Breath-catching moments at Lord’s

Spent the whole of a sunny Sunday at Lord’s, the home of cricket, watching Day Four of the England/Pakistan Test match. After the recent histrionics of World Cup football it was great to see people enjoying nationism-free sport - for the fun of it. It must be the last sport in which everyone wears exactly the same uniform: all white.
Turning to my left during a rare lull in play I saw the only other person on the pitch apart from players and umpires: an artist painting them. At an international cricket match! (How does he get them to stand still? And how would we know?)
The beauty of a five-day match is that when you get home on days 1,2,3 or 4, someone always says ‘Who won?’ (We’ll know tonight.)
But it doesn’t matter a lot. England’s captain is off injured, as is the stand-in captain – but no matter, the stand-in for the stand-in (pinch-hitter) scored 138 runs. Our star swing bowler (a kind of knuckle-ball exponent) is also off injured, but the stand-ins did well and of course the game will depend on them in the end.
But a great day, meeting up with old Aussie friends and consuming copiously of chilled beer and Côte du Rhone.
Can’t wait to know who wins.

The Danube's not blue

There must be a right size for a ‘long weekend’ city. Madrid, Rome, Paris, London, NYC: yes, wonderful cities all, but a weekend would be too brief – a bit like having one M & M. When Goldilocks was trying out the beds; one too big, one too small, one just right; she must have had Budapest in mind. It’s just right: pocket-sized – population 2 million – big enough to have an interesting history, magnificent buildings, lots of galleries and museums (picture is by a 19th century Hungarian artist called Mihaly Munkacsy) an Opera House and views of the Danube, but small enough to almost get around it in a day.
It has that relaxed air characteristic of former Communist countries – a sort of ‘OK I’m doing this job but there’s nothing in the rules that says I have to enjoy it’. That sounds unfair – the absence of the ‘Hi, my name is Bruno and I’ll be your waiter for the evening’ treatment is probably something to be thankful for. And there are some friendly places – the Jazz Garden for example. That’s how jazz clubs are - the place was booked out, so we ate in an adjoining room wired up for sound.
The food in Budapest is certainly unforgettable in quantity terms - you need at least two stomachs. We chose one restaurant for its ‘lighter touch on Hungarian food’. It was true - I only had to leave three pork chops on the plate. But prices are tasteful – except for the tourist traps on the Buda side of the river. One for your ‘must not see’ list is called Arany Hordo, picturesque and with one of those in-your-soup gypsy bands for true Magyar atmosphere. It serves appalling nosh at outrageous prices and then they tell you they don’t take cards and when you tell them they should have mentioned this earlier, they say well they do but their machine is broken. Then when you insist, they reluctantly accept your card. (So we reduced the service charge to something more appropriate - ie, nil.) But then there’s the Rivalda, not 400 metres away, with excellent food and no Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. Another good one and then no more talk of food was a small family-run discovery called Pesti Vendéglő.
Sorry, we did not do the thermal baths. Yes, I know – Niagara without the falls, Hamlet without the Prince etc. – but it was in the nineties and humid, and we thought it would be better in the autumn.
In other words, we loved Budapest and we’re going back.

Mi scusi

What is it with Zidane and Italians? He apologized for head-butting an Italian player in the World Cup Final – but then said ‘Je ne regrette rien’. I’m not sure how that counts as an apology. (His coach said he didn’t see the incident: which game was he watching?)
Still, it’s better than Zidane’s lack of repentance when given five weeks’ suspension for head-butting another Italian in 2000. Or when he stamped on a Saudi Arabian’s back in the 1998 Finals. Perhaps he thought that, as France went on to win in 1998, leaving his head-print on Materazzi would bring his team luck again.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch

