Blue Moon

Sad about Stuart Pearce – he was a breath of fresh air when he came into football management. He managed the way he used to play: enthusiastic, energetic, tough but fair. And never missed a thing that happened on the field.
Then there was the Ben Thatcher incident, when one of his defenders violently tackled an opposing player in a thinly-disguised career-threatening attack. It was time for Stuart to show his mettle. Would he take this opportunity to start to clean up the reputation of football – and of Manchester City - by disciplining Thatcher?
Sorry. Stuart 'never miss a thing' Pearce, borrowing from the vocabulary of such greats as Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, ‘didn’t see the incident’. (Or, presumably, footage from any of the 20-odd TV cameras.)
Last week his Light Blues were playing the Dark Blues of – as it happens – Everton, at Goodison Park. In the 90-minute match, Everton led 1-0 until the 92nd minute, when Manchester City scored, making it 1-1. City’s Joey Barton, a nasty piece of work with form for violence on and off the field, decided that a bit of triumphalism was called for, and dropped his shorts in front of the Everton crowd.
Another chance for Stu to show some Management – and decency, you might think, as an example to the millions of young kids who watch these games.
But no: ‘I didn’t see the incident myself’, Stu told the BBC after the game. Yet in yesterday’s Times he was able to say that he hoped the FA would not ‘unfairly punish’ Barton, because ‘I was pleased to see him give his shirt [to a disabled fan] and pleased to see his team-mate Nicky Weaver come over and tell him to pull his strides up’.
Funny that – the ‘shirt’ event took place immediately before the mooning, and the Nicky Weaver incident just after it. In between, Stu (‘never miss a thing’) Pearson suffered temporary sight loss, but before and after, he had 20/20 vision.
Welcome to the club, Stu.

As Virgil – former pilot of Thunderbird 2 – once said, beware of people with diminutive first names, unless they’re jazz musicians or comedians. If the guy also has a diminutive surname, (as in Charlie Haughey), he could be double-dodgy. If he’s also a politician, he’s likely to be dodgy squared. (I know the maths doesn’t support that, but it’s a metaphor.)
OK, so we’re talking Bertie Ahern, Irish Prime Minister (and successor to Charlie Haughey) for the last nine years. Bertie, a former accountant, has apologized to the Irish Parliament for accepting about $80,000 from businessmen when he was Ireland's finance minister. ‘It was a misjudgement’, he said. ‘It’ has been various things. First it was ‘only $60,000’, then 'a speaking fee’, then ‘an unsolicited gift to help me over my separation’ then 'a loan’. Now, it’s ‘a misjudgement’. I may not have them in the right order there, but you get the point, which is: keep an eye on those diminutives.
So if you see green truck with ‘Eddie Stobart’ on the side, get in the outside lane.

Cabin in the Sky

Arriving back is a strange feeling. I don’t mean driving on the wrong side of the road, or the fact that the sun is shining and the sky clear, which can be pretty disorienting if you’re not used to it. I guess that for all that I criticize France, it’s a kind of mini-homecoming. (It’s why we can criticize – the way we can complain about loved ones but won't allow anyone else to.)
We stop off at the supermarket to get what she who must be obeyed calls ‘a few essentials’ and stagger out with a Caterpillar D9-load of goodies that needs a fork-lift to transfer it to the car. We arrive here, unload the groceries (five trips up 28 steps, or 140 steps each), open the shutters, and there’s a cruise ship out in the bay, the still snow-capped mountains (40 miles inland) are almost touchable, and as the sun sets, a rising, nearly-full moon shines across the bay and we realise we’ve reached a different planet.
As part of the re-entry process, we try to spend a couple of days adjusting before people notice that our shutters are open. We probably know a more varied range of people here than we do in Jollie Olde - haven't got a collective noun for them yet: let's call them 'coasties'. There’s an American couple who live in what can only be called an ‘eagle’s nest’: a little house 4,000 feet up in the Southern Alps. They are surrounded by woodland and they look down on the mountain village of Eze, with the rust-coloured Esterel mountains to the right, Italy to the east, and Corsica to the south-east. Because of their altitude, and the blueness of the sky, the Mediterranean looks the colour my childhood paint-box called ‘cobalt’. Truly, the Côte d’Azur – the blue coast. When we saw them last autumn we came away entranced, but by the time we’d had a glass of something in our apartment in town we were asking each other if we envied them their eyrie. Could we live there? Answer: never! Their nearest bus stop is two miles away and it takes half an hour to get to the boulangerie for a loaf – and that’s in the car! But there’s obviously something there that we missed, because they’ve lived there for 28 years! The answer is simple: they have their work (he writes and she paints) and each other.
And that’s enough.