the snail hunter casts out the little devils.  There will be carnage.  It will not be pretty.

The illusion of happiness is a waterlogged pitch

Partick Thistle Football Club

It was with some trepidation I logged on to the BBC Sport web site to check out the football scores back in the 'old country'.  In the traditional New Year's Day round of matches the Jags had the never less than daunting task of hosting Celtic at Firhill.  The 'tic had not won their previous two matches - even worse they'd been sufficiently careless as to lose their last encounter - and a lifetime's experience (by which I mean approximately 47 years) tells me it is never, I mean 100% never a good idea to meet the Champions a week after they've had a bad day at the office.  They feel some overwhelming 'We Are The Champions' need to give their next opponents a monumentally painful going over.  

So it was with great relief, bordering on ecstatic joy, I read that the game had been postponed because the pitch of Maryhill's finest had become waterlogged, despite the best efforts of the home team's staff.  (References to ecstatic joy in the previous sentence may border on ironic overstatement ... but only just.)

Relatively speaking, therefore, New Year's Day turned out, as it happened - or more accurately as it didn't happen - a good day for the Harry Wraggs.  We didn't lose three points while the teams below us in the league were all soundly beaten, putting more distance between us and them than had been there on Friday - at least that's my not very sound theory.   

It will not last, of course.  A day of recokoning must come.  But for now, as the saying goes, I'll take any port in a storm.

And today's word is ...

INDECISIVE

I'm back in Prufrock territory, specifically:

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I am completely incapable of making any decision today.  We all have them, do we not?  Days of indecision.

I refer to the smallest, most inane decisions, of course, rather than weighing in the balance the pros and cons of invading a small country or privatising a nation's steel industry regardless of the social and economic damage that ensues.  No, like Prufrock, I have been rendered immobile by small, comparatively inconsequential decisions.  On such a stiflingly hot day as today is it too late to drive to the supermarket at one 'clock when the temperature reaches 35?  But if I don't, what'll we have for dinner?  Should a new desk sit straight across a room or at an angle or not be placed at all in the room for which I thought it was intended.

Good God Douglas!  Give us peace man.

I am an irascible, hot, bothered and bothersome old man.  By and large decision-making is beyond me today.  I can't even work out who or what to blame for my predicament?

Oneself is probably the beginning and end of the search to answer that question.  Roll on tomorrow.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot ...

Auld Reekie lit up at The Bells

You may be able to take the boy out of Scotland but it is not possible to take Scotland out of the boy.  It's odd - or maybe not so hard to make sense of when you think about it - but somehow it just never feels that my New Year celebrations are complete until I know the fireworks have lit up the sky above Edinburgh Castle.  

The good side of this ex-patriot romanticism is that you get to enjoy 'the Bells' twice.  Not that one could see it through the night to witness the Scottish New Year as it arrived.  No.  When the clocks of Princes Street struck Midnight and the skies over Auld Reekie exploded with sparkling light we were fast asleep.  Some time later we woke pleasantly and slowly to a warm summer morning (just) and a lazy day ahead kicked off with a delicious breakfast.  Spike asked me if mangoes and melon would suffice?  Well ... as we say in the old country ... is the Pope a Roman Catholic and do bears shit in the wood?  As it turned out we enjoyed mango, melon, strawberry and blackberry fruit salad then creamy scrambled eggs on toast.  Not quite your typical Ne'erday breakfast in Scotland where there would be less mango, melon, strawberry and blackberry and more bacon, square sausage, black pudding and tattie scones to accompany the eggs - scrambled or fried or both.  The Scottish breakfast has no less magic in the right circumstances; just different... in a heart-attack way.

I found the photograph in a story about the success of Edinburgh's Hogmanay elebrations on The Scotsman web site.  One sentence in particular caught my fancy.  It reads, "Vast crowds had descended on the Royal Mile and Princes Street by early afternoon, lapping up the unusually mild weather, with temperatures soaring as high as 10 degrees."  As I sheltered in a cool part of the house, as far away from Canberra's 33 degree start to the year as I could reach, I thought, 10 degrees man?  No half bad for New Year's Eve.