A few days ago I noticed that our on-line wine supplier, Tesco’s, has a Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais on a very special offer, so, being partial to the odd lightly-chilled Beaujolais at this time of the year – and a cheapskate - I ordered a couple of cases for delivery next week.
Then I heard on the French news that Duboeuf – the biggest Beaujolais shipper - is being investigated on the charge of having adulterated his Beaujolais with non-Beaujolais grape: cheap old Gamays and such. No wonder it was on sale. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I was reminded of this when the story broke about John Prescott, our revered deputy prime minister (a sort of English Dick Cheyney but without the same air of scrupulous honesty) and his recent all-inclusive tours. John influences the future use of a multi-billion pound white elephant called the Millennium Dome – although he says he doesn’t. (I mean, what does a deputy prime minister NOT influence?) Hence it is interesting that he has spent a night at the ranch of the purchaser of said dome, who plans to turn it into a super-casino.
Now you may not believe this, but I’m not implying that the billionaire and the politician spent the evening sipping Gallo Brothers’ products while plotting the future revenues of the casino and the participation of the Yorkshire tripper therein . I’m only saying: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

It must be the anniversary season for battles. We’ll be off-line for the next few days - in Budapest taking the medicinal waters and commemorating our wedding. So hasta la vista, or viszontlátásra as it says in the Lonely Planet guide. Have a great weekend - even if France do win the football and the women's tennis.

Is it a bird?

- or O Henry!
Call me a cynic if you like, (and some do), but I get slightly suspicious when a footballer with a better sense of balance than Nijinsky goes flying through the air, arms outstretched like Superman, after the merest contact with a fallen defender. The latter would almost certainly have had sense enough to know that you don’t trip up world-famous strikers in the penalty box under the referee’s nose. Still, it won Henry’s team another penalty kick and spared us having to sit through extra time - and the less worse team won.
Portugal did make some contribution to football: the game has got people talking about the possibility of giving out red cards to divers, which can’t be all bad.
Pity though – I used to like Thierry Henry. As the DG and the bard truly said, ‘Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds’.

Some over-funded PR manager thought it would be a good idea to have a big celebration in Trafalgar Square to remind the world that it is a year since London heard it would be hosting the Olympic Games in six years’ time. (Yawn. I guess we haven’t had much to celebrate recently.)
But perhaps a little insensitive in view of the fact that tomorrow, 7/7, is another anniversary - of the day when four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London Transport.

Ornithological observation

I think I’m being stalked by birds - or is that ‘storked’? Must’ve been watching too many Hitchcock reruns.
Apart from the ubiquitous blackbird – he’s still here by the way - reader(s) if any will remember my incident in Villefranche with the seagull who tried to hitch a ride with me on a 737. I’ve been physically attacked by a magpie and published an article on Charlie Parker.
NOW a huge raven has made his home in our gutter, right above the bedroom window, so that when he gets home he blocks out the light for an instant as he lands. (No, he doesn’t say ’Doors to manual’.)
The guy pictured came pecking at the window one morning, - a literary bird who knew his Poe: ‘While I nodded, gently napping, suddenly there came a tapping’. But he wasn’t your aggressive ‘Hey, open up’, Woody Woodpecker-type tapper; more an apologetic, ‘excuse me’ type of pecker (that’s in the English, not American, sense of the term). He would peck away – you can see the marks on the window – for about ten minutes, then, when we didn’t take any notice (which we couldn’t because that window doesn’t open) would go away and come back at the same time next day. He kept this up for several weeks, then left as mysteriously as he arrived. We didn’t even know who he was. Then, a couple of Christmases ago, DG and I accidentally gave each other the same presents: a book on British birds. So we looked him up twice. And it turns out he wasn’t even a ‘he’, but a young female chaffinch. But what did she want?
Maybe she wanted to fix me a date with Tippi Hedren.

It looks as if football is going to win in the end. Who would have thought that a Germany v. Italy semi-final with no goals for 120 minutes would be the best game so far – or that Italy would win it? So mixed loyalties for tonight: the theory that most cup-winning teams start badly and improve (unlike England who started badly and deteriorated) certainly seems to apply to France. But they are such poor winners – they’re still calling themselves world champions from their 1998 win, so will be unbearable if they win this. But I’d hate even more for the diving divas from Portugal to win. So it has to be Italy v. France for the final - or so a little bird told me.

Great British contributions to international culture

I hope that on this special day Britain’s efforts will not go unappreciated.
Had we not fearlessly bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour – sorry, harbor – for 25 exhausting hours back in 1814, Francis Scott Key would not have had the time to complete his poem.
So let’s hear it now, to the tune of To Anacreon in Heaven:
‘O say can you see…’
Fabulous Fourth Ed.

Soyez le bienvenu, Thierry!

Well done, Thierry Henry, welcome to the band of thieves!
Watched the game with son and family. He had filled the house with banners, balloons and cold beers and DG made a cake with the flag of St. George picked out in strawberries. Fun with frustration - let's face it, we didn't deserve it.
Now that I’ve cooled down and can reflect dispassionately on the World Cup 2006 competition, I remember saying in an early post that I was worried that the Adidas beach-ball and poor refereeing might go some way to spoiling the competition. The ball is certainly playing its part – look at some of the better goals scored in previous competitions and ask if they would have been possible with this ball. As former England mid-fielder John Barnes so truly predicted: ‘there could be lots of misplaced passes and high and wide shots’. (Can be tough if most of your goals have to come from mid-field.)

But the real disaster is the refereeing. The odd game sticks in your mind because it was well refereed – it used to be the bad ones you remembered. And the control of the refs by the fools in FIFA: referees were instructed not to penalise diving – the simulation of injury with the objective of having an opponent yellow-carded or sent off. The result was that simulation became the norm, and the disgraceful histrionics, not only of the old hands at the game like Cristiano Ronaldo, Ruud van Nistelroy and most of the Italian team, went not only unpunished, but were rewarded. Even a formerly honest craftsman like Thierry Henry entered himself for the footballing Oscars, clutching his face like Claude Rains in Phantom of the Opera when nudged gently in the rib cage. (Not only was Henry’s performance rewarded with the carding of the opponent, but it won the free kick which put France 2-1 up.) Well done, Thierry – see you at the Cannes Film Festival.
As there is no evidence that Rooney stepped on Carvalho’s cobblers, (which I can only think, recalling the time Carvalho held the Arsenal goalie in a full nelson so that John Terry could head into an empty net, is a pity), he should not have been sent off for restraining the kibitzing Ronaldo when the referee failed to do so. Stupid, yes, but if stupidity were a red card offence our football grounds would be almost empty.
Matches covered by the BBC are better commentated and better analysed than those covered by ITV – and of course we are spared this new low in short commercials. And Yorkshireman Mick McCarthy, even to a northerner like me, is barely comprehensible. What would you make of ‘T’ref turned a blind ‘un’?*

But, best of all, now that Sven has gone into wealthy retirement and the McBrat is out of Wimbledon, we can enjoy the World Cup and Wimbledon as football and tennis competitions and not as holy wars.

* - The referee turned a blind eye.

When did you last see Goodison Park?

It could be a question that the Immigration Service could use as a test for true scousedom. Just say 'And when did you last see your father?' If he’s a genuine scouse he’ll know what you mean. It’s the name of the second most famous picture in Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery (founded by Andrew Walker, a Liverpool brewer, in 1877 - thought you’d want to know). Most kids in Liverpool know it because nearly every school in the city has a print of it prominently displayed. (A disciplinary measure, perhaps, like the crucifixions in Catholic schools?) The painting depicts a boy dressed in a blue velvet jump suit standing in front of a large table faced by stern soldiers. A girl (presumably his sister), is in the background, crying. It’s a 17th century scene, and the boy’s father has been a supporter of the Royalists in the Civil War, and Cromwell’s men - the Roundheads - are obviously looking for the old man with the objective of decapitating him. (Fortunately Republicanism had a short life.) The picture was painted by W. F. Yeames (a non-scouse) and acquired in 1878.
The picture’s popularity is surprising in view of the fact that – as avid readers of this blog will know – Liverpool supported the Parliamentarians against the Royalists in the Civil War. They still do.
(Another Immigration Service test story: Dizzy Gillespie shows up at JFK without the necessary documentation but claiming to be the real Dizzy. An alert NIS official says, ‘What comes after Oop Bop Sh’bam?’ ‘A klook-a-mop’, says Diz, and is admitted in a flash. But you don’t have to believe it.)

With all these memoirs about the battle of the Somme, which began 90 years ago yesterday, I’ve been thinking about when I last saw my father.
460,000 British and Commonwealth troops were killed on the Somme, 20,000 French and half a million Germans – almost a million men in one battle. Walter was lucky – he was one of the boys who came home.

All in a day’s cliché..

Went to our Town Hall today, and was attended by a very pleasant lady whose pen had an England flag on it – as also did every one of her fingernails - passed a white Mercedes on the way with The Flag painted all over it. It looked like an ambulance. All symptoms of how worried we are about the outcome of tomorrow’s game against Portugal. (For strangers’ information, the Portuguese coach has already knocked England out of the World Cup – in 2002 when he was coach of the Brazil team – which then went on to win.)
When reminded of this fact in an interview this morning, the England captain, David Beckham, was moved to hitherto unattained flights of oratory: ‘What’s past is in the past at the end of the day’, he said. ‘We’re quietly confident.’ (Personally I think it’s time we reminded them that it was us who kicked Napoleon out of their country.)
Speaking of clichés, have you noticed it with weather forecasters? ‘Spits and spots’ of rain, showers ‘few and far between’ - they’re given a bag of clichés before they go on camera to see how many they can squeeze into the forecast. (The French ones are the same.)

Don’t you hate words that stick together
Like chocolate biscuits in hot weather?
Those adjectives which, I submit
Are stuck with nouns they should have quit.
Are all tones dulcet, mercies tender?
All reapers grim and hopes all slender?

Got to go now to see if Argentina beats Germany. We play the winner - if we beat Portugal that is.

It may be tennis, but it certainly ain't cricket

Three statements you should never believe:
1. I’m from the Inland Revenue and I’m here to help you;
2. Of course I’ll still respect you in the morning; and
3. The press have blown this out of all proportion.
The last is a quote from Andrew Murray, the Scottish tennis player famous for saying he would support any team playing against England in the World Cup. (E-mail on his website: ‘Andy, I won’t mind your supporting every team playing against England if you won’t mind my supporting everyone playing against you at Wimbledon’.) Not only has the McWhimp, who walked off the court tonight in his game against Julien Benneteau (plural of Beneton?) saying he’d had enough – which is not only unsporting but illegal - not withdrawn his remark, but he played today in a sweatband bearing the Scottish flag.
That’s cool - as everyone knows, I bear no animosity against the McMafia. I’m happy for them to enjoy the benefits of membership of the United Kingdom without accepting any of the responsibilities.

Making a virtue of necessity

In London today I passed a pub with a sign outside reading FOOTBALL-FREE ZONE. Intrigued at the possibility that this might be a refuge for sufferers from World Cup Fatique, where one was forbidden from thinking, discussing or even playing, football, I entered. In fact, it was a bar that didn’t have a TV set. (And you know what? It was packed.)
Tim Henman is out of Wimbledon - and it's only day two. A bit tough to find yourself – in the second round - up against the world champion; winner of the last two Wimbledon championships; who has won his last 42 matches on grass. They did a vox pop around the people on ‘Henman Hill’ afterwards and poor Tim was universally written off as not being quick/young/hungry/good enough. Well no, it was not entirely universal: one voice – an American one – pointed out that this guy had given immense pleasure as a top class player for ten years. ‘Trouble is’, he said, ‘you don’t know what you had till it’s gone’. (Might make a good song title.)

In response to many comments – well, one – on a recent post, I thought I might do another cemetery thing. The main reason is that Friday is the nintieth anniversary of the beginning of the battle of the Somme in World War I. The objective originally was to distract the Germans to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun, but, typical of most WWI battles, it was a monumental screw-up, and equally typically it was the poor Tommies that took the shit. They were sent over the top to occupy German trenches that they were told would be empty – but weren’t. But they went over anyway, into a wall of machine-gun and mortar fire, and 20,000 of them were killed on day one. They kept marching and dying until November, when it was decided that they didn’t need to distract the Germans any more and the battle was called off.
I haven’t been to all the cemeteries yet - there are more than 200 of them. You don't know what you had till it's gone.

A rose is a rose is a rose

No rants today, for ‘tis summer and Wimbledon has begun – or to be precise they managed 44 minutes’ play yesterday. It’s 11 years since they had a Wimbledon uninterrupted by rain, and fifteen since I sat at the Centre Court in a monsoon, hoping vainly to watch my then heart-throb Sabatini. I went home wet through, Sabatini-less, and swearing that henceforth I would watch it on television. (Why do Americans pronounce it Wimbleton – or is it just a yankee thing?)
Am reading a book recommended by friend Ed, which has a chapter on cemeteries. Not the sort of thing you normally see in travel books – in fact it’s my first encounter with anyone else who likes them. It's part of why we do, I guess: if everyone did, they’d be full of live people and not the calm retreats they are. Another odd thing is that the author, James Salter, likes many of the cemeteries that I like.
But our favourite is the Père Lachaise in Paris: it really is the Rolls Royce of cemeteries: an island of calm in the whirlpool of traffic that rushes around it. All the cultures are represented – cast includes Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Chopin, Voltaire, Bellini and Jim Morrison - as is a whole gamut of architecture – Gothic, Baroque, Arts Nouveau and Deco. (How to distinguish between the last two: early - twirly; later - straighter.) It’s not an age thing: I made my first visit in 1952, when some of today’s residents – like Yves Montand and Simone Signoret – weren’t even dead yet. (Appropriately, Montand’s defunct neighbour is Edith Piaf – one of his earlier loves.)
He was a great performer but not a nice man. Once when we were having coffee in his favourite haunt, the Colombe d’Or in St. Paul de Vence, I asked him if he would do an introduction on a documentary I was doing about the village. Certainly, he says. How much? I ask. Don’t even mention it, he says - anything I can do for St. Paul is a pleasure for me. But when the script is agreed and the sound and camera crews assembled he says no – if I do it for you everyone will want me to. So forgive me if I am less than convinced when I hear him sing the Song of the Resistance.
Ah yes, about the Père Lachaise. It’s the best value in Paris: this much talent would cost a fortune if they were alive. There’s even a New Orleans jazzman: Mezz Mezzrow. But my favourite tomb is that of Gertrude Stein. After the flamboyance of the French mausoleums, here is a simple slab of Provençal granite bearing her details in a valiant attempt at English. On the reverse are those of Alice B. Toklas, and at the base of the stone lie the disintegrating remains of a single rose, its petals faded and grimy and much of its colour now transferred to the stone, but still discernible as having once been red.

Who's next?

They were - thank you for your prayers.

Poll dancer

I have already posted complaints about the quality of refereeing at the World Cup. Tonight’s game was no exception. The Argentinians deservedly won, but they realised early that the Swiss referee gave them a free kick whenever they dived – so they dived a lot.
I still had a xenophobic inclination to assume that the bad referees were the foreign Johnnies. Only in Italy, I thought, can the directors of the major clubs tell the Football Association which refs they wanted for which games.
But sadly, the first referee to be sent home for incompetence in this World Cup was Graham Poll, the English ref. who failed to send off the Croatian defender Simunic in the game against Australia. (For the benefit of the uninitiated, a player can be sent off – shown a red card - for maliciously dangerous play, or given a yellow card for committing an offence of a somewhat more polite but potentially equally dangerous nature. A second yellow card means you get sent off for a Second Bookable Offence [SBO]. Poll unfortunately issued Simunic with an SBO, but did not send him off until he had committed a theoretically impossible third, or TBO.)
One might have thought that one of the functions of the two linesmen might be to prevent such a lapse, and that poor Mr Poll might reasonably have passed some of the responsibility to them – or even to the Fourth Official (American) with whom he was in permanent telephonic contact - who also failed to count the Czech’s earlier misdemeanours. But no, he took his punishment like a man. Poll galloped, and is now on his way home, banned for life from refereeing World Cup matches.
But ‘life’ sentences mean as little in football as they do in the criminal justice system, and my guess is that the blazered buffoons in the FA will forget Poll’s sins as readily as he forgot Simunic’s, and that, before long, he’ll be back issuing multi- coloured cards as if he were a croupier at Caesar’s Palace.
All we can hope for is that in tomorrow’s knock-out game against Ecuador, England’s footballers will be better than its referees.

What a splendid moment that was.

An article in yesterday's (Wednesday) London Evening Standard sent me by Gillie:
"Angry French fans have put their national team up for sale on eBay after a lacklustre World Cup performance. Les Bleus have only managed two draws so far, against Switzerland and South Korea, and are in danger of an early exit. They must beat Togo in Cologne on Friday to have any chance of qualifying for the knockout stage.”

It was Ladies Day at Royal Ascot today, the day on which the wearing of fancy hats is compulsory – for the women, that is, not the horses - which also means that, since Windsor is directly between Ascot and London, the town has been jammed with traffic – mostly of the Rolls, Bentley and stretch-limo variety. Nothing so common as a Jaguar.
It has also been Ladies Week for the DG and me, spent (when not visiting DG's son's hospital) visiting my daughter in a hospital which does surgery of the kind we men don’t understand in wards where the patients walk about like sailors on a turbulent sea.
Visiting our kids in their respective hospitals has enabled us to savour our famous National Health Service – a beacon of social welfare in 1945 which has rather fallen behind the rest of the world in recent years. The main problem seems to be beaurocracy: the excessive number of Chiefs relative to Indians. (Couldn't use the politically correct term because the expression would not have made sense. Try it.)
One of the patients in my daughter’s ward was calling for help because she was in pain and needed to turn over but was all tangled up in tubes. So daughter gets out of bed and interrupts the nurses’ conversation to tell them that one of their patients is in need of assistance. They tell her to mind her own business.
The hospital was even more busy than usual because two of the operating theatres were out of action because of air conditioning failures, and the only other A & E hospital in the area was closed because the roads around it were blocked by traffic - because it was Ladies Day.
The other A & E hospital stands in Ascot High Street.

Turkeys voting for Christmas

In the 2006 World Cup, today’s third game – in which Spain beat Tunisia 3-1 - marked the half-way point. 32 games played, 32 to go. You might say the preliminary sparring is over and the real battle is beginning.

Japan had a big win over the weekend. At a meeting held on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts while the rest of the world was watching football, they persuaded those well-known conservationists, Cambodia, Guatemala and the Marshall Islands to join the International Whaling Committee. Then, by offering lavish ‘aid’ packages to a number of smaller Caribbean and African countries, the Japanese were able to pass by 33 votes to 32 a vote for the resumption of whale hunting.
Now I don’t claim to be an authority on whale conservation, and do not normally get over-sentimental about consuming animal flesh, but some of the arguments of the pro-whalers have a distinct note of mendacity: such as the one that says whales eat smaller fish which, if not eaten by whales, would otherwise survive to reduce world hunger. They do not say how the poor and hungry would access the fish saved by the mass killing of whales.
I have to wonder why a country whose ships have already killed 823 whales in a year in the pursuit of ‘whale research’, is prepared to lavish even more money in persuading nations who have no whales to decriminalise their slaughter so that they can go after them in earnest. As Ishmael put it, ‘from hell’s heart I stab at thee’.
One could even have the sceptical thought that they may not have the whales’ best interests at heart.

Where to invest £100

Apologies to those who have already heard this news a thousand times, but this is for the benefit of those who may have spent the last 24 hours on one of the remoter satellites of Jupiter, or in Texas: England beat the Caribbean island 2 – 0 last night. This means that they will finish up in either first or second place in their group, and are therefore certain to qualify as one of the last 16 – whether or not we beat Sweden on Tuesday night. England were dire for the first ⅔ of the game, but then Sven sent in The Roon and Lennox, neither of whom scored, but they managed to inculcate upon the guys who had already been on the field for an hour a sense of urgency they had hitherto lacked. (The word ‘Roon’ does not appear in the Oxford, but its homonym is defined as ‘a mark of magic significance’, which is about right.) I don’t wish to be parochial about this, but goal #2 was scored by a different scouse, who for the first 90 minutes had thought he was Jonnie Wilkinson. (A rugby player.)
Whom we play in the quarter finals depends on a number of factors, but I think it comes out at either Germany or Equador. We will by then be in the ‘sudden death’ part of the competition – if you lose you’re out.

Enough about football – let’s discuss bananas. A shop in Sydney, Australia, has a sign in the window which reads ‘No bananas kept on the premises overnight’. Sound like the beginning of a joke? It’s no joke. Because of serious storms in its banana-growing regions, the crop has failed, and the cost of the phallic fruit has increased twenty-fold. So instead of putting your £100 in the stock market and ending up with £90, you could have had £2,000-worth of rotting bananas.

Do you get a wrenching feeling in the pit of your stomach when you get a message headed, "Introducing a simpler (or ‘safer’, or ‘more efficient’ or ‘beneficial’– you get the idea) policy", from a big organisation – or is it just me? Do you, like me, wonder who will reap these benefits? Today’s e-mail from British Airways is headed ‘Introducing a simpler baggage policy’. Flashing red lights – what is it going to cost me?
You will be pleased to learn that henceforth, in order to comply with ‘health and safety recommendations’, you will be charged excess baggage on every checked-in bag not included in the (unspecified - depends how much you paid for your ticket) 'free' baggage allowance, and that the maximum weight of said bag will be reduced.
But there's good news too: you will be allowed to carry two pieces of luggage on board – provided they are within certain measurement and weight limits. (To be fair, no efficiency or health and safety benefits are claimed for this procedure.)
The e-mail ends with a logo and the words:
‘In association with Samsonite’.

One small step for Man U. - one giant problem for Sven

No Paris today – promise. An American on telly yesterday said that when he first heard of the Scouse Giant, he couldn’t wait to see him, but when he finally saw The Rooney in the flesh, he couldn’t believe that this was a soccer player. ‘The way he looked, I’d love to have him play for the Steelers’, he said. The stereotypical ‘what’s a big tough guy like you doing playing a sissies game?’ response. I used to coach soccer in Pa. and disappointed dads used to send us male progeny who didn’t make it playing in tights and body armour. (Not quite as bad as New Zealand, where the only choice for boys who can’t play Rugby is euthanasia.)

But all this is secondary today, for this is R-day. Will Rooney’s broken metatarsal (the bone connected to the foot-bone at one end and the toe-bone at the other) have recovered enough for him to play in our match against Trinidad and Tobago tonight? A few days ago the England coach was saying ‘Absolut’ in that dyspeptic Swedish way of his – but a new element has come into the problem. It’s the threat that, should the metatarsal fail him in this game, or some naughty Trinidadian step on his foot, thus leaving him unable to start next football season, Manchester United will sue the pants off the English Football Association. And, since neither Man U’s American owners, nor their Scottish coach, nor Sven Gali, our Swedish manager, (who quits at the end of this World Cup tournament anyway) could give a stuff whether England win or not, there’s a strong possibility that the Roon might not play. And the following game is against – Sweden. Talk about divided loyalties!
On paper, England should win easily, and if we do we are certain to qualify for Round Two - but we have a special skill at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
In the Queens Club tennis, our Tim (Henman) won his singles, but sadly, the Scot-who-supports-any-football-team-playing-against-England lost. Pretty good day then.
Fingers - and metatarsals - crossed at 5pm UK time this evening for the trials of Nuremburg. Altogether now, to the tune of Washington Post: ‘Engerland, Engerland, Engerland…

What’s Donne cannot be unDonne

I'm beginning to feel like an impostor and am wondering if I should change my handle - it’s a bit misleading. But ‘windsorwriter’ doesn't have quite the same aura. We haven’t forsaken the azure coast but have more important things going on here right now.
(If anyone wants to read about my favourite Riviera town, it should be in next month’s France Today - but check on the net before you buy.)

There’s a strange noise not being heard in London: Big Ben is not audibly marking the ¼ hours. The famous chimes are mute. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It doesn’t toll for anyone.
‘Essential maintenance’ they’re saying, but my sceptical side says ‘is this true - or is it part of some fiendish French plot aimed at attracting tourist dollars to France?' And, if it is true, what does it say about British workmanship? That they don’t make things as well as they used to, that's what. God, they’ve only tolled for 150 years – they're probably still be under warranty.
I hope they’ll take the opportunity to bring them up to date – a change would be in order in the light of technological progress since 1858. Like, chimes, OK – but with vibes, on slow motor. How about, say Milt Jackson doing Django, or Gary Burton with General Mojo’s Well-laid Plans? (You call that up-to-date? I hear my children say.)
But of course they – whoever ‘they’ are – won’t do anything of the kind. ‘We’ve got to consider the tourists’, King Ken will say. 'They like Big Ben - hours and quarters.'
Paris considers the tourists – considers them all the time – but it doesn’t stop them from building a pyramid-shaped greenhouse in the middle of the historic Louvre, gift-wrapping the Pont Neuf – or having a roving jazz band at a tennis tournament.

Two Cities

To Paris – the only place in the world where you can sit for hours doing absolutely nothing except perhaps drink a beer, just pretending you're doing people-watching research - and not feel guilty. It’s only a 2½ hour train trip – but it's another planet away. Now that daughter is no longer Parisienne, we’re starting to stay in different parts of the city – this time, around Opéra. But wherever we stay in Paris, one of us is sure to say ‘I could easily live around here, could you?’ There are, of course, undesirable areas, but it seems Paris has managed to keep the structure of fairly self-contained ‘villages’ that it always had, and everyone sings the praises of their 'quarter'. You don’t need to charge off to the grandes surfaces – the disapproving term they use for super-markets – every day, because you never seem to be more than 100 metres from a street market, a grocer, a butcher, a baker… Yes, we could live here – and almost did once, then realized that we would be moving to a place that, for all its charms, had about the same climate as England. That’s how we finished up on the Côte d’Azur – it’s our little Paris in the sun.
The excuse for this trip was tennis. Roger Federer (Swiss) played Rafael Nadal (Spanish) for the French Open championship, played on the sort of gravel we use for garden paths. Federer does not like this surface, and even though he won the first set 6-1, youth won out over age in the end. Well, you can’t expect to be still at your peak when you’re 24.
But it was good to see that style and guile have come back into tennis, and to see every inch of the court being used. I never liked the ‘serve-and-volley’ game, that used only the few inches behind the base line, and whose rallies were only three shots long. But then I also wasn’t tall enough for it, so it could be sour grapes. Trophy presented by Stefan Edberg – whom I last saw winning the NY Open in ’91.

Up early next morning for Eurostar then straight from Waterloo station to take advantage of son’s present: a day at London’s Queens Club, the Wimbledon warm-up tournament – this time played – of course - on pristine, manicured grass. Don't wish to sound anti-progress but the game is called lawn tennis. A moment of nationalistic joy watching our unseeded Tim (Henman) beating Andre Agassi (with Agassi getting more vocal support from the crowd than Tim – what can this mean? That we are becoming outnumbered?) A promising newcomer called Monfils. An interesting men’s doubles duo pairing French star Grosjean with Scottish prodigy Andy Murray – how do they communicate? - the latter of whom I find it hard to support vocally because he refuses (despite the fact that Scotland failed to qualify) to support the footballers of England (the country in which he gains much of his living) in the World Cup.
We had worried we might not be able to catch England's opening match - against Paraguay - in Paris on Saturday afternoon. As it turned out it would have been impossible to avoid it!
Home late Monday suffering from travelfatigue, sunstroke and tennis exhaustion – and happily so. Only hope your weekend was this good.